It might not be a popular opinion but all the comments about cultural differences, or needing to be careful with communication seem wrong to me.

Someone offering you a gift to pay shouldn’t come off as rude or a power play of wealth. It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that some people are more well off. If a kind gesture makes you feel awkward, guilty or lesser that’s insecurity on you, not them.

Maybe, just maybe, you are bad at receiving gifts.

Let’s be charitable and stop assuming people are doing something weird. Yes we can communicate better but we don’t need to walk on eggshells just to be kind to friends.

I absolutely love treating friends. I intentionally invite people to dinner, don’t tell them ahead of time that I’m paying so they order exactly what they would have normally. I excuse myself to the restroom and ask the waiter to use my card at the end.

The few times I’ve had people had an issue or feel bad, I was extremely clear with them that

1. I want to, it brings me joy to give my friends gifts 2. I do not expect anything in return, I just wanted to spend time and enjoy a dinner with them 3. I purposely budget to do this, it’s the same as me inviting them over for cooked dinner 4. If they are deeply hurt or bothered by it I have no problem with them paying the portion and won’t do it again if it wasn’t something that made them feel cared for or enjoyed

I’ve never had anyone ever come back to point (4)

To me, it’s respectful to offer the intended recipients of your gift the choice to accept or not rather than forcing something on them they didn’t consent to.

So is it disrespectful to want to gift someone a meal? I don’t understand why it has to be so black and white.

Also the consent thing really sounds weird. Do you honestly go around making value judgements about when people did or did not seek your consent to this level of granularity? Why?

Again I think if the first place you go to when offered a free, meaningful and well intended gift is consent, you internally have an issue that you need to handle.

The good thing about consent in this case is they can just "return" the gift by paying you their portion of the bill, and if they don't consent isn't really violated. You went from owing the restaurant to owing them.

But why take the joys of life and make them difficult? Let your friend enjoy himself by being generous.

While this behavior is joyous and enjoyablefor you, not everyone may share your point of view. Some find joy in paying their own way. Let others choose for themselves instead of deciding for them.

Paying a bill isn't forcing anything on anyone. It literally doesn't involve them, it's between the payer (the gift giver) and the payee (the restaurant).

If you pay someone else’s debt without their consent it absolutely involves them. Of course the restaurant doesn’t care who pays.

How could it possibly? They aren't a party to the transaction.

They are. Picking up someone's tab is analogous to extending them credit. There are people out there who hate being indebted to anyone.

No, credit happens only by mutual consent. Paying someone's bill does not obligate them to reimburse you; extending them credit does.

It's still analogous to credit. Many people will feel like they owe you if you do it.

No. If the only way you can manage is via micromanagement then you shouldn’t be a manager, end of story, period.

The bar is far too low for managers already. The technical, communication and delivery bars are clear for developers at different levels. Managers have these too.

You don’t settle with dog shit management skills. If I ever saw a manager doing this and didn’t improve they would see the door in short notice.

Stop being lazy, provide your team with tooling or ways to help you gain insight. Make it clear to them what you need and how you can help them get there. Basically, do your job.

Both no management and micromanagement are failure states. The parent is comparing two failure states.

But I think the key to point out is that most line managers have fewer than 5 years of experience. The good ones move up the chain and the bad ones return to IC work. Sure, some will stagnate in an organization but it's more common to see it as part of the early career. (In smaller organizations, directors and senior managers will also have teams, but they usually have larger swaths of experience and end up delegating a fair amount to tech leads.)

I will also point out that few engineering managers have proper training. Most of us had to pick it up as we went. You talk about a manager seeing the door in short notice: if you were their boss, would it even cross your mind to give feedback and training?

I want to point out two additional observations.

1. There are a decent amount of software engineers or programmers whom literally aged at the perfect time to organically learn these tools that later became fundamental. If you even touched a computer from the 60s to the late nineties in a engineering aspect at all, you were bound to have worked in a terminal, worked on computers with a single core, worked on computers with very little memory, had to either get comfortable with some lower level tooling or build your own, at some point had to mess with networking or at least understand how packets were being sent and received, seen and gone through iterations of version control and saving your work, automated task using shell scripts.

2. While there is a plethora of knowledge, videos, tutorials and flavors of ways to learn these things; the sheer volume and breadth that presents to newcomers is daunting. Yes you can learn Git, but there are so many ways to do it that it can cause analysis to paralysis. Building on point (1) if you learned it early there were only a few ways it was being done or even shared in smaller communities. Too many choices or paths can lead to just using the way someone showed you without digging 1 layer deeper just because you might not know better.

All of those things you ‘caught’ by being at the right place at the right time are a privilege. Please don’t look down on people trying to aspire to learn or want to enter into this field that haven’t got there yet.

Coming from a family of immigrants and being the first person in my family to graduate college + enter SWE. I cannot count how many times other engineers were rude, made condescending remarks or discouraged me by shoving these expectations in my face as failures instead of taking the opportunity to teach (I was always open to learning).

I am the first to graduate college and to go into software. I learned a lot on my own before studying Computer Science, and still do after.

I can agree that people tend to quickly get condescending ("just google it") instead of giving keywords ("I think you are looking for X, Y, Z, try to read about them and come back when you have specific questions"). IMO the latter is constructive, the former is discouraging. The point here is: don't be condescending, try to give advice/keywords.

This said, many beginners think that their first project can be a complex application even though they don't know how to write code. The constructive comment for them is "start small, learn the language first", but of course many beginners don't take that as an answer. Beginners need to accept that learning software engineering takes time and dedication.

Finally, some devs tend to think that they are so smart that if they don't grasp something in 2 seconds, then that something is bad. I disagree with that. An experienced developer should know how to learn a new tool. If they don't like it, they can try another one, write their own (and see if a community follows them), or just accept that they don't have a choice. That's how it works.

I think there must be some sort of culture gap in play here. I've been told to "google it" more times than I could ever count and not once have I perceived a condescending intent. And similarly, I have told people to google things many times and not once did I mean it to be condescending.

Usually it means "I don't know the answer off-hand, but I know that I could find it if I googled it. Therefore I'm telling you how I would find the answer." I know such advice is useful, even though everybody knows that google exists already, because most times that I was on the receiving end of this response, googling it really was the solution for me and I just needed somebody to snap their fingers in my face and remind me that I know how to find the answer myself.

"google it" is usually useful advice when I am on the receiving end of it, so I don't think it's condescending at all. Ditto "RTFM". If I turn to my coworker and ask "Hey Jimbo, what's the flag for making GNU Tar do bzip2 compression?", maybe he knows the answer off the top of his head and tells me -j, but likely he doesn't know, knows that he could find out in about 5 seconds with the manpage, and tells me to check the manpage. Which is wholly fair; we both know how to search a manpage, so why should he do that on my behalf instead of reminding me that I can look it up myself? I don't perceive any condescension here.

> I've been told to "google it" more times than I could ever count and not once have I perceived a condescending intent.

Personally, when someone answers "google it", I read it as "fuck off". If you don't want to help me, just don't; no need to explicitly say you won't.

However, it's totally different if you say "you should read about concepts X, Y, Z", because that gives me keywords to search for.

> If I turn to my coworker and ask [...]

Well that's a bit different than asking a question to strangers online. Of course sometimes it makes sense to ask a coworker, though a quick search beforehand never hurts.

> This said, many beginners think that their first project can be a complex application even though they don't know how to write code. The constructive comment for them is "start small, learn the language first", but of course many beginners don't take that as an answer. Beginners need to accept that learning software engineering takes time and dedication.

That is just a phase, it is normal and nothing new even. I remember a lot of people of my generation whose idea of first project was the single player shooter with storyline and RPG like skills tree. Obviously they all failed. But I also think that they did learned a lot by trying or just reading up on it.

I think that for a complete beginner, whatever is motivating and fun for you, you will learn a lot from it. Because motivating and fun means you will keep going and keep learning. That is better in the long run then theoretically super effective start that will just make you bored and unmotiavted.

Literally no part of that post was condescending, it was an observation about how wildly different those with a certain level computer knowledge use computers from the general pubic. Which is interesting since so much of the world runs on computers. Sure your points are accurate, but, so what?

> Literally no part of that post was condescending

Sorry, did you read the same text?

>> I try and try to explain that this arcane system of monochrome text and rendering steps is ACTUALLY easier than editing in Microsoft Word, but my pleas fall on deaf ears.

This reminded me what my mother never grasped how exactly programming VCR works and often asked me to help with it, yet she did installed a bunch of apps she was interested on her smartphone (like social media, Pinterest and other BS) just fine and all by herself.

>> I try and try to explain that this arcane system of monochrome text and rendering steps is ACTUALLY easier than editing in Microsoft Word, but my pleas fall on deaf ears.

By characterizing the system as arcane, they are tacitly acknowledging that the system does not have a noob friendly first appearances. This is empathetic, not condescending. Somebody who was condescending would not acknowledge the difficult nature of the thing they are suggesting.

No part of the comment you replied to implied the post was condescending, just seems to me to be a reminder of some things we often forget when this topic comes up :)

The point I expressed in the conclusion was meant to turn the apparent condescension from the earlier part around on the reader. I'm saying that we should be more mindful of those who don't know what we know.

I like to surround myself with people where learning, teaching and curiosity are the norm.

I know the feeling of being looked down on. And vice versa I’ve been just as guilty of doing so when I was younger.

Both fundamentally sucks and doesn’t lead anywhere.

Managing our ego is hard, but even just the attempt goes a very long way.

Accountability via trainer is a good option. Eventually the habit will stick and then you can pocket the money if money is important to you.

The low/no money option is to tether an activity that you like to one you dislike. If you like watching Netflix shows, only allow yourself to watch it when you’re on a bike at the gym (or at home).

Like to go on YouTube? Only while exercising. Be 100% strict and no excuses with it.

Don’t go too hard, cardio done at steady state for like 30 minutes a day will increase your life span and make you feel 1000% better. Weight lifting is a non boring way to also be at the gym.

Last tip: to retrain your brain recognize that agitation or frustration and lack of desire means you are heading in the right direction. Hate going to the gym? You are doing the right thing. Your brain will fight you but it’s the only gateway to feeling better and being healthy.

There are a couple different definitions of failures

Mechanical failure - your form is being compromised, usually induced by muscular load

Throughput failure - you could maintain form but your cardiovascular capacity is the limiting factor and you are starting to decrease in tempo (either in the eccentric or concentric)

Partial Failure - you use assistance on the concentric or eccentric to continue to do the one that’s still has workload capacity

Each type of failure induces a different level of lactic acid build up, or muscle tearing, and can be increased in different ways. Usually one of them is a limiting factor and is why progressive overload is proven to improve strength and size.

Most of the people I’ve worked with don’t know true failure (within 1-2 RIR [reps in reserve] left) because they’re limited in cardiovascular capacity to even reach failure or they aren’t pushing themselves due to fear of form breakage/injury.

The reality is you shouldn’t be doing 1 rep maxes often, but you should be lowering the weight and experiencing true failure in order to progressive overload properly.

I've never had problems with upgrades, in fact the latest version of Rails make upgrading a breeze. What Rails app version are you trying to upgrade? Happy to help. Rails also has an upgrade guide that's quite good: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/upgrading_ruby_on_rails.html

And you can use https://railsdiff.org/ to check what you're missing in upgrade apps. Anything other thing that breaks would most like come from another gem, which doesn't make it Rails' fault or Ruby itself, in the case of Ruby, you can track everything to the source to fix it. Ruby keeps a change log diligently. Everything is trackable, at least in my experience.

I've upgraded our moderately sized app from 3 to 4 to 5 to 6. Haven't gotten to 7 yet. This is widely accepted to be one of the most painful parts of rails, so I'm surprised you haven't had a problem. Maybe you've only upgraded small apps, or maybe only upgrade very recent versions (they are getting better). There are whole consultancies dedicated just to this task. Github and Shopify post about dedicating whole teams and tools just to the task.

Even with very high test coverage on a large app it is a huge and high risk effort to upgrade - there are so many deprecations and unnecessary behavior changes. The `belongs_to` now validates presence was especially egregious and arbitrary. Of course you can turn it off with a variable - but now we have a rails app that is a mix if defaults from 4 different versions of rails.

It's hard to counter "it sucks" and other rather vague points like the ones you've made.

> upgrading to newer versions of RoR sucks

This hasn't been my experience at all. Rails comes with a built-in tool that interactively helps you upgrade your app `rails app:update`. Even on a 300k+ line Rails app I work on, our last major Rails upgrade took a single engineer about a week to do. It could be better, but it's one of the easier frameworks to upgrade, in my experience.

> The more time I invest in trying to like RoR the more I end up having to fork gems to patch them because upgrades cannot be made smoothly

Isn't this the case generally? Dependencies are liabilities. Not sure why this is a problem with Rails?!

> It so easily integrates ActiveRecord, and heavily encourages it, that when you want to pull out of using it it’s a huge pain.

ActiveRecord is a central component of the Rails framework. Why would they encourage you to use an alternative?

> Test suite combines unit and integration testing.

I think it's first important to state upfront: there is no single canonical definition of "unit" or "integration" tests. I assume your point is that the standard unit test examples in Rails hit the database? That being bad is, like, your opinion, man. And you totally can decide to not design things that way.

This is because Rails does not have a strict backwards compatibility policy like many other frameworks. It's done on purpose to stay relevant, aka "Progress over stability".

https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine#progress-over-stability

That would be fine, if it was possible to actually work out what changes you need to make. But Rails will have breaking changes every release that aren't mentioned in the docs. I've spent around 200+ hours over the last year trying to update our app from 5.1 to 5.2. And it's not some kind of megaproject on the scale of Github, its an ordinary app around 10 years old.

Every single Rails update is extremely painful and issues will slip through every unit test and browser automation you can come up with. Stuff that would be trivially catchable with type checking.

I would say the most annoying bit is around javascript. For example I would like to move a rails 6.1 project to 7, and also replace webpacker with esbuild. I'm pretty sure I will just create a fresh 7 project and start copy pastaing files over, then do the javascript stuff delicately (the default javascript setup in rails 7 is also quite strange)

But upgrading pure API Rails projects is much less painful

The Webpacker removal in particular was a huge pain for me. I was deeply frustrated by DHH’s belief that the framework no longer needs to support TypeScript.

Not sure why you're downvoted either, it's a legit concern. One way to address it is by being very conservative and picky with gems. A good example is Hey's Gemfile (the app made by Rails creators): https://gist.github.com/dhh/782fb925b57450da28c1e15656779556. It's a good (albeit slightly outdated) example of not straying too far from defaults, while not reinventing the wheel either.

You have to be super careful with gems because every single one you add risks blocking you from updating rails. Resulting you either having to wait for them to get updated, or if they are abandoned, you have to remove them and rewrite all the code that depends on them. I've spent so long replacing all the code in our app which is built on abandoned gems.

I agree you need to be careful to only add high quality gems - but that holds true for the deps for any project.

You can also fork/vendor the gem and fix it, vs rewriting the whole thing from scratch. If a gem is abandoned you don't need to nuke it - you just take ownership of the code. Essentially if you use a gem you are saying "this code is as good as our code" so just maintain it just like it is your code.

True. I tend to stay away from gems that try to integrate into multiple parts of your app to provide some sort of comprehensive solution. The kinds of gems I recommend are: 1) libraries (you call into them when you need them) 2) mounted apps on a url, isolated from the rest of your app 3) generators (a nice example: https://github.com/lazaronixon/authentication-zero).

I spotted at least three typos in your response so I stopped reading.

Maybe spelling is hard for them or English isn’t their first language.

So there’s a few really good resources on what we would now call minimalistic training.

Most people who go to the Gym do not need to squeeze out every ounce of progression. Unlike the fitness industry which is obsessed with small percentage gains because they are already in the 90+ percentile.

The study sighted really doesn’t do it justice to explain how much is enough to get the balanced, healthy long term impacts of going to the gym.

Go watch Jeff Nippards video on minimalist training, he also has a video interviewing someone whose PhD research is in this area.

tl;dr weight training for 45 minutes to an hour 3 times a week is often enough to gain 80% of the benefits from going to the gym (this excludes cardio vascular capacity and health)

Most threads cover anecdotal experiences and the summary is that many different strategies work.

I’m gonna go ahead and mention what I haven’t seen almost any thread say. Which is that any singular child’s early infant and toddler stages pale in comparison to the other 15 or 16 years+ that also determine your child’s habits, disposition and development.

Ignore the noise, partial studies and fads. Do what is best for you.

Dare I say if parents were less fixated on early sleep methods and actually being present and supportive (which also strongly correlates to having a healthy relationship with your partner and how your child sees you love them) throughout we would probably have better equipped and developed young adults.

We over index on sleep training when we lose sleep because it’s hard. But it’s a season.

People have left churches for a plethora of reasons, many of which stem from the church itself being corrupt. But moreover, as you mentioned people want a sense of community without and of the accountability that Church asks.

You don’t want to tithe because you don’t trust leadership with your money.

You don’t want to be told you’re doing things wrong, or to fix some of your sins.

You don’t want a judgmental group of people who think they are better than you.

You don’t want people who say they are generous but ignore the homeless and needy around them.

You want community without the worshiping God part. You want total freedom without guilt. And you want everything you do to be accepted without judgement.

The Church doesn’t exist to stroke egos or to center around a common interest (like a hobby). It supposed to be a place where broken people come and try to look more like Jesus. Even the Pharisees were corrupt. Corruption in the church isn’t new.

I think the positive impacts of the church aren’t publicized like the negatives are, just like any other large community, so like many people just take the worst and throw the baby out with the bath water.

There are good churches. There are good people. And money is honestly accounted for and used by churches.

I highly encourage lonely people to try church. But don’t just walk in thinking it’s perfect or that everyone there is to serve you hand and foot for just attending. It’s more of a hospital with patients that are committed to seeing each other get better.

> But moreover, as you mentioned people want a sense of community without and of the accountability that Church asks.

Do churches ask for accountability or conformity?

> You want community without the worshiping God part. You want total freedom without guilt. And you want everything you do to be accepted without judgement.

I believe you are strawmanning here. People who don't attend church experience guilt and have a moral compass likely in equal measure to churchgoers. The judgement that people wish to avoid is the kind that denies LGBTQ people's humanity, among other issues.

Accountability is a core tenant of Christianity. In the end you are accountable for everything you say and do, or don’t do.

There’s bound to be conformity in the way people grow or change under a given framework which is what Churches provide for everyone attending. Conformity as a whole is not the goal otherwise we wouldn’t have different denominations and expressions of worship.

It makes me sad that many online conversations become the Church vs. LGBTQ. I know this is a sensitive subject and the source of much pain. My main point is not to discuss that at length but rather to point to what this article and thread address which is ways the Church can help with loneliness.

I did not mean to intentionally straw man, if I did forgive me. When I spoke of ‘you’ it was a metaphorical as a general person who might not want church and less targeting the OP directly.

I agree with their points I mainly wanted to provide another perspective in hopes that readers might give the Church another chance. We have failed and will continue to in many ways, but I’ve seen the good outweigh the bad.