> they just stampede in with "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY". And the discussion can't even be had.

That's exactly what this person is railing against. They strictly forbid testing.

Again - that's a business decision that needs to be made in the context of that business. The fact that testing was forbidden isn't in itself good or bad. It depends on that business context. THe post says nothing about how that decision was made, whether it was discussed, or if it was just his absolutist ideal he imposed without consideration of the broader cost-benefit.

And I still feel the original comment doesn't give this point enough weight.

Forbidding tests is not a business decision, it's a software engineering decision, and it's a remarkably poor one at that.

Hard disagree. It's both. Choosing one way or the other comes with potential risks and rewards to the business and it's up to business leadership to choose what risks they want to take. Your job as an engineer - if you are not part of leadership is to explain those risks / rewards, and then let them make the call.

Okay, yes, that's a hard disagree.

I have an education and experience in software development. If a manager told me to make a product in an unsafe manner, I'd refuse, and if push came to shove, leave.

Leave, both because I wouldn't be able to defend my work as a professional, but also because I wouldn't work under someone who would want to dictate the manner in which I do what I do.

This is missing the point. If you’re a 2 man team it’s much more important to have code that has a couple bugs in it but allows you to quickly find your product market fit. As opposed to perfect code with no bugs that is useless.

No one is disagreeing that tests are good in a vacuum / mature product. But if your focus is building a mvp, and you’re trading off the test time with other things, it’s not always worth it.

Screw “leadership” but consider for a second that you’re the leadership.

We did this in 4th year comp-sci.

People have this mistaken belief than HR is for them when they are there 100% for the employer. The only people who are there for you in these situations is the union (if you have one).

I also think HR has this same mistaken belief about themselves. There are things they're aware they know that the employee(s) don't so they have some sense in which they're part of a misdirection, but anything that seems "a little unethical, but those are the rules" they kinda attribute to "I'm just doing my job and so it's not unethical". The job can of course be to do unethical things.

Depends on the company, but HR (and some other functions) can be relatively low power and it frequently seems that the low power person is facilitating groups that are above them, which leads to them serving as a pillow for the higher powered person to abuse the medium powered one and let the low powered absorb the blame/blows. It's unfair in a certain way, but realistically I think the low powered one refusing (in spite of them having the most to lose) is kinda the main way to keep things from getting worse and so things get worse. They can refuse or they can not take the job or they can somehow not pass the high powered person's problem on to the medium powered one, but they're disincentivized. I can empathize with the situation and expect them to take the deal that enables the high powered ones to take advantage of others while still assigning blame for not fixing the little part they could fix. Fwiw, it's also true of most middle managers and PMs, though they might not technically be the lowest powered one in the triangle. If they don't stand up for the thing they say is ethical, then I think it's straightforward that they're a/the problem.

this cliche is so often repeated that i'm now questioning whether this is even true.

unions are counterproductive many times - they serve the interests (only temporarily) for the incumbents while failing to or ignoring the larger consequences like the whole company or industry declining.

i wonder if the HR cliche is similar.

The cliche about HR doesn't mean that HR can't ever be helpful to you, just that they are incentivized to be helpful in ways that help the company. For example advising on how to best use benefits to keep employees healthy or recover from an illness or injury so they can return to work.

But if your needs as an employee go against what is best for the company by costing money, productivity, or creating risk for bad publicity, or they go against high level managers or executives who hold outsized sway with HR, then it will be difficult for you to get help from them.

If you belong to a union, you are the incumbent that the union exists to serve. Depending on the union's bargaining power, it may or may not succeed in representing your interests, but it has your interests as a central goal.

> they serve the interests [...of] the incumbents

Yes. The employees. That's the point.

> while [...] ignoring the larger consequences like the whole company

Good. That is, again, the point - to advocate for the employees when their interests are in opposition to those of the company.

You say they're counterproductive - sounds like they're working exactly as intended.

>You say they're counterproductive - sounds like they're working exactly as intended.

it can lead to the whole company or industry to be destroyed, so while it may protect the specific incumbents it puts the whole industry/country in jeopardy. in aggregate these things can work against favour.

if everyone ends up doing this the system can't work

Can you name a time it's destroyed an industry?

Who cares about undocumented immigrants, or Venezuela, or Iran, or Iraq, or Afganistan, or Iraq a second time, or putting Iran into it's current situation by overthrowing a democratically elected government in the 1950s, or Hawaii, or the Virgin Islands, Indigenous people of North America etc etc.

Or Cuba…

Another brilliant humanitarian crisis caused entirely by the U.S. for no good reason at all.

I'm not arguing the USA is a good guy. Just that that doesn't make China any better.

China cannot be compared to the two warmongers, the US and Russia, in any dimension.

Tibetans, uyghurs, etc? Factories full of North Korean workers under the watchful eye of their overlords, modern slavery even of your own people.

As a Kiwi I look at the US, Russia, China, etc as the same. Even the UK (where I now live) is a scarier place than back home.

That's fair, because you're in a Western media environment, and the fact that you can see them as the same already proves my point.

Ahh, this about the US only. Not America.

Its about the Gulf of America. Arguments persist about its Easternmost boundary but in the west it extends from Baja California to British Columbia.

> just as capable as using AI as anyone

This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of. They're the most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know the pitfalls of what they're doing.

I didn't realize that "fools and their money will soon be parted" was a flex.

“There are three of these things made in a year, and I’ve got the juice to get one of them” is. Zuck doesn’t care about a million dollar price tag, any more than I would care about a couple bucks.

If he was buying a solid gold furby would you have the same take? That's great that he doesn't care, still looks like an idiot to me.

Can you prove it's not? At this point if anyone wants to propose an alternative then the burden of proof is on them. So far everything else that we've tried has failed disastrously.

How could everything else have failed?

You entrench yourself and don't want to move when you need to

Fortunately we don't need to move.

I'm not making a judgement either way. You're saying that it's capitalism and multiparty democracy(i would question whether there's a difference between both the parties in the US, does it even count as multiparty?). China's the second largest economy in the world and there's no multi party democracy there.

I'll bite. What's a vertical river?

I don't understand the use of "I'll bite" when the message you're answering to is obviously not... bait. Are we now saying "I'll bite" before every question we ask?