I remember a marvelous quote from a guy that was at some MS conference and got handed a leaflet that said:

> WinForm or WPF, how to choose

and they were like: "the question I have isn't how to choose, but _why_ I have to choose".

transparency as well. WinForm really struggles with the idea of stacking elements on top of one another where there is an arbitrary amount of transparency or tricky shapes. Its just not worth the hassle compared to WPF.

> “The idea came from the women who answer the phones,” said Brown and Williamson spokesman Mark Smith.

Very cool that they did something that wild by trusting the judgement of their call centre employees.

I think in the analogy that we're the dogs.

because you lose the meaning over time. Emotional aspects of language can be useful.

George Carlin's famous piece on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY

> I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".

I used to work a very small org with an 80+ year old CEO. I feel like half the time the slide decks were unchanged and very little was getting done but I'm not sure the CEO noticed. Given the CEO often sidelined those meetings themselves, by having some bizarre senior moments. So what should be a 30m meeting always became a 2hr+ long one. The guy used to be technical but as you describe it had slipped away from him a long time ago and he had failed to delegate effectively.

Those meetings felt like my real job was just theatre for the boss in some sort of quasi-nursing home stage, where we helped them maintain the illusion they were running an entirely functioning business. I half wonder if in my short time there, I was a mug for actually doing any work.

After 30 working years let me confirm: Every job is performance theater for the people who control the company

tbf quitting vim is extremely unintuitive to someone that opened it by accident for the first time.

quitting vi is a basic competency test.

would you listen to a doctor that could not suture a cut? how about a mechanic that could not remove a socket from a ratchet?

simple file editing. vi has been around for every. if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?

(personal anecdote: once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..)

It's more of a cheap gotcha than a valid test. If we take somebody like me, I learned to code in IDEA/PyCharm, these days mostly code with either Zed or OpenCode, and occasionally drop into nano and Positron. I wouldn't be able to do anything in Neovim without looking it up simply because I had no reason to learn it. A doctor who learned practices appropriate in the 20th century might now necessarily be hired for knowledge of these practices today.

> quitting vi is a basic competency test.

no, its pop quiz bullshit. Oh you know about ":wq"? Well done! But if you don't know, you do it a few times and now you know. It does nothing, outside of teaching you a bit about poor UX.

> if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?

using one of the other available ides?

> once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..

That's not a sign of good judgement, that's a sign of being technically fashionable. It's hipster shit, akin to rejecting a candidate because they're a fan of Taylor Swift and don't know who the band Tool are.

are you being sarcastic? Its nothing like the power button. Everyone has to press the power button but not everyone has to use Vi.

:wq is one of the most insane key combinations to quit an app and this is just hipster shit where people who use vim think they're the only "real engineers". It's just a disgusting level of arrogance and masturbation. The code is what matters, not the IDE. To focus on it as a sign of technical excellence makes a mockery of what engineers are supposed to care about (comp sci things) and replaces them with all the elegance of a high school bully belittling some other kid for not wearing Nikes.

It's not about using vim, it's about when you had to sudoedit a config on a server you visited the first time, and it had vim as default EDITOR, so you have to know how to exit it and open nano, or whatever you use. It's about exposure, exposure to many small things is a sign of experience, it is experience, to be precise. If they don't know small basic things, it's a sign, they don't have relevant experience. Can also check, if they have empty lines at the end of their files, know how to remove docker images from their machine, or get a TCP/UDP joke.

Its about people wanting to hire themselves. It's a cognitive bias we all suffer from. Being completely unaware of it and purity testing others based on your own experience, is: to be precise, a lack of experience in realising that other people can be just as good as you but took a completely different path to get there.

Nah, I bet they suck, why can't they do what I've already done?

Yes, this is the bias we are looking for. If you can't quit vim, don't know how your frontend communicates with your backend, can't type on a regular qwerty keyboard without looking at letters, or navigate UI without mouse, never used a debugger, don't know how to check if it was DNS, can't write a spec for a feature, after talking to stakeholders (and defend it's priority on their behalf), or don't know how to open dev tools in your browser - you are not ready to herd the cats yet, they will herd you off the cliff instead. And that's okay, you'll get there someday.

Okay, how about having the problem-solving skills to figure out how to exit vim when you inevitably encounter it? Sounds like a reasonable middle ground to me. Do you disagree with this?

(FWIW I agree with pavlus.)

I’d been developing with emacs for years before I learned how to quit vi. Just means he’s never had to change the config on a remote server with a barebones setup :-)

I'm certainly not listening to someone who thinks vi is used by every developer

used. maybe not. but cognizant of it. sure. and having used it once or twice.

come on! you are a software expert and you never had to edit a file on a machine where claude was not available?

what would you say about a EE that could not use a scope?

i would say that analogy was made by someone who seems to labour under the misunderstanding that you can only write code from within vi.

I'd say, their degree is BS. You can't finish Uni as a EE, without using a scope a few times.

aside from gedit and geany and nano and emacs and notepad and vsc and notepad++ and sublime text and...

what if I told you some people weren't baptised into the unix ecosystem. Wild, I know.

You probably don't want a CIO who knows vim.

I used `killall vi` from another terminal for years before I finally memorized the proper way to do it.

How did you save the edits you made in vi?

I didn't try to make any edits in vi; I just ended up there, on occasion, when something would invoke $EDITOR.

Funny/informative story about this: There was a project, OpenHatch.org c. 2011 that tried to get people to be comfortable enough with programming to contribute to open source projects. In one of the tutorials (I think introducing command-line git?), if you followed the instructions, it would dump you into vim. It hadn't introduced to you vim by that point or explained that's what was happening, so you wouldn't even know enough to google the error. And this was a project that was supposed to be primarily focused on being newbie-friendly!

its extremely hard if you're being lied to when your org is so vast that trusting delegated responsible individuals is the realistic way of managing it. Also its probably not going to factor into your bonus.

life is too short to spend it drowning in misinformation. Calling someone out on a technical failure is 100% legit. How is it "aggressive" if they're clearly wrong?

to be fair a friend of mine made one of the first flashlight apps on iOs and made a tidy sum out of it.

I think the question really is about how well you hit your timings. You can have held bitcoin but sold it went it hit $5k or less. You can have a technical advantage in a given field but somehow waste it (dead startup, serious illness) and lose your timing. Nobody knows what the right timings are, but I think the OP is pushing for a more consistent risk investment strategy and setting up the timings to raise the floor significantly at the cost of losing some of the best possible ceilings.