Following the API blocking earlier this year, my fear is that the half-life of old.reddit's existence is getting ever so small...
201 karma · joined February 26, 2009
This. So much this. The exit is the lottery ticket. It'll likely fail.
But the real lure is getting to wear a ton of hats and fly by the seat of your pants. Any engineer in a < 20 person eng team is going to have a ton of exposure to how the business works, to making real-time decisions, and just generally being impactful. _THAT's_ why you go.
(And, that said, it's definitely not for everyone)
I came in by photojournalism -> photoshop -> graphic design -> web design through the 90's.
I was never really good as a designer. I was capable, but I didn't have that "real talent" that I could see in others. Instead, I was always interested in the technical aspects of design. I enjoyed color separation and complex printing jobs.
At around the same time, I realized I was getting tired of handing my designs over to the engineers who would slop them together. So I started dabbling with Macromedia Director (predecessor to Flash for making CD-ROMS [when that was a thing]), then flash, and then HTML and kept going farther and farther back in the stack. This was in the time of PERL and ASP, and I'd devour O'Riley books trying to learn as much as I possibly could. A book on regex. A book on data structors. Learning SQL.
I then had the fantastic opportunity to work with a group of people that stuck together through a series of companies (myself as the designer). At the last company, I was incredibly fortunate to have the architect take me under his wing and have daily master/apprentice style problems and reviews with me. Today you're writing a binary logger. Tomorrow a reader. Now an HTML parser. The architect was brutal, and I'd go home sometimes in tears... until I realized it wasn't about _me_. I had to check my ego at the door, and that this could be a dialogue if I was willing to participate and not to get defensive, and be OK unlearning some bad practices (To this day, I still think he's one of the most incredible humans on the planet).
Twenty years later, it's been an excellent career. I've built a lot of cool shit, and finally even had a decent exit. I'm in management now, but I can still find some "fingers on the keyboard" time here and there.
If I can give any advice:
- Never stop learning. Never stop asking questions.
- Don't get hung up on being a particular language specialist—it's fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals... everything else is just syntax.
- Interviews are going to suck sometimes, because there's some asshole in the loop that biases towards academia and thinks you're not worth their time... but don't let it get you down (pro-tip: you probably don't want to work there anyway).
- Celebrate your journey, don't shy from it, and be proud that you're doing this on your own; because it's a damned hard road sometimes.
My rough understanding is synology did some pretty heavy modifications to btrfs in their implementation though... (a quick google finds me nothing to back this up, but i remember reading about it somewhere...)
Of course, with the down-turn, and given that we were effectively trying to position ourselves as CRM middleware, all bets were off. The business dried up, and our burn-rate was through the roof. Word got out the day before about the upcoming layoffs. The next day there were kegs of beer that sat out in the engineering pits.
IT had a helluva time, as a lot of people walked off with their laptops and company-issued phones. The dirty secret was that there was also a complete (still shrink-wrapped) palette of brand new 2U Dell servers in the loading bay that mysteriously went missing in the CO office that day.
Like a naive babe in the woods, I survived the first 2? maybe 3? RIFs. Even as I was building a website that listed all of our hardware and furniture for sale, and unracking and packing all the servers from the colo—I still didn't get it. Reality hit like a brick.
I was lucky enough to fall in with a good group of folks who continued to follow each other to other companies either as employees or as contract work for the next few years. There were maybe one or two scary months, but overall it was manageable. (Also lesson learned: your network is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING)
I think it's more like slashdot. I didn't leave slashdot for reddit or HN. I just left. It got bad. I'm thinking the same thing is about to happen for me on reddit as well.
I bet there's a whole slew of us who spent countless hours inspecting everything, trying to take it all apart... that formed the developers we are today.
I dunno. I've seen more than one person get caught by setting up their phone for development (1), getting suckered into installing some mal-ware laden game (2)... 3 and 4 don't seem _like_ that much of a stretch in the valley.
Deliv is a crowdsourced logistics company that powers same-day delivery and returns for retailers, local businesses, and e-commerce companies. Deliv is focused exclusively on moving packages; not selling goods (so we can be really good at what we do). We work behind the scenes of some of the largest and most innovative companies - including Best Buy, Google Express, Bloomingdale’s and Walgreens and more, in over 100 cities (from manhattan to honolulu), and are getting ready to scale to a LOT more for 2016. We've also recently raised a $28mm series B led by UPS (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ups-deliv-idUSKCN0VX2U4).
In 2015 we acquired two companies, one of them based in Grand Rapids, and we're looking to expand there as well as Menlo Park.
Who we are: an 11 person engineering team, looking to grow to 16 by the end of the year. We're primarily ruby/rails/angular (and iOS/android), and are reaching that exciting stage of the company where it's all about really scaling the platform, blowing up old assumptions, making things purr.
We're currently looking for:
* Full-Stack Engineers (all levels experience)
* Back-end Software Engineers (all levels of experience)
1. Intro call with me, to answer any questions you might have (20 minutes).
2. Technical phone interview with one of our engineers (45 minutes).
3. On-site interview 3-4 sessions, an hour each
4. (optional) lunch with the group, or come to our bi-monthly game night
Even being televised, they've got to jack up the volume to try and make it seem more exciting.
Deliv is a crowdsourced, last mile logistics company that powers same-day delivery and returns for retailers, local businesses, and ecommerce companies. Deliv is focused exclusively on moving packages; not selling goods (so we can be really good at what we do). We power same-day delivery for over 4,000 businesses including Macy’s, Best Buy, Walgreens, Google Express, Farfetch, BlueApron and more, in over 100 cities, and are getting ready to scale to a LOT more.
We're currently looking for:
* Ruby Engineers (that don't mind doing full-stack)
* Seasoned Front-end Engineers (that aren't afraid to dip into backend)
* Lead Data Warehouse Engineer
Job descriptions still being written (they'll be up this week! http://www.deliv.co/careers) , but for more details shoot me an email: barclay[at]deliv.co
Eh. And not to sound like a cranky old man, but that shit sucks.
It's ridiculous that their "app" needs 20-30 seconds to boot on a modern computer. It's a damned music player. Plus, when the machine is under load, it skips like a 1993 disc player. And the damned thing crashes routinely.
Pre-CEF I was terribly impressed by their mac client. It's been a pretty ugly cliff they've fallen off though. They did a developer blog post some time ago detailing how teams are all using separate JS routines and libs... and I have to say, I wasn't surprised. It's rare that a popular app regresses in performance and usability quite as much as they have.
Famous last words, son. Like everything, seems simple enough up front, but since it's closed source, you have _no idea_ what's going on in there.
It was positively mind blowing.
Almost equivalent to seeing 240x180 video playing on a CD-ROM.
As someone who grew up in Oakdale, I'm positively shocked to hear there's a tech-related meetup there. Wow!
There's ways around it, but it's still pretty broken. :(
I've also got no sense of smell, though my ENT thinks it was due to an accident I had as a baby (fell face first onto broken glass), that severed the nerve.
I can smell absolutely nothing (not gas, not coffee, nada)... but, on the other hand, have a really strong sense of taste. Maybe this is what's leaning the doctor to that.
When I was working at a .net shop, VS became my vim (mostly because it was already always running), also because it was incredibly familiar.
Since leaving the .net world though, I've relapsed. Have had trouble with eclipse|intelli-j|etc due to their general java slugishness on the mac.
With one important difference: they're the most arrogant, uninterested and rude sales people i've ever had to deal with. "Because, what are you going to do, use Bing?"
C'mon OSM. Can't get rid of google fast enough.