curious, in what ways is swift the "javascript of ios"?
327 karma · joined December 15, 2017
i’m not now, nor ever have i been a member of a national chain’s loyalty program. as i had noted, my experience is an outlier. i’ve never had the dreaded endless-line issue, could handle two signature and a half dozen initial boxes without it being an undue burden (at the time). i never rent from airport locations, only local franchisees. this alone may account for my experience; a small franchise location in an area with a major airport may be more inclined to strive for great customer experience where possible. obviously my experience doesn’t scale!!
best of luck. i’m sure you will see success and light a fire under national chains to up their game. win:win
i find those sorts of statements to be a sort of “biz-smell”. it is easy to make dismissive claims about incumbents...and dangerous when those claims do not clearly map to value statements about your product/service. They are “inconvenient because of X, unlike us because of our feature/service/attribute Y”.
if someone has never rented a car from a national chain, or if they have never had an issue doing so (which is my experience) your assertion without context may fall flat.
the uber voucher is neat, but i’ve had avis bring a car out to my house and drive me home after returning it to the lot. all i had to do was chat with a human for 1-2min and explain my personal logistics. my experience is an outlier...but informs my analysis of the “inconvenient” claim.
Regardless, great work launching! I will be looking forward to you expanding geographic coverage so I can give you a spin :)
“I just can’t hire someone who fails this sort of problem”.
Given that this person was applying for a general backend position building foundational, framework derived features (mostly CRUD and some light analytics) it was confusing to me. There is literally zero application for graph traversal in their work. They will absolutely never encounter this sort of problem in the course of developing our software...which is b2b, targeted at industry experts: we build software that generates reports. Not even complex aggregates...just moving window averages and the like.
At this point in my career, after building more than one team/business I’ve learned that the shape of your technical interview loop informs not just the codebase you generate...but also your engineering culture.
had a control system installed where the rod was driven into a granite slab and was not sufficient
1. emphasis on drinking: “gotta have happy hour/get a keg”
2. off-site team building exercises that eat into personal/family time
3. disparaging competition, especially incumbents, often based on superficial things like the dated look of their UI or branding
4. periodic episodes where potential investors or current board members are brought to the office and the staff is expected to all be on-site and “look productive”
for context, i’ve been in large enterprises and a number of startups. the startups where the core staff had been through the process before lacked what often gets pegged as the “brogrammer fratdev shop” vibe.
also, almost every shop that got a keggerator or pingpong table ended up using those items to store things...
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i’ve never been a big fan of these sorts of assertions. not everyone picks things up at the same rate.
i’ve screened, interviewed and hired several engineers. the only time something related to tools like this came up was when using a specific tools was critical to the role.
I was thinking this sounds like how DCOS presents resources; buckets of cpu, ram, disc, etc.
I must have missed the swear words...
Is this what happened with your MIDI driver?
after a number of years in (mostly) software i’ve observed less tolerance for that level of analysis. i understand why it can/will impact velocity, and that the cost to change software (and time) is a fraction of that with physical systems...but still...a part of me winces whenever im like “screw it, im merging this sans impact analysis” ;)
has anyone else had a similar experience?
txting him this link, he’s gunna love it!
i will say that there is an interesting social component on-the-job, especially early on in a (my) career. more than once i had a colleague who would zero in on a gap in theory (almost always algorithms) and talk down to me. in one case i had someone jab their finger at my face and yell (yes...raised, angry voice in a large cube farm environment) "I got my masters from MIT and you dropped out of highschool". The fact that this person was, in the end, completely wrong is immaterial to my point. About a year post-conflict we were (and still are) great and supportive friends.
The issue boils down to a need to "prove yourself" to certain people when you lack an undergrad degree. If you bounce jobs, regardless of reason, the process starts all over again. Someone stepping into most of the environments I've worked in with a fresh BSCi in CS/EE/whatever have not been placed in the same position to justify their existence.
For me, it resulted in a multi-year personal issue of harshly judging engineers with degrees from well-known schools like Stanford, MIT, and so on. I would think to myself "why can't you do this? I dropped out of highschool, learned on my own while working crappy paying jobs as a teenager before getting a shot...mommy didnt send me to a fancy school...i worked my way up from the assembly line to the engineering team" and other such toxic inner monologues. Harsh judgements based on the fact that everyone has a different melange of life experience. Super unhelpful.
As time went on I realized that a papered engineer, especially one who was only a few years out of school couldn't possibly have covered all the things in their coursework...there is enough volume of knowledge it would take decades to learn it all in school...assuming that was all you had to study!
By now I have been around the block so many times that my lack of a degree is less of a barrier, outside of passing the resume-gatekeepers at larger tech orgs. It resulted in my career focus being in the startup-SMB sized orgs. Mostly people seem surprised I didn't go to college, maybe a little amused by the fact they took on a debt load to be sitting next to me.
I hear a lot of "damn, i could have saved so much money". My reply tends to be along the lines of "...yeah...but it took almost 10y for HR to stop trying to low-ball my pay based on my lack of a degree...so i think it may be closer to a draw than either of us realize".