SkipperCat

If someone told me "I don't know. I went to business school", I'd then ask "So why are you managing programmers, shouldn't you be managing business people?"

But all joking aside, I think there are few MBAs so dense as the one portrayed in this article. Sadly, I'll probably be proven wrong...

This stuff may happen, I can't say it is untrue, but I've never seen a manager terminate a decent to good programmer because they didn't understand their workload.

The companies I've worked for spend a lot of time recruiting talent. If a manager wanted to can someone because they didn't know that fixing bugs takes time, it would be the manager in front of a more senior manager demanding they explain their logic. Also, if you've managed programmers or SW projects for any amount of time, you'd understand why things take time.

Most folks I've seen get terminated is because the company is shrinking, or they are not performing or they are a jerk and/or violating company policies.

My thoughts are do the best work you can, be nice to others and you'll be fine as long as the company is making money. Don't worry about 'metrics', people generally know who's worth keeping based on more than that alone.

As someone who uses Mac products (macpro, ipad, iphone), I can say I've never had hardware from any other vendor which has lasted so long. Their gear stays functional for several years (especially the macbook pro) and the only reason I upgrade my iphone was because I get tired of replacing the battery.

My old Macbook from 2016 is still being used by my wife and the only issue she has is hard drive space. The compute power is still spot on. My reason for upgrading to a M1 was just because I wanted to play with the ARM chipset.

I've never had any other brand of laptop or phone age so well (maybe because my last Android was from 2014). There's a cost premium for Apple but I think over time, their gear is more cost effective.

Agreed about where the funds should go, and I'd also add that all intersections with cameras should have signs telling people of those cameras to get them to slow down and stop running red lights. The goal of these cameras should be to reduce traffic infractions, not to profit from their proliferation.

One of workplace tragedy in America is how we moved from professionally managed pensions to individual 401k retirement plans. Most folks have no business deciding asset allocation, managing risk, etc.

I don't buy that argument. If the plumber/electrician is working for a company and driving a company car, then the company will pay the extra $15 for that corporate vehicle to be in Manhattan.

If the person has their own business then they can easily afford the daily $15. Skilled trades and the owners of those companies make very good wages in NYC.

I see plenty of blue collar workers on the MTA. Its one of the fastest ways to get around Manhattan and much cheaper than paying for parking.

It has been said if the US and its allies lost WWII, the victorious Axis would have tried and executed the US military leaders for war crimes for the bombing campaigns. A prime example of history is written by the victors.

PBS did a great documentary of Nazis in the US pre-WWII

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nazi-town-...

It elaborates on your point about the large US Nazi presence.

We did not send troops until '42, but from about 1941 FDR was sending massive amounts of aid to the UK and USSR thru the lend lease and other programs.

I mention that in my 3rd sentence, but as an American of Jewish decent, the sides of WWII could not have been any clearer. My family did not have the option to weigh the facts and choose a side, it was chosen for us. I am just thankful that we happened to leave Europe before it all fell apart.

With good reason. It burns super hot and cant be put out with water.

A lot of people, including myself, feel similar when looking back at WWII. The roles of good and evil were very clearly defined and that has forged the US foreign policy up to today.

Of course, there's a lot of things we know now which show the conflict was a lot more complex, but at its core, the Axis needed to be defeated for our western style of freedom to exist.

I don't think we'll ever have something as clear cut as WWII again. News was highly controlled by a few media institutions and our country (US) was much less fractured than it is today.

Not a comment about who's right or wrong in this war, but it is fascinating that we have entered the age of the Internet being a place where warfare is fought. There have always been people posting web content about conflicts but now with Gaza and Ukraine, it seems that the nations fighting are actively looking at the internet as the fourth field of battle.

Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.

Thanks for the follow up. I've always felt any questions is good for an interview if it starts a conversation. Your thread did just that so I'd consider it a success!

When I upgraded my Windows laptop (running Windows NT) from something like 64 MB to 128 MB, it made a huge difference. Most of the benefit was that it stopped using swap. Sadly, I was borrowing the the DIMM from my boss and I had to give it back. It was like flying back on coach after getting there in first class.

I had a friend who supported a Windows desktop environment in the 90's. He would constantly complain about how rebooting a workstation would take over 20 minutes. The amount of scripts and other tooling was nutz.

My Macbook goes off when I shut the lid and right back on when I open it up. Try doing that on my early 90's Toshiba Satellite.

We live in a magical world now of high speed, multi-core and NVMe hardware. I have no desire to ever go back.

That makes total sense if you're archiving the data, but what happens when you want to have 10,000 people have access to read/update the data concurrently. Then you start to need some fairly complex solutions.

Why would your employer care what you invested in? How would they be impacted if you bought or sold public stock of someone they interact with? Would they care if you traded Google, Apple, Microsoft or Oracle?

I think most employers wouldn't care at all.

A new spin on Enshitification...

KEXP (kexp.org) radio is playing a lot of his catalog right now. Listen in if you want to hear the impact of his work.

Here's my favorite zinger of the article:

"When she became concerned, I used Monopoly as a comparison, so, for her, Mommy is playing real-life Monopoly now."

I wonder if she remembers that only one person wins in Monoploy and that happens when everyone else is bankrupt.

I think she could have focuses this article on how she was going to use the fruits of her hard work (and good luck) to improve her community and/or the world.

From my experience, the best way to get a pay increase is to code software for things closer to the trading system. Write code that makes a trading app faster and increases PnL, you'll make more money via bonuses. If you're writing back office code doing data loading, trade reconciliation or other "housekeeping" stuff, you'll not see the same comp.

Because of this, getting a SWE role that is assigned to a trading team is highly desired.

SWE will probably make between 250-500k. Quants who can come up with profitable trading strategies can make a lot more. Managers of trading teams can make over 1MM and sometime a lot over 1MM depending on how profitable their teams perform.

SWE who have deep subject matter experience are super valuable to these firms. Folks who understand how to write low latency code, FPGA work and other stuff like that. But the real money is in figuring how "how and what" to trade. Once that's done, the SWEs can bang out the code.

To a certain extent, you are correct. However, companies like Jane Street need to filter and doing so based on colleges is the most efficient when other factors are all equal. Top tier colleges strive to base their admittance on performance and strive to be racially and culturally diverse. This gives Jane Street the ability to say they filter on the same criteria.

I'm all ears if you have a better system that is more efficient. I'd also add that I went to a State college and my resume would have been tossed if I applied as a starting engineer too.

They're smart enough to know how create filters that don't miss people with competitors experience on their CVs. In fact, they actively seek those people out on LinkedIn and anywhere else they can find them.

HFT jobs are high value / high comp jobs, so Jane Street and their cohorts put a lot of effort into recruiting. This includes their resume intake system, internships with desirable colleges and professional outreach.

Its mostly done as a way to filter job applications into a smaller set. When Google was the 'hottest' job prospect (many years ago) they needed a way to reduce the set of applicants down to a number where hiring managers could handle the load. Setting criteria such as having an Ivy League degree or a CS degrees with GPA over 3.8 was a logical way to achieve this goal.

That being said, if you went to a community college but also had 10+ years experience at one of their competitors (eg: DE Shaw, 2Sig, Citadel, etc), you'd almost be guaranteed an interview. But once again, thats another very small set of applicants.

A modern cut thru switch typically has one ASIC for a group of ports, and that ASIC handles all the traffic. If the traffic for all of those ports is greater than what the ASIC can handle, you'll have buffering and/or drops.

That being said, the ASIC can typically handle line rate on all the ports. You could have 10G input and fan it out to 10G output on all the ports with no drops, but if there is other cross port traffic, something could get dropped.

I don't read the NYT as much as I used to, but I'll be a NYT subscriber for the rest of my life because they're the only media source creating content of quality and depth across such a wide range of American society (and of the rest of the world).

Some of their editorials are nutz but many, on both the left and the right, are exemplars of journalism.

Why would the exchanges want to move their colos into the cloud. They've spent the capex and they can charge lots of money to rent data center space, cross connects and other services to their customers. If they moved to the cloud, all that revenue would go from them to AWS/GCP/etc.

Doesn't seem like a profitable move for the exchanges. They make more $$$ with on prem setups.

I think it won't be AI that causes the collapse of university attendance. It will be people deciding not to go to college.

Most people just want jobs. Many employers are finding out that people with or without college educations can perform at their tasks, think critically and do all the same functions at most jobs. Ergo, folks will choose not to go into student debt purgatory and just dive straight into the workplace.

I've always wondered why the family that pays full price for tuition does not get the tax credit for their charitable contribution to some other student whom they subsidize.

If I donated $20k to a university, I'd get to write that off as a charitable contribution in my taxes. If I pay full tuition and 1/3 of that goes to a student needing aid, I get no deduction.