Links for 2020-04-27

Facebook Screwing Contractors, Hire Juniors, Tips on Work-From-Home, Managing Remote Teams, Generating Rust Tests, Tiling on GNOME Shell, WebKIT Energy Consumption, Looking for Work, Don't Defend Bugs

Facebook Contractors Must Work in Offices During Coronavirus Pandemic — While Staff Stay Home

There is being not-so-nice, being an asshole, and being Facebook.

While taking a lot of information from everyone on the web, now they are protecting their people instead of "people who work for Facebook". The idea is obvious: While we may look nice to our people, paying for stay-at-home and/or medical help, whoever is not in our payroll must keep the gears going.

Maybe that's not true. Maybe it is just hearsay. Maybe it's just bad propaganda. The problem, though, is that Facebook reputation makes this sounds true.

The future of work requires a return to apprenticeships

I've been doing this argument at the office (well, both offices, I'm outsourced, anyway) for some time: Companies may want to have senior developers 'cause they don't want to train anyone, but there are no senior developers available around. Why? Because senior developers are either doing remote work, getting paid in some foreign currency (and heck if the current exchange rates for the major currencies doesn't make it worth it), or they have some very comfortable position in their companies.

So it's time to train people, not look for people with lots of knowledge which you won't find anyway.

Things I’ve learned from 12 years of WFH

At this point, everybody knows how to work-from-home, right? RIGHT?

No? So here are some tips.

Some of them is almost "well known" at this point -- some of them I've heard a long time ago -- but I guess repeating is not that bad.

Free eBook “Managing Remote Teams”

Still on the topic of remote work and work-from-home, maybe you're actually responsible for managing a team that's going to be remote. So not only you you're working remote, you have to manage a team remotely. So maybe a free book could help you with some tips on how to do it.

Generate Rust tests from data files

Using build.rs to generate tests -- at least, the easy ones, in which you have an input and an output.

‘Pop Shell’ Wants to Bring Proper Tiling Window Features to GNOME Shell

A project to bring window tiling to GNOME Shell.

I've trying a few, including gTile, but never felt really comfortable.

Now there is another plugin claiming they can do tiling on the shell.

It even allows focusing windows using <Super> + <Direction>, which is one of the really good things with i3.

How Web Content Can Affect Power Usage

In a world where everything has a battery and almost everything is in the web, checking how much the pages are using of energy is really important.

And it seems WebKIT-based browsers have an inspector for checking this.

Career advice for people with bad luck

The times are not happy. Some companies doesn't seem to be able to survive the slowing of the economy. So better to be prepared than sorry.

Stop apologizing for bugs

The point is: If there is a bug, or if you're responsible for a bug, don't find excuses for it to exist.

I'd go a step further and say "Don't defend bad code".

Bugs happen, sure. Some of them are not intentional, but if we keep finding excuses for them -- there wasn't enough time, people were in crunch time, we were not aware of this requirement -- then we'll never worry about making things better.

This post was built with the help of

• Les Orchard
• HN Tooter
• Adrian Cochrane
• Anna e só
• Timo Tijhof