Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?
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@gąska Papadimoulis started it and therefore it goes where it pleases.
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@apapadimoulis Pair programming isn't a "skill" thing IMO, it's a "it makes it really hard to procrastinate" thing.
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@apapadimoulis The concept might have been good at some point, but approximately 5 minutes after someone first published it, a million managers latched on to it and turned it into the trash fire it is today. Now there's a whole industry of "agile coaches" and similar assorted shit that does nothing but make life hell for anyone affected by it.
There always seems to be this weird false dichotomy between "waterfall" (we'll decide on a strict schedule and allow no changes at all after the planning period ends) and "agile", but I've never seen waterfall implemented in any way that was even remotely similar to what agile followers always describe. Agile in practice seems to be a really bad attempt at fixing a problem that I don't think has ever existed.
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We learned pair programming in college. In practice, it was always me doing 95% of the work and some other guy getting my grade for nothing. I have yet to see pair programming in The Real World™.
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@pie_flavor said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@gąska Papadimoulis started it and therefore it goes where it pleases.
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@mott555 I've done it. It's been fine.
But even still, we (independently) decided we could get more done working alone. I mean, even if I'm just 80% as productive, and they are too, we're getting 160% productivity out of both of us working alone on separate tickets.
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@blakeyrat said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@apapadimoulis Pair programming isn't a "skill" thing IMO, it's a "it makes it really hard to procrastinate" thing.
It's a "the person they paired me with is an idiot who doesn't know how to blow his nose and now he's mysteriously vanished and there's a new speedbump in the parking lot" thing.
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@lorne-kates Yeah you murdered him, but you didn't procrastinate at it, right?
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@blakeyrat said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@lorne-kates Yeah you murdered him, but you didn't procrastinate at it, right?
I was very prompt and efficient.
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@mott555 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
We learned pair programming in college. In practice, it was always me doing 95% of the work and some other guy getting my grade for nothing. I have yet to see pair programming in The Real World™.
Yeah, that's pretty much how it is in the real world. I mean, realistically, when you have a single keyboard, someone is going to be the "driver" and that person is likely going to do all the work. I don't even consider it a slacker versus hard worker thing. It's just, once someone takes initiative, they're likely going to ride the partner all the way. (inb4 Quotes out of Context)
IMO the act of programming is generally an individual task. Unless you're shadowing a mentor to gain some knowledge or you are trying to tackle a really challenging problem where you do need some "groupthink" to accomplish a solution, it's hardly what I'd call an effective operating procedure in most cases.
In the experience I talked about earlier in this thread, it reached a of epic proportions when the CTO uttered the words, "Why don't we have all 5 of us developers take on this one task at once?"
That decision lead to an excruciating 5 hours of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1oV5T7HcL4
It was soon after everyone agreed to stop doing this shit and we were far more productive ever since.
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@mott555 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
I have yet to see pair programming in The Real World™.
We do it occasionally at work, for tougher challenges. It depends on both the personalities working together well and the person at the keyboard knowing a reasonable amount about what they're doing. Without the first, you've got a fight; without the second, it's dragging the person not in control through the shit of someone learning on the job.
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@blek said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
There always seems to be this weird false dichotomy between "waterfall" (we'll decide on a strict schedule and allow no changes at all after the planning period ends) and "agile", but I've never seen waterfall implemented in any way that was even remotely similar to what agile followers always describe. Agile in practice seems to be a really bad attempt at fixing a problem that I don't think has ever existed.
Waterfall was always a straw-man. Nobody sane ever worked that way (as it depends on knowing all the bugs in the system before you start coding it at all, a patent absurdity). OTOH, the original Agile was mostly OK because it was about getting able people to do what had been found to be good practices, and they could be told “and be reasonable about it, of course”. Alas, management consultants found out about it and decided that it was the perfect thing for running the programming effort of a zillion cheap outsourcing companies…
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@hungrier said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@boomzilla Good old "It's not my job to educate you" when challenged on their nonsense
There's a very simple counter to that. "Yes it is. Advocacy is education, sweetie. You went through the trouble of raising a hissy fit over the issue, so this is obviously very important to you. Given that, why don't you take the effort to defend your position, or kindly shut up if you have nothing of substance to add?"
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@rhywden said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@karla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Successful people learn to stand up for themselves.
That's a nice sentiment. There are also the not-so-small number of people who stood up for themselves and promptly found themselves standing ... outside out of a job.
Discretion is the better part of valor.
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@groaner said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
"Yes it is. Advocacy is education, sweetie. You went through the trouble of raising a hissy fit over the issue, so this is obviously very important to you. Given that, why don't you take the effort to defend your position, or kindly shut up if you have nothing of substance to add?"
Seriously, you need to word things more carefully than that. The concepts are fine, but you want them to take on board what you're responding with and not simply reject you and what you're saying for a mere ill-chosen surface to the words. If you're wording stuff to cause offence, you're just actually talking to your own side of the peanut gallery, and that's just going to end up with everyone pelted with peanuts and screaming at each other…
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@kurt-c-pause said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@apapadimoulis said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
As you know, I'm trying to become more aware of my own white male privilege so I can stop being so microagressive all the time.
I learned yesterday from a flurry of tweets by Social Justice Programmer and Twitter Celebrity sarahmei that Agile/XP is a manifestation of white male privilege:
If you follow the dozens of tweets and replies, the logic is sound. Before that, I didn't realize that a software development methodology could be racist and misogynistic, so now I'm now worried that DevOps is in fact, also a manifestation of white male privilege. Is that the case?
Stackoverflow is following the trend:
I don't get it. They finally identified their problems, as many people here ranted about for so long, but now that they decided to tackle that they're suddenly the bad guys?
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@blek said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
TBH I don't really care what finally makes the cancer that is "agile" uncool and what makes idiot managers switch to push some other kind of idiotic magic bullet regardless of whether it's even applicable or not. I just want it gone already, it's done enough damage. Agile is like communism, it sounds good on paper as long as you don't actually think about it, but then you implement it and suddenly there's no toilet paper anywhere and a hundred million are dead; wheon you point out how it fails horribly all the time and a crowd of idiots come out the bushes and start chanting "that wasn't real agile!". So, yay for crazy bitches on Twatter. Yaaasss kween slay!
I worked in a scrum team once. It was great. It was the best experience I've ever had working in a team.
I see a lot of people ranting, but I don't get it. It's mostly people that have to work in SAFe, though. I guess that's it.
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@dkf said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Seriously, you need to word things more carefully than that. The concepts are fine, but you want them to take on board what you're responding with and not simply reject you and what you're saying for a mere ill-chosen surface to the words.
If you want a more diplomatic version, omit the second sentence and touch up the first sentence a bit and call it a day. This would be my strategy if someone said "it's not my job to educate you" to my face.
The thing is, "it's my not my job to educate you" is in itself a derailing tactic designed to end the conversation and declare the speaker the victor. Someone who utters such a phrase is likely already flustered and not approaching the discussion in good faith. One could be the greater man and attempt to re-rail the discussion, if one has the patience for it, but as I've grown older, I've gotten more and more tired of being the adult in the room.
If you're wording stuff to cause offence, you're just actually talking to your own side of the peanut gallery, and that's just going to end up with everyone pelted with peanuts and screaming at each other…
Or, the , as we call it.
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@the_quiet_one said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
I've always hated pair-programming. I worked somewhere that experimented with it for a little bit, but I was paired with an arrogant asshole who took the reins and I was left with him just lecturing me and doing all the work. It left me feeling both powerless and a total slacker because I wound up just watching him work.
This is the crux of pair programming, and agile, come to think of it. It requires hands-on approach. It's testing lots of stuff and adjusting.
So when you're paired with someone you have troubles working with, you should be switched. This is the 101 of managment. If you have a doofus as a manager, don't blame the process.
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@captain said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@mott555 I've done it. It's been fine.
But even still, we (independently) decided we could get more done working alone. I mean, even if I'm just 80% as productive, and they are too, we're getting 160% productivity out of both of us working alone on separate tickets.
I think a huge part of what pair programming is supposed to do is make you see how other people approach a problem. At least, that's where I see the value of it.
There's the fact that the observing part can point out the coding person's mistakes sooner because they're not so much engaged with a process.
A lot of the agile processes is based on the assumption that there's a lot of people you can learn from in your team and it tries to facilitate that.
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@kt_ Scrum is fine. Kanban is fine. But they require you to have the right sort of team, and the power to make decisions. The core of agile development practices is that they are development practices that allow you to be agile. They have some things to do with other parts of the business (mostly visibility), but typically involve a lot of freedom. Every team is different, and to the extent that they solidify a process, it needs to be a good fit.
SAFe, alongside anything else that "implements Agile" or capitalizes the word "agile" as if it is something other than an adjective is not looking at things right. It isn't a matter of what you do, it's a matter of what you don't do. By trying to make it into something it isn't and define it as a Unique Concept, you instantly make it brittle and create all the things a focus on agility is supposed to fix.
There's a reason we've had XP, Lean, and others showing up: people realize that they were defining things too much, and know they need to make a looser definition. Then someone asks how their company is doing so well. "Oh, it's because we started this new 'Fast' process!" - and suddenly Fast has some conventions, and then the "Fast is Dead" blogposts, and we begin again.
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@magus said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
There's a reason we've had XP, Lean, and others showing up: people realize that they were defining things too much, and know they need to make a looser definition. Then someone asks how their company is doing so well. "Oh, it's because we started this new 'Fast' process!" - and suddenly Fast has some conventions, and then the "Fast is Dead" blogposts, and we begin again.
I remember proposing at work that we create a new process, Nimbl, not because we would believe in it doing any good or anything like that, but rather just so that we could sell books and speaking tours on it. Who the hell cares if it actually helps anyone else if it lets us cash in and retire to a private island in the Bahamas?
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@the_quiet_one said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
when you have a single keyboard, someone is going to be the "driver" and that person is likely going to do all the work.
I have recently experienced a very productive pair-programming session, but with the modification that we both write on our computers (synchronize through git), but sit at the same table and can easily discuss.
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@dkf Our company was talking about "Nimble Innovation" a year ago. Unfortunately, once english runs out of synonyms for "agile" we'll probably just get more languages in on it.
Here, I'll help you get ahead of the curve, with a great book cover:
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@apapadimoulis said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@blek the concept of "agile" is a really good idea:
- Smaller Changes
- Sooner
Transforming an organization to become agile it quite difficult, because thinking in "smaller changes" is really hard for the business, and even harder for IT to execute.
I don't really get what "XP/Pair Programming" has to do with "being agile", aside from the fact that both practices are misogynistic and racist.
Agile is an awful and stupid idea in a great many contexts.
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Regarding pair programming, it's a tool I've used with my team in occasion.
I find it actually works brilliantly with refactors, modernization and porting. In other words, tasks where, left to their own devices, I'd have a developer standing at my cube door every 5 minutes to complain about the old code's lack of quality and ask questions about what it does and why ("I dunno" and "Probably no good reason" respectively), and by sitting two of them together, they tend to reason that shit out themselves.
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@kt_ said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@blek said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
TBH I don't really care what finally makes the cancer that is "agile" uncool and what makes idiot managers switch to push some other kind of idiotic magic bullet regardless of whether it's even applicable or not. I just want it gone already, it's done enough damage. Agile is like communism, it sounds good on paper as long as you don't actually think about it, but then you implement it and suddenly there's no toilet paper anywhere and a hundred million are dead; wheon you point out how it fails horribly all the time and a crowd of idiots come out the bushes and start chanting "that wasn't real agile!". So, yay for crazy bitches on Twatter. Yaaasss kween slay!
I worked in a scrum team once. It was great. It was the best experience I've ever had working in a team.
I see a lot of people ranting, but I don't get it. It's mostly people that have to work in SAFe, though. I guess that's it.
Personally, I like scrum.
We converted started on the CRM project we took over from a large group HPC who had it for over 2 years and then attempted to release crap that was unusable.
The HPCs apparently took waterfall literally.
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@blek said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Idiotic magic bullet regardless of whether it's even applicable or not. I just want it gone already, it's done enough damage. Agile is like communism, it sounds good on paper
Which of the 12 Principles do you disagree with.
but then you implement it
That is wrong already. It is not something tangible that you "implement"
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@weng said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Regarding pair programming, it's a tool I've used with my team in occasion.
I find it actually works brilliantly with refactors, modernization and porting. In other words, tasks where, left to their own devices, I'd have a developer standing at my cube door every 5 minutes to complain about the old code's lack of quality and ask questions about what it does and why ("I dunno" and "Probably no good reason" respectively), and by sitting two of them together, they tend to reason that shit out themselves.
Big fan of pair programming. The most frustrating part of my career is when I am forced to work alone.
Unfortunately, there is solid evidence that 85%->95% of all attempts degrade into some variation of worker/observer.
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@jbert said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
women, junior developers or other people who might be outnumbered in a team to have much say in the process
But that's true for anything requiring collaboration.
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@gąska said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@lorne-kates said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
The second should be a reason to Jeff this to the Garbage.
I didn't even notice it's not in the garage. I mean, how the hell is this topic not in garage!? It's 100% garage material and no good discussion can possibly spring up from it.
@apapadimoulis can post shit wherever he wants. He pays to keep the lights on around here.
I did consider flagging the OP just to be funny.
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@dkf said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Seriously, you need to word things more carefully than that. The concepts are fine, but you want them to take on board what you're responding with and not simply reject you and what you're saying for a mere ill-chosen surface to the words. If you're wording stuff to cause offence, you're just actually talking to your own side of the peanut gallery, and that's just going to end up with everyone pelted with peanuts and screaming at each other…
In this particular situation, I see no evidence that it wouldn't end up with everyone pelted with peanuts and screaming at each other regardless of approach. Some people aren't reachable.
@groaner said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
This would be my strategy if someone said "it's not my job to educate you" to my face.
And this is a pretty good sign that they're not reachable.
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@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
craftsmanship
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@ben_lubar That's heightist.
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@the_quiet_one said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
In the experience I talked about earlier in this thread, it reached a of epic proportions when the CTO uttered the words, "Why don't we have all 5 of us developers take on this one task at once?"
I hope you didn't miss the opportunity to tell them about 9 women giving birth.
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@groaner said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@hungrier said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@boomzilla Good old "It's not my job to educate you" when challenged on their nonsense
There's a very simple counter to that. "Yes it is. Advocacy is education, sweetie. You went through the trouble of raising a hissy fit over the issue, so this is obviously very important to you. Given that, why don't you take the effort to defend your position, or kindly shut up if you have nothing of substance to add?"
I wonder how much time you've spent to make it exactly 280 characters.
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@apapadimoulis everything that works, because what works is considered a primary relevance/success criteria in that area, is white male privilege, by the definition of it not caring about your gender, race, orientation or feels, and only caring about your skills, contribution and merit.
XD
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@dkf said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
We do it occasionally at work, for tougher challenges. It depends on both the personalities working together well and the person at the keyboard knowing a reasonable amount about what they're doing. Without the first, you've got a fight; without the second, it's dragging the person not in control through the shit of someone learning on the job.
Yeah, this essentially. If you can actually work together in that setting and help each other to figure things out, spot mistakes and problems, then it's great. If you just constantly step on each other's toes, then, not so.
The learning setting is fine too, it just shouldn't be advertised as pair-programming. Teaching via a bit of careful back-seat driving (or letting them take the back seat) can work out, but it's not something you should try for immediate productivity. And both people must be on board - you can't teach somebody who doesn't want to learn that way, and learning from somebody who has zero interest in teaching and explaining what's going on isn't going to be very effective either.
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@dkf said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@mott555 said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
I have yet to see pair programming in The Real World™.
We do it occasionally at work, for tougher challenges.
That's called "collaboration" or "debugging". All practitioners, from accountants to mechanics, do that.
The idea of always assigning two people to complete the task that a single person ought to do -- as illustrated by the fact that computers have a single keyboard and are meant as single-input devices -- is totally asinine. It means you really suck at coming up with tasks that a single person can do.
Some jobs, like police work, require partners. But that's for totally different and obvious reasons. Programming is not one of those jobs.
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@weng said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Agile is an awful and stupid idea in a great many contexts.
Running a business that relies on software to define and control its processes is not one of those contexts. It's absolutely needed.
"Build an app for our service? Yeah sure, let's get that on our 20-year roadmap" -- said no company that survived today
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@ben_lubar said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
craftsmanship
Ugh. My work proxy didn't block this one.
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@apapadimoulis said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Some jobs, like police work, require partners. But that's for totally different and obvious reasons. Programming is not one of those jobs.
Talking stuff out and whiteboarding with other people is very valuable. Sometimes you just need that rubber ducky, though. I can see the value in sitting down with someone else to try to figure out something particularly tricky but not as a part of normal work.
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@blek said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Now there's a whole industry of "agile coaches" and similar assorted shit that does nothing but make life hell for anyone affected by it.
Most people are average or below average, and this applies to agile coaches as well. Going "agile" is really difficult, and you really need "coaches" to help change the organizational mindset.
Put yourself the CTO's shoes. You have a staff of 5,000, low-energy people in IT who's most granular unit of work (in their mind) is a week or month.
"Oh sure, need that logo updated? No problem, we should be able to get that in next month's release schedule."
This is part of the problem that agile practices solve.
I've never seen waterfall implemented in any way that was even remotely similar to what agile followers always describe
You haven't worked in enough large organizations then. "Waterfall" (or top-down planning) is the natural order, because people prefer it.
As an engineer, you prefer to work with highly detailed specifications that you can "translate" into software architecture, code, etc.
As a project manager, you would rather create a highly detailed project plan that outlines all tasks and expectations from the beginning to end of the project.
This applies to every single job. This is why agile is tough.
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Binshoe
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@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Talking stuff out and whiteboarding with other people is very valuable. Sometimes you just need that rubber ducky, though. I can see the value in sitting down with someone else to try to figure out something particularly tricky but not as a part of normal work.
Exactly. Some collaboration is good, but too much leads to diminishing returns or, worse, group think .
My understanding (and I could be wrong) about XP/Pair Programming is that it's a "full time" thing. That's how it was explained to me: when you need to program, you program in pairs.
If that's the case, it's a stupid idea, and the only reason it "works" is because you have two shitty, co-dependent programmers who can't manage to work independently.
Train them to suck less <--- that should be the solution, not enabling them to suck more.
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@magus said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Here, I'll help you get ahead of the curve, with a great book cover:
I don't get it. Do I have to solve the captcha to see the book cover?
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@apapadimoulis What if I'm a good programmer but a procrastinator and hard to motivate? Pair programming really helps in that situation.
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@sh_code said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@apapadimoulis everything that works, because what works is considered a primary relevance/success criteria in that area, is white male privilege, by the definition of it not caring about your gender, race, orientation or feels, and only caring about your skills, contribution and merit.
XD
Did you just come back to the forum because some Google Alert told you someone on the internet said "privilege", and you just had to show up to sealion them?
https://i.imgur.com/yLIskpr.png
Maybe you could, instead, just fuck off?
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@apapadimoulis said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
The idea of always assigning two people to complete the task that a single person ought to do -- as illustrated by the fact that computers have a single keyboard and are meant as single-input devices -- is totally asinine.
Yes.
I can see working in teams during the design phase. Lots of brains in one room. Go over what the solution should accomplish. Discuss pitfalls. Come up with design and infrastructure and UML models and everything needed.
And then break it up into tasks (even if it's just one task), and assign to individuals to execute.
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@karla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@blakeyrat Indeed. And it assumes that it works for a homogeneous team. I would suspect that this sort of thing is orthogonal to heterogeneity. For instance, putting certain similar personality types together can lead to a lot of conflict and acrimony.
She's just harping on her personal hobby horse of grievances.
I dislike people who aren't like me just as much as I dislike those like me.
Misanthropy, the only correct outlook on humanity.