Some reflections on The Gervais Principle, 5 years after first reading.

This is a business book that changed my life and I never believed there could be such a thing 📕 “All corporations are pathological” with its implication that corporations are built to be consumed, not built to last.

This was the central message of The Gervais Principle as far as I’m concerned.

It now informs every thought I ever have on work-as-imagined-vs-work-as-done.

The Nigerian tech scene is one of the only bright spots in my twitter bubble. They’re discovering the joys of the Web as I got to back in the 2000s but they get to use all the modern stuff whereas I had IE6.

They’re not building ad networks to spy on each other, they’re building technology that they see elsewhere on the planet and think would work in Nigeria.

“We got tired of waiting for Western tech to come to Nigeria so we built it ourselves” as a senior eng at Andela told me.

The joy of doing it yourself comes through in almost every tweet.

All jobs will be automated until only four remain: The Aristocrats!!! So the father is just automating and automating whether or not it makes sense and meanwhile the mom is in a passenger rocket to Mars and it’s just spewing shit and vomit all over the place from its engines and the kids are getting caught in the automation and covered in the shit

#pandemic meme dump thread

#testing concepts thread. What is deduction?

What is induction?

What are the differences between deductive and inductive investigation of anomalies?

I said I would write more about breaking into a dev role so here goes.

One of the things that absolutely destroys entry-level programming applicants is the fear that they won't be able to do "the job" once hired.

This fear is unreasonable and unfounded and I'll tell you why.

https://twitter.com/noahsussman/status/1170147370820149248

First, it is extremely unusual (ime it never happens!) for an entry-level developer to be hired and then placed in charge of some kind of complex high-risk project.

You're going to be the most junior and the most recent hire. You're not going to be in charge of *anything.*

@alanpage It's very telling that manual testing is seen as cheap.

IME this perception exists because (as I have repeatedly seen at clients) the absolute most junior people are hired as testers in order to keep costs down. Because they’re so junior they don’t contribute very much. 1/2 @alanpage 2/3 They stay junior because they have no mentorship (because mentorship is expensive).

The “5x to 15x” cost of automation proposed by the OP fits with this model: median developer pay is around $150k US. A team of five devs then costs ~$750k annually (considering TC only here)

technical debt is a better metaphor once you know that engineers don’t borrow from technical credit cards but rather from technical loan sharks technical debt isn’t clean managed debt like business debt. it’s an obligation scrawled illegibly on a cocktail napkin.

Interaction Resiliency (iXR) is the practice of Software QA (aka #testing) as applied to "devops" or more properly Safety-II software delivery (aka continuous delivery & continuous deployment). I put a name to "testing in devops" or "agile testing in continuous delivery" because a) those phrases are clumsy 😀 and b) the current discourse in #testing constantly collapses back on itself as big-A Agile + CDT are conflated time-and-time-again with Safety-II + Kaizen #iXR

The place where "testing vs. checking" starts to really leak (as all metaphors do but still…) is the Cartesian division of "things a human does" and "things a computer does."

First, Safety-II and therefore #devops, explicitly reject the Cartesian view of complex systems.

https://twitter.com/noahsussman/status/930835582112206848

For instance the idea that there exists a computer activity called "checking" and what "checking" does is it validates assumptions.

There is a problem right there. Validation assumes some kind of goal-oriented behavior — telos — which computers do not on their own, have.