309 karma · joined December 17, 2022
It decent for applications, web services. Prefer C++ for embedded programming. Python for scripts and data wrangling and ML.
Sorry but what do I not know about computer science?
What a general purpose programming language choice have to do with knowing computer science?
main issue in big tech..manager reports to manager reports to manager reports to manager. one dev team with 5 coders plus product manager, software engineering manager, technical program manager. 3 to 5 ratio not including management chain.
is massive waste with empire building and politics. impossible to do innovative work because territory wars, managers fighting to get more head count, simple decision need 10 people to agree instead of 1 maybe 2.
fix this problem, can avoid bug layoffs in first place.
hire more people who have meaningful output, not manager that sit in meeting all day. fake economic class with little or no economic output.
does not teach ‘mastery’ but he teach much about what to look at when buying car..have car issue..avoid get scam by mechanic.
his speaking style like old grandpa. very enjoyable and improve my ability to understand spoken english too so not use chatgpt when doing work
to search for name joe as example:
> grep -r joe .
-r will do a recursive search in case you have files in folders and those folders have more folders with files
This strawman. you jumping to big conclusion by asking aggressive question.
im minority person. dei things me saw at big tech massive grift. usually run by people without real skill..people who simply there for crusade if they personal social beliefs.
in one org person responsible for daily long email on trans issues. not single trans person on team or on org. so let maybe discuss ukraine..libya..palestine?
at another big tech company..small army of engineers to scan entire company code base and flag word like “whitelist”. Highly paid engineer and managers $300k+ comp to change “whitelist” to “allowlist”
Me minority. none of this nonsense helpful. it actually insult. most stuff corporate entitlement program to create fake job for people without useful skill. pandering to often white people with savior complex who seem to hate other white people.
prefect. we both agree to this.
with this idea in mind how do Amazon justify so much hiring?
what the people do all day?
this my point. bloated bureaucracy growing without doing anything new or disruptive. instead of more efficient.. just growing headcount for promotions and ego. it massive GRIFT.
as a shareholder in amazon do not believe the layoffs go far enough. they run business like charity. company like amazon coddling economic elite class who do little valuable work.
prime shopping worse today than 5 years ago. many item take longer than 2 day promise. too many scam items, like shopping at some flea market. reviews unreliable.
me kindle same thing as what I purchase in 2017 or 2016. in past two year they update some screen so feel more like android style but its otherwise exact same product.
alexa is timer and alarm clock. sometime use for weather but it always say “by the way” and try to sell something stupid.
ok now we discuss aws. “hey we give like nothing to open source community but let us take you open source project, create our own fork, and sell your hard work as managed service.”
ok but what aws really even do that big in past 5 year? s3..lambda.. ecs decent. redshift basically eat hole in your wallet. but all this stuff available 5 years ago. no significant disruption or amazing feature.
ok AWS at least make money. rest of they business is low or no margin. massive grift from amazon friends brag about rest and vest.
Main problem these company took benefit of cheap interest rates and overhired. hiring for promotion and ego. hiring not sake of true business growth.
Saw entire teams and orgs at two big tech companies sitting idle..senior and staff engineers have no commit in over a year. ok..maybe they doing design work or something else to drive efficiency or cross org optimization.
but no, even college level hires have no commit or other meaningful work. reasonable question: what they do? especially when team own no critical service and even have no support burden..why 7 engineers plus 3 managers?
meanwhile managers getting increasing hc and fighting territory battle.
this was massive grift. a union only make the grift last longer. real solution: remove dead weight.. massive bureaucracy..go back to entreprenurial root of company and what it vision.
It saddening to see it not questioned enough.
A private gathering—-people with agenda and means..capital media and celebrities—-to normalize and propagate that agenda.
while these globalists say they want more open border they meeting in one of most exclusive country in the world where difficult to get citizenship.
this also a grift. jason calacanis said on all in podcast how they offer him a seat at table for $25k or $40k some number like that in early 2000s.
also remember part of this to help share price. executive leadership teams sending message to market they ready to focus on “value” and cut the excess. earning season getting underway and most company have big miss against estimate, so need data to provide example of what cost cutting happening in earnings call.
this a massive GRIFT..saw armies of new hires. Now people on HN and LinkedIn say, "So hard to recruit this level talent. Will need to re-hire them." Oh really? Let me tell you.
i saw:
- original founders, execs, and they proteges leave, to be replaced by "Professional Managers"
- professional managers have no vision or direction.
- professional manager cares nothing for customer, product, or value.
- professional manager driven by prestige of being at big tech and ego
- only goal is to increase HC, fight territory battles, and grow empire.
- main incentive was PROMOTION.
- how to achieve promotion? Managers: empire building. IC: invent complexity, build solution to problem that not real. launch it, get promoted, go to next team. great, now we need to spend even more $$ to support some piece of shit services because critical stuff taking dependency on it. manager, Sr. Mmnager collude across organization to show big impact and get unnecessary thing entranced deep in tech stack. But hey, now we write document in promotion portfolio so sr. manager can become director.. sr. engineer become staff level..
- 20% of company provide value that pays the other 80% salary.
- Many people work on stupid thing that have no meaning for customer.
let me pick a random big tech co:
you tell me what huge improvement in amazon shopping, how alexa better, how kindle better, how fire (junk) any better? What big innovation even from aws in past 7 year? oh let me tell you – lets steal some open source project, give no credit or contribution back to main project, and sell as managed service and eat our customer in data transport cost alone.
this grift went on long time enable by cheap borrow policy. and in silicon valley, it at level of Ponzi scheme. I invest in company x,y,z, and c. i force c to use shitty SaaS products from x,y,z or some other company my friend invest in. it literally same dollar moving from x to y to z to c.
entitled grifters.
bingo. this fakes problem not limited to only books. ran into same issues with protein powders..electric toothbrush heads..razors. once received a box of diapers that looked legitimate but fine print on side had misspellings.
this article give amazon too much credit. me reported fake toothbrush heads. amazon refused to publish my 1 star review and send me email saying they investigated and product is real when clearly it knock off being sold as real.
author has belief he owed more $ than what apple offers on 15 month old machine.
they likely have specific margin per sale. after doing trade and factoring in costs.. not worth offering more when newer apple chips available that customer want.
and weird belief apple should support environment by giving more money for old machine. seriously?
if you care about environment you should hang onto your old machine yourself and control you consumerism appetite.
english not me first language but this article so poor, makes reader think..can anyone work at tech radar? they pay these author per article? lack of logical thinking.. author admits no plan to actually trade in machine so clear to me they just amplifying this non story for controversy and clicks.
- this week in tech
- Lex freidman
do users not intuit checkbox button? is this some problem being solved or more of fad?
What criteria for “sizing up” their partner?
This sound sociopath behavior. if me business partner do like this maybe they not right person to partner with.
if someone partner a business criminal or physically hurt someone good to know what you getting into up front. but otherwise trying to judge someones partner feel poor behavior.
seen havior like where one tries to judge your ability, motive, and success based on how you look..what car you drive..value of you house..based on what you father does and how much he earn. toxic traits.
always fools errand and people like this never get far long term.
changes for me were more life events. marriage gave me partner but it was several years living together to really understand spouse and show proper love respect understanding they deserve. honestly I was just young and naive.
life and personal goals improved for better having first child. it gave opportunity to reprioritize and focus on what most important to me. working 70-80 hour weeks was feather I felt in my cap. good to have hustle but it was first time i truly empathized with coworker who have child and not work so much. and me realized working so many hours and relentless focus on productivity not most important thing.
other important lesson from working with difficult people and bureaucracy as my employers size ballooned. had experiences with intellectual dishonesty where my contribution credited to others. felt upset but mainly learned maybe my priorities and focus would better serve in me own company. why work so hard and help someone else become director or senior staff and give me ideas to company patents? I decided to start me own company.
in me experience.. essential math is single variable calculus and multi variate culture usually taught over 1-3 separate courses. linear algebra..discrete math (more of CS class than just pure math).
amazon for example is services architecture. many frameworks and solutions built once for shopping/seller use case. now you want to join Y space? incentive to reuse tooling and framework that already exist. get to market quickly. sound like big advantage but the tools were built for problem X. with problem Y, we have hacks on top of hacks to fit square into circle.
“you want to build mobile apps? okay. we only know how to do services really.” so even how you build code or how to branch and release strategy missing or expertise is only in some specific business division who did everything so custom when they invent it first time that it not really work for you.
so if you observe you company like amazon try do 100 different things at once. sound good and impressive and stock grow. but 98 thing executed very poorly and not close to best in class experience.
this my exact experience at two different company.
once you get over these problem, then u focus on optimization. N second videos? Okay.. let’s preload them..let use lower resolution..let’s have warm cache of recommendations if you like this vide, meaning you watch it for greater than S second..let invest in custom recommendation pipeline with online and offline training to expand dataset of video recommendation so u eyes stay on a video longer while we preload next one.
because we smaller nimble build what we need now without politic of tech alignment across orgs and ownership territory battle going up to separate director or VPs.
this me experience and me sure there are other things too.
at risk of sounding arrogant, maybe you missing important experience so this not resonate with you.
me time in big tech had many teams or even orgs focused on adding features to some legacy product or service.
product managers pitched doing X or Y as big wins for customer experience. managers, directors, and vps all got onboard.
so you have service that does X. it do it very well. you can put two people to support it and have rest of people focus on next innovation. instead, you take team of 9 people including 2-3 managers and engineers do some marginal improvement.
you add layers of new abstraction or helper services. you operational footprint and cost goes up. you do some tiny marginal improvement. it like you have steak house and with this 1 year effort, imagine chefs can save 50 millisecond on time to season a steak. do it really help you make more money or improve customer experience? no. honestly it fake work.
software not have to end like tv show. but you reach maturity level where now people doing things for political reason, to justify headcount, because they need complexity to demonstrate promotion requirement. all the wrong reasons. root causes many: over hiring.. obsession with growth..empire building..promotion. instead of next true innovation just adding duct tape and doing work with no value for you real customer.
knowing when to stop and refocus is key skill and having focus to do in large organization very hard. need founder like entrepreneur business person mindset and strong influence or top down leadership mandate to stop the nonsense.
my experience at two big tech companies said this extremely overdue.
especially since about 2012.. lots of added head count. managers and sr. managers and directors #1 priority on increasing head count to grow empires and get promotions. it elephant in the room supported by easy US fed policy. uncomfortable truth these people dont want to admit.
what is vision for these new teams? if stock price is $100/share does director X’ org contribute $.50 or $1 or $10? many teams are negative contributors to this equation.
actually much of $ attribution and downstream impact was gamed. the founders and their protege slowly left and replaced with professional managers. no vision. no obsession with features. little thought to value. instead they see prestigious job. “i have 150 people report to me.” that kind of discourse mainstream. indirect way of bragging “look how important i am.”
maybe 15% of employees at both companies providing actual value building new things that bring revenue. another 15-20% just support legacy cruft with software patches. no feature work. no innovation. large teams of engineers and managers resting and vesting.
it is honestly entitlement and horrible joke. why these people entitled to $200-500k+ salaries??? its like this country built fake economic class of worker. little to no economic output.
cuban here. please dont pretend america care about democracy. america have interests. when they need new regime they suppress democracy as needed or push for democracy. main idea to get some regime subservient to american economic interest.
why america has so many migrants at border but america do nothing or even talk about what crisis happening in central or south america country? instead they fighting proxy war in ukraine. why? more lucrative and profit opportunity in ukraine. south america not have resources or proxy war opportunity.
and given state of American government..race issues..economic issue..growing gap..unaffordable housing..America last country to dictate how other country should run.
i not favor cuban government, but your post bullshit. you idea that you know more about cuba like you on some pedestal.watch as you infrastructure crumble you homeless and drug population rise
> The wedding was held outside, the food prepared out in the open air as it always is. The crows sat on their electric poles overlooking the venue as preparations were made. If an opportunity presented itself, they did not hesitate: a piece of meat for a skewer, a half-chopped onion, old bits of lettuce and tomato, all went one by one to the crows who commanded the territory.
Aware developing countries have lower work safety standards but didnt realize food safety also missing. street vendor food is all outside, yes..but Pakistani weddings i think would not be street vendor but catering service. To learn food prepared outside in 40+ Celsius heat shocks me.
Easy solution for you. dont like their policies? dont do business with them.
if people create idle accounts on my own service id delete too. good news is you dont have to use it. :)
had director colleague say this in same words.
it cynical view, so we pretend it not happening and not rock boat.
well here we are now with layoffs. entire teams who produce no economic value. problem is too many people hired for empire building purposes.
it is easier to ignore real issues causing stagnating product. instead, bring in professional manager class. product owners, program managers, software engineering managers, senior mansgers. layers and layers of competing political incentive. building complexity for promotions and to increase head count.
Game they play is just say right platitudes like “obsessing with customers”, “all about customer journey”, “reduce friction for customer” and humble brag “my org have 120 people report”.
Me experience: functional constructs and declarative problem solving helps in grand scheme, as does putting your time into building missing abstractions or using right library.
with big monolithic architecture not only modularity important. also good if language has good set of libraries. also easier to maintain with strong typing. no strong typing in large code base is deal breaker to me.
did not have formal education on distributed systems in my country but learned many things in this topic on job.
So then me took course by lindsey kuper on youtube. it is amazing course, super clear instructor even for me with not good english.
i think professor in this class say these diagrams came from leslie lamport who did lot essential thinking in distributed system space