Here's a thought experiment. Imagine if every fatty acid in your gut is contained in a cell that will independently try its best to maintain homeostasis. When it's under stress -- from any source -- it will secrete hormones.
Now imagine an anorexic woman who recovers, but she overcorrects and ends up overweight in the eyes of her anorexic friends. They shame her for overeating and she tries to eat less, which puts her adipose cells under stress. Is it possible that she'd keep gaining weight from the stress of undereating? If it's impossible, how do you know? If it's not impossible, should we blame anorexics the same way we blame people with habits that you think are bad?
The fat scare is far from over. Not everyone spends time on Hacker News or controversial diet channels on youtube.
Moreover, nutrition is a lot more complex than "fad in, fad out". The subcutaneous fat of an animal can hold some pretty toxic stuff -- that's kind of its purpose. It wasn't a scare, people were just missing nuance and still more research needs to be done.
"It wasn't a scare, people were just missing nuance"
This reads like post-hoc rationalization about the claim (scare) that saturated fat causes heart disease, because that's what the scare was about. As far as toxins in fat goes, the primary toxin that I've seen discussed is dioxin and that scare tactic is sorely missing nuance.
I'm willing to wager that we thought saturated fat was bad for a very good reason, and it's not one of the reasons touted by people who want to eat deep fried bacon wrapped hot dogs for every meal. My first thought when someone calls a scientific consensus a scare is that they have an agenda. You'll see similar language in climate change denial. Yes, new data comes out and some theories are shown to not be perfect, but if you're getting your education from internet memes and hacker forums and scattered papers you're going to draw conclusions that miss things. It's also a matter of whether whichever studies are being touted right now are representative of the larger scientific landscape.
That's an interesting mix of red herrings and what I'm going to call Cougher's Law: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving climate change approaches 1. The good news is that your red herrings are low in saturated fat, so you can use them to your heart's content rather than to its detriment.
This is the moment I decide I'm absolutely done battling nerds who think that because they understand computers (usually badly) they understand everything about complex metabolic processes. The lack of humility is seriously mind-boggling.
There's a scientific consensus that you understand nothing about. People spend their lives on this stuff.
Recommendations have certainly changed as new information came out -- we also discovered iodine and B vitamins -- but is there any government agency in the Western world that recommends a high-lard diet? If not I think you're batting out of your league.
Not that this absolutely needs to be said, but lard isn't pure saturated fat, and the unrendered fat of an animal is an organ.
Some of the worst and most ineffective coworkers I've ever worked with were intelligent, knowledgable, skilled, and severally lacking in the social skills department. In some cases I've seen the more abrasive and toxic variants of these people completely crush morale for the rest of the team or company, and destroy any success. They were a net loss to the company.
Yeah, social skills matter. A lot. It's not about having a girlfriend, it's about effective communication with the people you work with.
I am coming to the conclusion that social skills are probably more valuable than coding skills. I don't think I am especially productive in my current job due to a lot of context switching, but I think they like me for my attitude.
Clearly you need both; I've also worked with really sociable and nice people who were a great laugh but couldn't program their way out of a paper bag if the survival of the human species depended on it.
The ability to partition work into independent chunks is way more important than social skills when you work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Then they can work on their things and you can work on yours with little need for further communication.
And don't come saying that divvying up technical tasks is a social skill, it really isn't.
If you don't understand what technical information they need to do their job then you lack technical skills. If you don't understand what technical information you need to request from others then you lack technical skills. If you can't write them down or express them in words you lack technical skills. If you can do those things then you can work with others and be productive.
You might not be fit for a career in sales but that is not what we are discussing. The only major "social skill" you need is the ability to not offend or inconvenience others. This part is not very hard and doesn't need repeating as much as people do it.
If by valuable you mean they keep you employed despite not doing anything, sure. They are valuable for career progress and such, but when faced with real technical difficulties, you are not going to talk yourself out of it. Or maybe you can, delegate them to some poor bastard. What a wonderful world we are living in.
I didn't say that I did nothing, I just know that I have been more productive in previous jobs due to a number of factors. But hey perhaps you lack some social skills jumping to conclusions like that.
On the other hand, my colleagues talk a lot. Like, almost half of their day (i.e, 4 hours) is spend talking about random topics like weather, food, gossipping etc and nothing job related. They aren't that skillful coding wise. But I wonder, is this more acceptable than having hard coding skills? Serious question.
I agree, but there's a certain line that a good software engineer should not cross and that's where their improved social skills make local gf attainment feasible, because then they'll start devoting their time to other things.
In my case I can already see my increased HN karma pulling me away from our tablegen spec. With a gf I'd be useless.
Once you get past a certain point in your engineering career, in order to grow more you'll need to take on more responsibility than one person can reasonably do. Then it's more about leading and influencing others and getting them to jump onboard, even if you're an individual contributor.
Assuming you care about taking on more responsibility. That's not the path for everyone, though. I'm fine being just a very experienced programmer. I couldn't care less about "leading".
If you can use social skills effectively, you get to decide (to some degree) what you work on. If you don't, then someone else decides what you work on. As long as you're okay with that trade, there's nothing wrong with it.
No social skills needed, you just need to be honest. So say that you'll leave because the current work is boring/stressful and the will let you choose the project you want if you are any good. Also usually they want to put their best developers on the most interesting problems so they'd ask you to do it anyway.
There's a skill to being honest in a productive way. Being honest in a way that communicates your thoughts and gets people engaged rather than defensive is really difficult but really valuable. But if you don't yet have that skill being completely honest will hinder you.
Maybe we are just thinking of different things when we talk about social skills? I think of things like being able to participate in small talk all day or participating in social events. I am very good at reading people and understand how they think and how they would react to different things I say, so in some way I got good social skills, but I'm pretty sure most people would say that I have bad social skills since I don't like social situations and therefore don't build connections.
Honestly? That's not how development works at all, in my experience. Best developers aren't isolated on "most interesting problems", but rather, are getting constantly sucked into war rooms and emergency calls. And when they are working on "interesting problems", they are constantly working, verbally and in writing, to convince reluctant management and other engineers to agree to their new, "interesting" approach to the problem in question. Those are massively social behaviors. "Being honest" is necessary but not sufficient. Understanding people's motivations, finding reasons for them to believe your idea is beneficial for them and their own interests, that's what gets you what you want.
Here's an example. I am trying to do important, interesting work, but I'm often interrupted, because I work in DevOps and wind up drawn into other people's problems. So on the whiteboard next to my desk, I wrote my two "Wildly Important Goals" (from the book Four Disciplines of Execution), and underneath that, the sentence "If something does not apply to these goals, why am I doing it?" This became quite the controversy, but it works! It has significantly reduced my interruptions. That's social skill in action.
Your industry's success depends on you being an effective communicator and "people person". Technical skills are table stakes. What gets you the job, the promotion, the fun project is how well you deal with others and function on a team.
Especially since most people really can't read or write code for more than 4-6 hours a day. If you're working more than eight hours, you're either in crunch (and consider leaving for a new job), or your day is being filled with useless meetings and other non-work.
Your personal success may depend on your ability to communicate with your peers, managers, and subordinates. The linked page is not exclusively about finding a mate; in fact, on a quick scan, I didn’t see that mentioned at all.
Your industry's success requires you to be effective. Doing work for more than eight hours a day leads to burnout, and not doing anything besides sitting in your room prevents you from being creative. The more diverse experiences, interests, and skills you have, the more creative you'll be.
