I’m not at all denying Racism in Portugal.

I’m denying Racist Hate, even back in Fascist times: people were prejudiced about those in the “colonies” and even looked down on them but they didn’t at all hate them.

People did (and still do, though less) go around with all sorts of prejudices about different looking people or people from other places, especially “Colorism” (though, curiously, in present day Portugal it’s more the Brazilians that are discriminated against than people with Black African ancestry).

My point is that even during Fascism and the peak of the wars of liberation against Portugal in the “colonies” people didn’t went around thinking that “Africans are human animals” or that “we should wipe them out” and ditto for the figures of the Regime, whilst the shit coming out of Israel and especially from the mouths of Ministers and politicians of the governing coalition is relentlessly racist and some form or other of mass murder are common suggested as “solutions” for the “Palestinian problem”.

That level of extreme hate along racial lines is simply not the kind of thing traditional Fascism tries to indoctrinate into the population, whilst it’s the core of ethno-Fascism and its Propaganda.

This is far from a “just Portugal” kind of thing: even the most violent traditional Fascist dictatorship - that of Franco in Spain - didn’t engage in widespread violence against different ethnic groups (or, in fact, in any kind of “white supremacy” ideas) and its violence was mainly the period of Civil War at its start, which pitched mainly Spaniards against Spaniards.

I mean, if you want a present day example of traditional Fascist violence, just look at Russia in Ukraine: they’re mostly trying to take Ukrainian shit and have the Ukrainians become Russians and work for the Russian regime, not to wipe them out in Ukraine. The violence is because the Ukrainians naturally refuse and there are certainly atrocities in war by the Russians and even vengeance against civilians using missiles following Russian defeats, and that’s it. There is no such thing as a campaign to get rid of Ukrainians in by any means necessary no matter how murderous.

Absolutely, that too is evil shit. It’s however more of a nation state version of Theft and Pillaging whilst what the Zionists and other ethno-Fascists do is Extermination, a whole different level of Evil.

I’m Portuguese a country which had a Fascist dictatorship until 74.

I was very young at the time and don’t remember anything of the dictatorship directly but did heard the stories and saw what came out of it.

The country was definitely colonialist and the people and natural resources of the “colonies” (which were all in Africa) were definitely being exploited but there was no messaging of racial superiority and no racist hate even when the people over there started rebelling and there was war. In fact so little was the racist indoctrination that immediately after the Revolution all “colonies” were left to gain their independence as nations and all of them became friendly nations with democratic Portugal within a few years.

From all I’ve seen the focus of the Fascist propaganda was all about the Greatness Of Portugal (all the while it was a shithole) especially old “greatness” like the various achievements of the Portuguese during the time of the Maritime Discoveries in the 15th and 16th centuries.

That shit is nowhere near what Nazis and Zionists do and even during the wars of liberation of Portuguese colonies there was never any mass targeting of civilians over there, much less a systematic massacre and a long list of babies murdered by the Portuguese Military.

As soon as racial supremacy and racist hate gets into the picture, even in war you go from an atrocity here and there generally done remotely (as you see Russia do in Ukraine) to systematic massacres with snipers seeing children through their scopes and choosing to shoot them in their heads (as you see Israel do in Palestine) - traditional Fascism has Sociopaths leading the military, ethno-Fascism has the entire military all the way down to privates acting as Sociopaths.

Thanks for that very complete view of things.

Things are quite different since I last was doing hiring, which was pre-COVID.

Yeah, my experience leading a remoted team in India also showed the importance of cultural awareness and good requirements: I ultimately got into the habit of, after the big meeting with the boss were all the work was given to the various teams, get my guys individually on the phone (so that they feared not “losing face”) and carefully coach out of them any questions or doubts since otherwise they wouldn’t voice them and just end up implementing something they misunderstood or which wasn’t explained correctly and indeed they also needed very detailed requirements which was a problem because the senior guys on the other side who ended up having to write said requirements could pretty much have done the job themselves in that time.

This was a big Investment Bank and some top level manager in NY decided to create a division in India to outsource work to, but it definitely didn’t get the cream of the crop over there and the career structuring there was so shit that the few good techies we got would quickly end up as (bad) managers - their pay scales followed the stupid idea that “nobody can be paid more than management” so good mid level techies had to become junior managers to earn more, and they invariably were crap as managers.

Just a small correction: this is not just plain Fascism, it’s ethno-Fascism (like the Nazis), a far more violent and derranged variant than traditional Fascism because it’s anchored on Ethnicity, feelings of Ethnic Superiority and the ultra racist casting of entire other ethnicities as sub-human (i.e übermenschen vs untermenschen or, as the Israeli leadership calls them, “human animals”) whilst the traditional kind (such as Mussolini’s) is anchored on Nationalism.

Traditional Fascism being based “merely” on Nationalism does have the capacity to inspire their people to such massive levels of cold sociopathic violence against entire groups of people as ethno-Fascism does.

Or, more in general, extreme racists are far more irrationally violent than mere thieves.

It’s a pretty standard technique of ethno-Fascists: the Zionists, just like the Nazis did, claim to represent an entire ethnicity and then cast any criticism of them and their ultra-racist Genocide as being criticism of that ethnicity they claim to represent.

And this is hardly the only propaganda technique Zionists and Nazis have in common: most of the tricks the Zionists use are pretty much Nazi shit with just the names of the ethnicities, places and nations replaced, down to how a lot of what the Zionists claim about Palestinians in Gaza being pretty much what the Nazis claimed about the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Being against Israel and its Genocide is as much anti-semitism as being against the Nazis and their Genocide was anti-white.

Think of all those babies they murdered: it all adds up to lots of entire human lives worth of emissions avoided.

Having spent most of my career working as a senior contractor, which often meant landing on code bases with 3+ layers of fuckups, I can only imagine how painful it will be to end up having to clean and fix AI generated code, since that doesn’t even have a consistent coding style or pattern of design errors and bugs.

More specifically: the same kind of decision makers are behind both.

I see. That does change the idea I had about things a bit.

It’s been a while since I was last hiring.

I wasn’t aware that the problem nowadays in the West (or at least the US) was an excess of people who don’t really have a natural skill for it choosing software development as a career.

That kind of thing was one of the main problems with outsourcing to India maybe a decade ago: the profession was comparatively very well paid for the country so it attracted far too many people without the right skills resulting in a really low average quality of the programmers there - India had really good programmers just like everywhere else but then had a ton of people also working as programmers who should never had gone into it, so the experience of those having to deal with outsourced programming in India usually was pretty bad (I remotelly was a technical lead for a small outsourced team in India from London, and they were really bad whilst, curiously, the good programmers from the Indian Subcontinent I worked with had emigrated from there and were working in London and New York).

I think it’s even worse than just the bar for competency going up: even for a coding wizard going into the career, it’s a lot harder to squeeze through the bottleneck which is getting an entry level position nowadays unless they have some public proof out on the Net of how good they’re at coding (say, commits in open source projects, your own public projects, or even Youtube videos about it).

This is something that will negativelly impact perfectly capable young developers who have an introvert personality type (which are most of them in my experience, even in domains such as Hacking) since some of the upsides of Introversion are a greater capacity for really focusing on on things and for detailed analysis - both things that make for the best programmers - and self publicising isn’t a part of the required skillset for good developers (though sooner or later the best ones will have to learn some “image management” if they end up in the Corporate world)

I’m a bit torn on this since on one side salesmanship being more of a criteria determining one’s chances of getting a break at the start of one’s career as a developer is bad news (good coding and good salesmanship tend to be inverselly correlated) but on the other side a junior developer with some experience actually working with other people on real projects with real users (because they contributed to existing open source projects) has already started learning what we have to teach fresh-out-of-Uni developers to make them professionals.

Sound like a variant of the good old saying “pay peanuts, get monkeys” only using a stick and threats instead of payment.

Mind you, it does sound like the kind of think somebody with his kind of personality - narcissistic shameless and dishonest salesman - would think it’s a great idea.

In my experience working for almost 3 decades in software development, passive-agressive shit from upper management just causes the best people to leave (as they’re the ones who easilly find better jobs) leaving behind mainly a mix of the incompetent and those who never worked anywhere else (who are either already incompetent or will become so, as only ever having worked in just one company is far too narrow professional experience for anything beyond junior/mid level - you need to have seen more than one way of doing things to understand certain higher level concerns and choices in software development).

The one time some manager voiced such an idea, I very overtly in front of everybody offered to make “loop unrolling” software working at the source level (compilers already do it at the Assembly level in some cases for performance) for me and my colleagues to really boost that code line count (while totally screwing maintenability).

Mind you, all devs in that meeting were loudly against measuring performance by code lines, but I like to think that suggestion of mine really hammered down the coup the grace on that “brilliant” idea.

I’ve worked as a freelancer (specifically as a Contractor) in Software Development for over a decade and more often than not I ended up having to work with some existing code base, having to deal with the design choices, coding style and bugs of somebody else, often multiple somebody elses.

There’s nothing quite as “entertaining” as having to deal with 3+ different code and design styles in the same code base because all previous developer thought their own way of doing things was the superior way so just added one more layer of their style (not just coding but, worse, software design) on top of what was already there increasing the mess, rather than work within the existing structure and style and doing some refactoring.

Anyway, in my experience having to read, understand and work with existing code that you yourself did not made is way more time costly and less pleasant than actually doing your stuff from scratch.

Outsourcing killed a lot of the junior and even mid-level career level opportunities in CS and AI seems on track to do the same.

The downside is that going into CS now (and having gone into CS in the last decade or so, especially in English-speaking countries) was basically the career equivalent of just out of the starting line running full speed into a brick wall.

The upside is that for anybody who now is a senior techie things have never been this good because there are significantly fewer people at that level than there is need for such people, since in the last decade or so a lot of people haven’t had the chance to progress in their careers to that point.

Whilst personally this benefits me, I’m totally against this shit and what it has done to the kids entering my career.

I have the impression that most people (or maybe it’s my faith in Humanity that’s at an all time low and it’s really just “some people”) just want pre-chewed explanations given to them rather than spend time and energy figuring things out themselves - basically baby pap as ideas food rather than cooking their own ideas food out of raw ingredients.

Certainly that would help explain the resurgence of Populist sloganeering and continued popularity of Religion (with it’s ever popular simple explanations of “Deity did it” and “it’s the will of Deity”)

Critical thinking, especially Skepticism, does not make for good Consumers or mindless followers of Political Tribes.

Middle and upper management are like little children - they’ll only learn that fire hurts by putting their hand in it.

Good programmers (and I don’t mean just at the coding level) make less bugs exactly because they want to avoid bug fixing as much as possible.

They still have to do debugging - and hence have to be good at it - just less often than if they didn’t invest any time into figuring out ways of working that reduce the rate of bugs in their work (and, again, this is at more levels than just coding).

I think that misconception of “good coders do not produce bugs” in anchored in the totally wrong idea that it’s at all possible to make code without bugs - the way I see it the path to being a “good coder” must go through being good at debugging and just wanting to avoid doing it as much because how how much more time it takes to have to go all the way down to using the debugger to find bugs than doing things like at least some analysis upfront of the program requirements, using proper naming conventions to reduce the likelihood of the kind of bugs that comes from confusing variables and structuring you code so that you don’t get lost or don’t forget things (especially for code you don’t see for months and later come back to having forgotten the logic you were following with it).

I’ve done some programming without proper debuggers (embedded stuff in shitty shit microcontrollers, shader programming) and it’s a total PITA.