akamia

I would clarify this in the HN post. As it is right now, it looks like this is a remote first role when the reality is it is a hybrid role. Just because you might be willing to make an exception doesn't make it a remote role.

Some of the most important work that a good manager does goes unseen by their team. I've been a manager and now I'm an IC so I've seen both sides. There is a lot of shielding and pushing back that managers do to protect their teams. Unless the manager tells their team about everything they've been doing behind the scenes, the team has no idea.

You say that you've never seen anything get done faster or better as a result of something a manager did but you've probably had managers that were working preventing interference, saying no to last minute requirement changes, pushing back on deadline changes, etc.

I can definitely relate to this.

I worked at a startup where the founder learned this the hard way. We were trying to sell to government agencies. He insisted on a pricing model that meant we had to go through complex and expensive RFP processes.

We had potential customers come to us and tell us directly that they wanted to buy our product. They explained that with some adjustments to our pricing model, we could avoid the need for an RFP. The founder would not budge and we really struggled.

I hear that narrative a lot and I think it does a major disservice to the people interested in entering the field. Are there blue-collar workers making huge sums of money? Yes. Are most blue-collar workers making huge sums of money? No.

There is also the physical toll that gets glossed over. I know tradespeople who made a lot of money until they weren't physically capable of doing the work anymore. Some were able to focus on running the business and had trained up good people to do the actual work. Others were in a really bad place.

Do you have more documentation somewhere? If so, I’d suggest making it more easily accessible. I couldn’t find any on the site and the support link just takes me to discord. I’d be more inclined to sign up if there was some documentation I could read through to get a sense for requirements, setup, branching, CLI commands, etc.

That was why we used an at home euthanasia service for our dog. He hated going to the vet and had to go multiple times a week toward the end. We didn't want to have him scared and stressed in his last moments.

Look into at home options if the time comes. We actually found that the cost was not much more than doing it at our vet's office. I think it was $500 at home vs $400 in office. $100 extra to give him the best end possible was the least I could do.

This is the reason why I refuse to pay for any work travel expenses with my credit card.

I once worked for a company that had a similar travel process. When I was asked to travel, I insisted that my VP have his assistant schedule and pay for everything. When I arrived at the hotel on one trip, the hotel asked me for a credit card to pay for the booking. I stepped out of line and called my VP to have him fax his card info to the hotel.

I understand this wouldn't work for everyone but I think it's ok to question the policy and see how much flexibility there is. In my case, I was able to avoid taking on personal liability for my employer's expenses by pushing back and working with my VP to find a solution that I was comfortable with.

That's super helpful to hear. I'm also making the move after 3 years in management.

Being able to be done at the end of the day is something I'm really looking forward to but it's going to take some time to get back into that mindset.

As a manager, I felt like I was always on.

I'm in the process of transitioning back to an IC role from a management position and that was one of the biggest factors. As a manager, the level of stress I felt just became unbearable. I'm wrapping up my management responsibilities right now but just knowing that I'll be back to IC work soon and won't have that management stress has had a huge positive impact on my daily life.

I had something similar happen with a Facebook recruiter. I didn't reply to her first two emails so she started emailing my mom to try to get in touch with me. My mom called me because she thought it was a phishing email. I had never had that happen before.

The concern could be a brain drain. If lots of your early employees cash out and leave, you are potentially losing a lot of historical knowledge and expertise at a time when you are trying to build up to a successful IPO. Early employees often leave after an IPO. At that time, it is still disruptive but the company's priorities have changed.

My mother and my sisters all have degrees in English. My mother had a good career as a high school English teacher and one of my sisters is doing the same. My other sister works as an editor for an educational publishing company.

Outside of education, there is a need for clear and well structured communication across every field. Copy writing/editing for marketing and sales campaigns, internal and external corporate communications, technical writing. These are all areas I've worked on with English majors.

I once spoke with a law professor who said that English majors often make the best lawyers. Their undergrad experience prepared them for the volume of reading, analysis and writing that is required to successfully complete a law degree.

I was a lead at a startup that was acquired and the acquisition process would have probably sunk us if the acquisition had not gone through.

We were in the middle of raising our next round when the offer came through. The founders and the board decided to accept the offer but it was still contingent on due diligence. While going through the due diligence process all funding conversations had to stop. Luckily we were small so the due diligence process only took 2 months but we had to tighten our belts. If the acquisition had fallen through, we would’ve been in real trouble because we burned 2 months of cash and would have needed to line up funding quickly.

That's the approach I've taken and it has worked out really well. As long as they're getting their work done, I'm not concerned with how much time they're taking off.

There are always going to be people who take advantage of anything "free". I once worked at a boring large company that didn't offer any of these perks. They repeatedly had to tell people that the office supplies were for work use only. One person was caught selling office supplies on eBay. Another person had been using them to supply the office for his side business.

One practical benefit for the well-off is having people in close proximity who can staff their local restaurants, shops, schools, etc.

It's much easier to hire and retain staff for your business when your pool of potential employees isn't a 30+ minute bus ride away.

For the well-off residents, it means better and more consistent service at their neighborhood grocery, coffee shop, restaurant, pharmacy, etc.

Not necessarily. They're describing the benefit for me. I only really use these services during the work week for lunch. My wife and I both work from home and sometimes we didn't make something in advance or stop at the store to pick something up for lunch. We don't always have that 75 minutes to step out and buy something. It takes 5 minutes to order through the app and they leave it at the front door so we can plan to have it arrive during the time we're planning to have lunch. Then we can just focus on having lunch together before getting back to work.

We had this challenge when we moved into our house. Our current vet was over 30 minutes away and we have to take our dog in 3x/week for fluids. Our new neighborhood has five vet clinics. Four were not taking any new patients. Luckily we were able to get into the fifth clinic because they were brand new and were building up their client list.

That wasn't unique to our area either. We've heard from several friends that they've had similar issues getting into vets.

This is a really great point. My brother-in-law went to film school and did exactly what you described. He networked with his professors and peers, worked on lots of projects, used the software and equipment available through the school, and graduated with a strong portfolio. He has been consistently working in the field since graduating.

Obviously this is just a single anecdote but I think it does show that it is possible to succeed if you really take advantage of the resources that are available to you in school.

Even in the early 2000s this was a thing in some places. I remember working at a store that printed the full CC# on the customer's receipt. As an employee, it would've been ridiculously easy to steal credit card information. You could just print a second copy of the receipt after the customer left.

This is spot on. I had a coworker who was in the reserves and the commitment was significantly more than what they say in the brochures. He was often gone for weeks at a time. This made it really difficult for him to progress because he was never able to start AND finish any major projects. Our manager really tried to support him but going through a promo process without any good examples of execution is nearly impossible.

Even raises and bonuses were tough because our company's policy in these circumstances was to default their rating to "meets expectations". The company didn't want to penalize people for their service but it also meant he usually didn't get anything above the average rating. Middle of the road salary adjustments and bonuses. Not bad but not great.

I think you need to clarify what you mean by at rest. You mention browser history but it's not clear to me if you mean that it's encrypted in the browser. If you mean it's encrypted within your data store on your servers, that's great for security but doesn't really address the ad concern. I'm assuming you hold the encryption keys. If that's the case, you can decrypt the users' data in your data store for ad targeting purposes.

I interviewed at Microsoft around 2010 and had a horrible interview with a Principal Engineering Manager in Bing. He was my last interviewer of the day and the interview started at 5 PM. I had been there since 10 AM and the only "break" I had was a lunch interview so I was exhausted but I was going to give it my all.

Since it was the last interview and he was a manager, I was expecting a culture fit/soft skill interview but it was more whiteboarding. I was surprised but I went with it. I asked some clarifying questions and then I started walking through my solution on the whiteboard. After a few minutes I turned around to ask him a question and he was staring out the window day dreaming. I said "excuse me" and repeated my question. He gave me a brief answer and then turned to stare out the window again. He did this through the entire interview.

I was shocked. I understand that it was the end of the day but it was his choice to have the interview loop keep going. I had given them an entire day and he didn't even respect me enough to give me an hour of his attention.

I didn't get the job but I'm sure I dodged a bullet if that was what the management was like for that team.

I also find that I'm more confident in the manufacturer to actually ship the item properly. On several occasions I've ordered something expensive from Amazon only to have it arrived beat up and damaged. When I've returned it to Amazon and ordered again from the manufacturer it usually arrives in much better condition.

That's funny. I read it that way too.

When I was a kid I shared the second Red Alert CD with my friend. We used the Modem multiplayer option to dial each other directly to play 1:1.

So many great memories.

I have experienced the exact same thing. In fact, the worst person I have ever worked with consistently aced interviews wherever he went.

It’s been several years since I worked there but if I remember correctly it was a little more complicated because these were basically subcontracts under one larger contract. The company had a huge contract agreeing to purchase some volume of services from the consulting company. For each project a smaller contract would be created to define the terms of the project and the resources would be drawn from the parent contract’s pool of purchased resources.

This created a lot of internal pressure to use contract resources as much as possible.

That was my experience when I worked at Boeing in IT. As soon as the contract was signed we got the most mediocre people.

Occasionally we’d get someone good but as soon as the consulting company figured out that they were good, they’d get rotated off our project and replaced with someone mediocre. They also never gave us any warning when they were going to switch someone.

Mistakes happen. I've never met an engineer who has never made a mistake. However, I have met brilliant engineers who have written incredibly complex software and have also managed to make some silly mistakes along the way.