Couldn't agree more. I worked 2 years 100% pairing, it's just too much. I also have some mildly introspective personality and the extra overhead of communicating every single word typed not only interferes with my deep thinking, but would make me feel exhausted by 4pm, instead of my normal capacity to work long hours for quite a few days before starting to realise I needed to rest.
Feeling sorry for someone and feeling guilt feels the same for me. Maybe OP are mixing them up? Ie. he feels sorry for them as soon as the "we are in this together" is gone?
Guilt (fear) and feeling sorry for someone else (empathy), are two distinct feelings.
The problem is the sociopath behaviour and attitudes, that will project all their bad feelings unto others. The sociopath won't acknowledge their own state, so will blame others, also knowingly and silently for personal gain.
The remedy is radical honesty and working with oneself. Nobody else can do the work for someone, but breaking the patterns can be inspiring.
Don't let authority gain undue power over your lives. Some day you will regret it.
As soon as read "hacking" being used as a synonym for coding/development, I started to get angry. I still read it just in case I was wrong, just to end up being right, and angry.
Hacking traditionally refers to prototyping like, "quickly hacking something up" and was pretty common in the Perl/dot com bubble days where everything was some clever hack, just to get it out the door as quickly as possible.
Depends on whom you ask. For many if not most computer people, "hacking" is synonymous to coding, and indeed something very positive.
In the public however, "hacking" is often more used synonymous to "cracking", which I find very unsettling and sad. At least there is nowadays some awareness that there is a different meaning to it. I guess that the word "hackathon" helped to change the public perception.
Saw it happening a few times in my 12 year of industry. I suppose it's specifically common in companies that use social media (and other media) presence as a recruitment boosting tool.
Twice the "leader" of the "Totally Amazing Success" left the company to "be totally amazing" somewhere else. In both cases the team was made mostly of very young engineers, the level of amazingness was strongly overestimated. It was also declared very early, before the "novelty" of the "new thing" faded, and also before the downsides appeared while maintaining the product.
Answering to a "male problem" (e.g. men pursuing less education) by stating it's actually another example of bias agains women ("that's because women need more education to get the same job") is not really a constructive position, is it?
I don't actually know if it is another example of bias against women. I only know that the picture might be more complicated- men may pursue less education but also men can advance faster with less education comparatively. The overall picture is probably not so simple as that men pursue less education therefore men are systematically disadvantaged.
Arguably, it shows that men are disadvantaged in one axis and not necessarily the whole axis, which is why I'm bringing up that there are other spaces along this axis where men are not systematically disadvantaged. I do firmly believe that men are disadvantaged in several fields and spaces which require addressing, but not that that means men are disadvantaged overall.
As some empirical evidence, look at how few StackOverflow sites there are in other languages: https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#technology-traffic. Just three (Russian, Spanish, Portuguese), all were introduced 5+ years after the main site started.
Similarly, Github doesn't have localised versions.
There are certainly clones in other languages (e.g. https://teratail.com/ clones SO in Japanese), but it shows how little demand there is when these well-funded platforms for developers de-prioritise local versions. I couldn't imagine a comparable platform for lawyers or accountants doing same thing.
As a slightly above average dev in London (and I mean it), I feel that for many big companies the interview process always achieve on thing: to avoid hiring anyone who could really transform it for the better.
That is because in a large company you are hired to support the fiefdom of a manager that wants to claw to the top in the existing structure, not 'transform it for the better'.
IDK, I'm an extrovert and a senior developer, I've had mostly positive experiences with interviews, but I think you have to give people the hope that you're the person that is going to be able to make things better.
I think except in the worst circumstances, people can be worked with positively and if you bring a certain energy to the workplace you can bring people around to your way of thinking and bring out their passion.
Some people will dead weight no matter what, but they can be identified and let go.
In a big company, "transforming it for the better" is not a thing that one hire can do until years have passed. Sometimes it takes an entire career! So, at a big company interview, revolutionary attitudes are going to be known to be a pain in the ass. Not thought, known. A desire to fuck shit up "from the inside" grows to be less of a positive trait the larger and more inertial a company is.
