OP's blog post also rang false to me. It feels like it was written by someone who works in HR trying to promote a culture that inhibits real interactions, under the guise of being "a good human being."
Being a good human involves honesty and naming things that are extremely difficult to name when you're both employed at the same place. I've had so many honest and illuminating conversations with coworkers after one or both of us left a company or organization, conversations that deepened into real friendships instead of just being colleagues.
Absolutely keep in touch with people because connection is essential to the human existence. Don't "pretend" to offer connection if you aren't willing to nourish it. The pretense is just mean and does more harm than good.
Yeah. There's a sort of uncanny valley to this that's hard to explain but you know when you see it.
It's like, conversations naturally taper yes, sensitive topics are danced around yes, particularly with people you're not that close with, but there's a grey area people play with generously in genuine interactions, precisely because they actually care.
Conversely in some interactions where you're sort of made acutely aware you've gone 'off script' the moment it happens and you realise, oh, this was always just templated/transactional.
I just think it's generally bad advice to enter into such interactions knowingly, even if you have good intentions, because of this. It's quite likely to happen and it's just an overall negative experience.
It's kinda hard to write an example or template for a communication pattern that seems really personal and genuine. OP is describing a pattern and is explicit that it's both a) a good thing to do on an emotional and ethical level and b) that the industry is small and it's good to not burn bridges.
I think it's clear from context that you can make the actual message a lot more personal based on your relationship with that person, but it seems harsh to say 'this looks like an HR template' when the post is kinda explicitly trying to make a general point.
>Don’t trash your employer, nor respond if they do. If they start that, say “I’m sorry, I can imagine why you’d feel that way, but I can’t continue this conversation.”. Note I’ve never had someone do this.
Are you kidding? Treat someone like a human but the moment they express emotion, explicitly denounce the thread and hang up?
Yeah, not sure what the author was thinking there. Definitely not 'reaffirming of both your and their humanity'.
I mean, I get that it's supposed to be just a general pointer or something, but that phrase is word for word what an LLM would say when it's self censoring... Or something lifted out of an episode of Severance.
I worked at a university library for a few short years in the 2010s. Reading your comment helped me make sense of some of the experiences I had there. I still try to keep on top of some of the trends, with the vague hope of working in that field again one day.
I'm curious what some of the "quirky/innovative smaller projects that no longer exist" are, if you're inclined to go into some details. Or if you could point to a good resource on this somewhere. A lot of technology projects in the library space seem to reinvent the wheel over and over, so I think such a list is very valuable.
I've found that there's greater range among CS graduate software engineers. Of course there are some truly excellent thinkers who know how to bring their training to bear on all kinds of problems. But some of them, well, you wonder how they even graduated college.
Among the self-taught, there's less variation. If they've managed to land a first job, they're usually at a pretty decent level of knowing how to learn new skills and apply them to solving problems. They were born in the "real world" instead of in the classroom, and it usually shows up in their sensibilities.
Just what I've observed from my own experience. (I'm self-taught myself.)
This site has been posted to HN before, but it's definitely interesting to revisit in light of drastic cuts to federal agencies like the FDA, USDA, and CDC.
Independent efforts like PlasticList are probably going to be more and more important as research funding gets slashed and health-related data is suppressed or manipulated.
Yes! I have to do front-end work occasionally but have been bad at staying on top of trends, so I would resort to jQuery if the requirements aren't super complex. Discovering querySelectorAll() and fetch() eliminated 75% of what I used jQuery for.
In the bad old days, there were a handful of canonical tutorials you used to learn the basics (HTML, CSS, JS) of web dev. Is there anything like that now that starts from those three technologies to build an understanding of web apps?
It seems like it could fill a real need for beginners who want to start by grasping the DNA of the web, so to speak, instead of the complex/sophisticated tools that are popular (not that there's anything wrong with that approach, if you need those skills for a job or project immediately).
My most satisfying side projects are often not necessarily my "best" work, in terms of code cleanliness, best practices, efficiency, etc. They're ones where I had a particular creative itch I wanted to scratch. Is this kind of solution possible? What would a certain unusual approach to a problem look like? How can I use this algorithm or library in this situation where it doesn't quite fit, as an experiment?
Projects with extremely loose parameters and no particular "skill acquisition" goals are great ways to grow in ways you didn't anticipate. Which is one way to think about artistic creation, I think: non-goal oriented growth.
For myself, while the learning curve is "longer" as I've gotten older, it also shoots sharply upwards as the time spent on the skill acquisition increases. Age has a magnification effect at the tail end.
I'm in my late 40s and I do pick up new technical skills a bit slower than younger folks. But because I have a lot of experience, I'm able to more quickly grasp various contextual aspects of those skills: how/why they are useful, how they compare to previous skills that tried to solve the same problem, the hidden costs and implications, etc. These matter a lot in the practical, everyday application of skills.
I find that younger people have a really hard time with those contextual aspects, or they don't think it's that important... until they discover they do.
Being a good human involves honesty and naming things that are extremely difficult to name when you're both employed at the same place. I've had so many honest and illuminating conversations with coworkers after one or both of us left a company or organization, conversations that deepened into real friendships instead of just being colleagues.