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Comment One in a series of design mistakes in newer cars (Score 4, Informative) 128

I'm gratified to see buttons returning to dashboards. It's a safety thing. Perhaps manufacturers will also reverse some other mistakes where greater technology has brought worse performance, at least in the US:

1. Thermostats replacing simple heat/cool settings. In the old days, you just set the interior heat with a simple dial. That meant in the winter, you could have warm air blowing on your hands all the time. Newer cars have thermostats that try to maintain the interior at a particular temperature. In winter, once the interior reaches the set temperature, the system begins blowing cold air on you. Grrr.

2. Intermittent wipers that set their own speed. These never work as well as intermittent wipers where you control the speed. I'm constantly turning my intermittent wipers on and off manually because some algorithm decides that the windshield is clear of water when it isn't.

3. Headlights. Newer headlights do a terrible job of illuminating the road. They are aimed to create a short halo of light in front of you, which is insufficient on dark country roads. This has been the case with the last ~20 rental cars I've driven, without exception. My 2017 car headlights work just fine.

And don't get me started on switching from heat to A/C. My car requires something like 8 button presses through a menu system. Stupid!

Comment Re:Conditions (Score 1) 176

You are mixing up feeling versus action.

Feel whatever you want to feel. Nobody's arguing against feeling hate or disliking things. Nobody's advocating to ban emotions. (Your argument is a straw man.)

But actions affect other people. If someone says threatening things about you, or about an entire group you belong to, to the extent that you'd reasonably fear for your life or your safety, that is an action and a serious one.

Comment Re:Total rewrites can work, but it's rare (Score 1) 38

Sure, the team had a spec as well. But specs aren't sufficient -- they don't account for all the ways that your code is called by others. For instance, callers may rely on behaviors that you didn't intend and didn't put in your spec. A few hundred million function calls provides a lot of confidence. :)

Comment Total rewrites can work, but it's rare (Score 4, Interesting) 38

I've personally seen "total rewrite" software projects succeed. In one case, it was critical back-end server software responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. Why did the rewrite work? The engineers ran the new software for months behind the scenes (no customer exposure), in parallel with the original, feeding it all input from production, and comparing its output to the production output of the original. Every discrepancy was treated as a bug. When differences stayed at zero for a long time, the rewritten version was released.

A second example was an interactive product design tool also responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The original was spaghetti code riddled with technical debt, but it ran. The new was clean, modern code. The new code gradually replaced the old code, component by component. The company ran both new & old versions in production at the same time and gradually exposed the new version to more & more users, fixing bugs as they came up. The whole process took several years.

Successful rewrites can happen, but they take a lot of planning and careful testing. Clearly this didn't happen at Sonos.

Comment Invalid survey questions are distressingly common (Score 1) 83

>...the researchers behind the CEV asked if you agree or disagree with these four statements:
>- I am proud to be working for my employer.
>- My main satisfaction in life comes from work.
-> My workplace contributes to the community.
-> I contribute to the community through my work.

Sigh. These survey questions are all invalid and will skew the survey results. They are presented as positive-leaning statements, which prime the respondent to answer more positively than they otherwise might. A valid question would use a neutral voice, e.g., "Please rate your level of pride or shame in working for your employer:"

  • Very proud
  • Somewhat proud
  • Neither proud nor ashamed
  • Somewhat ashamed
  • Very ashamed
  • I'm not sure.

"Agree/Disagree" scales are always biased in this manner. It's astonishing how many surveys fail to use ordinary best practices out of Survey-Making 101.

Comment This is normal (Score 1) 152

I'm a writer in industry, but I spend only 15-20% of my work time writing. The other 80% is program management, interviewing subject-matter experts, coding, legal reviews, managing my direct reports, meetings, etc., to support the writing. I suspect this kind of ratio is normal in most corporate professions.

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