Maybe I was super lucky or somehow immune.. but as a Kid I got zapped by flyback transformers quite a bit of times.. (5 or 6 times?) It hurts,and it leaves a burn point where it touched.. but did not killed me.
Eventually I learned to ground the whole thing with a cooper cable and a resistor.
To me, Unit Tests are live documentation for your code.
You definitely do not need 100% coverage, but if you can exercise a good percentage of your code, you are making your future "you" live easier.
Just consider that in many cases code lifespan is 20% dev , 80% maintenance.
In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I've seen where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time you "give them a chance", complain up the management chain, go sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm already got 6 months worth of salary from the team.
In short, they do it because it is profitable.
PS.. To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".
In the contract houses I've been in the vast majority of contracts were repeat business. A good contracting house won't pull this kind of thing because the company doesn't survive if they piss off clients. I'm out of that world now but can still talk about it.
The non-scammy way this happens is senior engineers are part of the interviews and requirements gathering. They do the design and estimation. They develop task and proof of concept code for junior engineers.
During the work the senior engineer almost never 100% on a single project. They are on three different projects in different stages: design/early development on one that just started, resource and mentor on a second that's been going a while, writing quote for a third, and initial sales contacts for multiple other.
Based on availability it might not be the same senior person at any step of the process.
It's hard to impossible to a give you the same person who was part of the initial contact because by the time you get teh PO approved they are already hip deep in something else.
I upvoted you because parts of that are absolutely always true. Some of it depends on the type of consulting contract, though. Some of them call for a dedicated team of X headcount for Y time, and if the consultancy subs people in and out of that team without sufficient cause that's a big red flag.
Good point. There's a whole bigger world of contracting that I never saw.
I should be absolutely clear that my experience has been in small contract engineering firms. All of them were less than 20 engineers total and large projects were 3 engineers at any one time.
I don't even understand how that happens. At one point I was a consulting pimp for my dad, and multiple parts of the contract required me to attest that he would be doing the work and if he had help he would be doing the majority of the work and if his time on the contract dropped below 50% of the total the contract would be cancelled and there would be penalties.
There was no way I could have switched him with someone else without paying penalties.
Contracts have to be upheld by a court, to mean anything. I could write in a contract that you will be required to hand me your testicles if you miss the deadline, that doesn't mean I will actually go to court to get them. A lot of companies write aggressive contracts and never actually bother to enforce them, since it would be more costly than what they might actually gain.
Legally, yes - But remember that those provisions are there because someone tried that in the past and so they added legal provisions against it. And remember that those legal provisions are hard to prove; What is 50% of the work? How would they know if he'd had another developer submitting code?
> To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".
And then when they apply to work at their next company, and that company wants to verify previous employment, the previous company that got screwed over is too worried about the possibility of getting sued to accuse the person of lying about who they were... so they'll just say "yes, Y worked here for 6 months".
I'll admit straight up when I fire someone I am usually so relieved if they leave peacefully that I don't just say they worked for me, I will usually even give a semi positive review of them. Not a glowing praise or anything of the sort, but usually a review saying how they're a good team player, they get along well with others, and other aspects highlighting mostly soft skills.
As I've indicated many times on here... most incompetent people are genuinely good, nice people who get along well with others and it's devastating to have to fire them, so when I do fire them it can soften the blow for them to leave some good words, give some positive feedback which allows them to leave on good terms.
That's good of you to do. I think it's pretty rare to be unable to say anything good about someone, and it nice to focus on those things when their future employment might be on the line.
And in the meantime if the consultancy kept the contract and delivered, it was on a successful project. The C- team had little or nothing to do with it being successful, barring maybe filling headcount until the A team finished another billable project. Bonus points if it's a publicly notable new initiative for the consulting client.
Our minds are wired to wonder, recall previous similar situations , associate and predict what is coming.. some minds are more active at this than others.
If you want to get some control over this, try practicing meditation. It will strengthen your ability to focus.
I recently found out that "unfinished" structures in Peruvian emerging towns is by design, as you don't start paying property taxes on a building until is "finished" , leaving it on an eternal state of construction, avoids you those taxes..
Your story may be apocryphal. I live in Peru and the unfinished aspect is rather the result of the extended period (we are talking years) it takes poor families to build their houses and also from the fact that the vertical growth of the house reflects the growth of the family: the children as they become adults build and live on the second floor, the grandchildren on the third etc. These houses are always getting upgrades as the families grow and round up money and therefore are never finished. You can always see the metal rods sticking out of the cement columns because they always plan to add another floor. (Housing in Peru is mostly built on cement and bricks, except the poorest people, because of earthquakes).
"His buildings are nicknamed cholets, a portmaneau of chalet (a Swiss mountain house) and cholo (derogatory slang for indigenous person)."
Just a small comment on the above paragraph from the article:
While in mexico the word "cholo" is used on a derogatory manner, in the andes (Peru and Bolivia) the word Cholo is used also as a pride term (like the N word can be used in the US) So people often claim "Cholo Power" for amazing endurance or Cholo Pink for a vivacious color on clothing or "100% Cholo" as a term of proud heritage.
In this particular case, I believe "Cholets" is used as a proud "originality" term.. but it certainly could be used as a demeaning term by the local equivalents of the infamous USA "Karen" type :)
> In this particular case, I believe "Cholets" is used as a proud "originality" term.. but it certainly could be used as a demeaning term by the local equivalents of the infamous USA "Karen" type :)
You might want to consider your use of gendered slurs.
Agree with the big benefits for training, specially if you can swap batteries like you do with industrial drones.
Other niche area where there would be a great benefit:
Remote regions like the amazon jungle where a regular trip between villages (no roads what-so-ever) takes hours or days on small powered canoes vs 15 minutes when flying. Electric seaplanes would not only deliver basic modern services (Medical, Police, Business, etc) to these areas but it could do it without the need of shipping expensive fuel from far away.. Solar chargers would take care of that. ( maintenance would be easier too.. )
And one more niche area.. Electric engines do not care about low oxygen, going up and down from coastal areas to high altitude Andes is economically achievable. Going from a place like Lima to Jauja in Peru can take 12 hours on a road, but barely 45 minutes by plane.
An early attempt with a Pipistrel sinus motorglider
* going back down to the coast requires very little engine time :)
1. Up thread people talked about electric ultralights as held back by FAA. Presumably your flights are in different t jurisdiction (Lima etc). Are there enough "pro" jurisdictions to compensate for the FAA "anti"
2. Your propeller (mounted behind you) seems to regularly cut out. Is that a planned thing to save energy? just a series of push then glide?
3. What is needed to go from this to something like regular service ? What is missing from this aircraft ?
1. This in Peru, far away from FAA's reach ;)
2. No,It must be a camera sync issue.. I was giving it just enough power to keep altitude
3. This was done just for fun.. To prove it could be done, if you wish. The engine (cheap chineese model) crapped out within 10 hours.. Sometime I'll put a newer/better and use it as a sustainer for when thermals are not available
I think there's a startup (either YCombinator funded or at least they post here) looking to do this with electric blimps carrying freight containers taking products to ports.
All along the Andes in South America there is a dire need to efficiently move products from high altitude to the coast (where major cities are)
In Peru for example, there are hundreds of small farming towns sitting at 10'000+ feet of altitude but just 40 straight line miles from the ocean.. Today to get there, trucks have to use one of the few roads that ,zig-zag up to the high lands before heading into any of this towns. ( an 8 to 16 hour trip )
Being able to ship produce straight down to the big cities on the coast would be a game changer.
* I posted this on another thread, but I just found this is the OP
All along the Andes in south america there is a dire need to efficiently move products from high altitude to the coast (where major cities are)
In Peru for example, there are hundreds of small farming towns sitting at 10'000+ feet of altitude but just 40 straight line miles from the ocean.. Today to get there, trucks have to use one of the few roads that ,zig-zag up to the high lands before heading into any of this towns. ( an 8 to 16 hour trip )
Being able to ship produce straight down to the big cities on the coast would be a game changer.
One of the issues with getting that high is that the higher you go, the less buoyancy the airships have, and you'd need bigger ships with more gas to haul the same loads. But the sky is very big, so it might just be an economics of scale problem
In this case, ships will be heavily loaded on the way down (carrying heavy produce) and lightly loaded on the way up (carrying lighter products like medicine or high value manufactured goods)
Eventually I learned to ground the whole thing with a cooper cable and a resistor.