Putting salespeople in between engineers and clients, and giving them perverse incentives to say "yes" to everything the client asks, and no incentive at all to try to understand what it takes to actually get any of that stuff accomplished. It produces clients that live in fantasyland.
Just a nitpick / editorial suggestion: The acronym "CRDT" is not extremely common, and never defined in the document. Such things trigger my obsessive personality streak hard and maybe others' too. Thankfully, Wikipedia gave me the answer, assuming this is about conflict-free replicated data types.
> A Conflict-free Replicated Data Type, or CRDT, is an umbrella term for any data structure that can be replicated and modified concurrently across multiple sites, and is guaranteed to converge without the need for a central authority to coordinate the changes.
Sorry about that. I saw the title, didn't know what CRDT meant, and clicked through to the document specifically to find out, not particularly wanting to read the article. I was then scan-reading and missed it. I must say in my defense, though, that the convention is to define an acronym when it's first used, excluding the title, and the definition is only at the fourth use excluding the title and first section heading.
> I must say in my defense, though, that the convention is to define an acronym when it's first used… the definition is only at the fourth use…
To be fair, the definition is not in the bulleted abstract, it is in the first use of the term in the first section, which someone not familiar with CRDT might first scan, helpfully headlined “Intro to CRDTs”:
# First part: Intro to text CRDTs
A Conflict-free Replicated Data Type, or CRDT, is an umbrella term for any data structure that can be replicated and modified concurrently across multiple sites, and is guaranteed to converge without the need for a central authority to coordinate the changes.
I do not at all think that, if government wasn't in the business of setting those standards, the standards would turn out lower.
Reputation would follow the institutions, and graduating from an institution that set lows standards wouldn't have any signalling power to prospective employers, so students wouldn't want to enroll there.
What you actually see in countries that have both a private and public education system is that the private institutions compete on the grounds of who sets the highest standards, not on who offers the most riskless opportunity to students to get the degree, irrespective of how low an effort they put in or how incapable they are.
If you're talking of a huge number of small institutions in combination with high mobility, then maybe reputation at the level of the individual institution wouldn't do the trick, but you would probably see certification and quality assurance agencies pop up to establish brands and enforce standards around them.
Well put. I recognize your argument, but ultimately don't share your faith that private certification bodies will do a better job than a government body such as the Department of Education (as long as such an organization is not intentionally devolved with unmeriting stooges). I may switch opinion depending on if we are speaking about schools/universities vs. jobs/trades. But it isn't one or the other. An institution can have a reputation as well as have standards to meet determined by a government department, and I would likely advocate that a hybrid approach is better than one or the other.
Measuring up a student/candidate who was home schooled or self-taught works for some schools/vocations more than others. Having certification/accreditation of some sort streamlines the selection process. Whether such quality is best defined by the market-driven private certifiers or the government will depend on what type of education we're talking about, and even then will be muddied by one's belief in the efficacy of free markets vs democratic governance, which is a whole other can 'o worms.
There's not much wrong with the government still setting standard and curricula, as long as they don't force them on anyone, and as long as they don't waste too much taxpayer money on the whole endeavor.
"researchforteachers dot org dot uk" sounds like it might be an interesting organization that I'd like to know more about, but the domain root is just a login mask. Does anyone have details on who is behind and what else they offer to the general public besides a scanned PDF of an interesting article?
> I'm really curious what the current definition of "minimalistic" is.
Things like cutting off content that overruns the screen size, without giving any indication that this has happened, and also hiding scrollbars, so as to make it impossible to navigate to that content if you have neither a mousewheel nor a gesture-capable device. -- Not saying that this is what Alexandria is doing; just cracking a joke about modern designs with "minimalist" inclinations in general.
> important stuff, that a lot of people rely on, and for which there will be severe consequences if it is built wrong.
Sure, if you're working on medical devices or software controllers for devices in vehicles or nuclear reactors or whatever, but, as a fraction of the software industry, that's tiny. I don't have hard numbers on this, but you can look at popularity of programming languages as a proxy. Most software "engineers" do JavaScript or Python, two languages you would never ever use for such things.
Most software is a form of entertainment with a small amount of usefulness sprinkled in, or doing things that could, in principle, be done with paperwork.
I had to choose a VCS for a project a year ago. At that point jujutsu looked extremely promising but immature. It's great to see that so much progress has been made. I can't wait to give it another go, the next time I get to choose a VCS for something. Innovation in this space is desperately needed.
> What you and most other developers don't realize is that[...]
Generalizations like this are just so bad. My biggest beef with design/"product" folk in the tech world is this thing that many of them do, where they justify their existence as a group of people and a business function by bad-mouthing developers.
Lol. You can't just qualify a generalization with "many" to make it a non-generalization.
Before getting into design, I was a full-time back end developer for 11 years and worked in dev organizations in ops/support rules for a decade before that. The job market over the past decade had coddled developers so much, and made them so fragile and arrogant. Even intimating that my professional opinion on design is more informed than a developer's opinion on design often yields a intellectual temper tantrum.
...except when it's decided to shove an update down your throat, in which case it won't even let you log in until it's done.