birdymcbird

> “ Because people are human beings who empathize when bad things happen to people, not with companies that did an 'oops' an over hired and place the consequence of their over hiring on people just trying to live their life.”

agree 100%. But adding to this:

in anecdotal big tech experience at two companies, many people producing no value. they know this. rest and vest is what they did.

managers were given increasing headcounts. they hire more and more managers. explosion of managerial class then hire kids out of school.

no vision..direction..why teams or even entire orgs exist. this a massive grift when you paying $200k+ in salary and rsu alone to most junior ic and $300k to most junior manager.

how you provide value is question no one asked. instead people brag ‘i have org with 60 people’ or 300 people. Ego game, broken incentive, and innovation declines. Customers lose because to show revenue growth, both me companies just show more ads.

hardworking good workers losing jobs. companies to blame but also to blame people comfortable in fake jobs especially managerial class who do nothing.

Someone knowing existing pattern help me understand this. right now when i use these “foundation” apis in swift it is doing c call? so they rewriting now the c code in swift? (dont do ios or mac code so now sure)

me dont understand what make it faster now. i once wrote some jni code to call c++ library from java. does mean there some similar code to do cross language call? they get rid of it and so things now faster?

offtopic but debugging crashes in c++ over jni call was super hard. logs not work and me not figure out how to fix. wonder if they had similar “troubles” and this make everything easier :)

always feel skeptical when seeing large code base have “rewrite”. try many time in me career thinking there good reasons but super hard and not best value in end

only tried amazon kindles. bought one with a keyboard when me much younger. was gifted a new model last year.

it same thing. battery life very good but it so slow. new model has menu screen like android.

me young when I saw T1 and what memorable to me exactly the horror element of movie.

> “Terminator allows viewers to have a legitimate sense of discovery while watching the movie, to learn crucial plot details largely as Sarah learns them, which makes for very efficient storytelling.”

feel today interesting story points would get shown in trailer.

> “The fact that investment is being driven by pure hype, by data-free narratives rather than actual revenue data or first-principles analysis. The circularity of it all -- hype drives investment which drives hype which drives investment. The influx of influencer engagement bait.”

Think this cynical. author good to see ads or marketing using hype for clicks. people do stuff to make money on latest trend, just nature.

but me dont know anything productive in web3. it hype through all way. English not me first language. writing use almost feel magic to have chatgpt clean and rewrite my posts. also used for coding examples. dont think this equal to web3. maybe need time to mature to billion dollar scale but me wouldnt bet money against

> “we believe a concerted effort to reverse the rising tide of bureaucracy offers a more immediate and less speculative route to enhanced economic performance”

David sacks was on episode of show “UnHeard”. Hit nail on head. ‘professional elite’ or ‘surplus elites’ he called them.

sacks came at it from politic angle. we know what happening but media and everyone quiet. this manager class say right politically correct thing.

in two big tech company me saw anti pattern where so many managers who give no real output. directors.. product and engineering management.. all involved in increasing headcount fight territory battles.

product manager and managers of product managers who just have meetings. product same thing as it existed 2 year ago..3 year ago.. 5 year ago. no innovation. maybe find way to show more ad.

me immigrant in this country. what me saw is h1b and other visa farm. entire industry of importing from other country. people sit idle.

if stock price $100 a share this organization not contributing even 1$ to that price. revenue is from legacy ad business. managers just bureaucratic up charge and organization so slow and resistant to change they contribution maybe -5$ or lower negative number.

Any story need have start, middle end. Halo me played maybe back in 2001? It now over twenty year later story should ended long ago. but they focus on make more money even if it no purpose.

many company do this. was big fan of avengers and infinity movies. very nice build up and conclusion. then they throw water on it all and because of multiverse it make everything cheap.

these companys no passion or respect. do what it take to make some more dollars. very sad.

> This kind of conspiratorial thinking is just bizarre.

You’re really that convinced this is honest reporting? That media isn’t biased? Or is it just bias when the media reports something you don’t like?

> The popular narrative is that these are just a bunch of bloated tech companies laying off surplus employees that don't do anything useful.

Wrong. not only surplus employees but surplus elites.

in recent years, big tech paid bloated compensations to people producing little or no economic value. saw first hand professional managers dont understand tech get hired by friends and collectively engage in empire building and building head count. easy promotion game.

engineers create complexity for smallest problem and launch new services. get promoted. then they get hell out and move to new team. managers willingly accept tech debt to justify more head count hire more managers and engineers under them.

you tell us what innovation come out of amazon fire alexa kindle. same thing they sold 5 years ago same hardware maybe little bit better speaker. why pay for increasing army of engineers? and me just discussing amazon devices.

how many engineers you need to run website? has shopping gotten better in 5 years? No! it way worse, too many ads.

this a massive grift. Most value amazon gets is these people don’t start their own company and threat amazon with competition.

big tech took advantage of cheap or free money from US Fed and created class of elites. Now the game ending for now anyway

Looks like cool project but would help if landing page details or give example of what this service is or what unique. it is not clear and i don’t want to create account just to figure out purpose

worked at two big tech companies. there is perverse incentive to grow your organization. gets you to director or VP. if you engineer it goes to your promotion packet to get you promoted.

pattern i saw is teams do not build customer feature but work on “efficiency” or “cost saving” project. Ok, so you build something that other teams should use because it will save them time. Sounds very good on paper.

so you do these things to entrench your team DEEP into the tech stack. now people depend on you you use it as reason to get even more head count. ok now the engineers got their promotion but they struggle to support these teams when things not working. So they leave. they got promo, why stay?

managers now use all this ammo to ask for even more hc. it is self serving cycle. Now..development harder. harder to push new features. new people from college come. first they have imposter syndrome and think this is all great and they just not smart to get it. within few year they get it..see processes and tools are idiotic. they learn to play the same game. circle of life continue

>”Trying to claim there is some kind of conspiracy against Musk or Tesla”

this is not defense of elon but indictment of media propaganda

>”and further claiming that forbidding discussion of wages is no big deal because other companies also do it”

me never said this. youre clearly antagonizing and even trolling me.

think my opinions didn’t fit cleanly with your agenda so like many of virtue signaling group, you resort to attacks and suppress opinions. fascist technique

>”So.. you have no issue with Elon or Tesla for exploiting the ignorance of poor people like you? You desperately defend them not just in spite of what companies like them have done to you, but because of it?”

Not my point at all did not defend elon or tesla. you English better than mine and think that much obvious to you. Sad that you continue this strawman posts and anger because someone say something not fitting your agenda.

> Why did you submit to their unlawful attempts at restricting your speech? Was it just ignorance of your rights?

don’t come from privilege. For some people easy to virtue signal in a condecending way, as you do here. Was getting paid minimum wage to support family. whatever law is or however government holds that law if ever me can not risk losing job and not paying apartment rent with children at home.

>”No different to you pushing your narrative that everyone should submit to the unlawful whims of employers.”

no my point that Tesla and elon singled out because media hunt against him. my point that this has been abused and broken for decades, as i told you in me examples. media does not care. suddenly they talk about company breaking law as if they care about justice. Lol

for reasons you respond in bad faith..have unproductive discussion and on purpose or from arrogant misrepresent what i say and argue strawmans.

if you has issue with elon or Tesla, fine. amazes me how social justice people like you do this virtue signaling on behalf of laborers,poor (I was one through 1990 and 2000s) but it about you and your agenda not do with helping others or law

> Maybe they're not afraid of anything. Maybe Tesla and Musk are just grubby operators.

what it mean grubby operators? there is no major headline in 2022/2023 than daily obsession with musk and every move?

there is narrative to destroy musk and undermine his companies. paradox that tesla ev company and media favors progressive shift to ev going away from fossil fuel.

much of anger and propaganda since he bought twitter i think they fear his active management style is threat to american mass media monopoly on shaping culture and world opinion. they fear because he owns twitter and fired much of company that had political alignment with american mass media machinery.

>”Lots of companies doing a shitty thing is not some magical excuse for any given company also doing that shitty thing”

strawman argument. something is widespread and has been widespread but now has spotlight because “tesla” and “musk”. and spotlight on tesla here, not other abusers.

the news media doing this reporting is not to unhide injustice but a focused assault on musk and tesla.

should force critical thinking about why media has turned so hard against tesla or musk. what is it they are afraid of?

every employer ive had has been clear about this. in mid 90s i worked at a electronics store called circuit city. had coworker get fired after discussing hourly pay. in 2000s i worked gas stations and hotels. same thing. went back to school and first white collar job discussing salary was not allowed and they say so at orientation training.

think tesla news is because people are against musk and targeting him. convinced this still widespread and happening everywhere. media just pushing narrative.

ios. i use macbook air and iphone. with settings, subscriptions, passwords all saved and synchronized using icloud. the camera on my phone works well. everything just works and i have no complaints.

me used samsung phones many years ago and did not like preinstalled bloat apps it would not let me remove. overall me think android not bad. tried google pixel phone and for its price i think it very good purchase.

i am big fan of apple products. feel they have high quality focus with hardware and software. some companies release barely working stuff to rush to market. Like, i never pay for amazon products quality and features feel like they hate customer.

Fitness goals regressed later part of year, but overall i in much better shape. stronger now than 1 year ago but did put on body fat too.

other big goal was to work less and better balance hobbies and family. always believed in extreme ownership and progress but introspected hard and found politics and games at my company were pushing me to more working hours, not netting raw results.

i did not accomplish this goal and 2022 i worked 70 hour weeks, often sacrificing sleep and mental health. did slow down in q4.

still positive learning for me is i cant tune out or slow down because work is that important for me. but instead of making other people rich or successful should work for my self. biggest learning is that i have been giving away free ip to a bureaucratic, slow system that cannot and will not do much valuable thing with it. so why give this to a company? why not keep knowledge and file patent my self?

Always wanted to have something like the crafting interpreters style book but implementing a database from scratch, and bonus points for a distributed system with a leader/replica model, leader election and things like partitioning, resizing partitions, handling node failure.

Something like building a toy dynamodb variant. Would pay good money for this.

Is one thing to read about and guesstimate implementation choices from white paper. Totally another if databases/distributed systems expert walks you through propagating write ahead logs to replicas. Hehe

And what it means to have eventual consistent writes vs strong writes in practice. A way to teach by doing.

another pe here.

i have different opinion. few college new hires already personal trait and past life experiences that give them solid work ethic and ability to focus.

some see themselves struggle and have awareness to really see this. many of most of them in my experience want to be in office.

then you have remainder who isnt able to dive into company (team) culture or influence it, understand need to deliver and have impact, and become independent contributors. these are good engineers but haven’t figured out that you do have to put in the work.

id say the company I was at and the company I joined are both remote first. remote first means different things to different companies, orgs, and even teams. there’s no canonical definition, if you know one please share it.

I think group 3 I described desperately needs to be in office. these are like the high school kids who didn’t get to experience high school during COVID. unfortunately the environment is so hyper politicized that this wfh thing is sensitive topic and many companies don’t want to properly address problem head on. its being told as binary choice without taking more nuanced approach

amazon a product manager focused organization in many parts of their business. Person A comes to america to study for masters or mba. A gets hired by amazon. A is under pressure to release features to increase sales or show how their feature is attributed some top or bottom line metric increase. A fears losing job under amazon cut throat culture and will optimize for exactly that. No amazon job means bye bye visa you go home. if you have family, sell everything and move back.

so as you could guess customer benefit is not primary or even second third focus.

company leadership create culture of one incentive. workers output optimizing for that incentive.

Very open ended question. Maybe tell us what you tried so far, what depth knowledge or background you has now.

pick any of the top results on youtube for react development. course not super necessary but if u really want, check react on coursera and take any of top results with good rating.

if you want to be very successful dont glue yourself to one specific stack.

start with react node but focus on patterns like how requests are made from client to server, server gives back responses. you application had metrics, logs, likely connects to some database.

it would be good to take an intro to CS course on YouTube. Stanford and mit have free online.

Deeper understanding will help u differentiate from crowd of everyone else trying to take boot camp and become coder.

practice what you learn. Code side projects. learning react? Everything u learn, try apply to your own website.

> super competitive FAANG jobs

the faang hype is oversold. last 12 years of my career were at two of these. i lucked on the pay. that’s the biggest benefit.

alot of work is mundane, little value. both my employers ballooned in size. the seeds of our extremely slow, painful regression have Ben obvious. chains of professional managers who dont care to understand the product, the customers, and have no mission or passion. its a self serving grift on how to survive, throw your own people under bus to protect yourself and extreme focus on personal advancement. all kinds of politics and games to get more head count and grow org so you can get to next level. practically zero time investing in people you hire, their development, and of course what value do you all provide, are your customers happy. 20% of people drive 80% of value and those systems are already built… most recent stuff is just experimental with no monetization strategy.

the best people in FAANG are super super good. Hard workers, brilliant work ethic, hardcore engineers. the majority is just red tape bureaucracy of people who provide little to no economic value. at best it benefits company because they won’t start their own company and force faang to actually compete.

sorry for long rant. Tl:dr pay amazing especially if market is good. everything else mixed bag, delusions, politics, empire building

Interesting bit:

> “The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet,” he said.”

agree article is mostly clickbait. these guardian writers appear to get paid per article or per paragraph

anyway if first concept topic fascinates you or anyone else reading this, i suggest you read the “three body problem” by liu cixin. you in for real treat ;)

you don’t need 3K+ employees to keep the site running.

i was at google and a service you probably use everyday if you have android was being supported by 3 people.

not defending elon but the company was bleeding money on edge of bankruptcy. feels like entitlement to me to give fake jobs to thousands of people who don’t produce value.

i thought amazon would dominate and conquer books market but they never got beyond just super basic concept of selling a book online. Finding interesting books is awful, everything is an ad. reading on kindle is ok. i have prime and once or twice a year read a free book on it.

i assume the problem is complacency. I don’t think buying real solid books has really changed on Amazon at all in past 5 years. kindle digital reader is same as it was 5 years ago. i wonder how many people work in kindle and what they actually do.

Question wasnt directed at me but if you like three body problem I also recommend the expanse series.

What percentage of non macos developers use linux or windows because of apple hardware cost?

am aware of hackintosh but not sure how well it works for dev productivity.

any well built service architecture doesn’t require a massive head count of engineers to keep things running. if code isn’t constantly changing because of new features, it’s behavior should be same. If traffic increases, more hardware will automatically get provisioned and added behind your load balancers, and lbs should auto scale as well.

you must need a few support staff which you can hire contractors for to keep things like OS and other software dependencies patched with latest updates.. and if u using third party cloud, depending on abstraction you get this taken care of as part of the package.