The reason cited seems much more a case of moving call-management into a high-level software system that didn't have the same sort of rigor that telecom systems traditionally have. Maybe it did and someone missed this? It's hard to know. In short it feels a lot more like a management failure than a failure of software.
Probably a lowest cost bidder and not helped by the US devolved government if this had happened in say the UK the papers would have a field day and the government would force the telcos to fix it stat!
Where I get the most resistance to functional programming is more in the abstractions: both that they are too complex and that people aren't already familiar with them. High-level/complex/abstract patterns are hard to understand the first time and FP seems to make those patterns easier to express.
I'm surprised how much we take for granted an understanding of object-oriented coding in the industry. Any graduate with a four-year degree in CS can be expected to write passable object-oriented code, but many have absolutely no exposure to functional idioms. Of course, those same people may have very little exposure to more complex OOP design patterns. I've seen people's eyes gloss over the same why when saying, "It's just a monad" as when saying "It's just an interpreter pattern".
The thing that prevents me from using VSCode, and I tried, is having to edit code on multiple systems. It's so nice to be able to have the exact same environment on my local system, remote production systems, test servers, VMs with crappy graphics. All I have to do to get my development environment set up on just about any Unix system is copy a few dot files.
Maybe there's a solution with SSH file systems or similar, but now I'm getting into the realm of configuration we were hoping to avoid, right?
For a while I was even using a Chromebook and doing most of my coding by SSHing to my much more powerful desktop.
You'll find a lot of part-time workers that work 30-35 hours/week, including in IT, because that is the most they can work without being entitled to benefits. The difference in the nature of that work and the benefits may hide any significant differences due to total hours.
There are also plenty of companies where the employees only work a few hours per day but are in the office for 8-10 hours. Take Google, for example. It's fairly easy between gym, meals, massage, sports league, etc to only actually have 30 hours/week allocated for work, even though a person is in the office for 8-9 hours. However, it may be a huge psychological difference to be trying to fill your work day vs. having full control over time.
> There are also plenty of companies where the employees only work a few hours per day but are in the office for 8-10 hours.
I think that pretty much describes every company that's primarily composed of white-collar jobs. Realistically, a company is only going to get ~4 hours a day of actual productivity from an employee at the office.
Or maybe a number ever closer to the Office Space number. I think I recall the main character saying that once all of the distractions, needless interactions with other employees, and 'spacing out' (I took that as low quality sleep with eyes open) were removed only about an hour of actual, real, work was being done.
Particularly for what are really creative arts, a more relaxed day and better quality of life /outside/ of work are probably important positively correlated factors in performance.
Dogsled racing is a working area that has seen trend away from pure huskies. There are still plenty of huskies in the sport, but mixed teams are very common in the Iditarod now. In 2000 there were only three all-husky teams in the whole race. The racers are crossing with other breeds and bringing in new dogs that are more optimized for the race. There's a danger that in the long run they could end up with something extreme, like what greyhounds are for racing, but right now it's full of healthy, diverse dogs.
For apartment dwellers I always recommend getting an older dog. Puppies are cute, but they're honestly a lot of work and generally high-energy. After just one or two years most dogs will settle down and you'll have a very good idea of what you're going to get. The adult dogs are perfectly trainable. Most people who get puppies also have no actual skill in how to train dogs, so they're basically rolling the dice on what their dog's personality is going to be like.
Rescue organizations (in the US at least) are a great place to find dogs. The dogs have often been in a domestic setting with a foster owner. The history of the dog is usually known. You'll be adopting dogs in the 2-8yr range and you'll have a great idea of what you're getting.
It can take a while to find the right dog, but it should. It's a decade-long commitment.
I'm glad you used the phrase "get a pure breed" as opposed to "purchase a pure breed". There are far to many amazing dogs that need a home to spend money buying a dog.
If you want a rough story, look at the Bernese Mountain Dog. Twenty years ago the life expectancy of the breed was only 7 years due to congenital heart problems. Breeders have been working to breed it out of them and introduce more variety in the genome of the breed for some time and their life expectancy has been going up.
The key is to at least get a diverse line, though I don't think there's any reason to get a pure bred dog unless you want to show or breed it yourself.
My father recently purchased a Sharpei. It's father was also it's grandfather because it was basically the product of two kennels interbreeding. In humans go as far as to outlaw that in many countries. In dog breeding it's a matter of course.
> I don't think there's any reason to get a pure bred dog unless you want to show or breed it yourself
There is one other reason - working dogs. Livestock guardian for example is a job that's very poorly suited for mutts due to the genetic personality traits involved. An LGD with chasing, shepherding, or tracking instincts would be at best worthless, and at worst a danger to your animals.
Maybe I'm ignorant but my understanding was it's not really a social construct for us, it's often rooted in the understanding of genetics that makes inbreeding a bad idea.
Mostly myth. The first million years nobody cared. Inbreeding over time is a bad idea, if the gene pool is too small. But line breeding(?) like done with dogs (and cattle and pigs and ...) is not a death sentence, nor even a very bad idea unless taken to extremes.
All dogs can still interbreed, so they're still the same species. They're different enough from wolves that they're given a different sub-species, sort of like Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis. However, the variety within domesticated dogs is similar to race.
What makes dogs breeds so different is that the dog genome is extremely plastic: it has a lot of room for variation as evidenced by how far pugs have come from wolves, even though theoretically they can still mate and produce fertile offspring.
> What makes dogs breeds so different is that the dog genome is extremely plastic
Is there evidence that dogs genome is more plastic than humans?
To my (very limited) knowledge we've not tried selectively breeding humans within bloodlines in anywhere near the same way that breeds of dog have been selected. Are there other domestic animals that have recieved the same degree of breeding but not reached such variation?
I think there's a more important metric: productivity has concentrated in the coastal cities. Our workforce is more productive than ever before. Much of our economic gains year after year are due to productivity gains: we produce more goods per worker.
In our current economy, if you want to have a high-paying job you have to have a highly productive job. The best way to do that is to be in a city that has high network effects. Centralization and computerization is allowing people in cities to be more and more productive. This is why even Walmart has fewer regional managers and employs more people in cities managing logistics or even doing research in programs like @WalmartLabs.
Being in a city helps you be more productive due to network effects in contacts, opportunities, leads and education. If we want to help people out, we need to help them get those benefits elsewhere or help them move to the coastal cities that already have these networks.
Nine months ago I had an offer to join Fitbit's engineering team. When I first started interviewing I didn't even realize the company had gone public a six months before. I guess I missed the news.
Looking at the stock price and talking a little with the employees, it was hard to get excited. It had gone from an initial surge of $47/share to $14/share. It looked like an overeager IPO to raise funds for a company that really hadn't quite figured out its market yet. We've seen them many times, but I'm not yet sure what the commonality is. Not having a lasting market? Not having the growth potential?
Most people at the company had an optimistic outlook, but it would be hard to work there and do recruiting otherwise.
