danwee

Indeed! I would buy it if it were smaller (e.g., 4.7')

I think the technical product manager role is the worst of both worlds:

- not enough tech: so you don't get to work on the nice and interesting stuff

- it has it's management part: so you get to work on the boring stuff

I guess I wanted to say "because of the promise of money"

> I was promoted to tech lead 2 months ago

Did you get a salary increase as well? And if so, would they decrease your salary if you go back to IC? If you keep your salary increase, that's a good deal. If there was no salary increase -> that wasn't a promotion! If they decrease your pay -> find another job

> I would rather not maintain a system that was built on quicksand, where dependencies cannot be upgraded without breaking anything.

To each their own. I prefer to maintain a bad system because:

- I can make it better

- If something doesn't work as expected it's because of the current state of the system, not because of my lack of ability

On the other hand, I don't really like to maintain very good systems (crafted by very intelligent people) because:

- There's little I can do to make them better (I'm a regular Joe)

- If something breaks it's because of my ability as a programmer (all the shame on me)

So, it's like playing in two different leagues (but the paycheck is rather more or less the same, so that's nice).

I'm not defending fraud: if fraud is made, then you pay for it (either economically or via prison). On the other hand, having thousands of people on the internet call you everything because of a mistake. I don't know, I definitely wouldn't like to be judged by Twitter users if I make a mistake in my life (that's why I don't have Twitter/IG/etc. It's so scary to be judged in 0.5 seconds by thousands all over the world).

The best he could have done is to apologize, though, and handle it legally.

This feels strange (maybe I got it wrong).

It's probably because Amazon has all the money in the world they need to develop their products, but I would expect to launch a new product with some minimal but strong features to attract customers. Q offers 40+ built-in connectors from day zero. Like I can imagine the engineers/managers working on connector number 25: "Man, we have implemented already 24 connectors and we don't even know if the product will be a success or not...".

> his year our team is hiring for 3 new people instead of 4

Na. We'll be able to do more with less... but the amount of work to be needed will increase, hence more people will be needed as well. Same old story. Compilers didn't get massive people fired.

> Outsourcing the work to a country with low wages. Even nowadays you can get highly skilled workers for like $50 a month in some African countries.

But this is not the norm. In order for company X to hire people from a different country, it is necessary that:

- company X hires contractors/freelancers. The vast majority of people out there in IT work as employees, not as contractors

- company X needs a branch in that country. This is rare

- company X hires in that country via an intermediary company. Not as rare, but usually it's not worth it

Not even in Europe countries hire people from other countries that easily. It's more common now after covid, yes, but it's definitely not "let's hire from country X developers 50% cheaper!"

What you say is true, but the amount of "grunt work" is not constant over the years. In fact, I think the amount of "grunt work" in teh tech industry is just growing and not shrinking; I think the following look is quite obvious:

- amount of current grunt work: X

- new tech Z appears that makes X be reduced to 0.1X

- at the same time Z enables new ways of doing things. Some things become grunt work because they are a byproduct of Z

- amount of current grunt work: Y (where Y ~= X)

- ...

If the technological progress had stopped in the 2000s, then all the grunt work (originated in the 90s) would be esentially zero today. New tech just brings automation and grunt work. I don't think we will live in a society where there's practically no grunt work.

The most recent example is AI: there are AI tools that generate sound, images, video and text... but if you want to create a differentiating product/experience, you need to combine (do the grunt work) all the available tools (chatgpt, stable difussion, etc.)

I'm a total newcomer about this, but I would like to learn and start making "music". They advertise:

> MAKE USE OF THE CURATED SELECTION OF DRUMS, BASS AND KEYS THAT COME PRE-LOADED ON YOUR K.O.II.

Question: would I be stuck with their pre-loaded curated selection or is there any way I can "upload" any extra dum/bass/keys and use them?

I'm not sure if reading the book would help. If the manager has a technical background (e.g., they have worked as developers before) then they already know the main point of the book. If the manager does not have a tech background, then there's little that the book can do for them.

What? If anything a startup founder (in general) wants to become a gigantic corporation. The bigger the better.

I'm the only one NOT using autocorrect? I find useful the suggestions that popup above the keyboard but ultimately I decide whether or not to use them. I find autocorrection (on phones) annoying.

What always surprised me is not DNA, but how other non-living things can exist at all without DNA. It makes sense to me that I have green eyes since that's what my DNA says... but where is defined that a rock has a particular color or weight or texture?

Whenever I think of how planets move around a star, I always think "Ok. So, I imagine that at some point the universe should know the distance between planet X and star Y, and also, probably, maybe, it should know their masses... but that data is nowhere defined (that we know). So, is the data computed 'on the fly' every $minimal-unit-of-time?). Perhaps the universe doesn't need to know distances nor masses, though.

But how good is to say "Image generated by Bing AI" (or whatever)? Many of this generated images are a one-off (so, you don't get a URL you can copy). It's like saying "Image found in Google.com".

> literally the threat of the sword

Obviously, we need to find contemporary analogies:

- the other day I opened (manually) a bunch of Linkedin profiles (each in one browser tab). Apparently, Linkedin thought it was a suspicious activity and blocked my account for some time (I don't remember, but in the range of hours). Luckily me, I still got my account... but it would be hard to find jobs and keep working connections without Linkedin. I dodged the sword

I'm sure one can find similar examples (or worse) for all the big companies out there (never heard of "google banned me. help!"?)

> The more organisational layers you have between you and the customers - architects, business analysts, and the like - the more disconnected your work will be from the business value.

In every company I have worked for in the last 10 years, the layer in between business experts and software engineers has been always: the manager (either product manager or eng. manager). It's a bottleneck. The flow usually goes like this:

business expert -> manager -> engineers -> manager -> business expert -> manager -> engineers -> ...

Whenever the manager comes with "requests" from the business side, we end up with tons of questions because everything is half-baked. Manager goes back to business with our questions and comes back with some answers, but usually that just generates even more questions. In this way managers feel empowered. There's no way they can let the engineers just talk with business (otherwise the managers would feel like they are not contributing in anything... which is kinda right if the engineers are more or less professionals).

> By Thursday, I began to worry about my own job security. I had been spinning on a feature I said I would ship 3 days ago.

Off-topic: is it really like that in the US? (I'm assuming he's from the US). Like, if you get stuck for a few days, you start to worry about being fired or reprimanded?

I tend to sleep on weekdays around 8'5 hours (from 1am to 9:30). On weekends I sleep usually 9'5 hours. I'm not on my 20s anymore. I don't wake up in the nights (unless I drink a glass of water before going to sleep, then I wake up earlier in the morning usually).

Edit: on summers I usually sleep one hour less (because it's too damn hot in the morning). I hate sleeping during the summer.

In general, engineering managers. I'm not talking about "bad" engineering managers, I'm talking about average ones (which are the ones one usually get).

- It's difficult to sell good engineering work to them, and hence salary increases happen (if any) but on the lower end.

- With the typical excuse "Eng. managers should empower engineers", eng. managers do around 1% of the job when it comes to start big projects. The whole load lies on the shoulders of the senior engineers. One would expect that an eng. manager is probably the individual in the team with the most experience (both in engineering and in management), but eng. managers usually don't spend time trying to understand the systems their teams own. A classic example is: an eng. manager who knows very little or nothing about, let's say, Node+js, even though he has been in the team for over a year: their excuse? They only care about the "high level design decisions, they don't need to code anything". Funny thing is, the "high level design decisions" are done by senior engineers

Good engineering managers are invaluable, though. But in 80% of the software teams out there we either have bad eng. managers or average ones. In summary:

- good eng. managers => heaven

- bad eng. managers => it's ok. Since they are bad, they most probably will be fired or the whole team will know quickly how bad they are

- average eng. managers => hell. Because they are not "bad", so they are not fired. They think they are good and all.

> I've felt most burned out were when I worked with people who didn't care, who I couldn't trust to care, and so I ended up being the only person in the room who cared.

Been there, but I don't see it as a problem. On the contrary, by being the only one who cares, I got promotions and salary raises. In the few situations in which I didn't get more than my peers (who didn't give a damn), I resigned.

So, at least for me, being around people who don't care that much is an opportunity for me to by working normal hours (9-5) and caring, get a salary bump.

Off-topic: I think I've seen this page layout before https://mswjs.io/docs . Did they use a css-html template/framework for it?

Funny enough, I would fail your interview. But not because I don't know how to solve the problem, but because I don't know how to solve the problem without Google and/or documentation. My struggle is: I can come up with some working solution by myself, but I always know that my solution is "not the best", so after "solution v1 made entirely by myself", I jump into Google and find out what's "the best way to solve my little problem". After a few iterations, I come up with "solution v4 by myself and the help of the internet" which turns out to be way better than v1.

My v1 would not pass your interview. My v4 would be a world-class solution. Fair enough, you are not looking for my v4, and rightfully so I should fail your interview (because I bet there be some people out there who can produce world-class solutions without relying on external sources)

Pardon my ignorance, but a solar storm would wipe out offline harddrives/ssds/laptops?

In the year 2023 tech companies are not "buying" (supply > demand) but "selling" (supply < demand); that means the hiring process should at least be equal in terms of time spent on it. Candidates spend way more time in home assignments (hours to days), while companies spend in the order of minutes to review the assigments. We think this is "normal" because "the company is OFFERING you a job"... that couldn't be less true nowadays, it is "me the one CONSIDERING working for your company". A big difference.

Not sure if it would be any better, and I say this as someone who hates leetcode-related interviews.

Code reviews are way more subjective than writing a piece code (at the end of the interview session, if the code works, then that's a huge thing already).

If I highlight something like "Perhaps we could inject that dependency, instead of harcoding it": sure, that seems probably the most correct assesment, but again, what if we are dealing with a really small project and hardcoding the dependency is the best way? Same goes for variable names ("i" is too short? Depends on the scope, right? Well, probably it depends on the interviewer's mind), what about composition vs inheritance? Again, subjective as hell. And don't let me get started with anything related to microservices vs monolith...

But who guarantees that Cloudflare will not charge me for egress in the future? Sure nobody guarantees either that S3 won't becomer more expensive, but migrating to another provider just because right now they are cheaper without guarantees of their price in the future seems short-termist.

> Build software faster in an editor designed for pair-programming with AI

Isn't it known that what takes the most time (in software engineering) is to understand a given business problem, decompose it in manageable chunks that can be worked in parallel, then provide a solution for each chunk, and then maintain such a solution? Using the IDE to write the actual code, sure, it needs to be done, but it's rather the part that takes the least amount of time. So, if any their slogan "Build software faster in an editor designed for pair-programming with AI" is rather misleading. I actually spend more time reading code with my IDE than writing code.

> If you're still using VS Code, you're falling behind.

For a moment I thought that what would come after that sentence would be "... Use Jetbrains IDEs instead"