A very big thank you for taking your time to answer in such an elaborate way and giving pointers for further information. Highly appreciated!

Very happy to read that, but honestly, when reading “$1 million USD” as investment sum, it reads more like an advertisement stunt than a real investment. (Like, 2 senior developers for one year?)

We need more diversity in Open Source operating systems for desktops, laptops and any of the *BSDs is a great candidate. (Would love to see Haiku getting some sponsorship or even ReactOS!)

Nice, I like it very much when one can separate between personal fit and quality! :-)

For me the whole point of the book is to accept the story, while your own sense/mind tells you to not play along, which made me reflect about how much - dare I say everyone of us - plays along everyday… Besides this, I simply like Ishiguros writing style (non native English speaker here, so wonder what a native would think about it.)

Would love to get a list of books from you that you respect and like (or respect and don’t like ;-)).

Short book that hit hard:

• Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
• Never let me go, Kazuro Ishiguro
• The last unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
• 1984, George Orwell
• Prince of Thieves, Chuck Hogan

Mandatory heads up: The writing gets better over time.

The first time I tried to read it, the writing style of the first book really turned me off.

Indeed. :-)

I still insist that the music of our generation growing up was the best time for listening to alternative/metal etc.

So much innovation, new genres were created, and so much creativity.

Today most of the music sounds like ‘more of the same’ and very formulaic to me. I am happy for any recommendation of current music in alternative/metal which is innovativ.

Thank you very much, a great recommendation!

… and yes, agreed: I am lucky I had a very good manager once, who didn’t pull the usual shit and had human integrity, but people like that are the exception not the rule.

Thanks for the book suggestion, I’ll buy it! :-)

Yes, I also saw it in every job/team/organization, and it seems very human, everyone just likes some people better than others.

The think which irks me, is that I also sometimes experienced favoritism/nepotism with totally incompetent people I had to directly work with and also several level above my pay grade. Like, if you have two competent people and chose the one you like more, I can totally understand. But if there are competent people and you chose your incompetent crony over literally everybody else, it seems self defeating in the mid/long run.

I benefited of someone with relative power taking a liking to me later in my career, and all of a sudden I was elevated into a network where things are possible which weren’t before. Still at the very bottom of the ladder, but very aware how much difference a few connections can make.

Correct, not all of my examples are about nepotism.

Thank you for your recommendations, funnily enough I don’t suffer from the political/social skills.

What I cannot wrap my head around are situations, where people through nepotism/favoritism or politics get a position where they fail, which then comes back to the people who put them there. To rephrase it a little bit: “Why not put someone who is 50% competent and 90% loyal on a position instead of someone who is 25% competent and perhaps 95% loyal”? It seems kind of obvious to have a little bit competence, and if it is only for self preservation. (Just to ‘objectify’ that: Saw higher managers which are totally incompetent (not only my opinion), have a proven track record of failing everything they touch by stupidity (like: that is not how reality works stupid) which got officially demoted after several years, hurting their sponsors. Why didn’t their sponsor demote them earlier or put them in the position in the first place?)

Wow, thanks a lot, the books look very interesting and special shout out for the Podcast, I already subscribed to the feed! :-)

• Finch - Say Hello to Sunshine
• Paledusk - Palehell
• Faith no more - King for a day, fool for a lifetime
• Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
• Philipp Glass - Glassworks
• Henryk Mikołaj Górecki - Symphony of sorrowful Songs
• Fear Factory - Obsolete
• At The Drive-In - Relationship Of Command
• Boy sets fire - After The Eulogy
• Refused - The Shape of Punk to come (not a fan after their sell-out-reunion, but the album is still great)

Seems SAP’s investment in good arguments pays off.

OTOH Europe and Germany have obvious problems in the cloud sector: They cannot do it on their own and thus are depending on either the USA or other countries who have the know-how.

Not a situation you want to find yourself in, when IT is the backbone which keeps everything running.

Luckily German government’s investment in paper, floppy drives and fax machines makes it secure against attacks towards IT infrastructure… ;-)

No worries and thanks a lot for your suggestions/answers!

Thanks for your suggestions: Can confirm start/end bytes are wrong. Tried to open in Shotwell, GIMP, Firefox, Google Chrome w/o results.

I assume the hard drive is ok: I also have some git repositories on the drive and the checksums for git are correct. Every other file on the drive is ok, so cryptolocker malware could have only been on my phone at that time.

Good points, and I mostly agree with you, especially with feedback loops!

Still, I never argued for waterfall. This is a false dichotomy which - again - comes from the agile BS crowd. The waterfall UML diagram upfront, model driven and other attempts of the 90s/early 20s were and are BS, which was obvious for most of us developers, even back then.

Very obviously requirements can change because of various reasons, things sometimes have to be tried out etc. I keep my point, that there has to exist requirements and a plan first, so one can actually find meaningful feedback loops, incorporate feedback meaningfully and understand what needs to be adapted/changed and what ripple effects some changes will have.

Call it an iterative process with a focus on understanding/learning. I refuse to call this in any way agile. :-P

… I cannot count the number of times at my different workplaces where we had an agile process, dailies and everything else of the agile BS for projects which where either trivial or not solvable. No worries, the managers, product owners and agile coaches made money and felt good, we developers went for greener pastures…

Agile is a scam, nothing they do is based on any facts and when you challenge agile coaches / other people which profit it is always ‘I believe’ or ‘proven by anecdote’.

Combine this with the low quality of people in the average software projects and you have a receipt for failure.

Writing the requirements first at least forces people to think trough a project (even if only superficial), so I am not surprised the success rates for this projects goes up.

It is a long time ago, when I read the books, and I liked, that they where very political and changed the narrator often (if I remember correctly). To say, I kept them in good memory w/o the urge of reading them ever again. ;-)