candybar

Given the lack of details, my guess is that your role at those startups is wildly different from your role at the middle-sized company and also that these aren't necessarily comparable companies outside of size and age. 3 is also a stupidly small sample size for what it's worth.

Startup work isn't necessarily more chaotic than established companies. Assuming we're talking about tech companies, working at a big company doesn't mean you have "clearly set requirements" and working at a startup doesn't mean you don't have "clearly set requirements." You can have a well-defined role at a startup or a fluid role at a big company.

Not sure if anyone doesn't get this but just in case this isn't clear, the entire point of the quote isn't that people can be neatly separated into A/B/C classes, but that lowering the hiring bar can lead to a slippery slope effect that continuously lowers the bar, hence the short-term benefit of hiring someone good enough has to be measured against the long-term cost of this slippery slope effect.

A lot of startups jobs are well-defined and have a pre-existing business strategy. In fact, in my experience, startups can even be much less fluid in this sense than big companies, because startups are funded for a much narrower mission based on a very specific vision, whereas big company often has a huge scope within which there's tons of ambiguity as to what to pursue.

A lot of these types of statements generally are made by founders whose relative role at the startup (C-level) is much senior than their past or would-be role at larger companies (entry-level or close). Or early employees who got to be much more senior within a startup than they had been at a larger company. This just isn't an accurate statement for the rank & file or when you compare people at similar levels across companies.

On the whole, this is a fairly good write-up but this is just not right:

> Being at a startup is hard in a way that is almost indescribable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

Being at a startup as an employee isn't necessarily hard. You hear this type of "startup is so hard" because running companies well is hard and successful startups will often grow faster than their founders are able to grow their own ability to run companies, which makes their own job challenging. And a lot of startups are poorly run in ways that are entirely avoidable (often as a result of their CEOs not being able to grow as quickly as their company) which can make life hard for the employees as well. But this isn't a necessary part of the startup experience.

This is just garden-variety narcissism (btw, not trying to accuse the author of anything, I think we all feel this way sometimes) telling you that when you made the right decision, you were right and even when you made the wrong decision, you were actually right all along, you just let your true self be overridden. In reality, a lot of difficult decisions involve you being on both sides of the decision at different times, so it's very easy to look back on any wrong decision you made and decide that the real issue was not trusting yourself.

I'm also a bit surprised that she's throwing the "big company executive" under the bus here, given that it's very easy to identify who this is. She doesn't seem to be merely saying that the fit was the issue, given this:

> 1. They frequently use the wrong pronoun “I” followed by “[contribution to the company]”.

> 2. You dread having 1-1s with them.

> 3. They blame you or their peers.

> 4. They complain laterally and downwards.

I think your position is basically the same position that most people that advocate for monoliths (which btw is a bit of a strawman created by microservice architecture advocates in the first place) hold. People are objecting to service/network boundaries as a default domain decomposition tool and arguing that it should be used instead when there are clear and immediate technical advantages to do so.

Being able to scale to any specific amount of usage is never a reason to use microservices. Plenty of planet-scale services and apps are powered by monoliths. And you never run into any kind of ridiculous overengineering when you refactor things into services for scaling reasons and that's not a microservices architecture in the first place.

The problem has always been about people deciding that different parts of the app that differ mostly in terms of business logic somehow need to be independently deployable. It's like deciding that instead of having a single database cluster and having multiple databases and tables, you need a separate, independently scalable cluster for each database table, because of some bogus reasons like some tables are queries more than others and different teams work on different tables and we can't let people join tables because it breaks boundaries or something.

Not sure what you're trying to get at here - from the standpoint of developers, Cloud Spanner is the opposite of a microservice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microservices

> A microservice architecture – a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style – is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightweight protocols

> A microservice is not a layer within a monolithic application (example, the web controller, or the backend-for-frontend).[8] Rather, it is a self-contained piece of business functionality with clear interfaces, and may, through its own internal components, implement a layered architecture. From a strategical perspective, microservice architecture essentially follows the Unix philosophy of "Do one thing and do it well".[9] Martin Fowler describes a microservices-based architecture as having the following properties:[2]

A typical monolith would use Cloud Spanner as a layer, not as a microservice.

Most people's criticism of microservices isn't about never having independently deployable services, but rather the service boundary being based on business domain decomposition, rather than essential technical characteristics. In other words, different types of storage (due to their technical characteristics, i.e. blob storage for photos vs relational database for transactional entities) being served by different services for technical reasons is eminently sensible and not something most people would have issues with and has been around for much longer than microservices. The problem is more around people deciding that for a hypothetical financial website backend that "bonds" and "stocks" should be two separate microservices, rather than just two endpoints served by the same monolith, even though they differ merely in terms of business logic and do not require any special handling from a technical perspective.

I think you're understating your point. Most of what the OP mentions are generally expected of senior engineers or even mid-level engineers, though circumstances may vary.

> I don't like having to check on others to ensure they're working as they should.

This is impossible to avoid in most professional settings outside of entry-level.

> I don't like hiring people and doing interviews.

Interviewing is often a core expectation for engineers.

> I don't like having to worry about "capacity" when getting a new project.

Senior engineers almost certainly have to worry about whether there's capacity to take on a new project.

> I don't like doing performance reviews and making sure that people's "efficiency" is as high as.

This can mostly be avoided for ICs, until you get to a fairly high level (i.e. staff).

> I don't like having to supervise every proposal going out to make sure our marketing department didn't promise some technical heresy.

Standard senior engineering expectation.

> I don't like giving people "shitty" tasks to do (because there will always be some).

Prioritizing and assigning tasks are generally expected of senior or even mid-level engineers.

> I don't like sitting with someone for a couple hours to explains how I'd like things done

Standard senior engineering expectation.

> or having to fix something they've done wrong.

Standard expectations for most engineers.

> And of course I don't like being in endless meetings.

Meetings are also unavoidable as you become more senior, even as an IC.

Looks like this was written almost 10 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20130506231540/http://eewz0z.pen...

Makes more sense in that context - what made me question the authenticity of this account was the author being seemingly unaware of the entire interview prepping industry.

An earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5664839

It claims to be a guest post, but it honestly reads very much like a fictional story carefully written to emphasize the importance of her books and services, while also maximizing engagement/outrage. The character doesn't seem super plausible either in terms of the history or in terms of how they respond to failures.

Edit: Actually looks like it's a very old story instead, which made it seem implausible in modern context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34289608

> scored way more league goals compared to Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

The Brazilian league being third-rate, like some others have mentioned, isn't accurate, but it's also not comparable to today's La Liga and EPL, which draw from a global talent pool, not mostly limited to a single country. Scoring was generally higher back then as well.

> he won 3 world cups

Winning the World Cup is far more about luck and circumstances than individual brilliance. The main thing you can say about this is that Pele's longevity allowed him to be part of two dominant Brazil teams 12 years apart, but then again Messi had a longer peak.

> Santos was an above-average team before he arrived. Same as napoli with Maradona. They took average teams to new heights.

Santos won Campeonato Paulista in 1955, the season before Pele's debut and also in 1956, when Pele debuted towards the end the season. Santos finished second in 1957 when Pele became a regular. They were a dominant team but being a consistently dominant team takes more than one all-time player.

This isn't like Napoli with Maradona, who were a mid-table team when Maradona joined that had never won the top-flight league.

This has nothing to do with worldviews. It's just that a statement like this:

> If I were to make a list of my top-10 problems, corruption would be near the top. None of the cases I've seen involved money laundering.

rather clearly reveals your lack of understanding of the topic at hand. The fact that you think this has anything to do with political polarization is another clue that you have no idea what you're talking about. Your repeated attempts to anchor all of this to your personal experience are also quite revealing with respect to both your bias and lack of grounding in the subject.

And this isn't about your conclusions being wrong - it's just that you (and people like you) seem to form absurdly strong opinions when you don't even have the slightest clue regarding why things are the way they are.

Btw, since you are now pretending that you were this intellectually eager person just trying to have an honest discussion and I somehow poisoned the exchange, let me remind you that this was your first contribution:

> If I were to list my top 10 problems in life, money laundering would not make the list.

Which, of course, is combative, dismissive and arrogant. Why on earth is your personal list of "top 10 problems in life" relevant to any discussion? Who the hell do you think you are? It's the type of response that immediately signals lack of interest in learning anything, which you have since confirmed.

> I'm done here.

> I propose we terminate this discussion

You can do whatever you want - is your next reply also going to mention how you're really done this time?

It's not that hard to infer that you know very little about the topic at hand, but you think you know, because reasons. Your comments remind me of the other time I had to engage with complete nonsense from someone who was oddly confident about their position, despite clearly having no idea they are talking about (to be fair, you're not nearly as bad as the other person, who was unironically arguing for freezing the entire global credit market to avoid the coming COVID apocalypse of small business failures) - just because you can put together some words that appear to make sense if you don't think deeply enough or have no context, doesn't mean the resulting output makes any sense.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680687

> Very little of the corruption I've seen involves bags of money.

As I said, that's precisely because the world works the way it does, rather than the way you wish it did. The bottleneck for lots of otherwise extremely profitable criminal endeavors is their reliance on traditional financial intermediaries.

> That touches on one form of corruption.

I'm talking about the type of corruption that keeps entire countries from developing economically. I don't know what you're on about. And no, your series of suggestions, which amount to saying make the current regulations stronger, doesn't come close to closing a huge loophole created by giving blanket immunity to financial intermediaries.

Edit: honestly it sounds like you ran into some unfortunate situation somewhere and hold a personal grudge. But that's not a particularly meaningful basis for policy recommendation, especially given that it's quite clear that you don't understand the domain particularly well.

> Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.

Most corruption is like this when you live in a country where corruption isn't much of a problem.

If you don't understand the connection between money laundering and corruption, you certainly do not have a very strong understanding of the problem of corruption. Also, good luck having "transparency measures" in a world where intermediaries are allowed immunity as long as they don't know stuff.

Money laundering isn't a big problem for you right now precisely because the world works the way it does, rather than the way you wish it did. The relationship between money laundering and corruption is well-established and globally, corruption is one of the biggest problems if you care about human welfare.

Then payment processors either need to either 1) be able to determine with 100% certainty whether something is legal or 2) be given broad immunity with respect to customers' illegal activities as long as they weren't strictly aware. The problem is that 1) is not possible and 2) incentivizes these intermediaries from keeping track of what their customers do, which then opens door to all kinds of criminal activities. Money laundering becomes virtually impossible to prosecute in that environment, which then makes other criminal activities substantially more profitable.

> Active cooperation between the FBI and Twitter

It's virtually impossible for the government to do its job without the private individuals and institutions "actively cooperating" with them. Nearly all interactions between the government and private institutions can be described that way.

> That is why it is a scandal and there are things like the 1st amendment that basically say "government shouldn't do this, it is illegal".

This is completely incoherent - the first amendment of course does not say that the government shouldn't cooperate with private individuals or institutions. Like how is it even possible to interpret the first amendment that way? I mean, it's very obvious you have no idea what you're talking about and your motivation here is entirely political, but how is it possible to get things so wrong?

I mean there are so many things wrong here, but one additional thing is that the Constitution enumerates and limits the power of the federal government. The Constitution does not grant the FBI any power whatsoever, except indirectly through the President.

What you're saying (rather extremely incoherently) amounts to saying President Trump was unconstitutionally abusing his powers to hurt his own campaign.

Also, this is how you started:

> the Muller report came out around the time he said that and basically debunked the issue as a serious problem

And this is where you ended:

> To take the Muller report seriously requires someone to believe in devious Russian plans to reveal the truth to Americans

> That was always political weasel language, and goes a long way to discrediting Muller as purposefully adding spin to the situation

And no the Mueller report doesn't insinuate - it extensively documents criminal ways in which Trump obstructed the investigation. He simply felt it was the job of Congress to act on the evidence he found.

It's actually not equivalent - we're seeing a lot of accuasations here that the FBI "coerced" Twitter or that the FBI requests were "partisan" - there's actually no evidence in these files for these claims. On the other hand, there's plenty of public evidence that Republican politicians were trying to coerce Twitter to accomplish explicitly partisan aims. Yet here we are.

> Well, the scandal here is the FBI were rolling in, giving Twitter a list of random bystanders with the expectation that they will be silenced. US Federal government agencies are specifically not supposed to do that.

Which is substantially less problematic that the sitting President threatening Twitter. Yet here we are.

> Yeah, but the Muller report came out around the time he said that and basically debunked the issue as a serious problem; raising the question of what exactly Wray was trying to stir up. He looks like part of the anti-Trump crowd that has been active in the FBI for the last few years.

This is so far off the mark that it's hard to take you seriously. The Mueller report extensively documented Russia's attempt to interfere in the 2016 election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report

> However, the report states that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion

It didn't exonerate the Trump campaign either. It more or less said that it couldn't prove the collusion in large part due to extensive attempts by the President's attempt to torpedo the investigation. It describes these attempts at obstruction of justice, without specifically accusing him (or exonerating) because Mueller didn't think it would be fair even if he believes a crime occurred:

> The report describes ten episodes where Trump may have obstructed justice while president and one before he was elected, noting that he privately tried to "control the investigation". The report further states that Congress can decide whether Trump obstructed justice and take action accordingly, referencing impeachment

> Mueller's belief that it would be unfair to accuse the president of a crime even without charging him because he would have no opportunity to clear his name in court; furthermore it would undermine Trump's ability to govern and preempt impeachment

So the big scandal here isn't that the FBI is implicitly threatening Twitter in a way that raises 1st Amendment concerns, but rather that the FBI is using public funds to help a social media company do its job. This has nothing to do with free speech and there's also no evidence the FBI's actions were motivated by partisan concerns.

To me, it's rather clear that a bunch of people who are not particularly principled or have a strong understanding of the ethics or laws involved, but are prone to thinking that anyone working against their own agenda must be evil or nefarious in some ways, reverse-engineering their way into finding faults with how things more or less have always worked. This also isn't some nefarious hidden secret motivated by partisan concerns. Trump's own Director of FBI, Christopher Wray stated that Russia was attempting to interfere in the presidential election:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-security-idU...

> Russia is determined to interfere in U.S. elections despite sanctions and other efforts to deter such actions before the next presidential election in 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday.

And he specifically told the public what the FBI is doing about this:

https://time.com/5548544/russian-internet-trolls-strategies-...

> FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, said social media remains a primary avenue for foreign actors to influence U.S. elections, and the bureau is working with companies on the problem.

> “What has continued virtually unabated and just intensifies during the election cycles is this malign foreign influence campaign, especially using social media,” Wray said. “That continues, and we’re gearing up for it to continue and grow again for 2020.”

Are there any scenarios where it is acceptable for the President to threaten private companies to change their moderation policies to suit his needs? That's what Trump did repeatedly.

There's a fundamental contradiction in the narrative presented in the Twitter Files, apparently we're supposed to believe that Twitter is this overwhelmingly liberal place where employees were highly biased against conservatives in their content moderation and also the FBI, of course that famously leftist institution, coerced Twitter in a highly biased way to get them to silence conservative narratives. If Twitter and FBI were aligned, there's no coercion. If Twitter was being forced, it remains to be shown exactly how. And to the extent that Twitter is institutionally biased towards liberals, then it's those that sit on the opposite political spectrum that are most suspicious. After all, if Twitter was going out of their way to help the Democrats, why would they need to be coerced in that same direction?

There's plenty of public evidence that Republican politicians including the sitting President threatened Twitter and other social media companies in order to influence their moderation policies. Where's the outrage among the "FBI asking Twitter nicely is a First Amendment issue" crowd?

This is what actual problematic coercion looks like:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/trump-t...

To the extent that "informal coercion" could be problematic. This is pretty standard practice for most politicians of course and I think we all know where all those "Free Speech" proponents that are worried that Twitter was "informally coerced by FBI's emails" stood on this, when Trump was constantly threatening Twitter.

Republicans - and Trump specifically - have been directly threatening Twitter for years to try to get them to act in a way that benefits them and you think this "implied consequence for refusal" is some big issue?

In that case, Republican politicians publicly complaining about social media moderation in threatening terms would be far more problematic than the FBI notifying Twitter of tweets that are in violation of their TOS. Yet I don't remember the "Free Speech" proponents doing anything but applauding these types of "informal coercion."

Collusion implies coordinating on something illegal or worth hiding from the public - what exactly is the alleged wrongdoing? That Twitter had people that worked with both presidential campaigns to expedite the review of moderation requests? I mean, by this definition, what interaction between private institutions and politicians doesn't qualify as collusion? Like what principles are even being violated here?

The 1st amendment doesn't come into play unless Twitter is being coerced by the government against their will. There's no legal prohibition against Twitter moderating their platform in a way that also pleases certain people associated with the government.