cplanas

The American occupation of Japan may have been less punitive than Germany’s, but it was arguably more invasive: Japan’s postwar Constitution was largely drafted by Americans, with minimal Japanese input. By contrast, West Germany’s Basic Law was written by Germans themselves under Allied constraints.

Nice! I haven't read Axiomatic yet, but this has been my "Greg Egan year". I have read Permutation City and Diaspora: maybe the two most stimulating scifi novels I have ever read.

Not totally related, but I wanted to make a question. Iam sure this post will host quite a lot of Culture fans. With which novel should I start with The Culture? The main two candidates are Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games.

That quote from Banks only tells us that The Culture is his personal utopia. Fair enough, but Banks does not have authority over interpretations on his work. One man's heaven is another man's hell.

Location: Barcelona, Spain Remote: Yes. Also open to hybrid.

Willing to relocate: no. More than happy to make periodic visits to any office, though.

Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Javascript

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16LgKHqECH5NDHnN_QCQtk-cXsEv...

Email: me[at]cristianplanas[dot]com

About me: Nice to meet you! My name is Cristian. Let me tell you why I think I’d be a great addition to your team. I have over 15 years of experience with Ruby. The highlight of my career is probably the decade I have spent at Zendesk, where I am one of the technical leaders of Support, their flagship product, as a Group Tech Lead and Senior Staff Software Engineer. My main focus is scaling the ticketing system and making sure it can handle massive workloads efficiently. That experience turned me into a bit of a Rails performance nerd—so much so that I wrote a book about it, Rails Scales!, published by Pragmatic Bookshelf (https://pragprog.com/titles/cprpo/rails-scales/). I’ve also had the chance to share my insights at conferences like RailsConf, EuRuKo, and RubyKaigi. You can check my talks in my profile in RubyVideo (https://www.rubyevents.org/speakers/cristian-planas).

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Remote: Yes. Also open to hybrid.

Willing to relocate: no. More than happy to make periodic visits to any office, though.

Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Javascript

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16LgKHqECH5NDHnN_QCQtk-cXsEv...

Email: me[at]cristianplanas[dot]com

About me: Nice to meet you! My name is Cristian. Let me tell you why I think I’d be a great addition to your team. I have over 15 years of experience with Ruby. The highlight of my career is probably the decade I have spent at Zendesk, where I am one of the technical leaders of Support, their flagship product, as a Group Tech Lead and Senior Staff Software Engineer. My main focus is scaling the ticketing system and making sure it can handle massive workloads efficiently. That experience turned me into a bit of a Rails performance nerd—so much so that I wrote a book about it, Rails Scales!, published by Pragmatic Bookshelf (https://pragprog.com/titles/cprpo/rails-scales/). I’ve also had the chance to share my insights at conferences like RailsConf, EuRuKo, and RubyKaigi. You can check my talks in my profile in RubyVideo (https://www.rubyevents.org/speakers/cristian-planas).

> I’ve noticed lots of rails developers optimize so heavily for making things DRY, they make the most hard to debug monstrosities full of meta programming all so they could write a thing one one line of code instead of 3.

I think that was definitely the case some years ago, but the Ruby community has matured since then. Meta programming is a bit looked down upon, these days.

Your experience is very different from mine. I rarely interviewed white candidates, but they were still more common than Hispanic and Black ones. The majority of the candidates were Asian.

I don't think that most of proponents of DEI share my opinion, but for me, the endgame of DEI (and antiracism in general) is the destruction of race as a social concept. IMO, race is basically a casta system, particularly given how it operates in America.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe in genetics. I do believe that certain groups of people form genetic clusters. Nevertheless, I don't think that "race" the genetic cluster and "race" the social concept are that much intertwined. Of the 4 major racial groups in America, there are two that very obviously don't cluster (Asians and Hispanics): this somehow is ignored by both pro and anti DEI sides.

In a world in which DEI efforts are successful, the current races would just become non-sensical, in the same way in which considering Irish and Italians non-white has become non-sensical today.

Could you share which supplements?

It must be terrible to live with this level of self-hatred.

Author of the presentation here. While you are right that sharding is an incredible tool that makes our lives much easier, not everything in our system is/can be sharded.

Also, we do handle more than a billion requests/day, that was just for giving the title a nice ring.

Author of the talk here. Thank you, you made my day by sharing my presentation. :)

One thing I would like to add after reading some of the comments here. The "1 billion requests/day" is actually an understatement so the title has a nicer ring. Last time I checked we were around 2B -and that's according the most conservative approximation-. Those are requests that hit the application, excluding the CDN caching layer.

BTW, happy to answer any questions!

I think he meant particularly Ginny and Clarence Thomas, not people of different races in general.

Spaniard here. Over 50k is definitely possible, particularly now with so many remote opportunities available. Unfortunately, those positions are highly-coveted, so prepare for long interviews with multiple stages.

I think becoming a software engineer is totally possible for you, you are only in your mid-30s. However, I think you need to like the field, at least a bit. Do you enjoy it?

I'm sorry, but exactly which "medium-sized European city" has more expensive housing than SF?

I'll be moving back to Europe this year, and I find your comment quite funny, given that I am moving to a city with significantly cheaper housing and better weather than where I live now (NYC).

I think that the racialization of Hispanics as a group has been pretty bad for "non-white" Latinos too.

1. You are right that someone that doesn't visually appear "white" will be racialized in the US. However, the magnitude of this racialization can differ a lot. Incessantly repeating that "Hispanics" are a very consistent group of people makes the "otherization" of all Hispanics worse, including for "non-white" ones.

2. Including people of European descent in a group that is going to benefit from affirmative action opens an obvious loophole. Unconscious bias will provoke that the opportunities created by AA end up with people who look/are white, not to Latinos "of color". Hollywood is particularly terrible on that: with most of Hispanic actors looking European (Ana de Armas is a recent example) or coming directly from Europe. I guess they can't find non-white Latinos in LA. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3. Finally, the idea of Hispanics forming a genetic cluster will be pernicious for all Hispanics, particularly when applied to medicine. It puts our lives in unnecessary danger.

I read that book when I arrived to the US: really interesting. IMO, the activists that pushed the idea of the "Hispanic" race/ethnicity into the American mindset made a huge mistake. Racializing yourself is a bad thing, even if the government gives you a few pennies in exchange.

I am a "Hispanic" that lives in the US. I am also European. In my experience what qualifies as an Hispanic varies incredibly from institution to institution, from person to person. A few months ago I was admitted briefly to the hospital, my race (not ethnicity) was marked as "Hispanic". Other times, in other places, I have been assumed to be "white".

Also, you wouldn't believe how much better I am treated when I am perceived as "white".

I doubt that it can be taken seriously as a medical question, as some of the American "races" don't cluster genetically. Hispanic is probably the worst offender, but Asian is pretty bad too.

And yet Spain (and Italy) are relatively stable first world countries. Damn, I live in the US, and I would say there is way more hustlery here than back in Spain.

I kind of agree here, but the problem is that big tech is not even matching the "demographics of the people obtaining the necessary skills to work in that department".

According to your own data, Hispanics got 8.16% of CS degrees; African Americans got 3.81%. Facebook tech workers are 4.6% Hispanics and 2.1% Black. Google tech workers are 5.3% Hispanic and 2.9% Black. Both companies are far away from even matching the percentages of the candidate field.

Sources: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/07/facebook-diversity-report-... https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-...

> It always felt condescending to me.

I completely agree with you. Pity is a particularly disturbing version of contempt. But if you think that this contempt is only reflected in the diversity circus, you are fooling yourself.

High-caste Americans (sorry Wilkerson, the simile is too good to let it go) want to virtue-signal and maybe give some breadcrumbs to the minorities they feel pity for, not put them at their level.

You don't have to. It just helps significantly.

Because diversity efforts are largely ineffectual and, if you are interviewed by people of your own race, unconscious bias will help you.

Some studies showed certain ethnic markers are harmful for applicants: https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n... https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

> More concretely, my wife happens to be hispanic, and feels she's experienced more negative racism in Barcelona than she ever did in the US.

I'm a bit confused by this. Racism in Barcelona against Hispanics? It's because she doesn't speak Catalan?

I think it's totally worth to try it. While I will be coming back soon, I am happy that I was able to have this experience. Good luck!

Oh, I'm from Barcelona myself. While I agree with you that the upper class in the US is much richer than in Barcelona, I strongly disagree with you about the poor. I think very often about my particular situation, and what would have happened to me if I would have been born in the US. I come from a family that would be on the lower side of the middle class; unfortunately for us, there is a genetic illness running on my father's side of the family. In Spain, to get healthcare was never a problem; I'm not sure if that wouldn't have been an issue in the US. I see the same problem with education: while we were not poor, I am not sure if I would have been able to go to one of the best schools in my country, as I did for free in Spain. Free education and healthcare are very important.

On racism, I don't wanna sound harsh, but I believe you only see less because the US is much more segregated. I am typically perceived as Hispanic by most Americans, and believe me, racism is an issue. I don't want to imagine how it is for an immigrant from Africa or Latin America.

Maybe you have been lucky. I have seen racism in engineering jobs, most typically in the form of bias or preconceived ideas of how people of certain "races" are supposed to behave, or what are their perspectives in life.

ES -> DK -> US

For me it's a mixed bag, and we will be probably moving back to Europe next year, after spending 6 years in between San Francisco and New York.

On the positive side, money. Software engineers make much, much more in the US than anywhere in Europe, including Nordic countries. My income tripled in the US, and my income was considered pretty high Denmark. Another positive side of the US is that there seems to be more opportunities, particularly if you are white or Asian and work in tech. My wife couldn't get a job in Europe, here she joined multiple FAANGs.

On the negative side, the lifestyle doesn't really fit us: too much focus on work. The problem is not -only- longer working hours, but that a lot people center their life around their job. I also find the social issues of the US (unequality, racism) more disturbing than the ones there are in Europe.