I think this is misguided reasoning. Everyone starts somewhere, and the hallmark of reasonably competent writing is a ramp-up. Whether it’s one sentence or one chapter.
I think failing to define acronyms is a violation of just about any style guide out there.
Communication is a majority of engineering so I think these things are very important.
> If you don't already know what CORS is, you're probably not a Web developer and don't need to know.
This is an appallingly poor and misguided take, and goes against the most basic rules of writing technical documents. Docs need to be clear, unambiguous, and self-contained. The very first time a acronym is presented, it must be after the full name is presented.
It takes less than a sentence to do the right thing. There is no excuse.
Sometimes OPS people get the job of fixing CORS for developers who don't understand how it works exactly.
I work with a client who built a web app in... Vue, I think. For unknown reasons they decided that it would be better that the APIs they need to call to live on the same domain. At the same time, the developers decided that the API microservices should not return CORS headers. Instead it was left to operations to hack in CORS headers in the webserver/loadbalancer.
Oh the MSX had it too for sure.. The TRS-80 was almost not sold here in Europe. We had some Radio Shack shops (called Tandy) here but the TRS-80 wasn't a big thing. We only got the LCD model.
But it was exactly the same thing yeah.. Jiggling the relay super fast would fuse it. One of my friends had this happen to his MSX 1, I think there was some early 'malware' in a copied game or something. But at least a relay replacement is not difficult or expensive.
I started writing my own WinCompose-like utility in AutoHotkey, before I learned about WinCompose. Gave up on that immediately, obviously.
AutoHotkey is really an amazing tool. The actual programming language is awkward, but it has capabilities no other tool offers without writing a bunch of tricky low-level C code yourself.
Proprietary, not PCI, but expansion slots, yes. On HPs it was called the MIO slot and later the EIO slot. If your printer came with a MIO card that only did serial and parallel, you could swap it for one that added networking.
And if it stops working, try re-soldering it in an oven before throwing away. Some infamous batches had bad soldering problems that can be fixed. See i.e. [0]
Gil was brought in to swing the axe, and he did exactly what he was brought in to do. He cancelled a bunch of stuff that was draining Apple's resources. He was never going to be popular but the point was that the next guy could come in with clean hands.
If your manager is telling you that your performance is lacking and that you need to improve in specific areas, how is that really any different from being told you are on a PIP, and the rest of that? That is, what would you, as an employee, do differently if you were told specifically that you had been placed on a formal PIP, rather than just being told how you needed to improve?
The leadership principles are an important part of Amazon's solution to the problem of getting hundreds of thousands of employees pulling in the same general direction. They are easy to get people to sign on to because they are, for the most part, obviously good ideas succinctly stated. People at Amazon actually use them to make decisions daily.
Other companies don't propagate their corporate culture so explicitly, so it seems a little weird and cultish. But if you're a big company doing things the same way other big companies do them, you're going to get the same results that other big companies get. Amazon wants to get better results than other big companies.
When I started at Amazon, I felt like 14 was simply too many. I tried to do a Carlin-style winnowing, but darned if I could get the number below twelve without starting to lose things that the company obviously thinks are important. (They recently added two more, by the way.)
As a bonus, after a stint at Amazon, your familiarity with their leadership principles can make you very desirable to other companies. I know a number of people who were individual contributors at Amazon and were snagged by Microsoft for leadership positions, either team leads or product managers.
