_skel

There is a lot of cynicism in this thread, including this from the OP:

> This is also what Software Engineering has become: you memorize, regurgitate and participate in agile the masquerade. Creativity is shunned. Tried architectures/patterns are what is expected.

No, not really. Maybe some jobs are like that. Many are not. But even the jobs that are not like that will generally be gated by interviews that include Leetcode-style questions.

This happened in the software industry because credentials and experience often mean nothing, resume fraud is rampant, and the cost of hiring a bad engineer is very high.

How about a take-home assignment? Suggest that and many will respond, "I don't work for free" or "I don't have time to work after work, I have a family to take care of." How about just looking at prior experience, or credentials? Resume fraud prevents that, and a lot of companies prefer to hire generalists and find a team for them to work in, rather than hire specialists for a particular team. Outside of research-heavy fields like AI/ML, a university degree is no predictor of success.

So, we need to find a way to evaluate a candidate, in a short period of time, that gives a reasonable estimation of how they will do in the job. If there was a better way, and it was proved to be better, the industry would adopt it very quickly, and it would be a competitive advantage for the companies that realized it first. But that has not happened.

If you put aside the cheap cynicism that permeates threads about programming interviews, you'll realize it hasn't happened because none of the people who are hiring have figured out a more reliable way to hire, even though there are very smart people doing it and they have an enormous financial incentive to figure out how to do it better. A company that could find all the good programmers who can't Leetcode, and weed out the bad programmers who can't Leetcode, would get an enormous amount of talent that others overlooked.

This is just a hoop to jump through, and it's not nearly as difficult as getting a college degree or learning how to code in the first place. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's doable with time and practice. Most of your colleagues have done it at your current job and also at your future job. I can't do it at the drop of a hat either; I would need to practice like almost everyone else. You can do it too, if you approach it with the right mindset: you aren't supposed to enjoy it or find it intellectually interesting; it's just an obstacle to overcome and it's smaller than many other obstacles you've dealt with before.

> So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer.

Your simple task, which you think would only take a few days to implement, is probably one request in a long queue of requests that team is dealing with. That means they won't be able to start on it for a long time.

That team probably set up the onerous Google Docs process to gate requests because they get so many!

When they do start working on your request, maybe it will only take a few days -- or maybe you underestimate the level of effort required because you are new to the company and you don't understand the complexity of the systems you are dealing with.

Take this as a learning experience: don't assume that you are at a startup where people will drop everything to handle a request from you right away. Instead, assume that people are dealing with a lot of other requests, from a lot of other people. Learn how the system works, and learn how to be effective within that system.

I know for sure that it's possible to be highly productive at a large company with a lot of bureaucracy -- but I also know for sure that new employees who try to bypass process and question the priorities of other teams, before they learn the ropes and build credibility and trust with other people, do not succeed.

To be fair there is also a large contingent of well-intentioned people who don't realize the full implications of what they are asking for.

Ironically many of those people would say they oppose the concentration of corporate power, yet they are asking a very large capitalist corporation to exercise power over one of the most fundamental freedoms.

How do you ensure that this Ministry of Truth you are proposing will remain free of political pressure and corruption?

And how do you expect a panel of experts to escape groupthink and rule fairly in cases where the expert consensus turns out to be incorrect?

Both of those goals are impossible to achieve.

The amazing thing to me is that a game that has been in development for so long runs so badly on consoles that were new when development started.

I bet they spent a lot of time updating the engine and graphics over the past 8 years, and as a result the game barely runs on the hardware they were using when they started writing it.

I don't think very many people actually like Pocket. I wish it would die. It makes Firefox look like it's no better than any commercial browser -- not even Chrome installs that kind of stuff in my toolbar by default!

> Perhaps companies should hire more talented customer service representatives who have a technical background instead of continuing to make their products shittier.

Most people with technical skills would not settle for being customer service representatives when they can make far more money by putting those skills to work in technical roles.

School isn't just about education. It's also a social service.

School gets children out of the home, in some cases dangerous homes. It provides supervision for children whose parents would not be capable or willing of doing so -- rich kids get nannies, poor kids get left alone all day. It provides opportunities for socialization and puts kids in contact with adults who can serve as role models and alert authorities in cases of abuse.

The loss of these important social services matters a lot more than letting kids slip behind in math class by a year.

Meditation in the way western people think about it is kind of like shopping mall yoga: it's a tradition with a long religious history that's been turned into an anodyne "healthy" practice for American consumers.

> USPS operates with many government mandates that don't apply to private companies.

Then let's remove those mandates before asking the taxpayers to pump more money into a failing system. The system won't magically fix itself. If we allow it to continue to demand more and more money, there won't be any incentive to fix the underlying problems.

We could have a very similar conversation about the pension obligations of Ford or General Motors, but I doubt people would be as enthusiastic about bailing them out as they are about the USPS.

Microsoft didn't compete in e-commerce. They competed on desktop operating systems.

Name an e-commerce company Microsoft tried to compete with.

The choice between regular and tax-managed funds, and also the choice between regular and tax-exempt bonds, is not straightforward.

There are quite a few caveats in that wiki article, e.g. stuff like this:

> Your actual tax cost will be higher if you owe state taxes (add your state tax rate on the dividend yield, reduced by your federal tax rate if you itemize deductions and are not over the limit for deducting state taxes) or are in the phase-out range for some tax benefit such as the child tax credit (add 5% to all tax rates) or the personal exemption phase-out for the Alternative Minimum Tax (add 7% to all tax rates, but your overall tax on non-qualified dividends is 28%).

That's a bit complicated. I would still recommend paying for at least a one-time consultation with a financial and/or tax advisor before choosing where to put $450k.

That's good retirement planning advice for normal situations. Having a $450k cash windfall adds a few wrinkles -- there are more investment options available (e.g. buy a house with cash), and the tax consequences of those various options can be very different.

I don't think most people need a financial advisor, but if I had a $450k pile of cash and I wanted to understand the tax consequences of various investments I would definitely pay for a consultation.

Netflix does not pay a license fee per viewer. They generally negotiate multi-year deals that are priced in advance at fixed rates. Whether one person or a million people watch a show, Netflix pays the same licensing fees.

Plus, a Netflix membership is like a gym membership. Some users watch a lot more content (and cost more in terms of infrastructure) than others. Much like at a gym, all subscribers pay but only some cost as much as they pay. If a gym only charged people who showed up, the fees would need to be much higher.

If every subscriber cost more than they brought in, Netflix would have gone flat broke years ago. There is a reason shareholders wanted subscriber growth and got spooked when it slowed.

Apparently Iosevka is a font.

Just in case, like me, you had no idea what the heck it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iosevka

Being first doesn’t matter. Docker became the industry standard and jails did not.

The fact that the Docker port was allowed to die is a pretty good indicator of how little interest there is in using FreeBSD in the industry, particularly in cloud environments.

I recently went through a fairly large upgrade from JDK8 to JDK 11 and it was a bit of a pain -- lots of dependencies to update, etc. But very few code changes were required, and the static type system made it pretty clear when the codebase was broken -- it just wouldn't build. It still took my team several weeks.

Migrating from Python 2 to Python 3 is way worse than that -- code changes are required, and because Python is a dynamic language you may not notice bugs until you actually run the code (or even worse, until after you release it to production and some code branch that is rarely invoked somehow gets called...). In other words, the tooling and the type system are not confidence-inspiring and it's really hard to verify that you migrated without breaking stuff.

His job, as the head of the FSF and GNU, was to represent those organizations to the public, which includes many people who don't know him. Being judged and vilified by people who don't know you is what happens to public figures.

If your behavior brings disrepute on the organizations you represent, you should let those organizations find different representatives. RMS was right to step down. He is still free to say whatever he wants as an individual without damaging the reputations of GNU and the FSF.

The only way to solve the problem is to build more housing, and the only way to do that is to change the zoning laws. A startup cannot do much about that.

The only way to change the zoning laws is to convince the majority of voters that they need to be changed. A nonprofit would have just as much luck doing this as a VC-backed startup.

You are correct, but I would never tell a manager I was interviewing unless I had an offer letter.

That one is the best. When I tell people about it they think it is too ridiculous to be true. A guy who thought he was Jesus's brother started a war that killed tens of millions of people.

Ironically there has never been a better time to buy an affordable mechanical watch than now.

Quartz won because the mechanical watches that most people could afford in the 1970s were very inaccurate. A cheap quartz watch was more accurate than any mechanical watch and anybody could afford one by the late 1970s -- although they were very expensive at first.

Affordable mechanical watches on the market today are much more accurate than they used to be, and they are perfectly good for everyday use.

> If I was this “IT” person, I would explain to the individual that there was a critical vulnerability found which will not be patched and then print up a liability waver form for them to sign and date, stating that they are doing this on their own terms and I cannot be held responsible should anything go wrong.

That's even worse advice than what I was responding to. Great way to anger a high-ranking executive and probably get fired.

Frankly a lot of the advice in this thread seems to be coming from people who are very junior or otherwise don't have experience dealing with high-ranking executives. Heck, even mid-ranking executives would respond very poorly to the kinds of actions advised in this thread.

Here's the situation: a high-ranking person in the company is so powerful that she can disobey IT policy by refusing to update her computer. This person is also powerful enough to demand that changes be made to a corporate website to make it compatible with her older computer. This is a problem for the head of IT, and the head of IT either lost that battle or decided it was not worth fighting.

This is not the right place for a more junior IT person or developer to stick their nose in by going directly to that executive with some bogus "liability waiver" or appeals to wasted money or whatever else. It won't go well, and it's wrong to do it in the first place because it bypasses layers of management and the historical and political context that led to this outcome. If the head of IT couldn't solve this problem, a stunt like what you are suggesting won't solve it either.

MongoDB recognizes that OSI approval is a nice thing to have as a selling point. I very much doubt that they accept the OSI as an authority that can make binding rules and regulations about who gets to call their software "open source".

I'm in Silicon Valley and I work with plenty of well-compensated, valued engineers in their 40s and 50s. They are easier to find at large companies than at startups -- part of that is due to ageism, but another factor is that they are done putting up with the startup bs and want a stable job with good benefits and a high salary and work-life balance.

Some of them are senior individual contributors, some of them are in engineering management, and some have transitioned from engineering to project management. Many of them could afford to retire today but want to keep working. And very few of them are still in the building after 5:30pm, because they have lives to go home to and refuse to work crazy startup hours.

Ageism is real in the industry. But the outlook for engineers over 40 is not a terrifying or bleak as you make it seem.

It's not reasonable to expect your coworkers to treat you like a monk who needs to spend long hours in uninterrupted deep thought and reflection.

Avoiding the cognitive penalty of interruptions is a skill that every programmer should develop. It's a big win in terms of productivity, and it only becomes more important when you become more senior and need to collaborate more frequently with other teams or provide support to other developers. Collaboration is where true productivity comes from anyway, rather than raw coding skill (above a certain baseline of competence, of course.)

In my experience, productive programmers often avoid the problem by just writing stuff down. If the guy in the comic strip had a pen and paper he could have quickly drawn those flowcharts he had in his head. Or he could have typed his ideas in comments or in a text file. But if he tries to hold such a complicated structure in his head, to the extent that he can't have a conversation with another person, he's just needlessly setting himself up for failure. I doubt he would make it through a lunch break or even a bathroom break if he can so easily lose track of what he is doing.

I haven't ever broken macOS doing stuff like that, and I've been doing it for years, with both Macports and Homebrew.

I use the default prefix and make sure the Homebrew stuff is in my $PATH before the built-in stuff and it works fine.

I prefer my type errors at compile time.

You have to reason about types in any language because passing the wrong type to a function can result in errors. You have to do all of that mental work by yourself in a dynamic language because there isn't a system to do it for you.

> If there are already known rules, and one particular country comes in an adds a massive amount of applications, you can't turn around and yell discrimination.

If the rules are discriminatory then it's entirely valid to call them as such, and doing so may help to change them.