Sailor Marx

That honestly does not look very heavy, more on the light, fluffy side of the bread spectrum. I would guess it probably contains more white flour than whole grain.

Judging by the title this is most likely just a hit piece on any kind of activism the author does not personally agree with. I will not put effort into bypassing a paywall for something like that.

Nowhere in that text does it say “managers are the real software architects”. What it does say is “what managers do affects software architecture”. Sure you can extrapolate that to delusions of grandeur, but if you take into account the explicit call for collaboration it is much more likely what was meant is more along the lines of “we can mess things up if we ignore the architecture, so let’s talk to the real software architects before making org decisions”.

About the comic: That one does have the line “management designs software architecture”, much closer to the negative interpretation; but that too can be interpreted in a more positive way as “… and we are not good at that, so let’s make sure to bring in the people who are good at it at important points”.

That is pretty much a given. Why else write about it at all?

I read it similar, but also kind of from the other side: If your organization is set up in a way that ignores the technical requirements of the product, your are going to have a bad time.

And yes, of course this is more often on the bad side than on the good side in practice. If everything was already fine most of the time, there would be no point in discussing this topic.

The original post advocates for a holistic, collaborative approach; management and technical experts should be working together to align technical and organizational structure. I fully agree with that view (and I’m not a manager).

There is more than enough “shit managers say” material out there, but this is not it.

“being weird, rude and cringy is their whole thing” does not make that thing any less weird, rude and cringy.

Please don’t mix executables and data created by applications, even if the application happens to be a game. Those are supposed to be separate. That being said, “Documents” is obviously the wrong place for save game files.

Would you mind elaborating on that thought?

it’s really useful to comment functions/methods, because otherwise you never know if something’s a bug or a non-obvious feature. Comments act as a parity check to the code, since they tell you what the dev who wrote the code wanted the code to do.

Unit tests should be the parity check for other code. Those don’t get outdated with the next refactoring where someone didn’t remember to also adjust all the comments.

Also, everone thinks they write good, clean and obvious code. Hardly anyone purpously writes bad, hacky code. Yet if you look at code you wrote a year ago, or code someone else on your team wrote, it’s full of non-obvious hacks. That means, people constantly misjudge the obviousnes of their code. Comments should be put on anything that could maybe be non-obvious.

Why would people be better at judging if something needs a comment than at judging if something needs a better name or refactoring? Asking people to skip that judgement step and comment everything just gives you a bunch of useless boilerplate comments. That trains everyone reading that codebase to ignore comments because they are almost always useless anyway.

putting documentation of the code anywhere else than in a comment (e.g. Confluence) is a total waste of time

At least this we can 100 % agree on. Documentation should be as close as possible to the code. (I just think most of the time that place is in the name of things, not in an actual comment.)

About comments:

Please please please, do not always write comments. Try to write code that does not need comments whenever possible. Proper variable, class and method names go a long way. If you think a block of code needs a comment, turn it into a method and give it a proper name instead.

Comments should be a last resort for cases where making the code self explanatory is not possible, and those should be rare.

About optimization:

Optimal code is code that fulfills it’s purpose without observable issues.

If you try to make something faster without any prior complaints or measurements indicating that it being slow is an actual issue, you are not optimizing, you are just engaging in mental masturbation.

TL;DR: Looks promising in mice, not tested in humans yet.

Should probably point to https://neurosciencenews.com/vaccine-alzheimers-23722/