He was describing the ideal attorney. If you factor in human failure in your ideals from the start, what you get is the lowest common multiple, so you limit any aspiration and potential from the start.
No, the ideal would be an attorney that can almost perfectly differentiate between his emotions plus opinion against true justice.
Defence attorneys may not know if someone is guilty. Some clients may say "Yes, I did it, get me out of here" but some won't - possibly because they didn't.
Clients may be implicated by false confessions extracted under pressure. They may even believe those confessions, because hours of stressful interrogation can confuse people with limited ego strength.
There may be some other narratives, other circumstances, complex family or business relationships which are a relevant back story to the crime, and/or may incriminate someone else - and so on.
There are exceptions - including lawyers who specialise in defending organised crime, and are really just covert employees of criminal organisations.
But generally, it's just plain incorrect to assume that defence attorneys invariably know their client is guilty and are really just trying to cover that up.
I had a friend who worked for 15 years as a public defender. I asked her how she dealt with cases where it was completely obvious that her client was guilty. Her answer (paraphrased): we have a system of justice that requires that there is a process to locking someone up, or even just fining them. That process needs to be followed all the time, whether the person is "obviously guilty" or not. My job in those cases was to make sure that the prosecution, and the court system, dotted all their i's, crossed all their t's before rendering a judgement on my client. I wasn't trying to keep them out of prison, I was trying to make sure that only people who deserve to be there actually end up there.
You can measure the health of a society in how they treat the weak and helpless (helpless in this case in regards to prisoners who are at the whim of the prison).
In this regard, America is profoundly sick and defective.
It is of course true, instead of rehabilitating, they are breeding criminals in prison. It's an abomination.
I've come to the same conclusion after reading the article a few times. It pops up on HN a lot.
It's a hilarious and dark read, and certainly has grains of truth, but framing your worldview around that is silly and dangerous.
Rao is a good writer, but he's filtering a parody comic through a parody show, with additions from Dilbert (another parody), and supplements the arguments with examples from management gurus of questionable relevance. It's like Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra, where it's a simulation (parody) filtered through another simulation filtered through another simulation until you have something that doesn't reflect reality.
Are you shilling against SpaceX, or was that worded slightly weird, or what?
Bug-free is a ridiculous theoretical concept, where there are humans at work, there are bugs.
As for 'perfect development culture', same thing. Ridiculous concept. There is always something to improve on.
But would I personally, with my limited knowledge about Boeing and SpaceX, but with the catastrophic fails at Boeing regarding the 737 MAX in mind, judge SpaceX the more competent company in terms of management engineering skills, efficiency, to get a product as bug-free as they can without putting money before safety concerns? OF COURSE. There is no question.
You made a guide homepage in the post I answerded to, which repeatedly mentions "if you have these symptoms". But the symptoms are not mentioned in the guide.
I think for a proper guide you should absolutely list the symptoms of corona virus at the introduction.
I searched in search engines. As far as I could find the corona virus symptoms are similar to pneumonia. The main symptoms are fever, cough and pain in the lungs.
This is not similar to flu symptoms which do not necessarily spread to the lungs.
I think you missed the point, "will often express very blunt concerns about quality/risks in emails or PRs" means he straight up communicates any issue without sugar-coating. Which is what you want from a conscious employee. If despite that someone higher up in the decision chain ignores the issue (in the case of safety risks, that is criminal negligence), to continue to fight this battle is pointless and would only mean risking one's career for nothing.
I think there's a fine line between communicating without sugar-coating and speaking past one's own local knowledge of a problem that a lot of engineers don't recognize.
There’s plenty of ways that an IC can misconstrue managers not acting on their advice, and usually they come down to a lack of understanding the organisation, or immaturity. Having learnt a lot of those lessons the hard way throughout my career, I’d like to think I usually don’t fall into those traps.
The most common one I’d say is when an IC thinks whatever they’re concerned about is much more important than the organisation thinks it is. In such a situation, as long as I’ve communicated my concerns to the right people, I never have any bitterness about an organisation accepting risks I’ve raised after proper analysis (unless of course, it has some impact, and then they start politically back pedalling the risk acceptance).
Personally, due to the nature of my work, I am often brought in to contribute to projects that are either well under way, or nearing completion. I will often find things that I think are risks or other issues at this stage. Any time this happens, there’s a whole bunch of things that could explain what I’ve found. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake in my assessment, perhaps there’s some mitigation (planned or otherwise) that I’m not aware of, perhaps they already know about it and have accepted it, perhaps there’s some major constraint I don’t know about... So I ask around and try find out if there are any easy answers. If not, then I’ll escalate it to other stakeholders. Usually phrased something like “I’ve noticed this, I think it’s an issue for these reasons, and could potentially cause such-and-such an impact”, sometimes with “I’d suggest we consider this alternative approach” and potentially “I’d recommend delaying delivery of this project to address these concerns if necessary”. Even at this stage, I don’t know all the facts, so I simply express my thoughts without claiming to have any definitive conclusions, and trying my best to qualify them with where I believe the limits of my knowledge/understanding are.
In a well run organisation, this will result in my concerns being proven either founded or unfounded, previously known or previously unknown, and some sort of action could result (even if that’s only risk acceptance, further investigation, or plans for future mitigation). In a dysfunctional organisation, my concerns will either be dismissed off the bat, or pointlessly argued about by political actors.
In my experience the latter reaction will usually come from incompetent management trying to conceals their failures, or incompetent contractors trying to defend their billable work. In the first case I’ll just make plans to leave the organisation. In the latter case I don’t really care. I’m a contractor myself, so my job is to deliver value to the employer (who would usually be happy with me in such a situation), I’m not particularly concerned about whether my work satisfies other contractors in that respect.
The gear ratio would change. Also I can't imagine certification is only required for changes from a pilot's perspective, but from a functional perspective.
>The problems are less difficult to solve, but also much more frustrating. A lot more black boxes that you can't reverse engineer when you get stuck. Working with other people in a big company means things move far slower than my ability to get things done.
The part about black boxes you get stuck on strongly resonates with me. Programming can be a lot of fun, when you can rely on your own, or well documented programming.
But enter the world of development in big companies where everything specification never leaves alpha phase, is done in retrospect, only on request, 3 month later then needed and if missing half of the absolutely needed information is the best case, it's just so miserable.
No, the ideal would be an attorney that can almost perfectly differentiate between his emotions plus opinion against true justice.