I call this (well, in my head) the Sam Altman Fellow Kids style.
It's clearly a deliberate affectation that they're putting on because other words are properly capitalise (COVID, PIP, I, his own name, etc.). The author's other posts are properly formatted so I assume this was a a stylistic choice they made to illustrate their point on it being stream-of-consciousness.
I just find it more annoying on tweets because they've clearly fought the phone keyboard to override autocaps just to sound down with their fellow kids.
TL;DR: You got promoted or you wanted to get promoted. You decide you want to make a bigger project to show ambition, advance your career and whatnot. You embark on making some grand project, disappearing from view. This often leads to you getting stuck with something, falling behind and various negative effects like getting a PIP or becoming depressed.
His prescription to avoid this is to keep checking in and show some progress on something every day so you don't lose touch.
(My analysis: I don't think this is particularly a senior engineer problem, to me it just reads like ADHD-coded problems with time and interests)
The real prescription to stopping this is to only commit to looking at the problem for a few days regardless of how much progress you’re making. And never take on open-ended tasks with no sunset date. A CTO had me take an open-ended dev project once and I learned that the lack of a time box made it really miserable.
I concluded long ago that anyone who writes without capitalizing the first letter of their sentences is not worth paying attention to, due to some combination of hubris, delusion, etc...
Combined with the inner monologue stream of consciousness style, and it is certain that this article is devoid of insight
I kind of feel this way except I have a guy on my team that I actually really respect, that for some reason can't capitalize things. It's just one of those quirks I'm willing to work around because he's otherwise awesome.
What is he writing that doesn't get capitalized? Code comments or entire multi-hundred or thousand line issues, specs, etc? The context matters.
Moreover, the lack of capitals in this article is accentuated by the stream of consciousness writing style. It requires a very significant amount of effort to parse, so simply isn't worth it.
i voice to text. in hopes of getting the thing to stop capitalizing every third word because it's somebody's trademark, i told it to stop autocapitalizing. So here i am. blame Google
You probably need a better speech-to-text system then. I type 90% of my comments on HN with FUTO keyboard, which is a local speech to text engine, and it handles capitalization properly most of the time.
No, they also capitalize abbreviations like COVID and PIP.
I remember having a phase as a teen where I didn't capitalize the first letter of sentences because it just seemed redundant. Periods are there; why need another signal that another sentence has started? It was like a redundancy = bad phase.
Somehow, that reminds me: when I was younger and started learning programming, I had a phase where I seemed to hate most optional whitespace that wasn’t indentation. So each line would be indented to the proper level, but the rest of the line would look like this:
This is a perfect analogy. Just as we have coding standards, we have grammar and punctuation rules so that people can effectively communicate with each other.
Anyone who refuses to follow coding standards or punctuation rules is just an asshole. Obviously we relax them based on context - a comment here or text message are different from a blog post which is different from an academic paper. But surely publishing articles/essays on your blog, which you preusmably hope people will read, requires at least some minimal respect for language rules.
Evidently this person doesn't feel that way, so they have to accept (whether they do it consciously or not) that some people are just going to lint themselves away from reading it. Not worth the hassle.
