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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Well that might explain some things.

    Not to throw shade at your company but that process is so backwards that it’s no wonder the engineers are sparse on the details. I saw another comment likening software development to a crossword puzzle, which is a pretty good analogy. To further it, changing software once it’s done is like trying to swap out a clue/ word once the rest of the puzzle is built. It’s theoretically possible, but depending on how the puzzle is designed, it can range from an absurd amount of work to nearly impossible. Given the way you’ve described the state of things, your engineers are probably low on goodwill to boot.

    I’ve worked on cobbled-together crunch-time hell-projects and the last thing I’d want after getting free would be a random BA coming to me about details that more than likely packed with the project PTSD and would very much like to forget. Doubly so if it’s issues that I bought up early in the design/ development process (when they would have been comparatively easy to fix) and was dismissed by the powers that be. I can only speak for myself, but I can only take so much “that’s not a priority”, “we don’t have time for that”/ “we’ll see if that becomes a problem in the future and deal with it then” before I throw in the towel, stop keeping track of everything that’s wrong, and just bin the entire project as dumper fire run by people who would rather check boxes than make things better.


  • This is excellent advice! I want to underscore that Engineers are very often much driven by the how’s and the why’s of things. I’ll admit to judging people based on how they answer those sorts of questions. From a project perspective, I’m far less interested in doing something if the why of it can’t be adequately explained to me. Similarly, I’m far more willing to take a “you know, I’m not actually sure”, than a “we do it this way, because that’s the way we’ve always done it” (the latter is probably the fastest way to tank any respect I might have had).


  • Was trying to compose a similar statement on that lack of details. Like, my background is scrum/ agile software development and if a random BA called me up out of the blue for project details, my first response is going to be “I’m busy, talk to my scrum master and/or manager” and failing that it’s likely going to be the minimum amount of information required to get said BA to leave me alone so that I can get back to work. Plus, unless I know that my audience has the technical capacity for low level details, I tend to leave them out (I don’t mind answering questions, but I also don’t have time in my life to spout information that’s going to go in one ear and out the other).








  • The etymology might help break down some of the nuance here

    According to etymonline the etymology for expatriate (often shortened to expat) is:

    “to banish, send out of one’s native country,” 1768, modeled on French expatrier “banish” (14c.), from ex- “out of” (see ex-) + patrie “native land,” from Latin patria “one’s native country,” from pater (genitive patris) “father” (see father (n.); also compare patriot). Related: Expatriated; expatriating. The noun is by 1818, “one who has been banished;” main modern sense of “one who chooses to live abroad” is by 1902.

    Immigrate, is similar, but is more used to describe moving to a place:

    “to pass into a place as a new inhabitant or resident,” especially “to move to a country where one is not a native, for the purpose of settling permanently there,” 1620s, from Latin immigratus, past participle of immigrare “to remove, go into, move in,” from assimilated form of in- “into, in, on, upon” (from PIE root *en “in”) + migrare “to move” (see migration). Related: Immigrated; immigrating.

    The closer synonym to expatriate would probably be emigrate, the opposite of immigrate, to leave a place.

    As to why one might use expatriate over emigrate; consider the sentence “I’m an American immigrant”. It’s kind of unclear if you’re trying to say that you are an American that has migrated to another country (as in “I’m an American immigrant living in Brussels”*), or someone who has migrated to America (as in “I’m an American immigrant from Slovakia”). Using expatriate removes the ambiguity: “I’m an American expatriate” and makes it clear that the speaker is trying to convey where they are from.

    * technically, using emigrant here would be more clear, but English is a lawless and lazy language


  • Also a dude, sewing is fucking great! Thinking back, I’m pretty sure I learned to sew long before I learned any other forms of making, childhood me made lots of felt toys and crafts for friends and family because materials were cheap, accessable, and pretty easy to work with. I love being able to take a pile of fabric and make it into something functional, or at the very least mend my clothes to get more life out of them.