> The company has used the amount of code shipped as a major indicator of engineering output.
> That metric is controversial.
An important point that’s buried quite a bit down the article. Grindr seems to be measuring AI success not on features shipped or business value created, but on number of lines of code generated which seems a fairly flaky justification for such a large AI spend personally.
Charles Simonyi Has that story about how a PM began publicly calling out engineering productivity by having them report weekly lines of code, and Simony one week put a negative number in for his line count. The PM stopped doing that afterward.
Alternatively, since Simonyi was at PARC, just up the road from Apple, he may have known the story and shared it, which got re-attributed, as happens in the game of telephone.
The story was from the time he was working on Microsoft Office, so after Parc in the early or mid 80s. I was actually just surprised someone who worked at Microsoft back then was still at Microsoft (I heard the story in 2009).
I'm having a tough time making the few pieces I know fit together.
When Simonyi started at Microsoft there were only 40 employees. He was the head of the then-new applications group, which I normally don't think of as being a programming job, nor one where LoC is all that relevant.
(That's not to say he wouldn't have written any code. The book "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" mentions that Cutler, the head of the NT project, wrote some of the code, but not much. And Simonyi, like Cutler, was an expert software developer.)
Wouldn't any PM for Word and Multiplan/Excel be under Simonyi? As the head, he could surely say "no" to the request, and even tell the PM to stop gathering that information, right?
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Simonyi developed the "meta-programming" software production method in his PhD, which he brought to Microsoft. The meta-programmer does all the design work and architectural decisions, which the programmers then code up. If they get stuck, they take the problem back to the meta-programmer.
The meta-programmer doesn't actually write lines of code, or at least those LoC are much less than what the underlying programmers write, making that measurement even less relevant for someone like Simonyi who, of course, would be a meta-programmer.
Ah. I've never come across this in the US - every bank I've seen also has a website. The only thing the apps do that the website won't is mobile check deposit typically.
They’re API used to work via just providing a VIN however that also allowed remote control so you could just run through all the VINs Nissan uses and turn on remote heating, etc.
This was reported in the media which caused Nissan to start locking down their API something fierce.
Then the three years free of many services have started to expire for most vehicles, so locking it down more became a potentially profitable exercise so now they actual have development work against it.
They generally pre-auth for either £20 or £40 and then update the amount post-transaction.
In terms of PIN check, the card is just declined with an appropriate error message because you can’t insert it and the next time you use a contactless machine it asks for the card to be inserted and a PIN entered.
For petrol (gas) pumps in the UK it generally auths either £1 or £99.
Makes sense and matched my understanding of the pay at pump preauth for a fixed amount.
I guess the issue then becomes relying on contactless (only) without the hardware for full EMV with PIN, as then someone whose card has been used contactless one too many times can't charge, and potentially ends up stuck there.
It does feel like contactless is a good convenience measure, but probably isn't ideal as the only mechanism on a reader for charging infrastructure.
Unrelated to this, but not being able to initiate charging without internet access (for online auth of cards, and the ones that can only be used online) also is likely to become an issue in rural areas, as well as give quite a few resilience issues if cloud infrastructure isn't available, or internet backhaul from the area is disrupted. Even once power is restored after a storm, if comms are down (like with Storm Arwen), this doesn't sound ideal for EV charging...
I only have experience with Shell, Morrisons, and Tesco pay-at-pump stations. In all of those, you have to physically insert your card and type in your PIN; contactless does not exist.
An important point that’s buried quite a bit down the article. Grindr seems to be measuring AI success not on features shipped or business value created, but on number of lines of code generated which seems a fairly flaky justification for such a large AI spend personally.