birdymcbird

> Bought Twitter, made himself look foolish doing it, and continues to make himself look foolish in the running of it.

to who? you? corporate media? this is nothing personal but do you honestly believe musk cares about how you or the corporate media portrays him? that it clouds his mind in the morning “oh no, I look like a fool?”

Are we talking about musk, whose resume includes spacex, tesla, boring company, paypal? Are you sure we’re not talking about kim kardashian?

The guy has money and influence at the .1% but it’s the fear of “looking” like a fool?

> No one has done this to him. He did it to himself

done what exactly to himself?

hes still one of the wealthiest people on the planet. he could literally shutdown Twitter tomorrow and the people who’d cry the hardest are the ones cheering for twitters collapse, on Twitter, who refuse to leave.

elon is still running spacex, Twitter, and boring company. if he lost every dime and every company, he’d get the Silicon Valley vc funding, even in this economic climate, to go do the next thing.

one thing elon has done he doesn’t get credit for is ripping the mask off this massive grift in the tech industry. With over half of the Twitter workforce gone, the site runs just fine. what exactly were these people doing? in fact, they had little to no productive output of course with exception of their culture war/far left battles they were fighting in cahoots with government.

i digress but this grift is widespread across google, meta, amazon.. all big tech. class of professional managers and a propped up elite who produce little economic output. 20% of the biz drives bottom line for the other 80%’s empire building, territorial wars, and bloated bureaucratic nonsense.

no one wants to come out and say it in fear of attacks from the corporate media, but these execs are taking note from what Elon just pulled off, in big tech and Silicon Valley vc backed companies alike

Netflix is down 53% ytd. amzn is down 51%.

Unlike some other companies, Tesla was significantly overvalued to begin with. i think even elon joked as much himself. they never an energy/battery company first and they dont know how to fit and finish. none of this regressed in the last year.

Is this really news or is it being posted as snark at Elon?

Most of the market is down, outside of energy and defense sectors. Tech and tech related things have taken a massive hit. Tesla was massively overvalued on future sales. Given we going to a recession predicted as hard landing, its within reason this stock drops and more than Toyota, honda etc

But sure, Tesla is suffering because elon is too focused on Twitter.

feels more to me like corporate news media and progressive allies have a fight with elon. they wanted him to close the Twitter deal, then they were upset elon got rid of the woke crowd running the company. now now i keep hearing Twitter is about to collapse and Tesla is collapsing, all because of elon.

i don’t buy this narrative. Nope. and from the corporate news media reports, i had a fairly negative perception of this guy until i saw his interviews and on some podcasts. he’s brash but ultimately he threatens publishing industry with what he might do at Twitter. corporate media fears him and almost has a 24/7 section devoted to him and his companies, just to get ahead in case he knives them like trump did.

The places paying the top comp do the leetcode interviews. If there are companies you know of paying $300k+ without leet code, post that here.

My experience in both big tech and SV start ups has been leet code interviews, and lessor focus on English. To be specific as long as you can explain a problem and solution in simple words, Pete don’t really care about developers not having sharpest grammatical skills or polished writing.

Companies like amazon will pick your writing skills to death but only once you’re at senior or staff level. At the junior level it’s all about execution.

I often have moments of insights with really solid ideas. One thing that’s worked for me is to note things down, and handwriting notes instead of typing seems to work better.

as I’ve gotten older and had more adult responsibilities family work finances .. million things to keep track of, getting into zone and fully tuned is harder. don’t beat yourself up

> they tend to call what others call “overengineering” a “scalable clean architecture”.

I’m not sure what this means or what you’re referring to. It seems the premise of your argument is that Java is bad and over engineering, and anyone who disagrees is fundamentally misinformed, bias, and wrong.

With your argument, it’s actually impossible to have any kind of debate or constructive discussion because the premise is the other biased and stupid. You went from attacking the tech to actually attacking the people.

> “because they are actually using JVM a lot”

It has nothing to do with my company, and so interesting your rebuttal to my comment was snark and about an entirely different company.

Here’s your original comment.

> “if you commit in 2022 to java/scala - you subscribe to heavy 20yo over-engineering legacy, whether you want it or not”

And now you said:

> “Your success with java doesn't mean that java world is not full of legacy and suffering for many other teams.”

You painted a broad brush stroke, and I shared personal evidence of a successful business running on JVM.

Now you’re painting another brush, indirectly saying this case is exception or somehow doesn’t matter.

If you have something meaningful to say, or any particular experience on what my organization should watch out for (some blind spot), call it out.

It feels like you’re not here to teach or inform, this is more about you being right. Everyone can have an opinion. They’re worthless unless you have something actually constructive to add.

I’m assuming this is sarcasm.

I am not working at Amazon. If anything, you can view my post history and see my disfavor of big tech.

If you have something more substantial to say, please do it, but a sarcastic/snark remark isn’t jt

If you consume online content that makes you angry at one group or another group, the reality of it likely isn’t so black and white. You’re likely being fed a narrative to shape your opinion.

> “if you commit in 2022 to java/scala - you subscribe to heavy 20yo over-engineering legacy, whether you want it or not”

Fully committed to Java on services side and Scala for data transforms and Spark jobs.

The Java services have 500k-1MM TPS.

For a dev onboarding, setting up personal dev environment on Mac or their VM and creating personal cloud stack takes less than 10 min.

some of the services are up to 4-5 years old. couple spun up end of q3 this year. I think those are getting more like 100k TPS.

Devs are pretty happy, we have decent roadmap for next year, and operational support is totally reasonable. Zero pages all month (knock on wood).

We have high test coverage, including unit and integ tests, canaries, and full ci/cd. A couple code paths use AWS X-ray but with very low sample rate to avoid blowing up costs.

All the services are Java. The Scala I think is even simpler and more straightforward. Spark and a few other things orchestrated using Airflow. The Airflow scripts are in Python though.

Let me know more about your prediction for our over engineering. People are happy (close 1:1 feedback from people I mentor, their managers, and managers manager), and we’re making money [knock on wood].

Why is this not good enough and how can it be better?

Btw we have dedicated software engineers in test. Their tooling is also using Java in quite a few places, and their partnership with core dev teams is very strong. Haven’t gotten negative feedback from them or their leadership either.

>”Can you give some examples of stupid things?”

“We see a need to build X. Its fancy and shiny new technology. It is right thing to do. What problem does it solve? Dont worry about that. We are going to strong arm a few teams to adopt this, even though it costs money to build and support. Sure, we can make investment in Y instead but dont want to because solving Y doesn’t let us increase head count or write promotion documents. Plus, X is very complex. It guarantees job security for people who understand it. Let’s not worry about what happens if these people then quit and make this thing everyone elses problem”

Its not always outright nefarious reasons but there’s always an incentive structure incentivizing wrong behavior because it benefits individuals or is cool or fun thing to work on, without having meaningful impact or business value

By OC, you’re probably referring to me. I never wrote this anywhere.

So in addition to personal attacks, you’re using straw man defense.

my spouse spent $650 I think on a Dyson vac. I tried to interfere but it was going to turn into a fight and wasn’t worth it.

3 years later, its one of best purchases we’ve ever made. I put on airpods and vacuuming is almost therapeutic. It’s so light and works so damn well. not sure if it’s over priced but it’s not half the noise of the previous vac and works amazingly well.

if you start with a fundamental premise that CDC and government are 100% unbiased sources of truth, then you’ll believe this story isn’t really a story. america is so polarized that if your party is doing something dirty it’s didnt happen or if it did it’s totally justified.

> You need help dude.

> you agree with it and are triggered

> maybe you are part of that group and require introspective.

More personal attacks.

Here’s some advice for your personal benefit:

You can disagree with people and that’s fine. but share your ideas and respond to individual points you disagree with. avoid emotionally charged angry responses. you will only upset your self and drain mental energy thinking everyone else is out to get you. it’s unnecessary and unproductive

> Management control their own destiny. Coder's don't in a business.

Execs control destiny. Mid level managers can influence direction and provide a strategic and tactical vision on how to get there, but they have little control.

> If your manager calls you have to answer. If you call them they can ignore it.

”I’m not good at X so better to control people who do X because that somehow lets me have a better quality of life and people will have to bow to me.”

Hallmarks of an incompetent manager who is way in over their head. I question if I want this person as an IC, unless I can fit them into a role where they sit in a corner and can provide value while leaving everyone else alone. That attitude has potential to bring down an entire team.

> Toxic. Rethink this.

This is the second time someone disagrees with your view, provides a well written response, and you respond back with a personal attack.

I can try to steel man the other side of the argument, even though I disagree with it. nothing in your comment is a coherent, reasonable response to the op.

I’m not a gate keeper of this community but please share nuanced ideas to defend your view point. For the second time now, stop the personal attacks.

> Management allows you to control what you want to work on. OP wants enjoyment. Control provides it.

Not true. You can set direction and vision only to the extent they align with your company and leaderships goals. If you fundamentally can’t stand what your subordinates do, I doubt you can successfully influence other leaders let alone be one yourself.

Thinking that being a manager will give you “control” couldnt be further from truth. Going into the role seeking control will have disastrous consequences, if not for you, then the people who you “control”. You have far less control and you need to motivate people to properly deliver on the thing which in this case you seem to despise.

> I'd say your mentality is toxic.

Attacking me personally doesn’t validate your argument and does opposite. Leave emotions out and stick with merits of your perspective. Thanks.

> You can move towards management if you get the big picture and only code things you like.

This is terrible advice.

you hate X but somehow you can be successful in leading, motivating, mentoring, and developing people who do X all day.

This is the cancer that infected big tech. A class of professional managers who provide little to no value but don’t want to leave because the grift is so easy.

Russia isn’t Nazi Germany.

> "Give me your land and I won't kill you all" isn't much of a negotiation, is it.

And Russia isn’t trying to conquer Ukraine.

Russia doesn’t want neighboring countries, particularly Ukraine to join NATO. They’ve been repeatedly vocal and warning about this for over a decade. NATO kept that door open and said last year Ukraine entering NATO was a certainty hence the war.

Certainly, it’s easier to ignore the past two decades of context, how we got to where we are now, and just draw Nazi Germany comparisons. No one in their right mind would defend Nazis, and so you can use that tactic to ignore facts and quickly shutdown the debate.

IMO you can decide not to put in the research and go with the distorted NYTimes propaganda, but the Nazi comparisons are just intellectual dishonesty and bad faith.

This misses the point.

Google has done interesting stuff. Ideas, research papers, R&D in AI, Glass, Stadia, leading in all kinds of niches… Google Docs with real time collab editing for example. I’m not arguing against that, and to respond on that thread is a straw man.

But they can experiment all day and come up with all kinds of cool stuff but at end of day you need to monetize and make money. Not grow endless headcount, not build more and more empires of a professional managerial class who care little about actual value and more about their fiefdoms and promotions.

To make money, Google depends entirely on X and unless they quickly course correct, they risk massive disruption to their biz.

Google lost their way. The culture stagnated into one of corporate bureaucracy, red tape, and employees feeling persecuted because the contractor responsible for chocolate crepes on Thursday didn’t show up one week.

They have to start getting in shape. There’s no way around it. Yeah they’ve entrenched themselves but unless they change it will be a slow painful decline. Focus on a few things and do them extremely well instead of 50 different things that ultimately go nowhere. And figure out how to get off the ads lifeline

> I always figured that Russia wanted to own/control Ukraine, since it's a fertile, resource-rich part of the former USSR (it's a huge grain exporter; consider all the famine warnings since the war began?)

This isn’t the motivation. Putin has been saying since 2007 that NATO expansion is an existential threat to Russia. Now whether we agree with that or not is besides point. They view it that way.

They warned in 2007 Ukraine entering NATO would lead to war, but we basically told Russia that there a has been and they don’t matter. This led to what happened in 2014. Then in 2021, we basically come out in full support of pulling Ukraine into NATO.

What’s happening now is extremely dangerous. Russia can’t win in Ukraine because of west helping Ukraine and their economy is ruined after sanctions. They see this as an end of Russia.

You’re backing them in the corner. This is when rational state actors act irrational. The chance of thermonuclear war is increasing because Russia cannot take on the west in a conventional war.

We had a significant role in how we got to this war, but we won’t ever take responsibility. We pulled out of Afghanistan and now the military industrial complex is making billions through Ukraine.

Which part of ops statement is Russian propaganda?

At the onset of the current war, Russia and Ukraine met in Turkey immediately to begin diplomatic talks. You do realize we intervened and told Ukraine to walk away?

This whole narrative that Putin is irrational, that Russia is just plain evil, and any contrary perspective is “Russian propaganda” reminds me of 2003 when questioning the Iraq war effort would get you labeled as a terrorists sympathizer.

This war is far more nuanced than the US government-backed narrative being pushed in the mainstream media. That itself is propaganda.

And what’s truly embarrassing is people like yourself actively try to shut down any discussion or contrarian views. If it doesn’t conform to your view of the world, it’s propaganda.

Hard to pick specific episodes but all in and this week in tech were my favorite podcasts.

Lex Friedman interviews with Robin Hanson on “grabby aliens” and Carmack were also really god

80% of their revenue comes from ads, which is google search. Chatgpt and any other startup who invests in something like chatgpt can upend googles core business model.

and no, google doesn’t have anything significant in this space. “Innovation” behind search was to slowly increase no. if paid ads in your results, driven by need to increase revenue and keep the rest of the 80% of biz afloat.

No, but i think you do have a point. Googles board and company execs had convinced themselves they’re an untouchable money printing machine. This year, they’ve been violently woken up.

Latter statement you quoted accurately describes VC and start up world.

Big tech was even worse than this. Monopoly? That implies a vision and proper focus to achieve business goals.

My take is far less generous. This was one of the biggest grifts in recent times. the professional managerial class obsessed not with their products or services but instead on increasing headcount, building empires, and getting promotions. Office politics and political games played by people who produced little to no economic value.

Overly rosy take on big tech. I’ll use Google as example. Their execs are in full panic right now over OpenGPT.

What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome? 20% of company drives profits while 80% is a decorated R&D lab chock full of benefits, upset about cutbacks in their free oatmilk lattes, even though they’re not coming to office anyway.

these guys will double their attrition targets if not have full blown layoffs. ads drives their profits, but search has been in decline for years now.

google right now is a bloated bureaucratic whale that needs to hit the gym and get in shape. Step 1 is to get off the damn couch.

> we don’t have any incentive to try and stop it

Inaccurate. Russia is getting backed into a corner, where they believe the wests goal has been to destabilize and break Russia all along. The more desserts they get more likely they are to use a thermonuclear weapon in Ukraine.

The increasing probability of nuclear war should be sufficient motivation for america to broker a peace deal. Instead we’re sending more weapons to Ukraine.

The media narrative has removed the 20 decades of context on how we got here. Focusing only on what’s happening now, the narrative is that Russia is motivated by some strategy to conquer Europe and any different perspective means the person is stupid or a Putin shill.