Top
Best
New

Posted by zdw 20 hours ago

Software engineers should be a little bit cynical(www.seangoedecke.com)
246 points | 169 commentspage 5
the_cat_kittles 19 hours ago|
i genuinely believe the correct response to a post like this is: "shut the fuck up"
dfilppi 2 hours ago||
[dead]
khana 10 hours ago||
[dead]
black_13 19 hours ago||
[dead]
subdavis 19 hours ago|
> We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, so they can goose the (largely fictional) stock price. Meanwhile, end-users are left holding the bag: paying more for worse software, being hassled by advertisements, and dealing with bugs that are unprofitable to fix.

This is quite a straw man. I think a lot of engineers believe that other parts of the org lack perspective, sure. I’ve certainly seen managers or salespeople genuinely convinced that they’re delivering value when I know for a fact they’re selling snake oil. But I never assume it’s in bad faith, just an artifact of a shitty feedback and communication culture. People want to do good work, they just don’t often get good signal when they aren’t.

Sniffnoy 19 hours ago||
Why do you say it's a strawman? All of those claims seem pretty familiar to me, even if, as the post says, the full exact combination might not be. You say you never assume it's in bad faith. Well, great! But that doesn't mean it's a strawman, it seems that other people do!
subdavis 19 hours ago||
I say it’s a straw man because it’s a caricature that is easy to knock down. The point of my comment was that I would be surprised to find out that even 20% of people think this, much less a majority.
Sniffnoy 18 hours ago||
20% is a lot of people! If 20% of people think something is true, that's something worth arguing against!

"Straw man" strictly speaking means something you invented, although, yes, that is likely overly strict, since you can find someone saying just about anything. But 20%? That's a substantial fraction of the relevant population!

The other thing worth noting here is that the point of a straw-man fallacy is. In a straw-man fallacy, you replace your opponent's argument with a ridiculous version, and argue against that instead of what they actually said. Or, alternatively, it's where you are arguing against some general nebulous concept, and you instantiate it as something ridiculous -- which maybe someone is actually saying! -- and use your argument against the ridiculous version as an argument against the more general concept, tarring other versions by association. (The real solution here of course is to not argue about nebulous concepts like that in the first place, it's not a useful way of arguing, but that's another matter.)

But if you're not performing either of these types of substitution, if the ridiculous position is actually out there and you're simply arguing against it as it is and not trying to use it to substitute for something else or tar something else by association... then that's not a straw man, that's just people believing ridiculous things and you having to argue against them.

chasd00 18 hours ago|||
> late-stage-capitalist hellscape

Isn’t this the most prosperous, peaceful, and just period in history like ever? What “hellscape”?

NedF 19 hours ago||
[dead]