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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • On GitHub, the account that pushed the commit is already fairly evident.

    Commits pushed from my GitHub account are differentiated from commits that are not.

    I don't want huge centralized Git infrastructure, but while we have it, signed commits are less compelling.

    And I'm not saying I love the current state of code authorship verification, either.





  • Great read.

    I agree about the culture problem. People want to slap extra encryption into things, like a spoiler on a hatchback.

    The core issue is that the problem being addressed by signed commits is already solved.

    Did MajorHavoc write this commit?

    If it has my username, on GitHub, you're confident it's my commit.

    Alternately, it could be someone with so much access to my SSH keys, or to GitHib's infrastructure, that they could easily sign commits as me, anyway.

    Signed commits might become more compelling when we start to favor fully open source federated git solutions. At that point, if I'm famously trustworthy, and the repo I submitted a signed commit to is not, then my signature could mean something.

    But even then, there's the risk that someone interprets my 4 minute typo fix as my having some clue whether the repo is actually safe to use...



  • I'm at the same job, but yes to the bump in pay.

    My work life balance is pretty solid. I like and trust my director a lot. I enjoy what I do.

    The surreal part for me is that I've kept my team intact this year. As a manager of developers, retaining talent makes my job so much easier, and my team so much more productive.

    I like to imagine the reason I've kept my team is I'm just that good of a boss.

    But I suspect the real reason is big companies who used to routinely steal my talented staff are more routinely fucking up their public image by doing layoffs during record profit years, and are asking people to visit in-person offices to spread Coronavirus and the Flu.

    But anyway, it's possible for two things to be true, so I might also be a great boss.

    Edit: I daresay developers have long memories, and I may continue enjoying the "fuck those guys" boost to my own hiring for about the next decade. But, of course, Activision's will rise from Ataris, and Nvidia's will rise from SGI's - so I'll try not to get too comfortable.


  • Thanks, at least in part to a strong perception of a bad hiring market for programmers, I've not needed to hire for the last three years.

    I say perception, not to diminish those having a tough time, but because everyone in my contact list who changed jobs this year had a tough time, but wrapped their search with better pay and benefits from the role they were laid off from. (And the known numbers indicate that all the highly publicized layoffs put a fraction of a percent of a dent in the demand for programmers.)

    So something fishy is going on, and it is coordinated market manipulation by the CEOs of the big employers.

    The effect, is real though. My lack of need to hire this year is completely opposite of the previous decades, when I needed two or more rounds of hiring per year, to replace the folks who left for higher salaries.

    So, manipulation or not, the market for programmers is probably the coldest it's been since 1980. By which, to be clear, they're changing jobs much less frequently and for mere 25% pay increases, rather than their historically frequent 50% to 200% increases.

    That said, everyone predicting the end of the "programmers are hot" trend are too new at this to remember when "programmers are hot" ended forever in 1970. And in 1986, and in 2000, and in 2008.

    But I heard it's real this time because anyone can write code with C, BASIC, C templates, Visual Basic, now that Visual Basic for Applications is built into Excel, Modern Code Generation Tools, Web Frameworks, small scripts using Microservice APIs, Artificial Intelligence.



  • Silly fluff piece.

    Self-check out is there by customer demand. People suck to interact with, even underpaid, underappreciated people who are being asked to stand all day and deal with shitty customers.

    Shareholders were promised other savings on pure speculation, and didn't get it.

    Yes, CEOs and shareholders, you get to pay for the machine, then pay someone to maintain it, and pay someone to watch it, and pay someone to help me when I can't work it.

    In return, you get one more day of staying in business.

    Suck it up, buttercup. Self checkout is here to stay.