badfrog

I really appreciate that this was episode 665.

From the intro, why this is interesting:

> The question of whether mean body temperature is changing over time is not merely a matter of idle curiosity. Human body temperature is a crude surrogate for basal metabolic rate which, in turn, has been linked to both longevity (higher metabolic rate, shorter life span) and body size (lower metabolism, greater body mass).

Is F# usage growing at all?

What's the benefit for an average software engineer in going along with the acquihire rather than looking for a completely new job?

> Personally, I'd rather earn an extra $25k and buy a few cups of coffee with it than get "free coffee".

I don't think there are any companies that spend $25k per employee per year on coffee???

Much faster initial load.

> contribute poorly to regular sprint style work

> I am completely miserable doing maintenance level work

Sounds like something you might want to work on even if you don't get a job in programming. It seems unlikely you'll find any line of work where everything you do every day is new and exciting.

I've seen the opposite issue. I'll tell a candidate "I don't care if you know the exact function name and parameter order for the library function the get a sub-array; just make up something reasonable and focus on solving the bigger problem." And they still look up the actual function definition.

I think the shortage is _good_ web developers, and it sounds like this test doesn't really help identify those.

I, for one, know what Silicon Valley is but have never heard of Palo Alto Networks before. So the title as written is much more meaningful to me.

> That being said, I think it’s hilarious

I think there are many things that would be hilarious and also should get people fired.

The feature is actually called silos? I thought the hip thing to do was tear down all the silos in a company?

This crazy points system doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard of at FAANG.

Lol at "robots" and "AI". The jobs of most old school traders are being replaced by regular nerds with fairly simple code.

Are you sure that difference is not based more on how old the businesses are than where they're located?

> People are afraid to wear jeans at work because it might look "unprofessional" or like they're not working as hard as people who wear 'business' attire.

That just sounds like a bad company, not an east coast problem. I've worked at two NYC trading firms, and the typical attire is shorts and sandals.

+1, this is not a thing

What's the actual story here? This can't be the first trading firm that doesn't have human traders?

> but the problem is actually that the UI itself only loads these things once they've been rendered by the framework which is often after another component has loaded them

That just sounds like bad front end coding. A good framework used properly would not have that issue.

> all the data you intend to show them you should be able to fetch and send with the initial request.

Sure, but if it requires data from five different services and significant compute time, the initial request is going to be very slow. Users are more likely to bail out if they see nothing for a few seconds than if they immediately see a loading screen that lasts for a few seconds.

> a 2mb page right now, than a 200kb page that slowly grows to a 2mb page over the course of 20 components individually loading themselves.

Isn't the point that the 200kb is static code that can be served immediately, while the rest can't? Regardless of whether the remaining 1.8mb is built on the server or client, it still isn't available "right now"

> What about code that proves a complex, many page mathematical theorem?

The hard part should be understanding the theorem. If you understand that and the code is still difficult, then the code should be better written.

I guess one exception is when you're optimizing for performance and make an explicit decision to sacrifice maintainability.

I've thought that many times and always been wrong. At the end of the day, code is just code. After you take the time to understand the environment it's running in, it's not that much different than anything else you could write.

Creating BPF in the first place took a lot of cleverness. Figuring out how to fit it into a massive infrastructure at a place like Facebook took a lot of cleverness. But most of the people actually working on the implementations are just normal software engineers.

Does Google have a time limit for new grads to reach L4? Seems like this person may have hit that wall.

We're specifically talking about somebody who came from Google, so whether that's a lot to an average person is irrelevant. Somebody making that at Google would be very inexperienced, and the fact that they left to work for much less at another company probably indicates they were struggling at Google. So this person is by no means an accurate representation of a typical Google SWE.

I left to work on tech at a trading firm. It pays more, and IMO the work is more interesting and less stressful.

> these engineers, while they all tend to be very smart, tend to be borderline junior engineers in the real world

Define "real world"?

From that chapter: "In general, a method for combining data values satisfies the closure property if the result of combination can itself be combined using the same method."

It sounds like they're just describing recursive data structures? When most people talk about closures, aren't they referring to this (from Wikipedia)?

"In programming languages, a closure, also lexical closure or function closure, is a technique for implementing lexically scoped name binding in a language with first-class functions. Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function[a] together with an environment."

EDIT: My SICP quote was actually from somebody's notes, not the book itself. But the point remains.

Sounds like it's a bad place to work anyway. Hiring people who can recite definitions without evidence of being able to apply the concepts is a recipe for building a terrible team.

> Locally though, degree's don't matter because there aren't enough good programmers

Aren't programming salaries much lower in the UK than the US? If there's a shortage, why don't companies start paying more?