• Fnord Prefect (unregistered) in reply to Lars
    Lars:
    ... and writing free-text docs.

    I first read that as "text-free docs" - it took about 2 minutes for my brain to catch on to the mis-parse!

  • JB (unregistered) in reply to jobu

    'He' is the singular indefinite pronoun in English ("if a person drinks too much, he will likely experience a hangover"). 'He' also happens to be the masculine personal pronoun.

    'She' is the singular pronoun of personification in English ("if England fails to advance America's foreign-policy ambitions, she will suffer terrible consequences"). 'She' also happens to be the feminine personal pronoun.

    Confusing the two exhibits not a warm-and-fuzzy concern for the inclusion of women so much as a writer's or speaker's ignorance. Using the feminine personal pronoun as an indefinite article is as moronic as using the masculine personal pronoun for personification. Thus the captain greets us: "Welcome to my ship. Isn't he splendid?"

    Give it up, people. It's not thoughtful; it's just illiterate.

  • fner (unregistered) in reply to JB

    (Hu-/Wo-)Man, following such offtopic threads teaches me more about the subtleties (is it the right word here?) of the English language than any lessons back in school (I'm not a native English speaker) :) .

    Captcha: truthiness? WTF?

  • (cs)

    I'd say the consultant was not just brillant, but F---ing Brillant.

  • kbfj (unregistered) in reply to JB

    Just clagging a bunch of stuff from some web page doesn't make it true. And even if it is true according to some grammarians, that doesn't make it sensible, a good idea, or immutable. Ask why some people regard it as a rule: historically, men did all the published writing, for men; they'd tend to use "he" as an indefinite pronoun; eventually usage became entrenched and then codified into some rule of grammar.

    But the tide has well and truly turned on this one, as people have realised that words do have power and writing for a general audience needs to include the whole audience. Using singular pronouns interchangably is one solution, and it sounds about as awkward as all the solutions do now ("he/she", "they", ...), but you'll get used to it.

  • Icelander (unregistered)

    Since when is deploy-then-test wrong? My company does that all the time! Except instead of raising everyone's hands, we just get emails.

    (I understand why it's wrong. And that's a big part of why I'm leaving.)

  • tinkerghost (unregistered) in reply to Icelander

    Obviously you need to re-deploy the mail server the next time you deploy a major project. That should garantee a perfect deployment.

  • FuBar Revisited (unregistered)

    I've been in this position before. And I won. As a new manager I had no coding assignments at all, just snoozeable meetings.

    So I spent 3 weeks building my own personal system to compete with the consultant's. It wasn't perfect, but I used code generation for the DL / BL, and threw together a prototype. It cost me about 17 hours beyond 40 in a 3 week period. I did a private viewing side by side for the CFO.

    I never knew what happened to the consultant. I got promoted and received 3 immediate headcount for a dev team.

  • loida (unregistered)

Leave a comment on “A Show of Hands”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article