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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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    • Culture where you’re scared to criticize stuff, because people get angry when you’re telling them the truth or even just the elephant in the room. Echo chamber instead of idea lab.
    • Management constantly making decisions such that no one decision made ever gets totally implemented, but the loose ends just stack up.
    • Management not involving engineers in the and assuming that engineers are incapable of understanding how the business works, let alone contribute valuable ideas to how it might work better.
    • Too many layers of hierarchy, competitive, macho male-dominated, title-driven, ego-driven culture where people are fighting they’re way up the totem pole instead of working cooperatively together to create a great experience for their users.
    • Companies where silly little things that should be doable in hours costs weeks or months or where nothing gets done quickly, because too many people need to sign off on it.
    • Mission statement that is bogus and you know that it really is all about money, growth and status. I like companies that are truly trying to adding value to the world, however small that change may be. I am just not interested in your algorithmic trading, crypto non-sense, optimizing ad revenue or getting people to waste more of their time or money with endless bull crap.
    • Having to constantly fight to get the time to refactor, test, rethink, work on build/development/observability tooling instead of working on feature after feature endlessly. If I say something needs work I have good reasons for it that I am willing to explain, but do not assume that I like to waste time gold plating code because I am a autistic perfectionist with OCD with no sense for what the business is trying to do.
    • Constant bogus deadlines that seem to come from nowhere and are only meant to keep the pressure on the engineers. I work hard and this kind of pressure only means we’re going to go fast in the short run and extremely slow in the long run, because nothing gets finished properly.
    • Running the server side on Windows. I want to be able to debug issues in depth when they arise.
    • Using the Go programming language. I am not going back to 80’s programming and checking for nil all day long, just to see my program segment fault in production anyway. (and yes, I am talking from experience here)
    • Only remote companies. I get too lonely at some point and all the best cooperative ideas I’ve ever had in my career where born at the whiteboard with colleagues. This is just me though.







  • Language preference, ergonomics and isomorphic code have not been good enough use-cases to get people off of Js. There was a big hype around compiling to Js a decade ago, but that hype past us and nowadays this is usually only done for some small piece of pure logic that really needs to be isomorphic, which is kind of what we have wasm for nowadays. People who hate Js should really get off their high horse. Writing frontend code in Rust really isn’t going to make a material improvement over writing the same thing in TypeScript, unless you need raw performance which is less than a percent of all webapps.

    This is a good thing, because the frontend community is really not going to benefit from having the same thing written in a dozen languages. We’ve already got a bazillion datepickers, we don’t need a gazillion. People are dumb enough to want to rewrite a bunch of stuff in Rust just because they like the language. And Rust absolutely isn’t the best language to write a datepicker in. Having a single language, however crappy, did create some much needed stability in the frontend space. It is also quite handy that frontend engineers can focus on their job, not on learning language X with toolchain Y and libraries Z.

    Don’t get me wrong. I am not a Js fan. I’ve been coding since the 90s and am familiar with most languages and pretty much every paradigm. I can be quite picky when it comes to languages, but I’d rather have a single okay language that gets the job done with a good ecosystem then a dozen competing ecosystems some of which may be better in some respects. The current status quo with the advent of TypeScript isn’t terrible either. What is shitty though, is React and the complete lack of use of web standards, but that’s another tangental discussion.