249 karma · joined March 24, 2024
What if the President signs an Executive Order directing himself to shoot someone in the street?
The US couldn't pass the ERA, which just enshrines women's rights in the Constitution. Anything more controversial like "the President can't do extrajudicial murders" would be an endless partisan battle
People get very judgemental when Putin assassinates defectors, but when Obama does it it's ok?
If you're reading this, just on a tactical level for job hunting one thing I would say is to remove the (+/-) part of the resume. People can do the math on the duration if they care. Maybe even just put the years. I hope you're able to find something that isn't quite as dismal as 99% of tech jobs
South Korea was under varying levels of dictatorship from the Korean War until the Sixth Republic in 1987. Roh Tae-woo, the first president after authoritarian rule, was imprisoned for corruption. Roh Moo-hyun, the President from 2003-2008 was investigated for corruption and died by suicide rather than face charges. Lee Myung-bak, his successor, was imprisoned for corruption. Park Geun-hye, his successor, was imprisoned for corruption.
I don't know that South Korea is the poster child for a "better-run and not not-so-corrupt" society.
My advice is to just get a tech job where you can coast, work from home, and knock out a couple tickets a day. Have lots of flexibility to see your kid and take vacations while they're young. Some places offer 4 day weeks and you still take home 6 figures.
Sales Engineering or Customer Success would be an interesting pivot but you usually make less money and have less flexibility than SWEs
Change Data Capture (CDC) has also gotten really good and mainstream. It's relatively easy to write your data to a RDBMS and then capture the change data and propagate it to other systems. This pattern means people aren't writing about Kafka, for instance, because the message queue is just the backbone that the CDC system uses to relay messages.
These architectures definitely still exist and they mostly satisfy organizational constraints - if you have a write-once, read-many queue like Kafka you're exposing an API to other parts of the organization. A lot of companies use this pattern to shuffle data between different teams.
A small team owning a lot of microservices feels like resume-driven developnent. But in companies with 100+ engineers it makes sense.
I don't know that this is objectively true. The more accurate thing to say is that sometimes it's better to be wrong in the same way as everyone else. VC investing seems to be mostly based on chasing trends and "pattern matching", so trying to do anything heterodox is going to be an uphill battle.
And yes, some businesses are even harder due to regulatory requirements
Honestly VC-funded startups seem like a cake walk compared to actually starting a small business. Your biggest challenge is walking into a room full of rich dudes and schmoozing for your pay cheque. If you fail you get acquired and get golden handcuffs.
If you start a real business you can expect to take on debt, and you'll be personally guaranteeing it because nobody cares about equity in your boutique ice cream parlour. Plus a 5-year lease (which you will also personally guarantee).
Now your backend devs aren't bored writing "business logic" and your front end devs aren't bored waiting for your backend devs. You have a new class of inscrutable errors and performance issues, but that's why you pay your backend devs the big bucks! Because some guys from a technical college couldn't possibly solve your issue, you need to pay 250k to people who went to Stanford or Berkeley.
People complain about left-leaning protests taking over a public park - these guys took over multiple public spaces in multiple parts of the city. About a square mile in the middle of the city.
The AI trend is luring in a wide range of non-tech businesses that aren't VC backed (ex. car dealerships). This is the golden goose for tech companies in a tough macro climate.
To be clear I think it's not adding real value for these buyers, but there's a tremendous amount of FOMO. The media has been complicit in selling AI as a panacea for small businesses in a tough climate, and the ultimate beneficiaries will be people grifting off AI hype.
A couple years ago I thought about giving a presentation on a Golang VM I wrote to solve a simple problem, but it was seen as kind of a heterodox approach and I didn't want to deal with a million "umm acksully" questions about whether it was a real VM.