Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API

From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "opinions without context"
-
I am seeing a trend on here, where people dismiss a technology based upon their experience that they cannot use it first try, even though they clearly lack experience or knowledge about the proper usage.
Also people seemingly tend to imply self explanatory at various topics ranging from relatable broadly known experiences to small nieche opinions.
How is that? Since when do people, especially programmers, think they do not need to explain their viewpoint, even though there is not a clear indicator as to why? Stating an opinion without any backup to the claim is just a void call in the wind. Of course i know that user X thinks that Y is his or her opinion. But what good does it do when i can't relate / understand or discuss this opinion?3 -
Holy fucking crap, think I actually got some productive, positive output from this whole generative AI debacle.
Rather because I skipped the whole Prompt step and used FOMO blabber against itself.
Some context: at my last gig we had a whole "humanware procurement department" (A.K.A. "hiring managers", those fucks who think that javascript and java are the same thing). It was during the pandemic tech hiring boom. At this new joint I'm at, a MUCH smaller company, I gotta do it myself. Boring as fuck but at least I can get some good karma by not making an ass of myself for candidates, and trying to make this whole process a tad less abusive.
I got my reading up to date, and surprisingly enough, "yankee dandy" (HBR) has actually been saying one or two things that are not complete hogwash. For a start, they say that companies have been making their hiring processes overly complex and even after hours of interviews they hardly measure half the skills they actually need, and spend too long talking about many skills that are not actually required for the positions.
"Huh. That sounds like the inneficiencies that the stupid 'AI will make meetings more efficient' industry is overpromising to overturn"
So I tried a new thing. Instead of your off-the-shelf "solve this NP-Hard problem in O(1) then draw this bird using only your nose then invert a binary tree in COBOL then tell me what type of sitcom character are you" crap, I tried grasping how it would be like to work with the candidates. One at a time. Not too long, but not too short talks. I'm not trying to check if a kid really knows how to implement a solution for the TSP in apache spark, or if they know every cipher in TLS 1.3. I just want to know if they can understand a technical request and come to me with a plan on how to solve it without handholding or "just use a really big VM, like, 32Tb of RAM!"
Thus, if I can work with them. That's all. The rest are specific skills that can be trained in time, if the person is willing to learn new stuff.
But that is not good enough for HR, ooooh, no. You "need" an "objective way of measuring their skills", otherwise its "just biased opinions."
But that gave me an idea.
See, our HR VP is someone deep in the whole AI pyramid scheme, who drank the kool-aid and swallowed up even the cup. FOMO is their name. Hype is their business.
I posh'd up my bullshit'ish jargon and went whole "In the advent of new disruptive technologies, strategic skills can be acquired with grit and proper AI prompting. Thus, leveraging our collaborative intelligence capabilities we can hack our challenges and optimize our resources to offer more innovative opportunities and bolster our employer branding" - translation: "shut up and lemme hire someone good and reasonably priced instead of a sleazy smooth talker who wants 100M just to show up and play with chatgpt all day". The whole point is to make it sound like "we're using AI, so it's good" instead of "im doing the work I'm being paid for, so it's old-fashioned"
It seems like the HR troll swallowed it, bait and hook. Maybe all we really needed this whole time is to say the magic word "AI," especially if it makes absolutely no sense in the context. Now I want to get them to sign off on a "AI mindfulness bolstering platform" (a massage chair). Fingers crossed.4 -
My coworkers and I work in close quarters in a laboratory all day. We all get along well, and since we don’t have “offices” and often work together on things, we are a pretty close team.
We recently got a new member, Jill, who is 22, and this is her first job out of college. She lives at home with her parents, who are incredibly well-off, and has lived at home all through college. The rest of us are late 20’s to late 30’s. Jill is very nice but also very sensitive and somewhat immature, and I’m not sure if she’s just not 100% sure how to deal with people in professional settings yet or what’s going on, but almost everything that comes out of her mouth has to do with money, mainly how much money her family has. If it might offer some context, Jill and her family are not from the U.S., but have been here since Jill was a teenager.
I usually just kind of inwardly roll my eyes and change the subject, but with the holidays it’s gotten considerably worse and Jill is driving my team and me crazy. Some examples of things she has said just in the past week are: “My dad’s buying my mom a new car for Christmas!” “I’m going to buy my mom a Gucci Keychain for Christmas. It’s $225 dollars!” “I’m so excited, my mom is buying my puppy a Tiffany collar for Christmas!”
The thing that sent me over the edge was when a male coworker asked for ladies’ opinions on a very nice coat he was considering buying for his girlfriend. My opinion was something along the lines of “I like it, but I would go with the gray because white coats get dirty very easily, in my experience,” whereas Jill’s opinion was “It’s not even a name brand, you should go with either a North Face or a Michael Kors.”
I am honestly not sure if Jill knows there are people in the world who are not as well-off as her family is, and that people who aren’t as “fortunate” don’t want to hear these kinds of things every day. We are not paupers, but we are definitely not buying our dogs Tiffany collars. Is there a way that I can tell her to please stop talking about how rich her family is, without sounding jealous or mean, or causing a lot of friction on my team? Like I said, she’s a nice person, but money is a touchy subject in any capacity and I think this might hinder her professionally in the future, not to mention that we’re all sick of hearing about it!3