Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

This story makes me smile.

Back in the late-2000's, I worked at CNN on a 12-month contract. While there, I built a predecessor to the current "Breaking News" website banner.

At least at the time, Turner did not allow contractors to extend beyond the 12-month mark. So when my contract came up, they offered to convert me over to perm. I declined, because my interests lay more on the backend side of the tech stack, and my role there had been far more frontend-focused than I wanted for the long term.

Fast-forward 10 to 15 years, and I've had a lot of experiences that I'm very proud of. I've built concurrent systems that scaled to impressive levels of data. I've built event busses that moved hundreds of millions of dollars worth of financial transactions per year. Etc.

STILL, "my son built the Breaking News banner on cnn.com!" is the thing that my mom tells her friends. It's the only thing that my wife ever understood about what I do for a living.

There is such power in the visual, and in the consumer-side. In a very real sense, this silly thing was the crowning achievement of my career... and it was about two days of work and a few hundred lines of HTML and jQuery.

Related, I've often thought a resume site like LinkedIn should include a "What does your mom tell her friends that you do?" section. :-)

It would probably be pretty entertaining.

this is an awesome idea. a newer title for an executive summary for less traditional companies.

Ask HN: "What does your parent(s) tell their friends that you do?"

"He spends all day on his computer"

My daughter used to think—and tell people—that her father "makes money."

Then one day I figured out that she thought I literally created paper currency at my day job.

With the exception of my father I make more money than my entire extended family and partner's family. Doesn't stop them from striking a dismissive and disdainful tone when talking about my work.

Oh well. Whaddya gonna do.

Exactly what my mom (and sister) says.

https://xkcd.com/722/

"I spend all day getting pissed at my machine for doing exactly what I told it to do."

Thread created! I wonder what replies we will get?

Ask HN: What does your Mom tell people about your work or employment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31601004

My mother, in her 80s, still complains that she can’t tell her friends what I do for a living. This is despite any number of press articles, selling companies and the like. She wants the classic Indian mother straightforward explanation (doctor, engineer, lawyer etc).

Your profile says you are an engineer.

I feel ya man. When I worked at reddit I did mostly backend, set up the entire AWS cloud deployment and the datacenter before that, ran the databases, etc.

But when someone asks what I did at reddit, the thing that gets the most interest is, "I made the thing that puts the link title in the URL".

I always wondered why reddit decided to make that inextricable link. Any insight on why post titles aren't editable?

I thought maybe it's a database optimization, but it could also just be an unfortunate design decision.

Besides technical reaosns, it could be to avoid bait-and-switch schemes, where a lot of engagement is built around one headline, and then it's changed to something with a completely different meaning.

I've always thought that Twitter adopted the same line of thinking, preventing tweets from being editable.

I think it twitter's case it was architectural. By treating tweets as immutable the could publish them on a pipeline and not worry about duplicate copies around the system being out of sync.

That and early on it used sms as one of the interfaces, which is not editable.

They could always send another SMS with the edit. :)

But yes, that too. The whole system was designed around SMS which couldn't be "unsent".

It's to prevent tweeting "LIKE this if you like Ice Cream" and then editing it to say "LIKE this if you like pedophilia"

Nobody would ever Like/Retweet anything if it could be changed later.

We added titles to the URL for SEO purposes -- Google told us that search terms in URLs rank higher. That's why all the blogging software puts the post title in the URL.

Fun fact that, it's actually optional on reddit. You can put anything you want there and it will still work. These two are the same:

https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/v3ae16/rantiwork_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/v3ae16/grayskull_...

The reason we made you unable to edit titles is to avoid the bait and switch. Getting a bunch of upvotes and then changing it. If you want to say, "well how about in the first five minutes" our counterargument was, "just delete the post and make a new one". It kept the software simpler.

A lot of MVC sites do this - it's descriptive to both humans and robots.

If a URL ends with something like "/1234-content-goes-here", you can often shorten it to "/1234" and get a successful redirect.

oh so you made the "reddit is down" page. :)

(Just kidding.. I appreciate your work and I've been using reddit for a long time)

I did actually make one of them. :)

My favorite one was when we knew we had to take the site down for a few hours, so we made a page with curated content a-la-Slashdot where you couldn't vote or comment and it just stayed that way for a few hours. We just picked some of our favorite sites.

But we didn't warn the sites we were linking to and some of them got quite a shock with the sudden influx of traffic!

"You broke reddit :("

i remember those days, reddit was a lot down, and you did a lot of maintenance in europe time, so i would be productive at work.

Ha! Sorry bout that. We just did it at the lowest traffic times, and I'm a night owl.

> There is such power in the visual, and in the consumer-side.

This is, unfortunately, true with managers and execs. Do some backend thing, no one notices as long as the site doesn't go down. But do some flashy thing on the front-end, let's give so-and-so a promotion and a big bag of money. This is even true of tech companies where you would assume more tech-oriented managers exist. But sadly, no. They have to pitch your work to higher ups and the higher ups just have their eyes glazed over when they hear about databases and caching and transactions per second.

Related. I also have a similar experience when I worked as a contractor for [big ecommerce] for simply building a JavaScript loader that loaded ads on their ecommerce platform using JSONP. That ad loader got millions of views and pretty much seen everytime you shopped online at the site and surprisingly that's what gets most people excited when I tell them about my experience thinking it's such a crowning achievement as well.

I've got a similar proud moment. Back in the Flash days, I built the flash player skin for a starwars.com player that sat in their homepage for a while.

Since then, I've built way more complicated things I'm proud of. But nothing beats that during beer time with friends .

Great example of how the market doesn’t really care about the how, just the what.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com