Ask HN: Discuss burnout with boss? - <AUTHOR> I am burnt out at work and not sure how to start the discussion with my boss. I've tried addressing the problem myself over the past year by means of exercise, diet, getting more sleep, more time spent on hobbies, socializing more, and pacing myself at work. It's not helping, it's just getting worse. I know quitting and finding a new job is an option but I would prefer not to. How can I have a productive discussion with my boss about burnout? How did you handle it? <comment><USER2> My manager and I had a 10 year relationship going. I had just transitioned to a new role, had a new born and taken on too much. I was feeling it for 6 months but finally broke at around 9 months. I told him I couldn't do it anymore and that I wanted a sabbatical. I told them that my backup plan was to just quit.

He talked me off the ledge and within a day had transitioned my troublesome projects to others and moved me to a four day work week to recover. He had to run this by manager's three levels up, do an insane amount of HR paperwork (fulltime -> not fulltime, pro-rated salary adjustment, etc.). All this happened in a space of two days.

I stayed on a four day week for a couple of months. It was magical. He retained my reduced workload when I came back full time.

His first comment when I initially cracked - "you should have come to me sooner".

The quick reaction, sympathy and support I got cemented my loyalty to an outstanding manager.I'm still here a couple of years later.

<comment><USER3> I would like to interject: This heavily depends on the boss. I've seen great bosses who will make stuff like this happen, and I've seen terrible bosses who don't give a shit. Make sure you work for the right-kind of boss if you are going to take this approach!

<comment><USER4> Speaking as a boss who I'd like to think falls into the former category... If you don't ask you won't know what they'll do for you or not. Could be your boss doesn't help or makes it worse then you know exactly what to do next - quit,move to another team, or take it to hr id its really hostile. That dick boss is probably the reason for your burnout (aka situational depression caused by work) so the solution is in moving on.

<comment><USER5> [Also as a boss] I'm fully convinced that a lot of the badmouthing you hear about "bad bosses" comes from people who never made any effort to create a functional bidirectional trust relationship with their boss. There certainly are bad bosses, and I would never claim otherwise, but I think we'd all be better off if there was as much employee development training on "how to build a relationship with your boss" as there is "how to be a boss" training.

<comment><USER6> I suspect many hacker types do have problems with the small talk, I know I do.

When I broke down and got sick I started cognitive behavioral therapy and among the things we talked about was expectations. It turned out that I didn't really know what my boss' expectation of me was. What I thought his expectation was were one of the things that broke me. And it was all fantasy. Lesson learned. Be frank and honest, don't be afraid to talk to your boss. Make sure you get answers that are explicit and something you understand. Make sure it's not cloudy company and management pep talk that you can't even remember a few minutes after the meeting.

Me and my boss talked a lot, and I ended staying in the company, but switched boss. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a boss of devs. My off the cuff response to you is "please, god _please_, talk to your boss." Say exactly what you told us. "I'm burnt out, I've tried addressing the problem..."

Before you do, think through what's causing the burnout. It could be the hours, that's where everyone goes first, but it could be a particular client, it could be the number of projects you're having to concurrently work, it could be your environment, it could something else completely, or it could be a combination of a bunch of those things.

Once you get sorta close to what's causing the burnout you can work to a solution that you can pitch your boss. But I wouldn't lead with it, I'd let him ask you "so what can we do" and then present what you're thinking.

Speaking as a boss, I really don't want people quitting for negative reasons. If they get some crazy offer that I can't match or they get to work on some cool tech that excites them, them's the breaks and it suck for me but I'm excited for them. But if I have people quitting for systemic reasons, man that's bad juju and I need to know so I can fix that shit before quitting becomes contagious and I lose a shop full of good people.

It's also been mentioned a couple times to see a counselor. I concur. You may be dealing with some anxiety and depression issues that a qualified doc can help you through.

<comment><USER8> Are managers like you common or are you some type of unicorn?

<comment><USER7> Nah. Most of the managers I worked with truly wanted to treat their people well, they just didn't have the latitude or power to do so. They were given lots of responsibility with no authority, they got dumped on by the jackwagon MBA(s) they reported to, and they didn't have the power to do anything but serve as a conduit between upper management and the field. It was/is a culture problem endemic to many big corporations (and lots of small ones too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1\. Quitting and finding a new job doing the same thing (dev I presume) might not solve the issues. It could lead to additional stressors that worsen the problem.

2\. As an employer, make it easy for me! Be able to say what's going on matter-of-factly with a focus on how you feel and how it affects yourself. Don't focus on other people, now is not the time to air grievances within the team. Come up with a few options you'd like to try and lay out the pros / cons (ex. lightened work load for a month, different project, extended unpaid vacation for 1-3 months).

3\. See a psychologist! It may be hard to find a good one, but it is totally 100% worth it to have a professional that you can talk to openly.

<comment><USER10> I can't stress (no pun intended) #3 enough. Mental health is too stigmatized. See a good psychologist! Many specialize in this type of stress.

In addition, try guided meditation (I use Headspace). It feels kind of hokey at first, but it really helped me through a burnout period.

<comment><USER11> What exactly do you talk to a psychologist about?

I've often mused with the idea, perhaps there is some systemic issue that I need to have help with identifying and resolving... But then...what? Perhaps we have all seen way too many movies involving psychologists/psychiatrists, that it's slanted our view. I know it has slanted it for me.

<comment><USER12> Ideally you want to find someone offering cognitive behaviour therapy. You want an experienced practitioner. One to one face to face settings are better, but some people like group meetings or find telephone consults convenient.

For a mild problem you would be doing between 8 to 14 sessions of about an hour each.

The aim would be to indentify a problem. Then identify the "hot thought", the emotion it creates, how strongly you feel that emotion, and then the evidence you have for it.

You don't push that thought away, the therapist doesn't try to correct it. You sit with it for a few moments. You learn to identify the physical changes your body goes through (increased heart rate, sweaty palms, faster breathing, tense neck etc). Then you think of different evidence. You think about that new evidence, and say if it affects how strongly you feel the original hot thought.

It's an iterative process! This is just a very quick description - it's a bit more involved than that.

You're right - movies are _terrible_ portrayals of mental health treatment. Like CSI does computers level of bad.

<comment><USER10> I think the best portrayal of mental health treatment I've seen was Josh Lyman's treatment for PTSD on The West Wing.

And it still had a lot wrong with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I supervise developers. This is easy: talk to your boss. Either way, this solves your problem.

Outcome 1: it goes well. Your boss listens with empathy. Your boss works with you to find ways to help you feel better. You take some vacation or etc., and then come back to work feeling renewed. Success!

Outcome 2: it goes poorly. Your boss blows you off. Now you have an easy next step: Go find a better place to work (e.g., email me). Success!

<comment><USER14> +1 to this. After spending a lot of my career searching for the best paying job and not giving a shit about anything else I have recently realized that what I am doing and who I am working for is kind of important to me (good pay is still nice don't get me wrong). For that reason I have been working on building no-bs relationships with my managers. I tell them how I am feeling, both good and bad, and hope they'll do the same. The bosses this type of relationship has worked well with were the type of people I enjoyed working for/with and the ones who get that "life happens". In my opinion the good managers understand that their job is to enable their employees and remove road blocks. If your manger doesn't feel that way then maybe it's better you move on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a manager, if an employee of mine came to me and said "I'm burning out, what do I do?" I'd do whatever I could to help them rediscover their passion for the job they're doing.

But as an employee, I made the mistake at my last job of telling my boss that I wasn't happy. Instead of trying to help, he pushed me out the door. I'm glad to not be there any more, and my happiness levels skyrocketed, but I'll be wary in the future of telling my boss that I'm unhappy/burnt out.

It sucks.

<comment><USER16> If you were happy after you left the job, didn't your boss do you a favor?

<comment><USER15> Sort of. It's a long story, but I got transferred into his department. I was happy in my other department and unhappy in his. So in that regard, it was not a favor. But since the transfer was effectively irreversible, it wound up being a favor in that I could move on and find something better.

The other major downside was the stress of being unemployed and having to find a new gig. But it all worked out in the end, so there's that.

Next time, I'll keep it to myself until I find another job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If it's getting worse, you haven't hit full burnout yet. You should stop right now unless you really want to suffer that, let this be a cautionary tale: [http://jacquesmattheij.com/dealing-with-burn- out](http://jacquesmattheij.com/dealing-with-burn-out) I would just give a 2 week notice out of the blue. I'd say I'd made plans for a year's 'sabbatical', and I would give that to the company as the primary excuse for leaving -- if you can work out a deal where they'll hire you back then great but don't hold your breath. If you don't have a year's expenses saved up then you should also think about moving to a less expensive area. You can always move back when (and if) you decide to get a job in the area again, which may be much less than a year but if at the end of the year you still feel aversion your next Ask HN should be on reentering the job market but wanting to transition out of a pure programming role into something else similarly well paid (but maybe not even in tech).

Edit: Downvoters may not think this response is justified, but full burnout is very serious. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_%28psychology%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_%28psychology%29) If you're still at the stage where a "break", even one so long as a year, can help you get your head back in the game, you need to take advantage of that now rather than later before you burn out completely and spend at least a year but maybe even a decade to build yourself back up to a passable shadow of your former self, productivity-in-the-field-wise. That you have been struggling to fight burnout for a year already while it's getting worse suggests you need a longer break and perhaps a big shift in day-to-day work rather than a simple week or two near a beach without internet.

<comment><USER18> I second this motion. It's time to locate a more suitable work environment for yourself. The company's not going to change... and your personality's not going to change... but you can control what company you work at. Quit now, and spend some time locating your next gig. I wish you luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I tried this once. Conversation was like this: ME: "Hi I'm not doing so well, perhaps I could take a break?" BOSS: "Yeah, you're fired."

</comment><comment><USER20> I had a similar conversation with a manager a few years back, and it went much better than I expected. It's tough, because on one hand you're literally saying to the boss, "I'm currently unhappy and unable to work at the level I expect of myself.", but hopefully they are able to empathize enough to want to work through it. It could easily go the other way, though. My advice is to be prepared for it to be a conversation that leads to you not working there anymore, but at the same time be open to being pleasantly proved wrong.

Also, burnout feels terrible. Really sorry to hear that. Good luck!

<comment><USER21> > "I'm currently unhappy and unable to work at the level I expect of myself."

I think this is a really good way of putting it. I think it's also important to realize that you may go through stages of feeling like this fairly frequently. It's when you don't do something about it (often because you feel like you can't), that it gets to be a problem.

The conversation "I want to do more / I want to do better. Here are the things that are in my way", feels a bit awkward at first, but in reality it is music to a manager's ears -- _especially_ if your manager has been thinking, "What's going on with Joe? I really expect more from him." Often they are afraid to broach the subject because they don't want to put pressure on you and potentially make things worse.

Removing roadblocks so that people can do their work really well is the job of a manager. I think that many people don't realize this and as a result don't take advantage of/empower their managers. Often people view their manager as an impediment to work around (or simply as the gatekeeper to getting a higher salary).

Even if things are going well, I recommend that people get into the habit of saying, "I want to improve X, but I'm having difficulty because of Y" (even if Y is, "I don't know what to do"). See how your manager reacts and whether or not they can help you (directly or indirectly). A good manager is worth a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm always a fan of being honest and authentic. Your mileage may vary depending on your boss's personality and attitude to work/life though. Previously I've recommended that in your next touchbase (you're having them right?) simply let your boss know that you're feeling burnt out and as a result not being as productive as you can be for the company and happy for yourself. One would hope your manager wants both things (productivity and happiness) and you should be able to steer the conversation from there to ways you can reclaim energy and happiness.

<comment><USER23> My fear is that some managers take this as a sign they need to think about replacing someone - I'd be really careful about taking this option unless I had a really great personal relationship with my manager.

<comment><USER24> In the Bay Area, this chat triggers the Employee Retention Response Workflow.

<comment><USER25> I like how this response shifts the viewpoint from 1st person to 3rd person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you're feeling burned out and you've put over a year into your current job, I'd highly recommend you consider switching jobs. My own opinion is, if you're not feeling passionate about your work, the first thing to try and change is the work itself!

On the side of speaking to your manager, what's your relationship with this person like? Its easy to see someone speaking to you about burnout as a warning sign that you should consider replacing them. If that's your manager's reaction, you'll need to start looking for new work anyway. I'd suggest being _really_ careful about how you bring this up with them. Make sure you focus on the positives (I love this job, I really like my colleagues, this is a personal issue), over talking about any negatives.

Finally, perhaps this is a good chance to speak to your boss about taking on a new project, or trying a different role for a little while? A change in your day-to-day might make things seem a lot better :)

</comment><comment><USER26> When was the last extended break you had and how long was it?

Take a good chunk of time off with zero computer, technical or online stuff.

When I quit my old job earlier this year (after being burnt out hard) I was able to take 3 weeks off before starting new gig at smaller start-up-ish company. I used ZERO electronics and such over the 3 weeks. No programming books are anything like that.Was finally "refreshed" when I started the new job.

</comment><comment><USER27> It seems like all of the things you are doing are the standard stupid suggestions on what to do when you're burned out but you're not addressing the real cause. I'm not 100% sure but I think that burnout is caused when there is a mismatch between work and reward (not just monetary, but general personal and social fulfillment).

Are you working on a huge, elaborate and edpansive project with lofty goals that have maybe been scuttled by tptbs for no good reason, leaving your hard work pointless? Are you bashing your head against failure that is beyond your control for some reason? I think these are the sorts of things that truly cause burnout, not overwork per se, but overwork coupled with a mismatch with expected reward, especially if it's repetitive. Then you're training your brain to be allergic to work, because hard work is negatively rewarded.

Paradoxically, the platitudinous prescriptions that many give (get fresh air, exercise, etc) can be counterproductive because you reinforce non-work things that give you the dopamine response of success in predictable, comforting bursts.

Another approach I suggest is work modestly to strenuously hard on small things with guaranteed or near guaranteed success that will also be fulfilling in some way. Maybe the results will be immediately obvious because you are building a small tool that helps your coworkers. Social validation and support for your efforts will also help.

I could be wrong about the mechanism of burnout, but if what I describe hits a nerve, I hope you will try to shake out of it with a mind to the mechanism of your burnout. This strategy has really helped me get out of funks in biochemistry (where failure is frequent), and I've helped many colleagues too.

</comment><comment><USER28> I burned out and it took me 6 years to recover. Still to this day I deal with it. Two weeks ago I turned in my notice to a job that exceeded the stress level I wanted in my life, and just for kicks I looked for a short term contract a few days later. Immediately I was able to double my rate and get a reduced stressed position. There is no way I would have been able to ace the phone interview for the new shot term contract stressed out, working 60 hours a week, and in crisis mode. Then, the old contract cut me lose early and I got a week off to do some needed remodeling in my house before starting the new gig. So it was a win for everyone.

<comment><USER29> > Then, the old contract cut me lose early and I got a week off

One mistake I made for the first decade working was to always jump straight from one job to the next with no time off in between. Taking even a week between really helps you relax and gives you time to figure out what's important to you. Although most people hiring want you to start ASAP, I doubt they would be fased much about you starting a week later - even for short term contracts you can usually squeeze it a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> We've switched to using Kanban at work.

I won't go into all of it, but one thing that has really helped is to have all the tasks in progress on a board where everyone can see them.

And only have one task in express lane and two non-express items at any time.

You haven't said whether the problem is too much work or competing priorities (or both). Whatever it is, this has helped me.

<comment><USER31> What were you using before the switch to Kanban? This is very interesting to me, the idea that just switching up techniques can have that much of an impact on how you feel at work.

<comment> cam- Kanban is more relaxed than scrum.

When the teams I worked with switched to kanban, they liked that they didn't have the end of scrum deadline, they also disliked that they didn't have the ten day deadline anymore as they felt the arbitrary deadline helped to push them a little.

That being said, kanban is better, it is more relaxed and feature feedback is faster than scrum.

<comment><USER31> I'll have to look more into it then. At some point we just got tired of hearing about all the different ways to approach agile, and we've been using some sort of (mostly scrum) hybrid for the last few projects I've been a part of. But if there really is merit to this then that's something to consider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What would you want your boss to do?

Let's say this is a perfect, magical world where your boss will do everything possible to help you. What actions would she take? Would she switch you to another team? Reduce your workload? Allow you to work from home? Let you take a month off?

Basically your boss can't make your burnout magically go away. Figure out what you'd ideally want her to do. Then figure if that's even possible. If the concrete action you want is within your boss's power, then you may as well ask. But understand that your boss may say no, and you may end up quitting to get what you want.

</comment><comment><USER33> Disclaimer : I never had good relationship with any of my bosses in 10+ years, may be my fault or may be theirs. I cant change my attitude.(i'm not bootlicker and all my boss's expected that in my Indian environment/culture)

There are quite lot of good comments on approaching boss and talking about your issue. I agree with them but let me ask:

your boss doesn't know that you are overloaded ? Can't he see there are people in this team working less and probably getting paid more than you? If that's the case, why he didn't act so far? Is he biased towards few members?

Bottom-line is , if your boss doesn't know that you are overloaded and work is not split fairly- you can explain him about burnout issue, I'm pretty sure he will solve the issue.

If your boss doing all this intentionally, in order to make you to fall in line. I'd highly recommend getting a new job and then talk to him. Just to be on safer side, if talks didn't go well.

Again read my disclaimer :)

EDIT : Oh..wait..there is one boss. He's kind of technical guy,which i admire & respect. I can say I had one only good boss in these 10+ years. I changed 4 companies and met around 10 boss's in different projects.

<comment><USER34> >your boss doesn't know that you are overloaded ?

He might not, people have different stress levels. I get stressed pretty easily, my boss, not so much.

As for not wanting/be able to change your attitude: I don't think you should be expected to. There will be jobs you can't hold, but telling someone that their attitude needs adjusting is somewhat narrow-minded. I behave, act and react in certain ways. That's just who I am, that excludes me for working for a large range of companies, but mostly is companies I wouldn't want to work for.

<comment><USER33> >He might not

then its good news, should definitely have a chat with him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> First, you definitely want to discuss this with your boss rather than just quitting. It sounds like you like the company you're working for, but you're just feeling the effects of burnout. Here are some questions for you:

1\. how long have you been at the company?

2\. what is different about the work you did this year vs the first year you worked at the company?

3\. who at the company seems similarly burned out to you? have you tried talking to that peer about burnout and what the root causes might be (e.g. projects, technologies, pressure from business, etc.) before taking it to your boss?

4\. do you think your boss is the kind of person who would welcome a frank discussion about this -- is he or she the kind of person that already talks about controlling for employee burnout and striving for work/life balance among staff on a regular basis?

</comment><comment><USER36> I got burnt out working 10+ hour days, 7 days a week for a year, tried to ignore it and push through and was noticeably showing signs of burnout and productivity issues because of it. I couldn't take it anymore and asked for a week vacation. 3 days into the week vacation I was fired.

<comment><USER37> Shitty employers do shitty things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Throwaway acct time!

I'm burnt out but there is no way on earth I would discuss personal problems with my boss, particularly ones that might indicate a potential work performance issue. I'd be handing this person a reason to actively start searching for my replacement. No way. I'm closing in on 40, which severely limits my options in Silicon Valley. I make a fairly decent salary, for a very well known tech company. Not gonna risk that. I've got kids and a mortgage to pay.

Quite frankly, I am shocked at the number of responses encouraging people to do this. It seems very high-risk, low potential reward. Interview when you can escape for a few hours, and if you happen to find a better job that looks like it will be less stress, take it! THEN and only then should you tell anyone.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's great your trying to improve yourself, but that also adds stress when you can't manage expectations well (which isn't easy anyways for many people).

You can leave and take a break. Or talk to your boss. I don't know what your responsibilities are but it's never worth it to go burnt out for a long time. You risk breaking yourself.

I experienced that and it sucks, big time. I'm becoming stronger because of it. However, I'd rather see people learn without going through that.

I suspect you're worried about the consequences of talking to your boss. If he's an asshole chances are that was already contributing to burnout. You'll win if you get canned. It doesn't reflect on your skills so don't let your ego get bruised because of a trifling matter. If your boss is semi-human, you also win.

What helped me a lot was therapy and yoga/meditation. In yoga, good instructors reinforce forgetting about worries of life for a "mere" hour and focusing on myself. Once I stopped resisting that concept, life started improving rapidly. It's a hard thing to go, dropping "everything". Finding someone to talk or a group of people who understand is really important and there are many people who have gone through these kind of things.

Many don't learn or understand the meaning of priorities until the experience something traumatic.

So talk to your boss and don't quit before finding a new job. Or quit and take a long break.

</comment><comment><USER40> Attempt clear and open communication with your boss.

If they are receptive and want to help awesome stay there/cont. to work hard for them.

If not go find somewhere else to work that respects you and your hard work!

</comment><comment><USER41> I could share my personal experience, such as the time when I told a boss of mine with whom I had a great relationship that I was going to take a day off before I got close to burning out, using the actual words "burning out", but even though all the anecdotal responses are heart warming and all,...

1) this sort of thing is almost completely situational; i.e. depends on your specific context

2) you won't know exactly how it will play out until you've said words that you can't take back

3) at which point, if you miscalculated, you employer now has info that puts you at a disadvantage

4) company-employee relationships _by definition and structure_ give the company asymmetric advantages in issues such as information, financial negotiations, and time-line strategies.

I say all this, not to be a wet-blanket, but rather to offer an alternative. You can accomplish the same thing using different words. If you're burning out, don't ask for understanding from your company, do the right thing for yourself and do what is necessary to put yourself back on a sustainable path. If this includes giving a different reason for how you end up dealing with it, tell them what they need to hear, but, do _not_ add 'worried about your job' to 'burnt out'.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is something I've struggled with and did discuss with my boss after listening to this podcast. [https://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/podcast- two-t...](https://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/podcast-two-traps-to- avoid/)

I shared the podcast with my boss but first with a disclaimer to not panic. I didn't want them to think I was on my way out. I found that the podcast addressed exactly what I was feeling in regards to burnout. I suggested a 1:1 with my boss after to discuss direction and how they can help me make my way out of my slump.

It ended up being a really productive conversation and my boss thanked me for giving them the chance to discuss this with them. Since then my boss has been throwing more challenges and opportunities my way to mix things up and help me avoid burnout but also find new directions in the company that I like.

So my advice is if you like your day job but feel stuck and have a boss you feel you can trust, bring it up. But delivery is key.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why are you burnt out would need to be addressed first? Is it because your company understaffed for the work that needs to be done, too much travel, deadlines to quick, etc. Depending on which one it is, quitting might be the only option if you are not able to have your management address the issue promptly. What I have done is go to their office and say Hi Manager's name do you have a minute? If they say yes go ahead and close the door and let them know you are feeling burnt out due 'REASON HERE' and that you were wondering when you will be getting some extra personnel to assist you with the work.

Your manager should then relay this information into seeing what they can do to lower the burden you having to take on by hiring more people or lightening your work load. If that is not something they are able to do then you will unfortunately have to start looking for a new job that does not weigh you down so much.

</comment><comment><USER44> "getting more sleep" \-- how much are you getting now? For me, this is the #1 thing that affects my mood and productivity.

Also, on average, how many hours per day do you spend working or thinking about work? If it's more than 8-9, stop it. Go be with your family/dog/whatever is important to you and don't think about work at nights or on the weekend at all. If you need to, turn off work emails (or even better, don't have them on your phone to begin with), Slack notifications, or whatever your org's ball and chain of choice is. I've worked at places where it seems impossible to disconnect like that, and that's a pretty solid indicator that you should look for something new (at least in my experience).

</comment><comment><USER45> I am not sure how that conversation would go. In this era companies do not have a lot of loyalty, and it might taint your image.

In your comment, you say that you tried to address your burnout, but is that really true? Maybe think about the causes of burnout, and try to get to the bottom of that. I know that for myself, I get burned out when I feel like I am on a treadmill, where I work but there are no results (in other words, the feedback loop gets broken). If that is the case with you, then maybe you could adjust your role / projects so that there is a better connection between work and reward or progress. For example, reducing page or app size, increasing performance, things where there is a high chance of making some measurable benefit.

</comment><comment><USER46> You have to kinda gauge the culture. When I was getting ready to move on, I let my new boss know, who got me a meeting with the CEO, where we hashed everything out. We promised to keep everyone on the same page, and rash moves were prevented on both sides.

But you do have to be firm. I hope you have some cash saved up that you can live on in case of sudden unemployment. Personally, I'd recommend a three- month trip abroad. I travel every few years and it's great for resetting my burnout clock.

</comment><comment><USER47> It may take a little while, but I'd recommend reading Living Non-Violent communication or watching Marshall Rosenberg's 3 hour video on YouTube.

One important thing to grasp is the true nature of criticism (something that goes both ways). You will find it extremely difficult to get what you want from your boss if he hears a criticism as opposed to an unmet need, while if he hears the later there are much better chances that he will see it as an opportunity that he can opt-in.

</comment><comment><USER48> What are the reasons of your burnout, and is there a plausible way to recover without changing job? How much can your responsibilities, tasks, working environment etc. be altered? Improving your situation might be impossible, even if your boss and your colleagues care for your health.

</comment><comment><USER49> TIL I've never had a good boss.

</comment><comment><USER50> Many years ago I take a week of vacation after almost year of 60+hr weeks. Got fired on return, no official explanations. Unofficial reason- senior manager don't happy about me absent on weekly meeting.

</comment><comment><USER51> Good luck. It all depends on how enabled your manager is to make a difference. I've had good managers who listen, but I've never had a manager who was actually enabled to make a difference.

</comment><comment><USER52> Before you do anything, get your resume updated and start talking to recruiters, etc, and see what your options are. Make sure you have a fall back plan before you open this can of worms.

</comment><comment><USER53> Yes, of course, you should. If your boss takes it properly, you will have a good outcome. If your boss takes it lightly or improperly, you know what you should then do.

</comment><comment><USER54> Talk first with your boss and then make your decision.

</comment><comment><USER55> There is no such thing as burn out. You're either progressing or regressing in your job. Burnout, work-life balance are man made excuses.

<comment><USER56> I mean this sincerely because I truly am curious. This is a person that is obviously going through a tough period in their life. Why did you find it necessary to attempt to make them feel even worse than they already feel? Is this some kind of tough love thing? Do you get satisfaction from kicking others while they are down as some kind of ego boost? Or quite possibly some other reason that I don't understand? Again, I'm not trying to judge you or put you down. I very much am curious about your motivation here.</comment></comment>


Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters - <AUTHOR> http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why-the-apple-ii-didnt-support-lowercase-letters <comment><USER2> Site down at the moment. Mirror : [https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintag...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why- the-apple-ii-didnt-support-lowercase-letters)

<comment><USER3> back then we used to call it slashdotting, what do we call it now?

<comment><USER4> Whatever happened to Slashdot? Did the slowness of new stories appearing + their comments system turn people off eventually, compared to interfaces like here?

I used to read them daily.

<comment><USER5> After several management shakeups, the editors went off onto some weird tangents with video segments, allowing off-topic posts, and paid content masquerading as stories.

That's when I quit. Why did you stop?

<comment><USER6> /. -> Digg -> Reddit -> HN

<comment><USER7> Sometimes I feel bad for HN, full of all us fleeing Reddittors

<comment><USER8> I use both Reddit and HN. HN has much better content (both links and comments), but it has a singular focus on tech/things tech people generally like.

On the other hand, there's a subreddit for practically every hobby. In many cases, Reddit is home to the largest community related to a hobby. Sometimes things related to my interests outside of tech pop up on here, but the discussion is rarely in depth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always wanted to know why Apple II video screen is only 280 pixels wide.

The Apple II video screen is 40 bytes wide, but it only draw 7 pixels per byte, for a total of 280 pixels. The 8th bit was used for selecting the color pallet (eventually; initially the 8th bit was just ignored)

Drawing 7 pixels per byte makes everything a lot more complicated, so it would seem to go against Woz's obsession for simplicity. It's hard to believe that 7 pixels per byte would reduce the chip count, and it certainly makes the software a lot more complicated (lots of divide-by-sevens).

CGA graphics and the Atari 400/800 also provide a composite graphics mode similar to the Apple II, where each pixel lines up with the NTSC color burst frequency, but they draw 8 pixels per byte for a total of 320 pixels, and therefore use a wider portion of the screen.

Perhaps Woz thought (incorrectly) that the NTSC screen wasn't wide enough to accommodate 40x8 (320) pixels so he cut it down to 40x7, or he planned all along to use the 8th bit to provide extra color. It would be interesting to know the actual reason.

<comment><USER10> For text, a 5x7 dot matrix font fits nicely in 7 (wide) x 8 (high). 8-pixel wide characters look funny: characters have to be an odd number of pixels to get symmetrical letters like A, so you either have 1 or 3 pixels spacing between.

While NTSC allows 320 pixels, typical analog TVs overscanned a lot and you'd miss the right and left column or 2 of text.

<comment><USER9> That seems like a big price to pay for slightly better text spacing. Virtually every other home computer used 6 or 8 pixels per char/byte.

I don't think overscan would be an issue. The TMS9918 is also (the equivalent of) 320 pixels wide, and it was used in many different home computers and game consoles intended to connect to the family TV. There's no overscan issue, unless it's connected to an Apple II monitor.

When the TMS9918 is connected to an Apple II monitor there is a huge overscan issue, since the monitor is tuned for the narrower Apple II screen. It looks like this: [https://imgur.com/rGcRpw0](https://imgur.com/rGcRpw0)

That's what got me thinking about this issue is the first place.

<comment><USER10> OK, but the Apple ][ was sold before special computer monitors were common. It was meant to hook up to your existing home TV. So what mattered at the time was the way most people's TVs were calibrated. They usually had a lot of overscan, because (a) 1970s picture tubes weren't square, they had a lot of rounding at the corners (b) the (all-analog) deflection & blanking circuits made fairly ugly artifacts at the edges which TV makers tried to hide.

If they'd shipped with 320-wide video, a lot of people wouldn't have seen the prompt on the left hand side.

<comment><USER9> The Atari 400/800 and the TMS9918 (TI 99/4A, Colecovision, etc.) are 320 pixels wide and were designed to run on those same 1970s home television sets, and they didn't have an overscan problem (maybe some sets did, but most didn't). I don't think the Apple II had to cut the screen width down to 280 pixels.

That's the heart of the question. Did Woz think that 320 pixels would not fit, or did he cut the width down for another reason, like more color.

<comment><USER11> Or, perhaps, he didn't want to pay for a video generator IC like a 9918 or 6845.

If you look at the video generation circuit on an Apple ][ it's all done _in real-time in TTL, alongside the DRAM refresh activity_. And it's all crammed into the normally unused tock of the 6502, making this work with virtually zero overhead on the CPU. That's the reason why the memory mapping of the screen isn't linear to the physical display. The software tradeoff was cheaper than the hardware one.

[http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/archive/Apple-II- Desc...](http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/archive/Apple-II- Description/The-Apple-II-by-Stephen-Wozniak.pdf)

<comment><USER12> And it made add on cards simpler, as well as cycle counting. In addition, the overall throughput of the CPU is better than most other machines, giving the Apple an effectively higher speed at that clock rate.

Overall, given memory expansion, the goofy screen didn't end up being too big of a deal. Most programmers made Y axis lookup tables and called it a day. The fact that the artifact color mapping repeated every word, two bytes, did have an impact in that it was generally faster to maintain two pre-shifted copies of software sprites though.

<comment><USER9> Speaking of add on cards, I own a TMS9918 video card for my Apple II. It's remarkably simple. The 9918 manages its own 16 kB of VRAM and it doesn't place any timing restriction on the host system.

You'd think that the 9918 would be a bottle neck between the CPU and the VRAM, but the Apple II can write to the 9918 VRAM as fast as its own internal RAM. Faster, actually, since the destination address auto-increments. That was a surprise.

<comment><USER12> Interesting!

Hmmm, is the bitmap linear by line, or C64 style?

Auto increment + C64 style would rock pretty hard. It's still good per line.

Both have their merits.

<comment><USER9> Bitmap mode is made up of 8x8 tiles. The screen is 32x24 tiles, or 256x192 pixels. 2 colors per line per tile. So a single tile can contain up to 16 colors.

A single screen is divided into 3 separate tile maps, each 256 bytes long.

It also supports 32 spirtes but only 4 sprites per scanline, which is its biggest limitation.

The Sega Master System used an upgraded version of the 9918, adding 64 colors, smooth scrolling, and 8 sprites per scanline, all within the same 16 kB of VRAM.

<comment><USER12> So if a person maps them up, one gets basically C64 style display.

Yeah, auto-increment can rock! Blasting characters to the memory would be fast, and only require a precise index for the source data. Perfect for the 6502. Other index can be done every so often, depending on what is being drawn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reading Woz's talking about hand-assembling his 6502 code reminded me of my own practice which was the same. I would write out programs on graph paper with columns for the physical address, any labels and space for what the code would assemble to to the left of my actual assembler code. I would drop down to the monitor to hand-enter the hex code I would hand-generate. When you're working under constraints like this, you tend to be _very_ careful in your coding. There's a part of me that still thinks in terms of the Apple ][ architecture when thinking about how a program works.

<comment><USER12> Same here.

Early on, I didn't have a machine of my own and would hand assemble programs to be typed in next time I could get some machine time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Woz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; neither of its major contemporaries, the Commodore PET 2001 nor the TRS-80 Model I, does either, despite being developed by major corporations with substantial resources.

He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)—after the II's market success was proven—doesn't support lowercase letters. Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters, the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of a wire to one of the paddle ports.

The lack of support is because the company was working on the Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels. Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive.

Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support, or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had surpassed the II series.

</comment><comment><USER15> When I was a kid, I used to buy EEPROMs at the local electronics store and burn them with the Apple ][ lower-case characters. I sold them in my dad's computer store, along with a wire that would connect the shift key to the last paddle button on the game port. It was a common hack, and some software would actually recognize it and properly display upper/lower characters.

</comment><comment><USER16> Some of the Apple clones, such as the Franklin ACE models and others, offered lowercase.

Do a quick search for "apple II shift key mod" and you'll find vintage PDF instructions for adding it yourself..

[https://archive.org/stream/II_II-Shift- Key_Modification/II_I...](https://archive.org/stream/II_II-Shift- Key_Modification/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification_djvu.txt)

<comment><USER17> As a math grad student in 1980, I took out a student loan for $3,000 (equal to my annual stipend) to buy an Apple II computer. (Eventually, computation established my career, just not on this machine.)

I recall making a "shift key mod" within days, that no doubt voided my warranty. It wasn't the mod described in this article. I recall some card that gave me 80 columns, Pascal, and increased my memory from 48K to 64K. I believe that my shift key mod involved cutting a single trace? In any case it worked. Various out-of-school friends learned computers on this machine, and changed careers. I learned the low memory locations like the back of my hand, and wrote crude Pascal programs, while my "real" code was in the relatively young C language on a Unix timesharing machine. That all changed when I bought one of the first Mac 128K's. Manx Aztec C!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Videx lower case chip to the rescue:

[http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentat...](http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/hardware/video/videx_lower_case_chip.pd)

Another amazing bit of kit by Videx was a replacement keyboard controller called the Enhancer II:

[https://archive.org/details/Videx_Enhancer_II_Installation_a...](https://archive.org/details/Videx_Enhancer_II_Installation_and_Operation_Manual)

The Enhancer II included the lower case chip.

Videx also made an 80 column peripheral card for the Apple II. The company is still around:

[https://videx.com/](https://videx.com/)

<comment><USER19> Didn't the Apple II feature lowercase by the time of the IIe? My Brazilian clone of the II+ included the lowercase mod stock (even including Brazilian accented characters such as ç and ã).

<comment><USER20> It did, the upgrade for the Apple iie was the 80 column card which also gave 128k memory (from 64k). That was built in to the apple iic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.

<comment><USER22> Lowercase is simply easier to read because of more diverse letter and word shapes.

[https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72622/how-easy-to- rea...](https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72622/how-easy-to-read-are- small-caps-vs-lower-case)

<comment><USER23> This is not correct. The "word shape model" itself is actually probably wrong[0].

> The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read > faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers > spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more > proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of > uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of > lowercase text. Even text oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will > quickly increase in reading speed with practice (Kolers & Perkins, 1975).

[0] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word- rec...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-recognition)

<comment><USER24> Jazz pianist here. I had a weekly gig for a couple of years where the singer would choose songs and put the chord chart – | Eb C-7 | F-7 Bb7 | etc. – on the grand piano so the bass player could read it, and it was upside down for me. After a while, it almost seemed easier for me to read chord charts upside down!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > In the early 1970s, I was very poor, living paycheck to paycheck.

I'm just curious, was an engineering job at HP in the 1970s not well paid?

<comment><USER26> Define "well paid". Entry-level (relative) wealth is a recent thing.

<comment><USER27> Remember, he didn't have a degree until 1987. And credentials mattered more back then.

When I graduated with a B.S. in 1982 I had 4 offers, ranging from $22K to $28K. It was enough for the two of us -- our apt was $275/month. But there wasn't a lot left over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28>
      FD7E: C9 E0     CAPTST   CMP   #$E0
      FD80: 90 02              BCC   ADDINP     ;CONVERT TO CAPS
      FD82: 29 DF              AND   #$DF

</comment><comment><USER29> Did the Woz read the TV Typewriter article?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter)

I bought Don Lancaster's book from Radio Shack long ago...

Also: what new technology are people desperately trying to get access to? I need to start the new Apple..

<comment><USER30> I asked Woz about the TV Typewriter before. In an email to me once, he said he had not heard about it at the time.

[https://twitter.com/benjedwards/status/1303784698662055936?s...](https://twitter.com/benjedwards/status/1303784698662055936?s=20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Written by Woz himself!

</comment><comment><USER32> Later versions of the Apple II line did eventually support uppercase. I forget which had it first, but the IIgs certainly did.

<comment><USER33> The II+ was basically a II with support for lowercase and 80-column lines added by means of an expansion card.

<comment><USER34> Actually, the ][+ was still 40-column, uppercase. I remember wiring a pin off my keyboard controller card to the paddle button input and add a replacement character ROM to get lowercase support.

It was the //e and //c that had built-in lowercase support.

<comment><USER35> We had an Apple II+ with the limitations you describe. However, we purchased and installed the 80-column card that provided both 80-columns and lowercase characters, which is what I think the parent comment is suggesting.

<comment><USER36> I remember adding 16KB or 32KB to get to a total of 48KB of RAM with a card that piggybacked onto the existing chips. Was that the same upgrade that enabled lowercase letters?

I mostly remember that the RAM upgrade changed the gauges in MS Flight Simulator from octagons into rounder circles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I want to know why the Dragon 32 didn't have lower case characters but displayed inverse coloured upper case ones instead. Used to play havoc with Basicode 2 programs.

<comment><USER37> The 6809 and accompanying Motorola 6833 SAM chip in your Dragon that handled the graphics was originally meant to be a video terminal - and uppercase was just fine for that. The later versions of the SAM did have a proper lowercase. Those showed up in later TRS-80 CoCo II but took a bit of prodding to activate.

<comment><USER38> Actually, the 6883 SAM (synchronous address multiplexer) is the DRAM controller and the 6847 VDG (video display generator) is the one that has the various video modes. See the character set implemented by the internal ROM in figure 20 of [https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/ideas/mc...](https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/ideas/mc6847.pdf)

<comment><USER37> Your correct! It was the MC6847T1 update that allowed for lowercase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> BECAUSE STEVE LOVED TO YELL!!!!!

</comment><comment><USER40> Server was hugged by HN it seems.

</comment><comment><USER41> it seems they had an error connecting to the database for lowercase letters

</comment><comment><USER42> because 1 button... like the iphone or imouse? /s

</comment><comment><USER43> why do lower case letters even exist? in 100 years might they be done with?

<comment><USER44> Some argue that mixed case texts are more readable because the ascenders and descenders provide "synchronization points" for our eyes in scanning text. Also (and less controversially) uppercase is larger so it is slower to read it, because there are more pauses to move your eyes to the beginning of the next line.

<comment><USER45> There are plenty of languages without upper and lowercase, I've never heard of them being slower to read.

<comment><USER44> Yes, that's why the first point is more controversial. But the second is interesting: alphabets that lack lowercase, like Korean hangul, have bigger characters but they pack more information into each of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I am sure this could be answered in a one liner but the article is going to be long as hell

<comment><USER47> True of most articles but doesn't automatically mean reading them is wasted time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Imagine if Woz had had access to a UBI and universal healthcare instead of being super broke and living right on the edge. What could he have created with just a few extra resources? How many would-be Wozs are out there now too scared to spend that $300?

<comment><USER49> He had a job at HP so no need for UBI (probably would have paid less than HP). Health care costs certainly were not an issue at his young age.

Better instead if he had had some investor cash earlier. But as a hobbyist, he wasn't playing the "long game" anyway, just trying to make something cool for himself and bragging rights at the 'Brew.

<comment><USER50> Doesn't sound like it would have paid much less and he would have had much more free time, but it seems he was so enamored with working at HP he didn't mind getting subsistence wages as an engineer.

<comment><USER51> Working at HP at that time was a pretty sweet gig. It would have been like getting a job at a FAANG today.

<comment><USER50> It seems more akin to working at a game company where the companies take advantage of the fact that so many people want to work in the game industry they can keep salaries relatively low.

<comment><USER51> true... But also at that time you did not make much as a developer anywhere. When I started this in the 90s if you made 50-60k you were the super elite of programmers and had been doing it for 20+ years. Usually if you stayed at a company they would take care of you. One guy I know went the full route at one of those companies and retired in the 90s his retirement was very nice. The dotcom bubble changed everything with respect to pay and long term comp.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Park.IO adds .me backorders - <AUTHOR> http://me.park.io/ <comment><USER2> This is missing some essential information on their homepage: Are they a registrar themselves or do they rely on a third party service? What happens after one year? Do I have to transfer the domain somewhere else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Tim, you may be able to find some of the answers to your questions in the FAQ: [http://park.io/faq](http://park.io/faq)

If you have any more questions, please email firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment>


SF to prohibit employers from asking for salary history to close gender wage gap - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-prohibit-employers-asking-salary-history-close-gender-wage-gap/ <comment><USER2> I don't have a problem with them asking. I politely decline to tell them and move on. I have yet to have it be a stumbling block. An employer asking is a fairly standard practice, as is a potential employee not providing that information.

<comment><USER3> I've had an employer refuse to proceed with an offer unless I provide salary history.

<comment><USER4> "Thank you for for self-identifying. Good day."

That would have been my response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't you just lie about it? How are they going to check? And if they do ask for evidence can't you simply walk away from the opportunity?

That said, a better way to defuse the question without lying is to say something like "My former employers consider salary data confidential as I'm sure you do too, but my expected salary for this role is [true_target * math.randrange(1.1, 1.4)]."

</comment><comment><USER6> A law prohibiting employers from asking questions is much easier to enforce than anti-discrimination laws. I would still be willing to compromise by limiting anti-discrimination laws to manual labor jobs though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good. It's none of their business.

</comment><comment><USER8> I keep wondering these days who is left to stand up for good old fashion capitalism and liberty

<comment><USER9> What part of a negotiation where one side has all the data and the other side has next to none is considered part of "good old fashion capitalism"?

If a company wants my salary data I'll be happy be to provide it as soon as they provide me their accounting books. I wouldn't want to ask for too low a salary if I knew they could afford more

<comment><USER10> I just refuse to give my data until they tell me what they have budgeted for the position so we are on equal grounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> how does this close the gender wage gap?

<comment><USER12> 1 ) Banning past salary inquiries allows more rapid increases in salary, thus accelerating a trend induced by other factors of a shrinking gender gap. This is also why you should always refuse to reveal your past salary.

2 ) Assertive behavior like refusing to reveal past salary is viewed (consciously or unconsciously) as a positive trait in men and a negative one in women. This puts women at a disadvantage during salary negotiations generally, and specifically when asked to provide information that will prevent them from entering a position with a higher salary.

<comment><USER13> We'll see if that's the actual effect in practice. Young professional women make more money than their male counterparts. If they're not as good at negotiating as their male counterparts, this may negate their only advantage.

<comment><USER9> Out of curiosity do you have statistics for that? The female professionals I know make far less than the males, but as I'm in software I know about 10 men for every woman so it's not really a population size large enough to base conclusions off of</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How will the coronavirus affect the tech industry? - <AUTHOR> How do you think it will affect the tech industry? <comment><USER2> It depends. Most of the tech industry facilitates real world business and real world tangibles.

If Coronavirus is here to stay and as a result World enters a long drawn economic slump, the tech industry is going to be hit hard as well.

Big tech companies will survive, but the disruption at human level may affect smaller companies or upcoming start ups adversely.

Stock markets crash may spook VCs and big investors enough for them to tighten their wallets.

Finding good talent will become harder because engineers with stable jobs will think twice before making a jump in such uncertain times.

<comment><USER3> > Finding good talent will become harder because engineers with stable jobs > will think twice before making a jump in such uncertain times.

I don't think so. If there is a recession, there will be _massive_ layoffs. Though they'll be targeted at the least productive, the most talented will certainly be affected.

Also a weak job market will mean that talented people will accept lower offers.

<comment><USER4> Further, layoffs rarely are selective. Its not so much about the skill of the people being let go; its about keeping a sustainable subset of the business alive. A talented group may all be let go, and a less capable one preserved, because they are still cost effective.

<comment><USER5> Lots of companies didn't care about skills and talent in 2008, they laid off engineers making the highest salaries at my company, pretty much top to bottom in order. Except for one who was good friends with the CEO but even he was let go a few rounds later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I suppose it will popularise remote work in medium and large software companies. I hear that many companies advise their employees to switch to home office, in order to reduce the chance of infection by physical contact. I think we will see more and more employers who will be more accepting of remote work</comment>


Pharo MOOC - <AUTHOR> https://mooc.pharo.org/ <comment><USER2> I've used Pharo, and, way back, programmed professionally in Cincom (then ParkPlace), IBM VisualAge, and whatever the Windows version of Smalltalk was called was called (Visual Smalltalk?). Also tooled-around a bit in Squeak.

All three of the professional environments were very good. When Pharo kicked off, it was supposed to have been people building a free Smalltalk you could use to build real world software, as opposed to the research-oriented Squeak community. They didn't stick to that path, tho.

As another post described, Pharo is a mess, and it doesn't get more reliable from release to release. It's too bad. The idea that any Smalltalk environment today is state-of-the-art is just misguided. I would rather use Intellij IDEA any day.

Smalltalk is still a beautiful thing, tho.

<comment><USER3> It is like fitness. One just hates it when it aches all over the place and then quits. Or keeps on moving through the pain/grind and grow a lot in all kinds of ways.

And saying that VA or VW give a better user experience when coding vs Pharo, I beg to differ.

<comment> martin-t Except the pain in pharo doesn't come from the difficulty of learning new things or self-improvement but from the buggy environment itself. Learning to save your work every 5 minutes because it might crash any time doesn't make you a better dev, it just lowers your standards.

<comment><USER3> Come on, you are just throwing mud around for some reason I do not even want to know about.

It is hard to lose code with Pharo. I have always recovered everything 99.999% of the time.

You are happy with VW, fine with me. I cannot stand it.

<comment> martin-t The reason is Stéphane Ducasse is using his students as unpaid testers[0]. I can't see any other reason he'd make us use the latest technologies as you mentioned.

I also don't like the approach "let's write some code that passes tests and maybe works 80% of the time, and then release a few fixes every week for the next few months". Some of my classmates had to wait for 2 weeks just to get a working version of iceberg for the team project. And by working i mean it managed to clone the project, we kept getting "message sent to nil" and "object X does not understand message Y" errors for the rest of the semester and not just from iceberg. Any of those would be trivially caught in a static language.

Yes, there's a recovery feature. I found it slightly buggy too but it worked most of the time (and yes, i used it a few times). Still doesn't help when the whole image gets corrupted and pharo segfaults on startup.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16757107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16757107)

<comment> ben-coman Martin, IIUC you are a student that suffered a class using bleeding edge features. I can understand why you are bitter, but you should not be so quick to disparage Mr Ducasse. Your faculty was his client, and it seems that circumstance was outside his control. From our mail list...

Stephane Ducasse wrote:

> I told them NOT to use github.

> I told them that Bloc was alpha. They got a large list of topics and could > have picked another one.

> Now of course we should improve and they too.

<comment> martin-t Fair point, i assumed using iceberg was his idea, my apologies if it wasn't. Can't comment on the stability of bloc, other team-members did that part of the project.

OTOH, please note that iceberg was only the tip of the iceberg (i am a huge fan of the name), the IDE itself did crash many times and corrupted my image once. The formatter moved comments into other blocks which changed their meaning and combined with CTRL+Z it deleted code after cursor in some cases reproducibly.

One extra funny though harmless bug was that shift+click didn't select a range of items items in some listboxes. It selected just the new one but left the old one highlighted. I clicked a few items and sometimes it selected the whole range. When I released shift and clicked more items, it played back the clicks i made earlier and selected those items instead. We joked that smalltalk did not only invent OOP but also command queuing in strategy games. Yeah, it was mean but we couldn't imagine what code had to be behind the listboxes to cause this behavior.

So yeah, maybe someone else thought OOP students would make a good typechecker for iceberg and designed the class accordingly but what i think and say about pharo still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I chose Pharo for a project recently ([http://github.com/studio/studio/](http://github.com/studio/studio/)). I am enjoying using it in production. The Glamorous Toolkit framework (Inspector and Spotter) is saving me a huge amount of work.

I see Pharo as two universes: the stable (now Pharo 6) and the development (now Pharo 7.) I work on the stable one and I don't concern myself at all with what is happening on the development one. The yearly release cycle of development-to-stable feels about right to me.

I have had to spend some time working out how to fit Pharo into my wider project build system, and how to store Smalltalk source code on Github as part of a larger repository such that you can handle merges etc. This made me curse a lot. It worked out fine in the end though.

I have been working on this for one year now and I haven't had problems with Pharo bugs or instability.

<comment><USER5> I couldn't even tell what the Glamorous Toolkit was or how to use it; what's the best resource for it? I remember checking out the website when it was released but couldn't make heads or tails of it.

<comment><USER3> You haven't been looking much then. [http://gtoolkit.org](http://gtoolkit.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see many comments talking about teaching objects with Pharo, we used to use it in the UNQ (a university in Argentina), now we use another Smalltalk flavour, because of the complexity of it. It's called CUIS, developed in Argentina too, the first days we use a framework that uses some similar to prototypes, so the students can start learning objects without the overhead of classes and inheritance. And then we switch to the classical class hierarchy way.

It's a nice tool! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_e3_3MyTBY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_e3_3MyTBY)

<comment> ben-coman Yes, Juan and community have done a good job with Cuis. Cuis is a fork of Squeak same as Pharo, and all three use the same OpenSmalltalk-VM. Both forks arose to deal with a large technical debt in different ways. Cuis has been paring back class sizes while Pharo has been focused on a full source-code only bootstrap from a null-Image (i.e. no carried over state in an Image, that is one of Smalltalk's typical criticisms), replacing old subsystems, as well as adding new features. I'd say Pharo is more ambitious and we are starting to see the payoffs for this.

btw, which was the CUIS prototype framework you used? There should be little reason it couldn't be made to run on Pharo.

<comment><USER6> The framework is called Denotative Objects.

[https://github.com/hernanwilkinson/Cuis-Smalltalk- Denotative...](https://github.com/hernanwilkinson/Cuis-Smalltalk- DenotativeObject)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even if you are not going to develop any major apps in Smalltalk, its a language worth learning. Teaches you a lot about OO programming

<comment><USER8> Isn't Pharo a different language from Smalltalk?

<comment><USER9> That's sort of like asking if Scheme is a different language than Lisp.

<comment><USER10> Or maybe like asking if Racket is a different language than Scheme.

<comment><USER11> So the answer is "yes".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pharo is great for doing Test driven development:

1\. write a test

2\. run the test

3\. test fails; debugger pop up

4\. implement/fix the method inside the debugger

5\. repeat at 2 until the test succeed.

it's usual that a coding session is entirely done in the debugger which is like an interactive coding environment where absolutely everything is inspectable.

demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymITEeAOtEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymITEeAOtEA)

</comment><comment><USER13> Random off-topic feedback: the video is not correctly configured in Firefox (on MacOS). The pervasiveness of Chrome scares me sometimes.

<comment><USER14> It works here on firefox (linux).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have been using Pharo since its 1.x releases and deployed commercial solutions using it.

Very stable. Quite powerful.

And it was/is a pleasure to work work with it.

One has to invest time and effort to master it. I would say that this is best suited to people who actually know what they are doing. Syntax is easy but frameworks are very advanced. So, do not go there without support.

I see comments that are not that kind to Pharo. I do to care to be honest. I do not think that Pharo is for the masses.

It has imperfections but nothing is at the core. And things are moving forward very well.

As a Pharo consortium member I vote with cash and usage.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language in the tradition of Smalltalk. It offers a unique developing experience in constant interaction with live objects. ... When programming in Pharo, you are immersed in a world of live objects. You have immediate feedback at any moment of your development on objects representing web applications, code itself, graphics, network."

</comment><comment><USER16> Video lectures are in French.

<comment><USER17> They are dubbed in English as well.

<comment><USER16> Looking at slides while reading subtitles is really hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Smalltalk was the first language I loved. It was great to write, but I had difficulty understanding the structure of other's code. Even with that great integrated debugger, I couldn't figure out how Morphic actually worked.

These days for graphical programming, I prefer C with nuklear ([https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear](https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear)) over smalltalk.

<comment> ben-coman Many people find that about the depths of Morphic. It has high technical which Pharo is addressing by creating a new system Bloc (its getting close, but not there yet). Then Morphic will be deprecated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is anyone else having trouble viewing this on their phone?

<comment><USER20> Oh yeah, it goes really slow and scrolling is broken and really off center. I gave up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is kind of an offtopic question, but regardless: Is there any application written in smalltalk in the debian repository? (or any other linux distro)

<comment><USER9> The only people I've heard of using Smalltalk at all other than in dogfood situations are people using Gemstone.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemstone_(database)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemstone_\(database\))

<comment><USER22> JPMorgan have a fairly serious Smalltalk app [http://www.cincom.com/pdf/CS040819-1.pdf](http://www.cincom.com/pdf/CS040819-1.pdf)

However, only one. Make of that what you will.

<comment> ben-coman They only have on app because Smalltalk if agile enough they build everything they need into it as the need arises - and this has been maintained over many years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > It is very easy to learn...

> This Mooc is demanding but rewarding...

So the language is easy to learn and yet the course to learn it is demanding? Interesting logic...

Nevertheless, probably a good exercise for anybody who wants to learn what real Object Orientation is about and who didn't learn Smalltalk yet.

<comment><USER12> The language itself is simple[1] but the environment and tools aren't. Smalltalk is a world in itself which is both its strength and weakness.

[https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/smalltalk/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/smalltalk/)

<comment><USER23> I am well aware of that as I had my own trouble learning Smalltalk. Yet in hindsight I like the clean design of the language.

Nevertheless, I find the argument on their website kinda odd and a bit confusing. I mean, I see a lot of Smalltalk advocates claiming the language is so simple to learn and at the same time I see a lot of programmers having trouble learning it.

Maybe it is just wrong to call it 'very easy to learn' just because the syntax is simple.

<comment><USER24> The difficulty for me isn't the syntax, so much as not knowing how to use the tools. Examples are extreme like other niche languages. You get either hello world or writing a web server. I'd like to see someone build a YouTube channel with a lot of very small applications that show adding methods, classes,debugging, and deployment.

<comment><USER23> I don't know about Pharo, but I have seen very few IDEs which make it as easy as Smalltalk environments (e.g. VisualWorks) to do what you asked for as they provide you with GUI a for all that stuff. Pharo is probably no different.

I think the first important step, is to understand the different columns of the 'System Browser'. From a quick search that video playlist might help you:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xF4fnGaE2w&list=PLqbtQ7OkSt...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xF4fnGaE2w&list=PLqbtQ7OkSta0ULYAd7Qdxof851ybh- _m_)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some videos don't even have english subtitles, eg 2.1 Understanding Messages :(

</comment><comment> martin-t I had the "pleasure" of attending an OOP course at uni taught by Stéphane Ducasse. I didn't learn much OOP but i learned that pharo is an utter piece of garbage.

The IDE randomly crashes, corrupts images (all your work is in the persistent image) and randomly ignores clicks making it insanely frustrating to use. Git integration is "WIP" which means it sometimes silently deletes files or you just don't get it to work at all. Branches are not implemented, glhf resolving conflicts on a team project. Oh, and it saves your passwords in plain text.

Error messages will keep opening until you kill the "IDE" and undo will sometimes delete half your code with no way back (maybe that's why you're supposed to keep methods small?). It's a bit ironic that Mr. Ducasse calls himself an "expert on software quality".

Here's our final project, the weekly reports document our "learning" experience: [https://gitlab.fit.cvut.cz/taibrmar/sokoban-using- bloc](https://gitlab.fit.cvut.cz/taibrmar/sokoban-using-bloc)

Most students had similar feelings and the response to the course was overwhelmingly negative.

<comment><USER26> On your log you wrote, about the bugs you found, "no, i am not gonna bother reporting it, i am a user, not a TestCase" \- Maybe that's why Pharo is so buggy?

<comment> martin-t If he wants to use our class as a typechecker, so be it, i am not gonna be part of it. (I briefly considered reporting them, but the HTTP-only login on their bug tracker turned me off)</comment></comment></comment>


The Jonathan Computer (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.storiesofapple.net/the-jonathan-computer.html <comment><USER2> The Jonathan concept of modular slices was a copy of the Convergent Technologies NGEN family of computers. frogdesign sold Apple the same packaging they had done two years earlier for Convergent. See the product family here: [http://bitsavers.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/pdf/convergent/...](http://bitsavers.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/pdf/convergent/ngen/brochures/)

<comment><USER3> The concept isn't far removed from the S-100 [1]bus as seen in the Altair 8800, and you could probably find numerous other examples, weren't early IBM mainframes made up of standardised cards with a few nand gates on each?

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus)

<comment><USER4> Yes, early IBM _CPUs_ were made of standardized cards ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Solid_Logic_Technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Solid_Logic_Technology). It references [http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/logic/SY22-2798-2_LogicBloc...](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/logic/SY22-2798-2_LogicBlocks_AutomatedLogicDiagrams_SLT,SLD,ASLT,MST_TO_Oct71.pdf) which has lots of detail)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Jonathan could look not only strikingly different but also more impressive > as its performance increased.

I remember myself in the mid 90's joking about the internal expansion of PCs versus the multiple boxes around our Sun pizza-box workstations: the emotional return on investing on Sun hardware was greater because you could actually see the more disk space you had. Or, when we got to the Enterprise 4500's, you could even see the extra CPU and memory boards.

</comment><comment><USER6> Huh. Design-wise that thing looks a lot like a NeXT machine.

<comment><USER7> Well, it was designed by Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design, who would design the NeXT cube a few years later.

<comment><USER8> Looks really nice. It would be interesting to see the alternate timeline where Apple became an icon of the more boxy, greyscale, functional design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the reverse-stealing trojan horse fear was real: I think the amount of "yea lets be more mac-like" would have drowned under the "but I can play more games" emerging force of DOS. DOS gave birth to something compelling for home use, mac was better, but not enough to attract the moment of change in young minds. I wanted neither of them but the CP/M upshift to a UNIX world was not going to happen (for a long, long time)

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems a winning design. You can do both. And wining or not depends upon application and I do not think desktop publishing would use DOS.

<comment><USER11> The comment by the Product Development guy that they would have to "sell two or three Jonathans to equal the profit of a single Mac" came across as super myopic to me. This is one of those situations where you _can_ make it up on volume, and accomplish a whole lot of greater goals along the way.

Amazon's explosive growth in cloud services, Linus' recent comments about how x86 has an advantage over ARM because developers want the server to optimally mirror the desktop environment, and the increasing need for datacenter-like hub functionality at the edge all suggest to me that this was possibly Apple's biggest missed chance to get a foothold on the server side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Similar idea to VMEbus, perhaps VME was influenced by the Jonathan computer. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus)

<comment><USER13> You have the dates backwards; VME was 4-5 years earlier and AFAIK there were various backplane systems for years before VME.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not convinced they could have made it cheap enough for the average home user in the 80s. Apple at the time was not gaining home market share because their computers were very expensive

</comment><comment><USER15> One system to do it all usually ends up with a bunch of sub-optimal solutions combined into one.</comment>


I love Gears, but hope that Chrome OS isn't dependent on it. - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2009/07/17/the-ongoing-unfulfilled-promise-of-gears/

<comment><USER2> I suspect they'll have offline functioning that's cached locally and sinks up once a connection is restored.</comment>


Ask HN: Never worked with a boss or a team, how to get the experience? - <AUTHOR>

Straight out of university I started freelance developing. Over the years, I've always done solo projects, or with one other person. There was never a leader or boss-type.
I'm worried this has left me inexperienced in several fronts: - how to work on software in a team (not technically, but all the meta stuff around developing) - how the boss delegates and interacts with his developers - what is acceptable and not acceptable in a team setting - what is expected of you (at what point do you ask someone for help) - how to lead - etc...
These are all fuzzy points for the exact reason I'm not sure about examples of what I'm talking about. I'm afraid this lack of experience will hurt me in the future if I ever end up working as the senior developer in a team, or start a company and have developers to manage.
Is this a legitimate concern, and how can I best solve this. Should I take a pay-cut and go work for a normal company for a year, just to see how it works? Are there books that cover this? <comment><USER2> "Straight out of university I started freelance developing."

You have done freelance development. You have seen the worst. You probably have more experience working with other people than people who only worked in a single (large) team.

Chill out. They have much to learn from you.</comment>


New pi-top Laptop Launched: Hands on with the new pi-top computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/new-pi-top-laptop/ <comment><USER2> That's expensive... Why is that?

You would think they would try to compete with similar laptops...</comment>