bps4484

I thought the same thing about that quote. He is mixing up events with these two professions.

Nobody wants an engineer who is passionate while they are literally writing code, screaming at the computer and flailing his hands[1]. Much in the same way we wouldn't want a judge to be passionate when he's handing down a sentence.

But a judge should care about our laws, our constitution, and be opinionated about them. I want a surgeon who understands how the practice of surgery is evolving and stays up to date on best practices. I want a bridge builder to get ABSOLUTELY passionate about the type of materials used on a bridge and not settle for anything less. Similarly I think the best software engineers care deeply and are knowledgable about the craft of software engnineering.

[1] Well, I've had a coworker who did this and it was actually really comical and we were all entertained, but he was the exception that proved the rule.

Absolutely it has run its course. There are a now a litany of javascript frameworks to suit the variety of projects being done in javascript (both server and client side), and browsers are now far more compatible (I think partially because browser makers realized with the popularity of jquery how in demand that was) but I was only recognizing what an innovation it was at the time.

Jquery - abstracted away tons of cross-browser inconsistent behavior, both with the dom and javascript, and added new selectors to make dom manuplation easier. I think there was a reason it was adopted as fast as it was, it really was a 10x improvement in working client side.

I'm most curious about how the experience was, both for the atlas team and the product team, around this quote, "Atlas is “managed,” which means that developers writing code in Atlas only need to write the interface and implementation of their endpoints. Atlas then takes care of creating a production cluster to serve these endpoints. The Atlas team owns pushing to and monitoring these clusters."

Does this imply that the atlas team gets into the weeds of understanding the business and business logic behind these endpoints to know the scalability and throughput needs? Is the autoscaler really good enough to handle this? If it's transparent to the product team, are they aware of their usage (potentially unexpected)? I imagine the atlas team would have to be very large with these sorts of responsibilities.

From a product team perspective I imagine they are still responsible for database configuration and tuning? Has the daily auto-deployment led to unexpected breaks? Who is responsible for rollbacks? And is the product team responsible and capable of hotfixes?

Maybe a more broad question which all of my questions above speak to: how are the roles and responsibilities set up between the atlas team and the product engineering team that owns the code, and how has the transition to that system been?

I scrolled down the thread wondering if someone would mention him and if nobody did I was going to.

It's insane how much hype he had at a young age and how he's delivered again and again. The only players with similar [amount delivered] * [hype] values are peyton manning and tim duncan, but lebron's is way bigger.

Also worth mentioning in his accolades: brought a championship to his hometown, has never had any PR disasters (except for "the decision"), has many charities (scholarships, gives out bikes, etc), and elevated his friends and family to make them successful as well. He's basically done everything right.

And I say this as a long time celtics fan and lebron hater.

But wouldn't all those same problems you outline be the case in other countries?

I think the question isn't "Why are infra costs so high?" which I think your list answers, but instead "Why are infra costs so high in the united states?"

I'm very saddened by this loss. I took him for both 6.034 (artificial intelligence) and his survey course 6.803 (the human intelligence enterprise). Some memories:

1. I still use VSNC (you can read more about it here: http://blog.pptstar.com/?p=441) as a simple model for delivering technical talks. As a coincidence I has already been planning on giving a meta talk about this to my team next Friday. He cared more about, and spoke more about, presentation skills than every other lecturer I had at MIT, combined.

2. He was also the only professor I heard speak about the value of leadership skills and how they can be cultivated.

3. He really did care about his students. I remember his saying to help us get over imposter syndrome, "At MIT, 5% of students think it's too easy, 10% of students think it's just right, and 85% think that at any moment they're going to be found out."

4. I still remember his definition of intelligence as something you almost understand. He would tell the story of giving a preview of an upcoming lecture where they would write a program to do differential calculus. A student came up to him and said "There is no way a computer could ever do that!" After the lecture the same student came up to him and said "That wasn't really AI. The program just does it the way I do it!"

This article is a little bit old because he mentions the upcoming union vote. The vote has now been cast, and 95% of writers have voted to only work with agents signing a code of conduct that bans packaging:

https://deadline.com/2019/03/wga-members-overwhelmingly-appr...

Funny side note I learned from my girlfriend who is an aspiring writer and has worked at an agency: agents call this practice "getting points on the package" which may be a term that rings a bell if you've watched the wire, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Points%20on%...

"Amusing Ourselves to Death" is one of if not the best books for its avant garde cultural criticism.

I would recommend the book, but would skim the first 300 or so pages and only read deeply the parts that catch your eye. I think the author was on a mission to get the book to 400 pages and there is a LOT of filler on every detail of every Jho Low party and the types of gems the wife of the PM of malaysia bought.

I think it is also worth calling out that at least 2 of those acquisitions, android and google, were made before they became as dominant as they are today. Android was purchased by google 2 years before it even launched, and while youtube was explosively popular at the time of purchase, many at the time thought the 1B purchase price for a revenue-less company was a stupid decision, and nobody was concerned about a monopoly. In other words, the businesses, and their dominance in those business, were made well after the acquisition such that I don't think if they had been investigated rigorously by the FTC they would have been stopped.

I'm not sure if the same was also true for doubleclick (I don't know enough about ad tech).

> You cannot tell your selection committee 'I refactored code and that'll save us probably 100 bugs in the next year, times 2 hours per bug, at $300 per man hour, a $60000 savings.'.

You can't? Especially if you have documentation of the bugs that were previously happening, this is very solid evidence. Another one I've seen, "This would cause a weekly page a 2 am, and half the time ended up being an all day problem that needed to be put out. This no longer happens and is worth $X of engineering time."

I would agree though that second example "built a feature that saved $60000" is a stronger statement because it's so much more quantifiable to the businesses bottom line.

To go back to my original point though, we all (not just managers, but the entire team) should constantly be pushing to get ourselves to objective measure. The more subjective measures are used ("I refactored this code which is now easier to read") the more you allow the bad politics I outlined earlier where a boss and his buddy team up to get raises. It's very toxic and should be avoided at all costs.

First, just to make sure we are on the same page, are you in agreement that this wasn't politics, but perhaps a disagreement in the roles and responsibilities of a manager and an engineer and what an engineer is expected to do at google? I just want to make sure we're on the same page on that, which was the crux of my point.

But as to your point, on the roles and responsibilities of managers and engineers, I mostly agree with your comment about the role of a manager, which as I said before should be responsible for working with the engineer both to show their impact, but also making sure they're actually doing impactful work.

I disagree that if it's your job as an engineer to show what your impact is that you'll come up with creative ways of doing this. You can try to come up with creative ways of showing impact, and maybe a promotion panel will agree with you, but maybe they won't and you'll be left without recognition (I've seen this happen before).

To your last comment about competent engineers, I don't know what company you work at, but at mine, shipping projects on time, and under budget, especially when they are large in scope and involve complex technologies or large teams that you've led, and especially when those projects have impact on the company's bottom line, those project are considered major impact and and those engineers are amply rewarded.

[Manager here]

I don't really see what the political game is here that he lost. What I think he failed to do was show impact in a clear a visible way.

Don't get me wrong, there is salesmanship required here in terms of clearly demonstrating your value, but it's not like Google was giving the promo to some other guys who always went out to dinner with his boss and sucked up to him, or the guy the boss went to college with, or the guy who throws his team under the bus to make himself look good. that is politics, "politics" being defined as acts that make you look good but are detrimental behavior to the team and the company. And I think that's what google is trying to avoid with their promo panels where you get feedback from peer, peer team managers, and make the judgement as an impartial panel.

Also I see this as a manager failure. Clearly this manager isn't well calibrated, because he continues to get "strongly exceeds expectations" and yet can't get you the promotion you obviously deserve if you strongly exceed expectations. They also should be helping you both with your promo packet so that you're putting your best foot forward, and talking to you about how you can improve and demonstrate your value when you do your work to make sure you can get an even strong promotion packet the next time. Given this manager failure, I'm not surprised the employee quit.

I've often wondered about the selection bias of the "80% of restaurants fail, they're the worst investment" because I had a suspicion that many people start restaurants thinking essentially, "My Mom's pasta sauce is so good, people say they would pay for it. I should open up a restaurant with her recipe." and then proceed to fall flat on their face.

Reading this article, I think I'm right. I wonder what the success rate is of a restaurant is when the owner has even a basic idea of how the various positions in a restaurant work and the important business metrics.

Unfortunately I agree with your intent (going after your dreams, trying to enrich your life or enlighten yourself in a way that may seem crazy to most) but disagree that it can be applied here.

He literally did nothing to prepare himself to fulfill his dream other than a mandatory 3 months of lazily being a line cook learning nothing, and a weekend cooking at a festival.

I'm not in the food industry, but off the top of my head here are basic things I would advise to prepare yourself for success:

1. Get yourself a year of runway so that you can spend 1 year being a restaurant owner's apprentice. Spend 3 months being a line cook, 3 months working bar, 3 months wait staff, and 3 months helping with the book. 2. Use this year network with restaurant owners. Agree to buy 10 them drinks so they can tell you about their biggest mistakes. This < $1000 investment probably could have saved him 10s of thousands. 3. Use this year to also network in the service industry generally, which tends to have high turnover and is good to have a network to find replacements.

This plan took me 10 minutes to think of and could probably be vastly improved. Instead he just hoped things would somehow work out. At some point you shouldn't applaud someone for following their dreams and instead just call it what it is, dumb.

I completely agree. I grew tomatoes for the first time last year and couldn't believe the difference in taste. The cherry tomatoes had a sweetness I had never tasted in a cherry tomatoe before. It was almost like they were cross-bred with grapes. The heirlooms were so dense that when you cut them almost no water was on the plate. It was amazing the difference from anything I had tasted in the supermarket.

An interesting side note for those in the Bay Area: these were grown in sf, and in PAC heights which is on the foggier side. Tomatoes survived better than a lot of other plants. I can only imagine how they would have grown down in Silicon Valley with twice the sun and heat.

I agree with what everyone else has responded with about what makes instagram so huge, but there is something else that made it popular:

You only upload 1 photo.

True, someone can dump a lot of photos one at a time, but I think that's a bit of an instagram faux pas. It tends to be that if someone is on vacation (for instance) they don't dump all their photos on instagram, they choose their one best photo, crop it, add a filter to it, and try to make it great. You don't create an album like you do on facebook. This makes the quality of what you see in your feed a lot higher than what you would see on facebook. I've been told by a few heavy users of instagram that this is what they love about it.

"Four years ago Google said they would have a driverless car for sale in 3-5 years."

This is a side tangent, but do you have a source for that? I'm only curious because it has seemed to me most makers of autonomous vehicles, and in particular google, were overly cautious with their estimates and have been repeatedly beating them.

I'm not a doctor but just had a loved one die of cancer, and what the parent has said is correct from what I learned. Here is a breast cancer survival breakdown by stage:

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/breast-can...

Stage 1 they do pretty much exactly what you propose: lumpectomy (take out the tumor), radiation (zap tumor cells in a localized way) and chemo (poison yourself, but with a poison that especially likes to kill tumor cells). The survival rate after 5 years is 99%.

By contrast you have Stage 4 with a survival rate of 15% after 5 years. This is when the cancer has metastasized. This basically means the cancer isn't just in that body part (in my link, the breast), it's all over the body. For my loved one there were many many tumors on the lungs, kidney, liver, and tailbone. Even worse, it's in the blood, which means even if you could remove all these tumors (and put your body through horrible trauma to do so), they would still come back. At this point you don't cure the disease, you treat it and hope for the best. There are many many different types of treatment. Some won't work for a specific person, some will, but only for awhile, and if you're very lucky some may cure the person, but there are no guarantees and doctors play a bit of a guessing game.

Although there are many different types of cancer, in these later stages there are very few ways a person dies. The cancer breeds in places with high cell turnover in mission critical organs (lungs, kindneys, liver) and you die.

The problem with making the exceptions public is you're then making athlete's medical records public. There is a slippery slope here as well that as drugs continue to get added to the list of banned substances, an athlete has to report almost any ailment and it's remedy.

There should be audits of these exceptions and how they're granted, but I don't think it should be public.

I love the Steve Blank definition that "A startup is a business in search of a scalable business model" because it really cuts out all of the companies have their business model and metrics in place. It would certainly eliminate a company like evernote, and most if not all unicorns for that matter.

Another area that's scarily inefficient in transportation:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/12/technology/lyft-medical-ride...

"Typically, National Medtrans Network calls livery cab companies to book rides. Cancellations, late cars and fraud are big problems. Sometimes it can take as many as six phone calls to complete one booking. A 2005 analysis found that 3.6 million Americans miss or delay medical appointments every year because of transportation issues."

[note: I work at a company that allows telecommuting and I currently manage 5 engineers in two different locations]

I wanted to expound on "The bar to communication is lower when they're so accessible."

I think a lot of communication involves understanding the culture (and by this I mean 'the way someone views the world' and not a more the mainstream sort of 'they are asian' type of definition) of a person. The speed at which you are able to understand a person's culture (what technologies they like and don't like and why, what they're previous jobs were like, what type of family did they grow up in, what jokes do they like, etc, etc, etc) increases drastically when they are working on site, and it's usually small bits of downtime (lunch, coffee break, shooting the shit late night) when you learn a lot of this stuff. Not having this understanding comes with a communication cost, and it's not just for the managers, it's also for the engineers they work with (and it goes both ways, the telecommuter is going to have a tougher time understanding the culture of their coworkers/manger).

Which isn't to say this why my company doesn't allow telecommuting (on the contrary, we do), but I think this nuance is hard to put a tangible dollar amount on but is very real. Additionally this does happen eventually with remotes (I have two great ones that I really think I understand) and there are things you can do to facilitate it, but it is harder.

It may create more sprawl, but 2 of the big complaints I've heard about living in a city is how hard it is to get around, and it's hard to have a car that allows you to leave. Autonomous cars would solve both of these problems while freeing up cityscapes to also be more walkable/bikeable (you have to do something with what was former car parking).

This future is interesting because both living way out in the suburbs AND living in a city both become more attractive.

"but about creating want in the user" reminded me of a quote, but it was about television advertising, which I think may be a more apt comparison:

Indeed, we may go this far: The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons for a picnic in the country -- these tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

I highly recommend the book http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Busi...

No, there were many changes to the curriculum, and for a variety for reasons.

They created 6.01, which serves at an "intro to EECS" so it involves both EE and CS, as opposed to the old intro 6.001 which was really an introduction to CS. Some argue that this course is easier (I never took it, so I can't say) which could definitely be argued is to make EECS a little more gentle and open in response to the dot com crash.

They also broke up 2 very difficult courses, 6.046 introduction to algorithms and 6.170 lab for computer science, and at least put some of their course work into new courses. Again this could be seen as making the entire major a little gentler.

They also changed requirements. In the past there had been a lot of CS focused students who were uninterested in doing any EE, and were choosing to major in 18.c (math with computer science) to avoid an EE course load. The department right thought it was a little crazy that people were leaving the CS department in order to focus more on CS, so they lightened the required EE coursed for 6.3 (a major focused on CS) and vice versa.

This is all my recollection from the 07-09 era and from talking to some students since. There could be some errors in details.

It may have been that it just took 7 years to actually get a new course in place, but it wasn't until fall 2007 that MIT officially got rid of 6.001 as required course, well after the dot com crash.

There were a TON of changes that happened with the MIT EECS curriculum at that time, so perhaps it was a holistic response to the dot com crash that was beyond just 6.001.

It may be that a company has done very well but hasn't raised more money to bump up the present market value of the stock. In this case you would want to exercise early so that the clock starts for capital gains in the event of liquidity.

Why is it an absurd statement?

I legitimately don't know. I don't know what IFR qualified means.