alexbanks

My high school looks indistinguishable from a prison. When I have to drive by it now while visiting home I always kind of shudder. Giant mostly windowless buildings with a giant fence surrounding.

Literally none of them.

I would say, with respect, I don't think this experience is normal or standard. I've never been reimbursed for a conference even if it was exactly for the technology that company built their entire product with.

There were all kinds of problems with the test suite that could've been optimized. The problem was that there were too many to manage, and that deleting them was culturally unacceptable.

Lots of them made real DB requests. It's hard to get a product owner to justify having devs spend several months fixing tests that haven't been modified in 9 years.

> Wanna underline here that system tests are slow, unit tests are fast.

System tests are slow but, in my experience, are far far far more valuable medium and long term. Unit tests are fast and relatively unhelpful.

> In attempting to fix a bug, that could cause another "internal" test to fail and expose a flaw in your bugfix that you wouldn't have caught otherwise.

If an external test passes and an internal test fails, the external test isn't really adding any value, is it? And if the root of your issue is "What if test A doesn't test the right things", doesn't the whole conversation fall apart (because then you have to assume that about every test)?

IME this is a common path most shops take. "We have to write tests in case our other tests don't work." Which is a pretty bloaty and wildly inefficient strategy to "Our tests sometimes don't catch bugs." Write good tests, manage and update them often. Don't write more tests to accommodate other tests being written poorly.

> I mean, running internal tests is cheap.

Depends on your definition of cheap, I guess.

My last job was a gigantic rails app. Over a decade old. There were so many tests that running the entire suite took ~3 hours. That long of a gap between "Pushed code" and "See if it builds" creates a tremendous amount of problems. Context switching is cost. Starting and unstarting work is cost.

I'm much more of the "Just Enough Testing" mindset. Test things that are mission critical and complex enough to warrant tests. Go big on system tests, go small on unit tests. If you can, have a different eng write tests than the eng that wrote the functionality. Throw away tests frequently.

It's not about biting. You're allowed to feel however you want. It's unproductive and shitty to make drive by vague observations. I'm not even commenting on whether or not the feelings are valid, I'm commenting on the silly behavior that was posting "So far."

You have an opinion backed by real data. That's fine. Your post has value and advances a conversation.

The ol "Ominous and severe statement backed by nothing". You gotta love it.

Yes. This HR exec was always guilty of putting unmarked calendar invites on people's calendars because she didn't understand/know how to do private/restricted invites. So you'd show up to work and find a 2pm "HR Sync" on your calendar with no description. Really great times.

A previous HR executive used to open every slack conversation with "yt?" Which stood for "You There?". I never understood why you would say that and nothing else, and if the answer was "no", why you wouldn't just say what you were going to say so the person would read it when they WERE there.

Snowflake is by far the best data warehouse I have ever used. I would use it at any job where data warehousing was a keystone of our work. Really 10/10, not even close.

This is my first time being involved in a game. Is there a way to make dependency/package management not abysmal? I was legitimately shocked when I realized that if you wanted to install a .net standard 2.0 library, you had to manually walk the dependency tree of that library and download/copy every single DLL into your app. Did I miss something? (probably)

God, when I was in the Ruby world it felt like other engineers would always say things like "Just type < insert magic line of text > and it'll just do this for you". I hated it. I hated it so much.

My mistake. Was trying to translate (and very clearly didn't read).

Sorry - I didn't read the article - I was mostly trying to translate what (I incorrectly thought) the person you responded to was trying to say. I apologize.

I didn't read and don't want to spread misinformation. Disregard.

You've just identified the difference between "Proven" and "Proven to me." The former has already been done, but obviously the latter requires a person to not actively refuse to listen.

If you're ready to listen, the proof is already there.

I think you're both kind of right.

There are ads on pretty much every medium that say "Stay Home", which is not at all what you're describing. To say "nobody is saying do not socialize" is untrue, but to say "We're not allowed to socialize" is also untrue.

My point is not that it's easy, or that having a guide is unhelpful.

My point is that the pretend song-and-dance of current car buying is ridiculous and anti-consumer.

And lots of people don't have complex requirements for their vehicles. Size, color, type etc. Which could probably literally be managed via an Amazon-style listing.

Weird how customers are able to compare models and purchase in almost all other walks of life

Where did they say they couldn't afford to pay these people?

They latched onto the meaninglessness that is office work, combined with the obvious passive aggression and lack of respect that big companies have for their employees

I think it's different for everyone, and I think finding what piece is preventing you from moving forward is important. For some people, they just _want to want_ something, rather than actually wanting it. Identifying that you don't actually want something can help you move forward. Whether that means building the skill of "cultivating the ability to do things you don't want to do", or just abandoning a task in favor of doing things you actually want - either is usually fine. Most people just stop at "I am unable to move forward with this thing because I am an unmotivated person."

Doing layoffs doesn't necessarily mean you don't have the cash to pay everyone, or even that you're not cashflow positive. Sometimes orgs do big layoffs amidst big hiring pushes, meaning they don't feel like their resources are allocated correctly. Sometimes layoffs are a part of bigger organizational restructuring (this is Mozilla), saying they want to emphasize certain parts of the business and downsize others. If layoffs weren't evenly distributed around the company (ie every org loses 5% vs. we just laid off all of x department), it can mean different things.

Replace Software Engineers with "Anyone involved in the creation of software", and then it goes from a "Definitely not" to a "Eh, maybe."

Until the people pointing the software engineering departments are held accountable for their immoral behavior and goals, I don't think the engineers beneath them can really be assessed fairly.

> I feel you're trying to make a valid point

Thanks?

> but you aren't really respecting how much LeBron was an outlier as a prospect

This is rewriting history. The thing about signing someone straight from high school is it's tough to know how good they are, given they've mostly spent their whole career stomping normal people. Also I'm not implying Lebron was bad, or even anything less than a top pick. I'm just pointing out that there are quite regularly draft candidates that are touted the same way, that do not end up as a Lebron James.

> There simply are not plenty of prospects with his size, control, explosiveness, durability and fine motor control

Most of which he developed in the league? Which is as much a testament to him as it is his coaching, no? Which is a variable that could've prevented him from ascending as high as he did?

> 16 years after LeBron was drafted, we finally saw someone who is as much of an outlier as LeBron in Zion.

This is flatout not true (and frankly pretty offensive to Lebron). Zion is overweight and duck-footed, the combination of which has already shown issues even in his first season. His team knows it, which is why they're keeping him at 20 minutes a game.

If you can't play a player because of their fragility, you can't really call them great.

You're arguing against a point no one made. I never said said Lebron was all luck. I said that the luck was Lebron having his genetics and mindset combined with the year he was born, the circumstances with which he was drafted and the coaching and teammates he got.

I think that we agree mostly, but I just don't think Lebron's individual skill is that inherent. If you compare high school lebron to now, obviously there are tremendous differences. The amount of "what ifs" that show up indicate a tremendous amount of luck.

There are plenty of "Most insane athletes we've ever seen" coming up from High School that never turn into anything, or don't turn into the greatest players of all time. You can't just say "Lebron was more talented and worked harder" when things like car accidents, illness and coaching can all ruin a player's career.

Lebron James was the exact definition of right place, right skills, right time. Lots of players have "tremendous talent" and "tremendous commitment." Lebron wouldn't be what he is today without a tremendous amount of luck. Would his career have worked out if Carmelo was drafted to Cleveland and Lebron went to the Nuggets? What about if Lebron needed to do a year in college now? How would that have impacted his trajectory?

Nobody is doubting Levandowki is an extremely talented engineer, but literally every person that achieves that level of success also took a considerable amount of luck to get there. Right place, right time, right skills is everything.

> but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives.

It obviously depends on your definition of "better". And it's yet to be seen whether whiteboarding is "better" than pulling candidates out of a hat. You'll note that lots of companies that do strict whiteboard-style interviews are also extremely comfortable firing employees. Would you be "better" just hiring anyone whose resume seemed applicable, that could talk like a normal person, and then firing them if it didn't work out?