[HN Gopher] My First BillG Review (2006)
___________________________________________________________________
My First BillG Review (2006)
Author : mtmail
Score : 184 points
Date : 2022-09-14 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.joelonsoftware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.joelonsoftware.com)
| geoelkh wrote:
| Like a good movie, every time I ready this, I enjoy reading it :)
| [deleted]
| ThePadawan wrote:
| Reminds me of one of the best technical interviews I had.
|
| This was for a C# position, and my future boss did this top-down
| approach with questions about Entity Framework.
|
| How do you write a query? What happens when you run that code
| (lazily vs. eagerly)? Why is the return type Like That? What are
| the advantages and disadvantages of that approach?
|
| Until we got into quite obscure questions about how the framework
| would interact with different database runtimes.
|
| (That interview was the most fun I had in that position)
| Selfcommit wrote:
| I had my "first Joel review" while applying to work at Stack.
| Joel still did the final interviews for all applicants back then.
| After 4-5 back to back on site interviews, I was spent. Somehow
| we ended up talking about old AutoIT scripts I'd written - many
| of which include apologies to future readers in the comments.
|
| Joel was a great interviewer... that conversation turned into a
| game as Joel picked apart various ways he over compromise the
| script and asked how I'd respond in the next iteration.
| tzs wrote:
| Speaking of excel, for casual Excel users, the video "You Suck at
| Excel with Joel Spolsky" [1] is worth a watch. My casual Excel
| use probably got an order of magnitude easier from it.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
| nerdponx wrote:
| I love this. Is there something like this for Word? And/or for
| the LibreOffice equivalents, which in many cases are a better
| user experience than the MS originals.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Excel is, in some sense, a programming language for (mostly)
| purely functional incremental computations with built in
| debugger that shows you most intermediate values. Word is not
| very much like that so the contents of such a thing would
| surely be different. I think the first tip is probably
| something like 'create named styles instead of mutating the
| formatting of regions ad-hoc'.
| jonathanoliver wrote:
| My favorite quote from the article:
|
| > Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is
| like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to
| surf.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > non-programmers trying to run software companies
|
| You mean everybody who runs software companies then?
| gjm11 wrote:
| Bill Gates was a programmer and used to run Microsoft. Mark
| Zuckerberg was a programmer and still runs Meta/Facebook.
| Larry Ellison was a programmer and still runs Oracle.
|
| Maybe you're just pointing out that if you're running a
| company (beyond a certain size) you are probably spending all
| your time running the company and therefore aren't really a
| programmer any more. But isn't it obvious that Spolsky
| doesn't mean "person whose main activity is writing software"
| but "person who knows how to write software and has done a
| substantial amount of that"? Gates, Zuckerberg and Ellison
| are all programmers in that sense.
| areyousure wrote:
| Is Google/Alphabet a software company? Sundar does not know
| how to program.
| myle wrote:
| I don't understand this criticism. Sundar has technical
| background and great product vision. How many other
| people have been involved in so successful projects that
| define the industry like Chrome and Android?
|
| Indeed, Google has hired a lot of people with business
| background lately to operate large parts of it's
| business. We should, though, acknowledge that Google
| operates in many now mature markets where innovation
| plays secondary role to focusing on existing customer
| needs.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| He seems lost as well though.
| gadders wrote:
| >> Over the years, Microsoft got big, Bill got overextended, and
| some shady ethical decisions..
|
| Those innocent times when we thought the worst ethical decisions
| that Bill G would make was bundling Internet Explorer with
| Windows. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-
| epstein-...
| gjm11 wrote:
| What that article says about Bill Gates is that on multiple
| occasions he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein.
|
| Do you in fact think that that is ethically worse than using a
| huge company's monopoly power to stifle competition? It seems
| to me that the latter harmed a lot more people than the former,
| and in more concrete ways.
|
| For the avoidance of doubt: _Jeffrey Epstein_ harmed some
| people very severely. But It looks to me as if he would have
| done pretty much the exact same harms if he had never met Bill
| Gates at all, and I don 't see that Gates is significantly
| culpable for the harm that Epstein did.
|
| I think there is something badly wrong with any conception of
| morality according to which it is more important to cut off all
| contact with certain kinds of Bad People than it is not to do
| things that do actual substantial harm.
| marcodiego wrote:
| > What that article says about Bill Gates is that on multiple
| occasions he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein.
|
| Interestingly, RMS relation with Epstein is AFAIK zero. He
| once considered an old friend was involved in a situation
| where such friend could be doing something illegal without
| even knowing and the backlash was much stronger.
|
| Of course, RMS has his problems; that comment was the straw
| that broke the camel's back.
| evouga wrote:
| I don't see the connection between RMS and Bill Gates?
|
| In any case, the backlash against RMS was due to his
| defense of Minsky, characterization of Epstein's crimes
| using extremely tone-deaf language (referring to his
| victims as "entirely willing" members of his "harem,"
| e.g.), musings about the shaky ethical foundation of age of
| consent laws, etc.
|
| Whether you believe the backlash deserved or not, RMS is on
| the record making controversial statements about Epstein.
| The only (currently-known) link between Gates and Epstein
| is that Gates took Epstein's meetings.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| According to Melinda Gates, Bill Gates' relationship with
| Jeffrey Epstein was a significant factor in their divorce.
|
| Would Jeffrey Epstein and the bad he did in the world exist
| without Bill Gates (ignoring 'butterfly effect' like
| questions that we can't answer)? Yes.
|
| Did Bill Gates' relationship with Jeffrey Epstein represent
| an incredibly poor ethical decision? I can't say personally,
| I don't know the extent of it and who knew what when, but the
| fact that it was a significant factor in ending a 3-decade
| long relationship looks pretty damning IMO.
| gadders wrote:
| I think the implication is that Jeffrey Epstein made
| available to his "friends" the services of under-age girls
| that were sex-trafficed. Is there concrete evidence that Bill
| Gates had relations with these girls? No.
|
| However, if he did then I would say that is worse than
| bundling two bits of software together, yes.
|
| If he didn't then, your view could be correct however I note
| that it is unlikely he was completely unaware of what was
| happening.
| gjm11 wrote:
| From "Bill Gates had some meetings with Jeffrey Epstein" to
| "Bill Gates had sex with underage girls trafficked by
| Jeffrey Epstein" is ... quite a leap, no? I mean, enough of
| a leap that I don't see why anyone would make it.
|
| (In the absence of further evidence, that is. E.g., someone
| mentioned that allegedly Gates's acquaintanceship with
| Epstein was one reason for his divorce. Maybe that's nudge-
| nudge-wink-wink for "his wife divorced him because he was
| having sex with underage girls", since otherwise it seems
| like insufficient grounds for wanting a divorce. But this
| is all speculation founded on hearsay, and in any case the
| thing you originally linked to says no more than that Gates
| met with Epstein a few times.)
| tomrod wrote:
| Interesting read.
|
| One point that sticks out: if you are an executive over a
| function, you need to have enough depth in the function to know
| when you're being fed a line versus receiving competency from
| your reports.
|
| One concept that can be a two-edged sword here is being "managed
| up" -- which many treat as an adversarial/cloak-and-dagger
| relationship with execs with a positive spin. In my thought,
| keeping this under control requires domain competency.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I have been in a couple of orgs now where this was, in my view,
| a big problem because of ripple effects.
|
| Let's say you're on Team A. You're making a thing. You do a
| little research, and your thing has this gigantic dependency
| that you hadn't initially considered, but it's work that for
| whatever reason Team A can't do. You don't have the resources
| or there's politics or something. But you're in luck! You
| manager asked around, and it turns out Team B made a thing that
| solves that gigantic dependency. Yay!
|
| So you have a meeting with Team B, and they are weirdly evasive
| about their thing. Whatever, they gave you what you needed, and
| you spend a sprint or two integrating their thing with your
| thing. Except it's just not working as advertised. It just
| isn't. So you grab some time with a Team B engineer, just the
| two of you, and they admit that their thing was never really
| finished. The deadline from upper management was unreasonable,
| so they got it good enough to be demoable, and then called it
| quits because the next unreasonable feature demand was already
| on deck. This of course enabled by the fact that none of the
| managers had enough depth to know what was bullshit. (Or maybe
| they had a vested interest to their managers to sell it anyway,
| and so on until at some point the management chain loses the
| ability to smell bullshit.)
|
| Well, shit. At this point you're up the creek because your
| manager already made an unreasonable commitment based on the
| advertised capabilities of Team B's thing. What do you do?
| Well, you sort of half-implement what you can, make it
| demoable, let your boss sell it up. Just like Team B did when
| they discovered Team C's thing was half-implemented.
|
| If you are thinking about a big software company that keeps
| putting out shit products, now you know why.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| It doesn't even need to "not work." You can ship a
| V1/prototype/MVP product that does work with a small, focused
| team. But extending that product to support all the
| additional use cases, resolve feedback, address tech-
| debt/scale/performance, etc ... requires investment ... more
| investment probably than the initial version. But the version
| version is "done" - why invest more?
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| That is a perfectly reasonable and understandable situation
| that I am not talking about. If Team B came to us and said,
| "here's what it does right now, we were only able to ship
| the MVP before we needed to prioritize other work", that's
| fine. That's wonderful. That is the kind of open and honest
| communication about platform capabilities that is necessary
| to do quality work.
|
| What I am talking about is when Team B says, "it slices! It
| dices! It removes tough stains, washes and dries your
| cloths, hell, it'll fold them!" Then when you start working
| with their amazing miracle product you find that it merely
| slices, well, no, actually, it really needs more of a
| sawing motion because they initially misunderstood the
| requirements and built it serrated and didn't have time to
| go back and fix it.
| endtime wrote:
| I don't think this is why Google puts out mediocre products,
| FWIW. I think it's more that when something turns out after 6
| months to be a bad idea, everyone's incentives are to
| spending another 12-18 months launching (or "landing") it so
| they can get promoted (and then change teams). Failing
| responsibly after 6 months isn't rewarded. (From what I'm
| told, Meta is better about this.)
| endtime wrote:
| I'm surprised this comment for downvoted. I'd love to
| understand what about it people didn't like, if anyone
| feels like replying.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I freely admit Google was not the big company I was
| thinking of when I wrote my comment. I would be shocked,
| however, if all of the MANGA companies didn't at least to
| some degree suffer from what I described. I think to any
| company that organizes work around services is going to
| have problems with APIs that overpromise and underdeliver.
| dh2022 wrote:
| I wonder at what point this becomes full circle. I.e. team C
| depends on feature from team A which is half baked because of
| the initial dependency :)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This was a big reason for me continuing to do open-source work,
| while I managed my development team.
|
| My managers actually deliberately tried to interfere with my
| technical competence. I'm an ornery cusshound, though, so it
| didn't work.
| lazide wrote:
| It is essentially impossible to manage something if the person
| doesn't understand the thing being managed - and by understand,
| I mean 'knows how it works to to the point they can know when
| it's bullshit, and when it's real'.
|
| It doesn't require being GOOD at the thing they are managing
| (anymore than it requires being a fast linebacker to be able to
| make someone fast and teach them how to be a good linebacker),
| but being decent sure helps.
|
| Sometimes being really good at the thing can make it nearly
| impossible to be a manager of others doing it, because while
| they're good at the skill they don't actually _understand it_.
| It comes naturally to them, so they never had to figure it out.
|
| Just like someone who is a fast linebacker may just _be_ and is
| unable to explain to anyone how they do it.
|
| A VP/Executive is a level above managing it, as they need to be
| managing managers, ensuring decision making and prioritization
| is occurring in a way that produces the desired results, and
| setting the overall culture within an organization.
|
| Many times where problems occur is when someone gets promoted
| to a level where they are now over people who are doing things
| they don't understand, or when skill sets and day to day work
| shifts out from under them and they lose that competency.
|
| 'Managing up' can be a cynical ploy for a middle manager to get
| what they want while not actually doing what the execs want.
|
| It can also be the process of ensuring the important details
| the executive needs are there, and they aren't having their
| time wasted if a bunch of fluff that doesn't matter to them.
|
| Which one it is depends a lot on the culture and how good the
| executive/VP and middle manager are.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| This is a popular idea among many people with domain
| expertise (in this case, developers), but it doesn't hold up
| to scrutiny.
|
| By this standard, a CEO would need decent expertise in every
| aspect of running their business, which as a business scales
| becomes impossible.
|
| Businesses are collections of people and need to succeed as
| such. The whole point of hiring people is to grow the skills
| available to the business. If you know enough to micro-manage
| all your staff, you're either not very senior or you hired
| poorly (or both).
|
| Management is more complicated than just fact-checking and
| BS-detection. In fact if you're significantly worried about
| detecting BS by your staff, you already have a management
| problem.
| lazide wrote:
| It _is_ a requirement for every CEO that I've seen that
| they understand all core business functions, to the degree
| I'm stating.
|
| A CEO that can't understand how the companies finances are
| structured and how it makes it's money is going to be blind
| to the core machinery of the business.
|
| A CEO that doesn't understand how the companies operations
| work is going to make bad optimizations that will hurt it's
| ability to serve customers with it's core products.
|
| A CEO that doesn't understand how the companies customer
| support and public facing relations work is likely to tank
| the companies public image.
|
| A CEO that doesn't understand how the companies Sales work
| is going to be scammed by them or destroy the companies
| revenue producing channels accidentally.
|
| I can point you to dozens of high profile examples of this.
|
| None of this is micro management level. It's 'are the books
| making sense and congruent with the actual day to day
| operating status of the business'. It's 'are we competent
| and effective at producing our core products'. It's 'when
| someone needs help, they get it effectively and at a cost
| to us that makes sense'.
|
| To judge those requires knowledge and understanding of
| those areas.
|
| The reality is that no one individual knows all these
| things well enough to run a large corporation well, which
| is why the board of directors in a properly managed company
| will be performing oversight on many of these functions.
|
| Especially financial, as that's the most tempting target if
| someone gets desperate.
|
| And you're right - a good manager or leader isn't worried
| about BS (for long), but I never said they would be - I
| said they _could tell the difference_. Good fences make
| good neighbors, after all, and if folks know you can tell,
| there is no point trying.
|
| None of that is micromanaging.
|
| If you get a reputation as someone who can't tell the
| difference and/or doesn't care, a lot of people you
| wouldn't expect will try. That's what causes problems.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> By this standard, a CEO would need decent expertise in
| every aspect of running their business, which as a business
| scales becomes impossible.
|
| The solution is to have people under them to oversee the
| other areas that are not the CEO's expertise. Now how do
| you achieve that? I don't know. When one of those people
| moves on how do you replace them? I don't know, but promote
| from within would seem to be wise, since this hypothetical
| organization has a low tolerance for BS.
| pnutjam wrote:
| CEO is not a standard manager. They are running a company,
| which can do many things. The managers should have an
| expertise in what the company is doing. Too many places
| just assume the company is doing "marketing" or "sales" and
| the people running it need to be experts in that.
| drc500free wrote:
| My personal experience (as assistant to a CEO) was that
| between him and the CFO they could have run every aspect of
| the business competently. He had very consciously found
| another executive who complemented his talents so that
| there was full coverage.
|
| The breadth and depth of knowledge was intimidating and
| very impressive, and they could drill down to the necessary
| level to uncover bullshit anywhere. They rarely did, but
| knowing that they could prevented a lot of nonsense.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > By this standard, a CEO would need decent expertise in
| every aspect of running their business, which as a business
| scales becomes impossible.
|
| I didn't read that at all..
|
| "A VP/Executive is a level above managing it, as they need
| to be managing managers..."
|
| The 'higher ups' don't need to know how to do development,
| but they do need to know how to manager development
| managers - set priorities, provide assistance/blocking,
| etc. And the CEO would need to be someone who can manage
| those executives.
|
| The 'domain expertise' is (mostly) expertise/experience in
| managing people managing other people/processes.
|
| At least, that's what I got from the GP comment.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The GP edited their comment after I posted my reply.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| AHA... That helps clarify a bit. Thanks.
| charles_f wrote:
| The CEO is a bit of an exception in that they're where ends
| meet, through an organization it's the one place where
| radically different functions report to the same person.
| And those functions are not _that_ different in that they
| 're usually CxO, whom job is running the function under
| them.
|
| With that said, I would persist that a CEO should be a SME
| in the value creation function of their company.
|
| > Management is more complicated than just fact-checking
| and BS-detection. In fact if you're significantly worried
| about detecting BS by your staff, you already have a
| management problem.
|
| It is, but similarly it's also hard to figure a strategy
| that works if you can't empathize with your customers, and
| as CEO that's your job.
|
| I've been working on a "platform" that was led by a VP who
| didn't have dev experience. The only priority was
| increasing the feature set, with only consideration given
| to the "end user". Developer experience left as an
| afterthought and never raised to the level of a goal,
| resulting in cumbersome programming paradygms, and low
| adoption.
|
| > if you're significantly worried about detecting BS by
| your staff, you already have a management problem.
|
| Couldn't agree more
| spoonjim wrote:
| In many family-owned businesses the heir apparent (normally
| the eldest son of the owner) is prepared for the job by
| working as many of the low-level jobs as possible when a
| teenager. They clean the trash, lubricate the machines,
| etc. Two benefits: they know about how the business works
| so they can't be BSed later on, and they have the
| credibility with the line-level employees.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run
| organizations that do things that you don't understand.
|
| This has been the bane of my corporate life for almost 30 years
| now. The ED's just don't feel they have to understand the
| technical details of what's happening underneath them, which
| leads to the pervasive culture in all Fortune 1000's: the middle
| managers run around creating little fiefdoms, and fighting over
| their share of the department's budget.
|
| In my current company's onboard training, I counted 5 dimensions
| of cross-functional reporting. Also, there are at least 4 major
| IT departments. Who's responsible for what? Who knows! It's
| impossible to know! But they're fighting about it, and every
| group has a new policy or layer to add, every couple of months,
| to justify their existence. Meanwhile, people are just trying to
| do their jobs in the face of impossible deadlines due to workflow
| congestion caused by 40-year-old mainframe constraints.
| hintymad wrote:
| > which leads to the pervasive culture in all Fortune 1000's:
|
| I feel this is the same problem as an online community faces:
| the density of talent gets diluted over time as the community
| grows larger. When you only 1000 members in Quora, you get
| detailed and nuanced answers that open your eyes and expand
| your mind. When you have 100M users in quora, most of the
| answers are meh. Similarly, when a company grows rapidly with
| only few hundreds of people, you get amazing talent as
| described in the book Show Stopper. When the company grows to
| north of $1T with hundreds of thousands of people, well, you
| get current-day Microsoft and eventually IBM
| mhh__ wrote:
| Social media is now littered with lifestyle-consultants who
| sell this grand idea of becoming an "analyst" or consultant of
| some kind, raking in loads of money while going to the onsite
| gym and eating smoothie bowls.
|
| No knowledge of the domain, or statical training required.
|
| Good for them, but if you hire these kinds of people in your
| business you deserve to go bankrupt.
| int0x2e wrote:
| I suspect it will never happen, but I would love to work at a
| company that has front-line managers and recognized "thought
| leaders", and nothing else at all, most of all - no middle
| managers, little to no concept of "promo work", etc.
|
| Once you remove the incentive for managers to grow their org
| (because there's a point where managing more people directly
| becomes infeasible, or at the very least - painful), you'll
| have little to no politics, no more constant re-orgs, etc.
|
| Wishful thinking, I know...
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| > _In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming
| language without a name. "Excel Macros," we called it. It was a
| severely dysfunctional programming language without variables
| (you had to store values in cells on a worksheet), without
| locals, without subroutine calls: in short it was almost
| completely unmaintainable. It had advanced features like "Goto"
| but the labels were actually physically invisible. [...] I was
| supposed to come up with a solution to this problem. The
| implication was that the solution would have something to do with
| the Basic programming language. Basic? Yech!_
|
| Take a look at this 4-minute video: _Excel Magic_. This engineer
| demonstrated the implementation of many sophisticated
| simulations, entirely in Excel, including flight simulators,
| orbital mechanics, digital signal processing, ray-tracing, heat
| transfer, chemical reaction dynamics, and more.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9PLmtQZwmY
|
| I don't know what to say... On one hand, I clearly understand
| that, due to the programmability with macros and VBA, the express
| power of Excel is as powerful as any "real" programming language,
| and in fact, a lot of real-world engineering calculations are
| indeed performed in Excel, the prevalence of Excel in engineering
| is almost terrifying. Imagine solving differential equations
| numerically using 10,000 cells in Excel, yes, it has been done! I
| respect their skills and achievements.
|
| On the other hand, it just looks painful to me, and feels like
| constructing a skyscraper using a toothpick.
| amalcon wrote:
| Excel macros were/are _bad_ as a programming environment, for
| the reasons Joel says. The thing is, that 's because it grew
| out of the deficiencies of formulae. If you can't do a thing
| with formulae, the next logical step was a macro. Since Excel
| was such widely distributed software back then, and it took
| actual effort to get decent tools for programming, macros were
| a _lot_ of folks ' first exposure to programming.
|
| In turn, that means there are people who can perform what I'd
| consider pure wizardry with them. My hat is off to those
| people, though I still am happier that I got my hands on Turbo
| Pascal at the right age.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| Many times "it" started as one worker in the office who
| needed to get something done. And they figured out that Excel
| (or Access) could do "that thing". So they used Excel to
| automate it. Then "that thing" ended up doing more, and
| getting more complicated, until one day people realize that
| the company depends on this (now) business critical process.
|
| Excel was more likely because it came in almost every version
| of Microsoft Office. Access tended to come in only the more
| expensive suites.
|
| That's why I call Excel & Access "gateway drugs" - they're
| the tool that got a lot of people into programming. They
| didn't wake up one morning and say "hey, I want to be a
| programmer!". Instead they figured out how to do their work
| with the tools they had, and then one day woke up and
| realized "OMG! I've become a programmer without noticing."
| filoleg wrote:
| Oh hey, another turbo pascal starter. If you don't mind, can
| you elaborate on why you feel that way about it?
|
| In retrospective, I am happy about starting with it, and
| remember it fondly. But I cannot really make any good point
| for why, and I definitely remember cursing it out very hard
| at the time.
| amalcon wrote:
| Basically two things:
|
| 1. It was better than the other stuff I had access to at
| the time. This is due more to the poor quality of the other
| stuff I had access to at the time than any benefit of Turbo
| Pascal, but it still mattered.
|
| 2. There are pointers in it, but you aren't forced to use
| them for simple programs. Having encountered pointers early
| is a _huge_ leg up when it comes time to work with
| something like C or assembler. Being forced to use them (as
| in C) makes the learning curve really steep. Something like
| Pascal, where you _have_ pointers but you aren 't forced to
| use them for the sorts of program a beginner will tend to
| write, seems to give both benefits.
| unwind wrote:
| I learned C after years of first Basic, then MC68k
| assembler (Amiga 4ever etc). Pointers never seemed hard
| or confusing at all. :) #lifehack
| buescher wrote:
| > Imagine solving differential equations numerically using
| 10,000 cells in Excel, yes, it has been done!
|
| There's a nice treatment of how to do this for simple heat
| transfer problems in Tony Kordyban's _Hot Air Rises and Heat
| Sinks_. You will amaze and frustrate your co-workers.
|
| Excel is 100% the poor man's simulation package. I like Matlab
| and Simulink a lot better, and if I were 25 again I'd be a fool
| for Julia, but nothing beats it for sharing a simulation or
| other analysis with someone that doesn't have the same software
| you do on his or her computer.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| > Tony Kordyban's _Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks_
|
| It was a fun book, I don't remember the Excel modeling part
| though... I do remember seeing something similar on
| Microwaves101.com by The Unknown Editor...
|
| > _The spreadsheet has 96 distance steps and 2000 time steps,
| or almost 100,000 cells. In the old days it would bring a
| computer to its knees when you changed a variable. Now it 's
| almost instantaneous, however, it still measures 10MB. We
| will offer a zipped version of it in the download area,
| soon._
|
| https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/fourier-s-law
| buescher wrote:
| Chapter 25, "Even A Watched Pot Boils Eventually". If you
| want a whole lot of that, appendix D of Holman's Heat
| Transfer, which is referenced in Kordyban's book.
| marcodiego wrote:
| > Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document
| that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the
| time it was done.
|
| > we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier
|
| > THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC.
| HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE
| MARGINS.
|
| Even considering my historic dislike for microsoft, I must admit
| how a dedicated person Bill Gates was. The fact that even after
| being highly successful he was still apt and willing to review
| projects, maybe even code, to this level of detail is impressive
| and not a thing I've seen much.
|
| It is hard to say he didn't earn it.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Not to downplay Bill Gates dedication, but given how important
| basic was to Microsoft's initial success and how much of his
| own coding went into it, he was perhaps likely to take more
| technical interest in it than other products.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I used to know guys from Microsoft Germany. One day they were
| debugging some obscure issue in the memory management of
| Windows 2000. Gates came into their office and asked what they
| were doing. They explained the situation and they were
| surprised that Gates had a solid understanding of the issue and
| could discuss it on a deep technical level. They also said that
| Gates (and Ballmer too) has an incredible memory. He supposedly
| can recall who attended meetings years ago and what was said.
|
| His brain seems to operate on a much higher level from most
| other people.
| com2kid wrote:
| I've been witness to something similar. tl;dr Team member goes
| to present optical HR tech to BillG. He read up the academic
| and research literature and after seeing our demo, says we are
| obviously BSing him[1] and that the tech was barely ready for
| prime time[2].
|
| Completely outside his normal area of expertise, he had
| obviously researched and become, if not an expert, really
| knowledgeable in the space.
|
| Unrelated, he also heavily advocated for Tablets back in the
| early 2000s.
|
| Indeed, IMHO BillG's problem is that he is often _too early_ on
| seeing technology advances. Microsoft tried to make Smart TVs
| back before broadband internet had a large penetration! Smart
| infotainment in cars way before anyone else! Being too ahead of
| the curve can be a disadvantage.
|
| [1] Not a direct quote, but he was right. Optical HR wearables
| use some trickery to make the numbers look good, basically
| unfiltered, swinging your arm around will make the numbers jump
| up suddenly due to how the tech works, so you have to basically
| detect this and cover it up, accelerometers help here. There
| are plenty of other problems with optical HR that get paved
| over through clever presentation to the user.
|
| [2] It is better now, but circa 2014 optical HR sucks, and
| wrist based still sucks for a lot of types of motion, but they
| great for running and biking. Anything with regular motions it
| is great for. HIIT strength training workouts where you are
| frequently switching exercises? No, just no. Though again now
| days the tech has advanced to the point it is kind of accurate,
| but someone who knows the industry can still purposefully
| confuse most sensors.
| buescher wrote:
| They bought webtv, didn't they? Similarly, Microsoft was not
| only too early on tablet computing, but also never quite got
| it right.
| com2kid wrote:
| > They bought webtv, didn't they? Similarly, Microsoft was
| not only too early on tablet computing, but also never
| quite got it right.
|
| They bought Webtv and also made Windows XP Home Theater
| Edition. Lots of technologies get purchased then improved
| upon by large tech companies, including OS X and Android!
|
| Regarding tablets, one can argue that IPad Pro is slowly
| becoming what Tablet PC was back in 2003.
|
| IMHO my 2003 Tablet PC experience was _amazing_. Everyone
| back then thought I was insane for having a laptop with
| "only" a 13" screen (17 and even 21 inch laptops were
| popular back then), but my laptop had an "incredible" 3-4
| hour battery life! Heck my tablet had directional mics, I
| could specify from what direction I wanted audio recording
| focus on, it was amazing for recording lectures. I haven't
| seen that tech in a consumer product since. :(
|
| Microsoft not being able to realize they could ship more
| than one successful OS has hurt them many times. Windows
| has to be everywhere. Apple got it right by forking the OS
| and realizing if people wanted to give them money for iOS
| based devices, let the cash roll in.
|
| MS is better about accepting people's money now days. :)
| See Azure and Linux hosting.
| zamfi wrote:
| Heart rate detection?
| int0x2e wrote:
| Lots of great insight. Thank you for sharing!
|
| Your comment about being too early is on point, though I'm
| not entirely sure it's a bad thing. If you're a big company
| with scale and cash to support it, exploring new frontiers is
| probably worth it - you either stumble upon the next big
| thing, or you at least get to stake your flag through some
| patents, and in the process - make it so if this things does
| grow - you already have some kernel you can build upon to
| start that up without having to pay up for an acquisition...
|
| It's not perfect, but from a risk / reward perspective - I
| can see how this strategy could serve a large tech company
| well over decades...
| com2kid wrote:
| After a decade at MS I have come to believe that there is
| such a thing as a first mover disadvantage. Being too early
| to market is just as bad as being late. Basically a new
| venture at a high tech company gets a lot of enthusiasm and
| funding, but it if doesn't succeed within some time frame,
| not only does it get abandoned, but the company in general
| won't try again for quite some time. Something else that
| can happen is the early v1 product gets a bad reputation,
| making it hard for a better v2 to gain traction.
|
| This actually hurt Windows Phone sales. Windows Mobile 5/6
| (and Pocket PC before) were miserable consumer products[1].
| Sales agents in cellphone stores learned not to sell phones
| from Microsoft, because their device sales bonus would get
| clawed back when the device was returned. (Manufacturers
| give $$ to sales staff for each phone sold from that
| manufacturer, or at least that is how the market worked
| back when I was last in it, info is circa 2010!
|
| When Windows Phone came out, 2 bad things happened.
|
| 1. Sales staff wasn't being offered bonuses for selling
| Windows Phones 2. When everyone realized how big of a
| disaster that move was, bonuses started being offered, but
| staff had been burned by 7-8 years of horrible return rates
| on prior Microsoft smart phones, everyone knew iPhones
| didn't get returned, so sales staff pushed iPhones.
|
| oops!
|
| Microsoft Sync is another one. Microsoft tried to make
| Android Auto back in 2007! Holy shit. Just think about
| that. In 2007 MP3 playback was still an extra add on in
| many models. AUX ports were an add on! No one had smart
| phones! It was crazy ahead of its time. And cars just
| weren't designed to be "smart" yet. Heck I am pretty sure
| in 2007 you could still find a few cars that didn't have
| power windows.
|
| Oh I also used something that looked a lot like docker
| containers back at Microsoft. It was chained and nested VHD
| partitions that you could update the OS and Apps separately
| by just dropping in and relinking the VHDs, so the apps and
| dependencies were one self contained virtual hard drive
| image, to upgrade the apps just run some magic commands and
| the existing OS image had a new app image attached to it.
|
| Microsoft had a working, reportedly playable at reasonable
| speed (never saw it myself) XBox 360 emulator for PC
| around, I think maybe 2008 or 2009?
|
| To be clear, that is an insane technological
| accomplishment, to have it running at playable speeds on
| PCs of the time.
|
| I got despondent working at Microsoft because I saw so much
| cool technology just fall by the wayside, or get
| mismanaged, or get a v1 launched early and then have no one
| believe in the v2.
|
| Amazon Astro, their semi-autonomous robot, yeah MS tried to
| do that in 2012 or so. Failed because the tech wasn't ready
| yet (and for many other reasons!)
|
| Microsoft tried to do eBooks back in 2000. Oops, way too
| early.
|
| [1] Windows Mobile pre WP 7 was never meant to be a
| consumer product. Working on it I was told very bluntly
| that the target audience was corporate, and specifically
| corporate IT departments who were doing the purchasing.
| Pre-iPhone Microsoft even had a nice little report from
| some research firm saying consumers would never pay for a
| cellphone, they would only, en mass, get cell phones for
| free from their provider in return for the 2 year contract
| lock in. This was myopic as fuck. As a new college hire I
| felt like banging my head against the wall every single day
| for the horrible business decisions that I saw being made,
| and this was before the iPhone was announced!
|
| An example of this closed mindset: When I first started at
| work I got my company Windows Mobile device, and shortly
| thereafter I went out shopping for a new TV. I was at the
| store wondering which one to get when I realized I could
| pull out my phone and do research right there. I literally
| stopped in my tracks and realized that having the internet
| in my pocket was going to be a huge societal shift. When I
| told my coworkers what had happened, even the next youngest
| member on the team dismissed what I said as being
| inconsequential.
|
| Year later, same co-worker was proudly showing off the
| barcode scanning app on his iPhone that let him comparison
| shop in stores...
| richardw wrote:
| Apple's done extremely well by timing it perfectly, not by
| being too early. Never mind early or spot on, it's been
| pretty late for a lot of stuff, compared to Android.
|
| I still remember my only windows phone. Horrible thing. Had
| a Start menu and a stylus FFS.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hintymad wrote:
| Equally impressive was that Joel was hired as a product manager
| (I believe the official title was Program Manager, but writing
| product spec nowadays is done by eng or by product managers)
| fresh out of school, yet he was able to come up with detailed
| and highly technical product spec - a trait that many product
| managers do not have, especially in a big company.
|
| It also shows the talent density of the young Microsoft, just
| like in the young Google, or the young Facebook.
|
| Edit: s/Project Manager/Program Manager/
| [deleted]
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The title was 'program manager' which may have implied
| different things. He was just out of school but also older
| than a typical graduate so perhaps a little more wise to the
| world?
| hintymad wrote:
| Thanks! Oh yeah, program manager. I got it messed up.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| There's a lot of places within Microsoft that operate with an
| extremely high degree of attention to detail, completeness, and
| utter mastery over a topic. It's amazing.
|
| For example, the C# language design committee will, almost to a
| fault, consider every single little micro-scenario for a
| proposal and weight them all together to figure out if it's
| going to be feasible to implement, able to accomplish the goals
| that the proposal sets out, and if it fits in with the "spirit"
| of the rest of the language. I think it's a rarity in software
| to have such care put into the design and implementation
| process and it's amazing that these things are alive and well
| within Microsoft.
| alexklarjr wrote:
| Considering C# is copycat from Java and Delphi with every
| c00l sugar can be possible extracted from all other c00l
| languages for last 20 years it must win award for most random
| set of features and duplicated approaches in its "design".
| Typical Microsoft product, like Office.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| I was going to have a thoughtful reply, but I looked at
| your comment history and it seems like you have absolutely
| zero nuance or objectivity in your evaluation of Microsoft
| software.
| paxys wrote:
| As a developer, having a product manager and executive leadership
| with this level of technical depth is a dream.
| endtime wrote:
| I recently joined Roblox, and the CEO will occasionally send
| emails with questions about caching strategy or API design or
| whatever.
|
| I found it a bit odd, coming from a much bigger company, but if
| that's what sounds good to you, we're hiring. :)
| white_dragon88 wrote:
| That thumbnail made me snort coffee through my nose. Looks like
| the kind of photo an actor would have on their CV
| malthaus wrote:
| My take-away is that any of the other 4 hierarchy levels between
| joel and bill should have challenged & asked those questions
| already.
|
| When you already have 6 levels of hierarchy, is it really the job
| of the CEO to dig that deep on technical issues?
| nearbuy wrote:
| Spot checking for important projects is a good way of making
| sure those other 4 hierarchy levels are doing their job well.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| In far too many organizations, there is something called "the
| thermocline of truth".
|
| > _A thermocline is a distinct temperature barrier between a
| surface layer of warmer water and the colder, deeper water
| underneath. It can exist in both lakes and oceans. A
| thermocline can prevent dissolved oxygen from getting to the
| lower layer and vital nutrients from getting to the upper
| layer._
|
| > _In many large or even medium-sized IT projects, there exists
| a thermocline of truth, a line drawn across the organizational
| chart that represents a barrier to accurate information
| regarding the project's progress. Those below this level tend
| to know how well the project is actually going; those above it
| tend to have a more optimistic (if unrealistic) view._
|
| In the more Machiavellian companies that I have worked for,
| this would be a layer on the org chart where truth stops
| flowing upwards. It may also affect downwards flow of
| information as well. The brass at the top don't know what is
| going on because they can't depend on the layers of management
| between the CxO tier and where work actually gets done.
|
| > _is it really the job of the CEO to dig that deep on
| technical issues_
|
| No. You - as CEO - _should_ be able to trust the people in
| those layers. Maybe BillG didn 't trust them. Or he didn't know
| how to. He was technically excellent enough to be able to do
| this sort of sanity check for himself. Perhaps, as CEO, you
| only need to do this sort of "quality control" check
| occasionally.
|
| Any organization that has been parasitized by narcissists is
| guaranteed to have at least one, and more likely several,
| layer(s) where truth _must_ stop flowing in order to (1)
| protect the narcissists ' egos and (2) to protect the
| organization from their anger & retaliation.
|
| [0] - https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-
| the-...
| fasteo wrote:
| >>> is it really the job of the CEO to dig that deep on
| technical issues?
|
| From the post:
|
| >>> Later I had it explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want
| to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it
| under control ...
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > other 4 hierarchy levels between joel and bill should have
| challenged & asked those questions already.
|
| Congratulations, you invented bureucracy. Because those 4
| levels wouldn't (and most of the time - couldn't) answer those
| questions, so what they would do? Demand the lower level to
| answer it.
| localhost wrote:
| I had my first and only BillG review a few years ago. It was
| about a technology that I and everyone else _assumed_ that Bill
| had a lot of familiarity with. It is a technology that I'm sure
| is being used at his foundation. It is a technology that other
| CVPs at the company had presented to Bill in the past. And during
| the review, it was pretty clear that at least at that moment,
| this was the first time that he thought he had seen this
| technology.
|
| This taught me an important lesson. Our leaders, despite the
| legendary status that is sometimes bestowed upon them, are human.
| And fallable. They selectively remember things, and if you want
| them to remember certain things you'll need to tell them over and
| over and over again.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > (how many billions of dollars has Microsoft lost, in R&D, legal
| fees, and damage to reputation, because they decided that not
| only do they have to make a web browser, but they have to give it
| away free?)
|
| Joel is super smart, and I loved this particular story.
|
| However, I'm surprised he underestimates how crucial was to give
| away IE to kill Netscape, and keep dominating the desktop market.
|
| See this exhibit [0]. It's a rare gem of a find, I believe. Try
| to guess from this [1] when was IE introduced as free and
| default.
|
| (I'm pretty sure I am right on dates - please correct me for
| inaccuracies)
|
| [0]:
| https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/...
|
| [1]:
| https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/...
| civilized wrote:
| Why was it important for Microsoft to kill Netscape? What did
| this have to do with continuing to dominate the desktop market?
|
| Bill should have thought harder about these questions before
| going after Netscape by giving away IE for free - the most
| transparent act of monopolistic predatory pricing we've seen
| since Benjamin Harrison signed the Sherman Antitrust Act into
| US law.
| kragen wrote:
| Now the most important platform is not Windows but Chrome
| (and, secondarily, Mobile Safari). That's why my technophobic
| mother is using Linux now, on a Chromebook.
|
| When people at Microsoft saw Netscape and Java, they
| understood that this would happen.
|
| But Microsoft was able to delay their irrelevance for about
| 15 years by sucking off Netscape's oxygen, getting the W3C to
| rubber-stamp IE's implementation bugs and shitty API designs
| as official web standards, sidetracking the W3C for years on
| the make-work of XML and things like RDF schemas, introducing
| platform-specific extensions in Visual J++, splitting the
| Java developer base into Java and .NET, mugging Fortune 1000
| CTOs behind closed doors with patent lawsuit threats for
| using Linux, and shipping a really shitty broken browser for
| 20 years. That was long enough to kill Sun too.
|
| And now they own GitHub, which controls the namespace of most
| of the world's free software.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It delayed by a decade (or two) browser innovation. This
| meant that desktop apps weren't replaced with cross-platform
| web apps over that period. Note how now we no longer need
| Windows for most professional desktop applications. As much
| as we like to complain about JavaScript and Electron, they're
| largely the reason that we no longer depends on Windows for
| productivity.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| From contemporary technical documentation, it doesn't
| really look like Microsoft had exactly planned to just sit
| on IE once it had won.
|
| That first Web push gave us XMLHttpRequest, it gave us
| IDispatchEx and Windows Scripting (where JScript stagnated
| only after the Sun settlement, enough for a next-generation
| version in the form of JScript.NET to get developed and
| consequently[1]), it gave us HTAs ("Electron as a Windows
| platform feature"), DHTML (a non-standard abomination, yes,
| but so was <IMG>) not only implemented in IE but supported
| in FrontPage and Word, Active Desktop with its channels
| (OK, one might argue those count as a negative amount of
| features, but they _were_ serious about it), the Web
| Publishing Wizard and the Personal Web Server (bundled with
| an _end-user_ product!).
|
| This does not look like the work of people who were
| planning to do just enough to win and then stop--it looks
| like they were really into it (and they were really into a
| lot of things at the time simultaneously), then came the
| "oh shit" realization that helping the Web eat the platform
| lunch is maybe not exactly in your interest[2] when that
| lunch is firmly yours at the moment.
|
| ( _Java's_ attempt at same they were very consciously
| thwarting--can't find that Gates memo now--but then Java
| was pretty explicit and deliberate about that attempt,
| while the Web just kind of happened to be the only leak
| when a lot of people started feeling around the dam for a
| lot of different reasons.)
|
| [1] https://ericlippert.com/2003/10/14/designing-jscript-
| net/
|
| [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-
| microsoft-lost...
| lukasb wrote:
| _"Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to
| make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to
| ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't
| know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody
| was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question
| he can come up with because it's never happened before. "_
|
| It depresses me that the people considered the best in our
| industry are such assholes. Bill just wanted to yell at
| _everyone_ because it was the only way he knew how to motivate?
| myle wrote:
| As a teenager that grew up hating Bill Gates, because I liked
| Linux, I want to agree with you. As an adult, I believe we
| should be able to see past the surface of behavior that other
| people exhibit and understand their motives.
|
| It is nowadays in fashion to cancel someone based on today's
| norms, but if we want to be fair, we should put things in
| context that we don't have. If Bill Gates was so toxic that was
| unbearable, Microsoft would have failed.
| tricky777 wrote:
| not necesarily. Slave using countries survived for centuries.
| (business can be successful even if it makes people
| miserable)
| lukasb wrote:
| Criticizing is not cancelling.
| jononomo wrote:
| I honestly miss the old days when smart people would just yell
| at you. It's frankly more efficient and the people who can't
| handle it just aren't smart themselves. I'm not talking about
| unwarranted abuse, but I did like the confidence that top notch
| programmers felt free to express back in the 90s.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > the people who can't handle it just aren't smart
| themselves.
|
| Don't dismiss everyone who won't put up with that kind of
| environment as "just not smart". It's a completely
| unwarranted assumption.
|
| Just a hypothetical: Being verbally abused as a child might
| make that impossible to take as an adult. That doesn't make
| you any less smart.
|
| But it doesn't even have to be abuse. There are people who
| are plenty smart, whose reaction to being yelled at by their
| boss would be "why should I put up with this?" In fact being
| smarter might even make that response _more_ likely.
| jononomo wrote:
| You yell back and explain why you're right. Or, if you're
| not right, you go fix the problem.
| logifail wrote:
| > It depresses me that the people considered the best in our
| industry are such assholes. Bill just wanted to yell at
| everyone because it was the only way he knew how to motivate?
|
| A professor at my university took exactly this approach to
| interviewing prospective undergraduates (EDIT: minus the
| yelling!) He would ask a question, and if the unfortunate
| candidate started to give the right answer, he would (politely)
| cut them off, and ask a different/harder question.
|
| He was interested in how candidates answered questions they
| hadn't already got the answers for.
|
| At the time I regarded this as pure brutality, but looking back
| on it with a few decades of experience, I can see why he
| thought his approach was valid. We often think the edge cases
| are where the interesting stuff is.
|
| Q: Given a (fairly short) time to interview someone, how would
| _you_ attempt to find the boundaries of their knowledge, and
| how they handle stuff at the boundaries?
| lukasb wrote:
| I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with
| yelling at people as your primary method of motivating them.
| Which, according to Joel's story, was Bill's default method
| in every review.
| jononomo wrote:
| Just bring your blankie to work, maybe?
| LanceH wrote:
| If you ask a question, you shouldn't be cutting someone off
| as they answer it (unless they are rambling). The interviewer
| should have the courtesy to at least listen to the answer to
| the question they asked.
|
| If limited time is a problem, schedule more time.
|
| During my interviews, if someone answers the question and
| keeps going, I'll tell them, "I was only looking for xyz, and
| you got it."
| logifail wrote:
| > If limited time is a problem, schedule more time.
|
| I'm not sure how realistic that suggestion is. The pool of
| university applicants is large, the academics' time is
| short. If you're going to have multiple interviews over
| multiple days that just throws up even more barriers to
| entry to those whose parents can't afford travel and
| accomodation for that.
|
| At a broader level, if one can't distinguish between "good"
| and "not good" in one interview, perhaps one isn't asking
| the right questions?
| makr17 wrote:
| I used to know a HS Maths teacher whose approach to testing
| was similarly brutal. Essentially, in his view, if a student
| is able to answer every question on an exam correctly, then
| we haven't fully assessed the depths of their understanding.
| So every exam was crafted with the express aim of 100% being
| infeasible.
| logifail wrote:
| > So every exam was crafted with the express aim of 100%
| being infeasible
|
| Isn't the goal of any (every?) exam to attempt to
| distinguish between how good the candidates are?
| candiodari wrote:
| Not really. The goal of most exams is to have a
| predetermined number of people pass. For example,
| entrance exams. There is a, known beforehand, number of
| spots to hand out. The goal of the exam is to be exactly
| difficult enough to get all the spots filled but no more.
| This even applies to medical doctor residences.
|
| Only artificial, meaningless exams like olympiads are
| really meant to asses how good someone is.
|
| https://www.imo-official.org/
|
| Of course the easy and common way to do it is to make the
| exam _way_ too hard to realistically fill up the spots,
| and then cheat. In the best case, this is done by having
| a "translation table". Usually, we're talking a
| combination of nepotism/racism/... You _can_ pass fairly.
| It 's just that if you aren't part of the right group you
| need to score something like 20-40% better. And before
| you say this is unfair, I like the alternative even less:
| way too easy exams where making 1 spelling error in an IT
| exam will effectively disqualify you (like the EU
| commission exams). There _are_ limited number of spots in
| that exam too, and you have zero chance to start a career
| in the commission if you have a "low" score.
| Unfortunately 90% is "low". Hell, that's _very_ low. 98%
| is the real "pass grade", and 99% is not a luxury.
|
| And if they don't do this themselves, like has happened
| with medical exams, the "people upstairs" will find ways
| to give responsibilities to people who don't pass, who
| may not have got the required training to be responsible
| about them.
|
| There _is_ a level of incompetence that will get you
| kicked out, but it 's pretty extreme, and usually what
| I'd call "callousness" (what you might call a tendency to
| proceed after being warned) is a required part. Mere
| stupidity won't do it.
| jononomo wrote:
| Back in the 1980s in India if you scored 80% on a medical
| school entrance exam then you were suspected of having
| cheated because of how ridiculously high that score was.
| (Source: my parents who were professors at a medical school
| in India during the 1980s)
| mhh__ wrote:
| Shouting isn't great but to be honest I'd much rather have a
| very detailed if slightly macho technical discussion than some
| nonsense HR-gremlin driven "motivation" session.
| jononomo wrote:
| What Bill Gates should have done is hired a diversity and
| equity consultant to make sure Excel centered underprivileged
| minorities.
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