1. All tech discussion is irrelevant unless it’s leetcode. Don’t fill my brain with any other useless, unproductive information.

2. How much time (points) will this presentation take to get to prod. Then how many points (time) will it take to deploy to prod. Do we need a spike for this presentation. I’m going to put it in the backlog and close it out since we’ll never get to it.

IBM isn’t really a tech company anymore. More of a legal trolling company that cosplays as tech.

They seem to primarily benefit from kickbacks in the form of both leasing and technical contracts for things like opening offices in a location for tax benefits or to promote local economy.

Then they see how far they can cut back their end of the contract after the first few months (e.g. Maybe we agreed to have 500 employees in an office, but since nobody is allowed in, we think we can get away with 100 employees.) Then this turns into trolling about how the contract never defines what in office means so can we offshore… Too much undefined confusion, so I guess we get to break the contract but keep what the mayor paid us… Then they just shut down the office and move on to the next location.

It seems like the local government must be in on these schemes for leasing. Otherwise this wouldn’t be going on for decades as it has been.

The other part of business, technical contracts, is similar except instead of leasing it’s providing some sort of infrastructure coverage for something big. It starts off with good faith fulfilling the contract. Then a few months later it’s like well we have a US military contract that demands US employees but US employees are too expensive. What if we offshore but all the traffic is technically going through a single US employee’s computer which is what the contract technically demands.

Then it turns into well we have offshore people working on this anyway, why not just give them direct access and we’ll have a US person overseeing them. Lay everyone else off.

Then they see how long they can get away with this until someone gets mad. Then they take one step back to see how close to the technical contract they can get while threatening to abandon the whole thing at the same time.

Along with this sort of atmosphere and attitude for the law, it seems we see them constantly doing everything possible to constantly fire old people or anyone else that has legally protected status. So you’ll get statistical analytics on ways to fire protected people based around the constant performance reviews with statistics being used to see how close groups of protected people can be removed without statistically breaking the law. Whatever that algorithm is.

That plays into just straight up cutting people, but it also goes into a lot of other subsystems of skirting the law, like if old people can’t relocate as easily then hopping offices and forcing people to relocate 5000 miles is a way they can be eliminated. Part of this might be moving people onto new teams and then saying that team has to be in office for some made up reason, and then firing them for not relocating or using some made up metric like badging timestamps to get them, or some other technicality like leaving for lunch 5 minutes early despite being a salaried employee which is reported as hourly because of tax trolling.

I don’t know how IBM still exists because from my perspective it’s pretty clear they’re breaking or at best on razor thin gray line on ice on just about every possible law you could break.

This is yet another thing I’ve been saying is technically feasible in a large variety of games immediately since it started happening to game sizes around 2015.

I’ve had nothing except people screaming at me that I’m wrong and that this is just how modern games have to be. There’s always some gaslight argument about how I’m wrong and actually the devs are in fact geniuses because of some genius trick about a variety of systems significantly bloating the size.

Rather than try to look at the problem, I get continuously attacked with retconned reasons trying to justify every decision going into this bloat. This is exactly the same dev retcon trend train we saw with Cloud (“No, wrong, it’s not computers. It’s servers. Totally different. And it’s not even servers, it’s cloud.”) and MicroServices (“There’s literally no reason to ever not use microservices unless you’re a legacy dev. Especially on The Cloud, which is different and not comparable in any way to a a self hosted server.”)

I’m 3/3 so far. Waiting for you guys to still figure out leetcode and how this actually captures the inverse of the thing you’re trying to account for. But I already know you’re going to retcon that argument too and say ackshully leetcode DOES work to hire developers because we want to hire people who are wealthy enough to have time to memorize questions and answers. We always knew developers would have AI (lol) and this paper that retroactively applies a matching hypothesis that trends with leetcode is actually what smart developers like me knew all along.”

This is a direct result of using leetcode in interviews instead of any other, more legitimate tests like winning a tekken 1v1. Have you ever seen a good developer who’s not good at real video games?

If companies had hired real developers instead of cosplayers who are stunlocked with imposter syndrome as the only candidate pool with time to memorize a rainbow table of arbitrary game trivia questions and answers, things would actually work.

I think the current default knowledge you could expect a random average person to understand is limited to approximately the following single sentence: “A balance of diet and exercise is the key to losing weight.”

This is technically correct, but is so misleading that I classify it as incorrect.

That statement is exploitative of how the English language is understood, even if not intentionally so, that the lack of any other key points or instructions is itself used as contextual information.

In other words, the sentence likely translates something similar to the following incorrect statement: “A perfectly level 50-50 effort balance of both lowering daily calories to the [2000] calorie limit for [your demographic], because this is the stated necessary calories to support a healthy [demographic] for 1 day, as well as achieving the minimum daily recommended exercise limit of [1 hour for your demographic] plus [1 hour per 100 calories] consumed over [2000 calories] are both of equal value in the goal of losing weight, and are equal requirement to support the other such that one holds no value without the other.”

also gotta have every click on the page to highlight text navigate to a shopping cart subscription page and then break the back button.

Clicking on a video to mute it also needs to navigate to a sponsor’s page and break the back button. And then the page reloads which doubles the page view count. Genius web dev decision. I bet they said “there’s literally no downsides to doing this!”

Also, the ads need to autoplay on full volume, often bypassing my system volume somehow so they can play even though the rest of the audio is on mute and none of the mute functionality works. Surely the user simply forgot they had mute on so we should just go ahead and fix that.

They also need to play on 4K ultra HD to use my entire monthly cell plan if I don’t stop it in the first 3 seconds, which I can’t do because the video has to fully load before I’m able to interact with it to click stop. Or clicking stop pauses it and then automatically restarts playing the video.

These webdev chrome devs need to stop adding new random features and start fixing the basic functionality. I don’t want fading rotating banners that save 3 lines of CSS. I want the “DO NOT AUTOPLAY. EVER.” Button to actually work.

Crime, fraud and terrorism continue to be legal.

Yep I won’t use anything with a negative self deprecating name like this. Because some tech bro will use it as a a basis to disqualify my entire resume or sabotage an interview after solving the leetcode trivia troll questions and whatever other video game battles they add to the interview process in the future.

Project manager fires the entire team except 1 intern to finish the project with 1000 points of stories in 1 sprint? Heh or did you just figure out jank wasn’t capable of doing the job what did you expect?

Hotfix to fix a bug with the stage environment because the SREs set it up wrong? No bro it’s jank it’s that jank thing. Source: ctrl F “jank” in the message analytics and copilot says all matches are in the stage environment and that jank is also a tech thing. It also bright up every engineers profile that lists jank as a skill. Time to pick a scape goat.

Is tech bro in the room with us right now?

Just add an agenda. Every meeting. What is the topic. What will be covered. What decisions are being made.

No deviations without a new meeting or at least they need a settling time before they become concrete and people need active followups if they’re absent. People also need to read agendas and be prepared and also know what context this is about.

“Is JavaScript better than java” isn’t a valid meeting agenda item. What are you even talking about this isn’t a comparable question. Is your team confusing java and js?

You need to add context to the meeting that appeals to every person in it. Not just the Java vs js project you’ve been dealing with as yourself and 2 other people and now this has escalated to 5 teams and a 20 person emergency impromptu call with the director. You need to slow down and give context. Explain that this is in the context of candidate interview questions and not live engineering code being deployed.

Meetings also need to have a timeline. 5 min overview 30 min demo 15 mins questions. Don’t just ramble on in the overview for 50 minutes and then say oh I guess we’re over time but I have no conflicts so I’m just going to keep going. No. Other people have conflicts and now they can’t participate in the decisions section that you’re choosing to gatekeep by ambushing surprise information in a meeting. If the meeting was deemed necessary in the first place why would it suddenly not matter now?

That should be on the agenda. Again. No surprise information. Don’t ambush people on the spot with hidden topics. Engineers working on database integrations don’t need to context switch to answer random request to walk through how css works in a repo that was last updated 8 years ago.

This causes all work progress to be delayed and momentum reset and there’s multiple of these every day because of random vague meetings doing this.

Managers are responsible by default here. They are at fault if their team feels they cannot waste time in meetings because their time is not being respected. They need to ensure their team is at meetings they have decisions to make. They need to make sure or at least help escalate people hosting meetings are sticking to the agenda and having clearly defined and scoped questions that aren’t random or going to get lost in a sea of noise.

This is it.

We can’t have people going back and forth over chat to work out an issue. I need to start a meeting so I can monologue the portion people already understand again and then I can complete the work because my portion is complete.

I already completed my work so I don’t need to change with these back and forth messages finding oversights or conflicts. I can just sit back and coast.

Also when it’s in chat everybody’s messages are the same size and you can’t just skip over them. By holding a meeting, I can disable everybody else’s mic and the chat or just talk over anybody else and win the discussion. By talking louder, my opinions are better and correct.

I don’t like when some random person causes me more work by speaking up in chat so that’s why we need to have meetings. Plus there’s a whole paper trail and it’s just messy and inconvenient.