• 5 Posts
  • 159 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2023

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  • Ah, maybe one of my experiences isn’t common. Mine started after a benefit was added and somehow not reported, which probably was my employer’s fault but I didn’t get anywhere with them. Reporting it seemed to clear it up.

    I have had it where a second employer totally messed up which just involved waiting until April. Then another where a previous employer failed to produce a P45 and I just had to push them for it. Those are probably more common and, you’re right, the hotline didn’t help.

    I’ve been at a small company where I’ve overheard directors talk about how they purposely didn’t produce a P45 out of spite of someone leaving. It relies on good faith far too much and is confusing to navigate.






  • If you don’t already, use version control (git or otherwise) and try to write useful messages for yourself. 99% of the time, you won’t need them, but you’ll be thankful that 1% of the time. I’ve seen database engineers hack something together without version control and, honestly, they’d have looked far more professional if we could see recent changes when something goes wrong. It’s also great to be able to revert back to a known good state.

    Also, consider writing unit tests to prove your code does what you think it does. This is sometimes more useful for code you’ll use over and over, but you might find it helpful in complicated sections where your understanding isn’t great. Does the function output what it should or not? Start from some trivial cases and go from there.

    Lastly, what’s the nature of the code? As a developer, I have to live with my decisions for years (unless I switch jobs.) I need it to be maintainable and reusable. I also need to demonstrate this consideration to colleagues. That makes classes and modules extremely useful. If you’re frequently writing throwaway code for one-off analyses, those concepts might not be useful for you at all. I’d then focus more on correctness (tests) and efficiency. You might find your analyses can be performed far quicker if you have good knowledge about data structures and algorithms and apply them well. I’ve personally reworked code written by coworkers to be 10x more efficient with clever usage of data structures. It might be a better use of your time than learning abstractions we use for large, long-term applications.


  • Good to know the name, I’ve seen it invoked a few times.

    In fact, I had this recently at work where I questioned a decision only for them to retort with one similar characteristic which a prior suggestion of mine shared. This was also a modal fallacy as they only used that one characteristic to come to a conclusion about both.

    You also see it all of the time in politics unfortunately, a lot of “yeah but you also…” where we should be hearing good justifications.


  • I’ve used it for the exact same purpose, great minds think alike. It’s perfect for that scenario given there’s no internet.

    I just don’t use it much otherwise because apps like Signal are far easier to move my friends and family on to and they’re more than good enough. The metadata privacy Tor would provide would give me a lot of peace of mind but I know it’ll never happen.