Well, seniority helps on the deadlines front: you can spot managers trying to force too short deadlines on you a mile away and throw it back at them (“I’m am the specialist, so I’m the one who knows best how long it will take”) and if they just try and impose deadlines you can bluntly state “that isn’t possible” and if they somehow have the authority to push them you make sure everybody (especially other managers, ideally the managers above them) knows that you’ve informed them upfront that such deadlines were impossible so when it inevitably fails, said manager can’t shove the blame your way.

As for obtaining things from other teams, that’s a two part thing:

• First make it painfully obvious in your estimates that a dependency on something from an outside teams exists. When inquired about progress, constantly point out that it will only happen “if that team provides us what we need to progress”. Keep reminding people that those deliverables are a conditional for yours - “they’re late our project is late”.
• Second, start pushing them for delivering to you what you need well before you need it. It’s there, in your planning, so you know you need it and have some idea of when. The bigger the project the earlier you start pestering them. Persist on asking them for it, escalate to upper management if no movement is visible on their side. Make sure the groundwork is set so that if they’re late they get the blame on project deadlines being missed. It depends on the country culture but generally most people aren’t really impeccable professionals at time and priority management (and yeah, that includes managers) and tend to prioritize addressing “what’s burning harder” in their pile, hence why you need to start pestering them early, do it often and with more urgency the closer it gets to the point you need it (to make sure it’s perceive as an urgent need and rises to the top of their priority pile) and make sure the groundwork is set for them to be blame if your own deadline is missed because they were late and, more importantly, that THEY know they will get the blame (this generally at mid/upper manager level), so that from their point of view it’s “burning” (i.e. they’ll suffer if that doesn’t get picked up on time)

Of course, all this requires competent management since they’re the ones supposed to do it and if your managers are trying to impose deadlines on you or using slimy trickery to get people to commit to shorter deadlines, they’re NOT competent managers - that kind of shit invariably yields death marches and bug-riddled results that in the mid and long term end up wasting far more time that it was shave by those shorter deadlines.

Kinda sad that one has to play such games. Welcome to Mankind.

I would describe it as “insufficiently thinking about and researching the problems space”.

From what I’ve seen that’s very common because developers have a tendency to want to be hands-on rather than merely researching, myself include.

Even for the sake of figuring out inconsistent requirements or even just big gaps in the requirements, it’s a good idea to really think about it and cross check things.

Personally, the more I advanced in my career and the more complex and larger problems I had to tackle, the bigger the fraction of preparation time vs the fraction of coding time and I believe most very senior devs have the same experience.

I think you’re confusing doing analysis before coding with doing all analysis before coding.

If you do Agile properly (so including Use Cases with user prioritization and User feedback - so the whole system, not just doing the fashionable bits like stand up meetings and then claiming “we do Agile development”) you do analysis before development as part of evaluating how long it will take to implement the requirements contained in each Use Case. In fact this part of Agile actually pushes people to properly think through the problem - i.e. do the fucking analysis - before they start coding, just in bit-sized easy to endure blocks.

Further, in determining which Use Cases depend on which Use Cases you’re doing a form of overall, system-level analysis.

Also you definitelly need some level of overall upfront analysis no matter what: have a go at developing a mission critical high performance system on top of a gigantic dataset by taking a purist “we only look at uses cases individually and ignore the system-level overview” approach (thus, ignoring the general project technical needs that are derived from the size of the data, data integrity and performance requirements) and let me know how well it goes when half way down the project you figure out your system architecture of a single application instance with a database that can’t handle distributed transactions can’t actually deliver on those requirements.

You can refactor code and low level design in a reasonable amount of time, but refactoring system level design is a whole different story.

Of course, in my experience only a handful of shops out there do proper Agile for large projects: most just do the kiddie version - follow the herd by doing famous “agile practices” without actually understanding the process, how it all fits in it and which business and development environments is it appropriate to use in and which it is not.

I could write a fucking treatise about people thinking they’re “doing Agile” whilst in fact they’re just doing a Theatre Of Agile were all they do is play at it by acting the most famous bits.

You can have airflow friendly design without the flat single color body, plastic interiors and a tablet on a plastic pedestal.

Agreed that the whole SUV trend was a massive step back in so many ways, but being in Europe I’m not even comparing Tesla’s design with SUVs, I’m comparing it with other cars in the same category since they are still most of the cars in Europe.

Even something like a Mini Cooper EV looks downright daring next to the stale styling of Tesla’s offering.

The cars that I notice on the roads which leave me with the same overall impression in terms of looks as Teslas (minus the ugly tablet on a plastic pedestal look) are BYDs, which are way cheaper.

At this point in time Teslas stand out from the rest because they look like a mildly tweaked (mainly the higher back, inset door handles and big fat tablet in the middle of the dashboard) late 90s sedan or roadster design, because late 90s vehicles of these categories are the core visual styles they copied and tweaked in an attempt to make them look futuristic, a style which they haven’t changed since.

(Maybe that stuff was very different from the common car in the roads in North America, but it wasn’t in Europe).

The novelty value of inset door handles is gone, plastic interiors and big fat mid-dashboard tablets on a pedestal look ugly and dated, and the core car body design style just looks like your parent’s car back in the day.

Tesla are kinda like those old Sci-Fi Movies from before flat screens and computer graphical user interfaces whose idea of futurism were fancier cathode tube screens and showing fast moving green screen text. The thing is, only beloved Sci-Fi filmic universes with cult followings (or alternative universe ones, like steampunk) still keep those visuals in any new movies, and Musk has been busy blowing up what little cult following Tesla had (which itself was already limited because, unlike Apple, Tesla never stood for quality and that following was mainly linked his own personal cult and perceptions of higher eco-friendliness than the rest, both now gone).

IMHO, most people’s time usage perception tends to be heavilly skewed toward weighing higher the time taken in the main task - say, creating the code of a program - rather than the secondary (but, none the less, required before completion) tasks like fixing the code.

Notice how so many coders won’t do the proper level of analysis and preparation before actually starting coding - they want to feel like they’re “doing the work” which for them is the coding part, whilst the analysis doesn’t feel like “doing the work” for a dev, so they prematurelly dive into coding and end up screwed with things like going down a non-viable implementation route or missing in the implementation some important requirement detail with huge implications on the rest that would have been detected during analysis.

(I also think that’s the reason why even without AI people will do stupid “time savers” in the main task like using short variable names that then screw them in secondary tasks like bug-fixing or adding new requirements to the program later because it makes it far harder to figure out what the code is doing)

AI speeds up what people feel is the main task - creating the code - but that’s de facto more than offset by time lost on supposedly secondary work that doesn’t feel as much as “doing the work” so doesn’t get counted the same.

This is why when it actually gets measured independently and properly by people who aren’t just trusting their own feeling of “how long did it took” (or people who, thanks to experience, actually do properly measure the total time taken including in support activities, rather than just trusting their own subjective perception) it turns out that, at least in software development, AI actually slightly reduces productivity.

Doesn’t Windows 11 in practice require even more memory than Windows 10 to operate with decent performance?

Meanwhile my Linux gaming PC seems to actually use less memory than back when it was a Windows machine.

Well, there is a massive crowd of people, even here, who doggedly defend the Democrat leadership with some variant of other of “they’re better than the Republicans”.

That aged, compromised, out of touch and stuck in their ways leadership has pretty much zero pressure to change and over the years has even increasingly relied on “vote us to stop the other guys” a their main campaign strategy.

Everytime some Democrat Party tribalist blames non-voters for their own party’s electoral defeat after having used the “vote for the lesser evil” strategy once again, they’re displaying a complete total lack of mid or long term view (just ponder on what’s the natural evolution of management style for people whose personality type is ‘seeks power’ when their only limit for ‘doing bad things’ is ‘less than those other guys who sell Racism and Violence’) and just keep on digging that specific hole for their party.

Looking from the outside, maybe there’s hope for the future of the Democrat Party through people like Zandani in NY, but my own experience in Britain with Corbyn is that the well entrenched “establishment” will doggedly fight against such people and even shamelessly ally with their supposed adversaries from “the other party” in order to stop such internal challengers trying to change the direction of the party back towards left of center.

The idea of “both-siderism” is anchored on 2D politics: you can’t have “both-siderism” where there are more than 2 sides, hence my point about viewing politics as 2D.

You’re living inside a box and only seeing what’s in that box, hence hyper-aware of the difference between those because they’re all that you know, whilst I’m outside the box and pointing out that compared to the rest of the Universe what’s inside that box you live in isn’t actually very different.

It’s like I’m talking about “the landscapes of the World” with an Eskimo - you keep insisting that “this icy landscape is very different from that icy landscape” (which I’m sure they are in the eyes of a person who has only ever known those landscapes and nothing else) even whilst I point out that they’re both icy landscapes and thus very similar to each other when compared to other kinds of landscapes that do exist in the rest of the World, such as sandy beaches or tropical forests.

Worse, your persistence in closing your eyes to the point I’ve made repeatedly that there are more sides than just two, leaves me with the feeling that I’m talking to a particularly provincial and simple minded Eskimo who thinks that those differences they’re so hyper-aware off between different kinds of icy landscapes are far more important differences that the vastly larger differences between those and the rest of the landscapes that actually exist outside the place they live in.

Exactly.

For the Fascists, the ones they see as lesser are pretty much sub-human and to be treated as vermin, and they have no more empathy for the younger “vermin” than they have for the adult “vermin”.

Just look at Nazi Germany and Zionist Israel for very obvious examples of how for these people the children of the “lesser” races aren’t really human and get targetted same as all the other members of the ethnicities they literally call “vermin”.

If these people were both capable of empathy and unable to block their empathy on a per-ethnicity basis, they wouldn’t be Fascists.

You own post:

This bothsiderism is pretty thoughtless.

Your post starts with a sloganeering, hyper-reductive take of what I wrote.

As I wrote in response, “This is Politics, it’s not 1D or 2D”!

It is true that both contribute to a surveillance state but to equate both is to just ignore all policy differences, actions and more to pretend to be nuanced while painting everything as the same shade of grey, which is a downgrade to even black and white thinking.

In case you’re unware of it, two forests can be the same kind of forest even when the trees in each are different: demanding for others to focus on the details of the trees in each (otherwise they’re “painting everything as the same shade of grey”) is just a way to try to avoid that people look at the forest as a whole.

That said, you’re right. The details are different and I didn’t address that in my original post were I only talked about the main policy direction on these domains.

The broad policy direction on this subject is the same and the outcomes have been very similar and over time progressed in the same direction during the time in power of both parties, but things worsened in different domains at different speeds with different parties in power.

This is not even what many Americans call “the ratchet effect”, it’s actually worse because in this case it’s not one pushing in a certain direction and the other refusing to revert it, it’s actually both pushing in the same direction, with just some difference in details here and there which didn’t add up to much difference in outcomes.

So yeah, my point stands that in this domain both US parties are shit and my second point also stands that you’re trying to move the conversation away from criticizing parties for doing this shit by claiming that subtle differences in each party’s shit are more important that the overall shitty nature of their actions in this.

This is Politics, it’s not 1D or 2D, it’s N-Dimensional (with a very, very large N): it’s not just possible but pretty much a Mathematical certainty than in a country were there are only 2 parties they will match perfectly on some dimensions, even whilst not at all matching in others.

Trying to dismiss away that aspect of Reality (which is incoveninent for tribalists) with sloganeering like “bothsiderism” is just parroting propaganda meant for simpletons who see reality as having just one dimension where there is nothing more than 2 sides.

It’s pretty evident by their actual policies that strengthenning of police powers and the surveillance state are things in which both sides of the power duopoly in the US agree in the most, and it the face of both of those parties being shit on that domain your “yeah, but <tiny difference>” discourse is really just trying to distract away from the most nasty aspects of both of those taking big fat dumps on the face of every American, by talking about subtle details in the shape and consistency of each one’s shit.

Now, if you favorite party did start to diverge in that, you would have reason to celebrate, but it ain’t hapenning and discourse such as yours makes it even harder that it will ever happen - why would the tribe’s leadership change their ways when there’s a veritable army of tribalist peons going “yeah, but, bothsiderism” at any criticism of what they do, even those parts which are undeniably shit.

In case you haven’t noticed, the system in place now in the US became what it is today under both Republican and Democrat Administrations.

One has to be a tribalist useful idiot to deny that “their side” has done as much to create a Surveillance State as the “other” side - amongst those few things which have bipartisan support in the US are strengthening of police powers and erosion of privacy.

The comparison with most of Europe (with notable exceptions such as Britain and Russia) is very telling: it absolutely is possible to have low crime without reckless invasion of privacy, widespread civil society surveillance, draconian police powers and a pay-to-play Judicial System.

Also the fraction of Israelis who descend from Holocaust survivors is minuscule since the origin of the vast majority of those who immigrated to Israel is Russia.

Unlike the image they try and push with things like their “Western Values” talk, Western Europe and North America are the origin of only a small fraction of Israelis.

You can see the numbers here

In Israel the Holocaust is little more than a tool for nationalistic propaganda.

It has been my general experience over the years that with just about all electronics devices with “everything and the kitchen sink” in them, you’re actually better off buying functional elements separatelly as discrete devices.

For example, you’re better of with a “dumb” fridge plus a good tablet and something to hang it on the fridge door. Another example is how a “dumb” TV and a TV Media Box separatelly are a better choice than a Smart TV.

This is because those things usually have different technology life-cycles (i.e. the time period were a tablet is expected to remain useful and performant is much less than for a fridge) and some parts are useful on their own and hence are more flexible to use if they’re separate (i.e. a standalone tablet has many more uses than one integrated in a Smart Fridge).

It’s a way of showing one’s wealth (and peak dunnig-krugger status when it comes to technology) to visits?!

An alarm that beeps when the door is left open more than X minutes (say, 5 minutes) only requires a stupidly simple circuit and about $5 in parts.

No smarts needed (though it’s probably cheaper to make it with a microcontroller than have the timer circuit be done with discrete parts).

Receives a letter at home from Panasonic containing a message, a color printed sheet and a fridge magnet.

Message reads: “Dear costumer, please use enclosed fridge magnet to hang provided advert sheet on your Panasonic refrigerator”

I lived in Britain for over a decade and every single government during that time had policies to prop up realestate prices.

Frankly I’m surprised it’s only 44% of average wages.

I bet the picture is far worse if you look at the norm of wages (i.e. the value around which most wages are) rather than the average.

The average wage were I am - Portugal - is €1,741 before tax, whilst the average rent is €1,220 (for a 2-bedroom appartment)

Specifically for a 1-bedroom appartment it’s between €1500 in Lisbon and about €600 in the cheapest possible city.

So the average rent (for a 2-bedroom) is over 2/3 of average wage, whilst for a 1-bedroom it’s between 86% of a single average wage in Lisbon and 34% in the cheapest city.

Mind you, it has long been the case that, for example, to live near Lisbon in average both members of an university educated middle class couple must work full time, otherwise they can’t afford it.

Oh, and minimum wage in Portugal is €870, which means that for example a couple both earning minimum wage in Lisbon can only afford a 1-bedroom appartment if they don’t actually eat for most of the month.

Unsurprisingly birth rates in Portugal are some of the worst in the World.

The really entertaining thing is how successive governments have done all they can to push house prices up (same in Britain by the way: I lived there for over a decade and there too it was always government policy to prop-up the realestate market) so house prices in Portugal went up 17% just this year, and house prices going up invariably drag rents up.

(But hey, at least our Realestate Investor Prime Minister - who owns 54 properties - is 17% richer just this year).