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I agree but it’s also worth noting that you should also be able to step back and consider how much of your self worth you want to define by how fast you ride a bike. There’s good reasons to set goals and “beat yourself” but also good reasons to not worry about it too much and “accept yourself“.

I don't have the answer to your question, but I don't see the connection between mindfulness and Zen to be as direct as you're suggesting. I've been highly influenced by a lot of the mindfulness writing out there, but Zen actively turned me off for a long time, because it's a lot of "deep" paradoxical puzzle/koan things, anecdotes that make no sense, emphasis on "enlightment" etc. Contrast that with a lot of modern day mindfulness stuff which is highly, highly influenced by Buddhism but basically extracts the most practical stuff, meditation practice, awareness of thoughts/feelings, recognition of egotistical cravings, acceptance of impermanence, etc.

I interviewed at Twilio. My resume and phone chats made it abundantly clear that my professional experience was 95% backend in languages like Java and Go.

I looked at their Glassdoor where people wrote they were heavily biased to the algorithm type questions, for better or worse.

In reality I was given only a single coding interview my whole onsite, and it was to build a JavaScript SPA, including routing/linking, without the use of any framework, just vanilla JS.

I was allowed to Google whatever but 50 minutes is still a crazy time crunch to figure out a lot of the stuff that needed to be figured out.

It felt like a massively unfair way to evaluate me. I have honestly never felt more screwed over and time wasted by an interview than at Twilio and I would highly recommend avoiding interviewing there.

My overall point being, is there’s no silver bullet. It’s not necessarily about this magical process will work well and this one will not. It’s about the small details, especially things like making sure all of your interviewers actually read the candidates resume and that everyone knows what type of role they are interviewing for, and that the interview is designed to discover both the candidates strength and weakness. I’ve been on both sides of the process and I know too often shortcuts are taken and churning the pipeline forward takes priority over doing a diligent job and respecting the time of every candidate you engage with.

The very fact that the foundation of tech recruiting is inexperienced recruiters, with minimal tech knowledge, who are incentivized by sales type numbers, and churned through themselves at a comical rate, speaks to how the industry views recruiting. College athletes get recruited, top law school graduates get recruited, engineers aren’t recruited but relentlessly spammed in hopes of finding more bodies to feed into a process straight from a Kafka short story, the problem starts there and no a-ha process improvement will fix that.

What I often see is something like “exercise and yoga are good self care, but for serious mental illness you need professionals.” And “professionals” in 2019 usually translate to psych meds and talk therapy (eg CBT), both of which have extremely shoddy science but get far less skepticism.

I got involuntarily committed for mania/psychosis, didn’t sleep for weeks, hallucinations etc so of course I was prescribed the intense cocktail of mood stabilizers, antipsychotics etc and told I needed that and intense therapy for the rest of my life. I stopped all meds and therapy and focus on mindfulness, sobriety, routine etc and feel it’s the stable path.

I entered a super deep depression when released but read everything about mental health I could get my hands on. And I now believe the best “therapy” for serious mental health issues is things like yoga and meditation, plus lifestyle changes.

It gets reduced to stress reduction and mild exercise, but mindfulness is about developing awareness of feelings which leads to better emotional regulation. If you can develop more space between your thoughts and feelings and your consciousness you stop being so controlled by them.

The skeptics will say it’s a bunch of new age mumbo jumbo but they don’t apply that same skepticism to psych meds even though psych meds are not understood at all, mostly work by placebo, and have awful side effects. Not so long ago doctors were ordering lobotomies and overprescribing OxyContin because an attractive pharmaceutical rep sold it to them but now when they overprescribe psych meds and talk therapy they are seemingly infallible.

I dont think we all want to be things that are natural to be effective. People want pills to be magically effective. Antidepressants fail to outperform placebo once you remove publication bias, there is no first principle scientific basis for them working, yet they are massively prescribed and advocated for and the “chemical imbalance” myth repeated ad nauseum. Meanwhile, meditation and yoga get massively more skepticism because they’re not pills.

The biggest mistake of our current mental health zeitgeist is sharp skepticism of mindfulness and yoga while accepting the magic of pills on pure faith.

I was using a moderate, prescribed dose of Vyvanse/Adderall, I've always basically always had ADHD type symptoms and it was never a huge issue, but I never took any pills until I was an adult in an attempt to focus and get promoted at my big 4 job.

It ended up backfiring as I had a manic/psychotic episode, which led to highly erratic behavior that led to me losing my job, burning all my career bridges, etc. Then I also got diagnosed with heart failure. Almost ruined my life in every sense.

Since then I'm just totally sober, off all meds, and fortunately my brain and heart have both fully recovered. Were there other factors that triggered the episode, sure, did I probably have some predisposition to these issues, sure, but I highly suspect that the ADHD meds played a major role in triggering it all and I would highly caution people against them.

I judge them pretty negatively. People like Bezos, Jobs, or even Gates never really spent so much time building this PR image of being for the greater good, holier-than-though, "making the world a better place." Everyone knows "don't be evil", but how about their recruiting catch phrase "do cool things that matter." Even the "not a conventional company" tag line is relevant here.

Hypocrites just irk me more than people open about their intentions and motivation, and to me Larry and Sergey belong in the hypocrite category. They ultimately were billionares with total control over Google, this idea that somehow things just got out of their control is absurd. It didn't get out of their control, what happened is that whenever push came to shove on difficult issues, they always went with the decision that they felt would lead to the higher stock price. After years of telling everyone who would listen they were non-conventional leaders interested in more than just money, they always purely pursued the lucre. And why? They are literally amongst the world's richest people already.

I was at the TGIF where Sergey tried to sell the company on Maven, and then what happened was, internal google groups are a bit like public URLs, in that they were basically visible to all full time employees if you knew the link. So Sergey would say one thing on stage and then someone would stumble up on the link about the real strategy, and that what they said on stage was "messaging" to appease dissenters. It was total dishonesty, and it was all for big fat contracts, that's it. They did not care one bit about the dangers of weaponized AI or the dangers of being an international company building military technology for one company, or the general growth of the military industrial complex and how the biggest tech company becoming part of it it could snowball its size and dangerous impact on society. And Maven is just one example, but censorship in China is another, and there's many more. I do get that they struggle with some truly difficult decisions that are ethically ambiguous and they can't please everybody, but there are plenty of spots where it was abundantly clear that the only thing Larry and Sergey cared about was filling their already overfilling coffers with more gold. And when Bezos does that, at least he never pretended otherwise, but when Larry and Sergey do it, they are totally backtracking on a public image they spent years selling to people.

The joke is, two economists are walking down the street, and one sees a $100 bill on the ground, and the other says don't bother going to pick it up, if it was really $100, someone would have already picked it up.

This is totally true, not sure why it's downvoted. Psychedelic enthusiasts will often say "oh well that person who had a bad experience was predisposed and shouldn't have taken it." When there was literally no way of telling that the person was predisposed until they took the drug. You can be a fairly stable person but be predisposed to psychosis when you take psychedelic, but have no idea that's the case until you take the psychedelics. Maybe you family history is clear because nobody experimented with psychedelics and thus never triggered that predisposition, or maybe you just don't learn about every instance of psychosis in your family tree. If you try to bring this up to psychedelic enthusiasts they get defensive even though they're obviously in the wrong.

I worked at a startup that pitched themselves as "social good" working for a "double bottom line" (profit and social good). Then I worked at Google which recruited on the catch phrase of "do cool things that matter." Both of these companies are motivated entirely by profit, there are absolutely zero ethical qualms beyond making a buck. The "social good" and "cool things that matter" exist for PR and recruiting purposes, that's it. And once they've recruited people, those people are far too terrified to lose their prestigious and well-compenstaed careers to rock the boat.

mchurch's quote that "Silicon Valley is just Wall St for people who can't get up early" has always made me laugh. But I've also always said that, at least the guys at Goldman are authentic, they know and we know that they are motivated almost entirely by money, and they don't pretend otherwise. It really rubs me the wrong way that both Google the company and the "Googlers" that make up its workforce to this day want to maintain this image that somehow they are good people trying to "make the world a better place when" it's abundantly clear that the overriding concern is the value of the sacred GSU (Google restricted stock unit). I totally agree with the NYTimes that if anything, the HBO show is not nearly harsh enough.

I understand how people arrive at this position, but it's not a free speech position. You can't be pro free speech as long as you agree with it, that undermines the entire concept. You can't be pro free speech, as long as there are horrible consequences for free speech you don't agree with. If right-wing extremism and other factors are making people re-think the value of free speech, fine, there are plenty of compelling points to make about the dangers and downsides of free speech, but enough of the mental gymnastics where people convince themselves they're still pro free-speech when they are very clearly against the concept.

The key thing that would make things better, is if engineers organized into some sort of professional association or trade union. I don't mean a technology focused organization like the ACM or IEEE, but a politically focused one.

The reason engineers haven't been totally screwed is the explosive growth of the market in general. Engineers haven't been able to capture even a fraction of the value they've created, but fortunately attempts by capital to collude against labor have been undermined by the desperate need for more labor at various inflection points. Google, Apple, Adobe etc all colluded against labor, but then Facebook was desperately trying to catch up to Google and undermined that effort. That forced Google to give everyone an IMMEDIATE 10% pay raise and since then Google has attempted to pay "top of market".

Besides Facebook specifically, people like Paul Graham of Y Combinator tried to sell the startup dream hard, which was hugely helped by huge IPOs of Google and Facebook, and what at the time looked like upcoming huge IPOs of Dropbox and AirBnB (which did eventually IPO but took way longer and were less amazing compared to Google/FB). This forced the big companies to try to improve compensation and work environment. There is a leaked email of Sergey Brin saying, he was concerned about Googlers leaving for Facebook but even more concerned about them leaving to create the next Facebook.

The VCs and founders got, far, far too greedy and used tools like common vs preferred shares, liquidation preferences, delayed IPOs, and short exercise windows to totally eviscerate the very dream they were supposedly selling. It took a bizarrely long time for the labor class to realize that this was going on. People today still comically overvalue the value of their ISOs, and a major role of a startup CEO is to attempt to dupe young engineers into buying that debunked dream. In 2019, I think people are finally "getting it" and flocking to companies like Google and Facebook that are paying huge RSU packages to retain engineers while startups are having trouble hiring.

Both the big companies and the startups were upset and thrown off course by the election of Trump over Clinton. Clinton, whose campaign was hugely influenced by Google/Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt, was planning on pushing to massively raise the visa limit to flood the labor market with H1B engineering talent. Even if H1B are paid market rate, their influx will of course increase supply and drive down what that market wage is, and of course not being citizens they have very low political power (this is one of the reasons why, I believe to the extent we do let in technology talent, we should offer them a path to citizenship ASAP).

The lobbyists tried to convince Trump on the same thing - if you paid attention, during one of the debates he started talking about the importance of Silicon Valley importing talent. He later backtracked on that point on Facebook, after his campaign advisors pointed out that when one of your central campaign platforms is "build a wall to stop immigration", suddenly pivoting to an open-borders H1B stance is going to hurt your campaign. So the H1B cap has remained relatively untouched for 4 years, which Google/FB/YCombinator/Andreesen Horowitz/Greylock Ventures and the rest of the usual suspects were not planning for.

My prediction is, between the VCs digging in their heels on fixing their equity offers and in general keeping up with Google/FB on liquid compensation, tied to the housing crisis in the Bay Area and other hot tech markets, the consolidation of most top engineering talent to FANG companies and a startup dark ages that's mostly about flipping crappy web/mobile apps to greater fools with little technological value will continue on for a few years.

The two biggest things that will get the pendulum swinging away from that is, if engineers and other tech workers organize into a professional political association, or if there's another huge technological market growth that forces someone to undercut the collusion of capital against labor.

Only the professional association/trade union that can negotiate with the Googles/FBs/Andreesens of the world with some serious bargaining chips (for example, an SRE strike at Google or FB) will offer lasting stability and prosperity to the engineering class. Anything short of that will just be engineers capturing bits of huge bursts of economic growths that come from time to time, and it's very difficult to predict when and where those huge bursts will arrive. It's almost a certainty they will come sooner or later, but they could be much sooner or much later. The safer, smarter bet for the engineer labor class is to organize.

Technologists need to realize that arms races will doom our children. The solution is international agreements to not build horrifying weapons, not subscribing to fear mongering that demands arms races.

War parties want to dominate their enemies and win a given conflict as quickly as possible, but historically are quick to pick a new fight. The dust and horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were barely settled before the USA rushed right back into another armed conflict in Asia. For the hawks, there is always another “necessary” conflict around the corner that justifies a new arms race and more flawed rationalizations for war atrocities.

The bar for "recruiting" is laughably low in this industry. Many companies seriously consider "have a clueless tech sourcer 2 years out of an econ degree telemarket job openings with aggressive email spam funnel right into a hazing-style round of phone interviews and on-sites" to be "recruiting."

It's very tough to take seriously the bemoaning about engineering hiring difficulty from the likes of pg and others when this is the case.

To the extent companies are investing in the process, it seems to be look for more ways at how to reject people. Now companies want some technical project phone screen AND an algorithms on site AND a "design" review AND some sort of weird personality thing where they grill you on working with past managers and whether you mentored people. Find 99 reasons to ding you. By the way, the design review is usually run by someone 2 years out of school who works on their Jenkins configs and thinks the most important thing is that you magically read their mind and know the right "questions" to ask them.

It's just barely tangentially related to actually working in the industry, which has the result it's actually biased against senior engineers, because ironically the standard for being hired as a senior engineer is actually being better at these interview games that juniors have more recently spent time preparing for.

A lot of companies quite frankly look at what Google did, think "we're just as good as Google", and more or less copy what they do except add even more junk. These companies don't spend much of any time getting to know candidates, they will run some "events" that appeal to people with excessive free time, again mostly juniors. They haven't invested a hundredth of the massive PR push that Google has (Google literally got a box-office movie with Owen Wilson made to recruit), and they CERTAINLY don't want to offer Google-style RSU compensation packages.

After all this "we have the best people" crap, "we have this rube golderberg style interview to filter out all the riff-raff" crap, they want to offer market salaries and some weak ISO package you will have zero chance of valuing accurately and leave 18 windows open for VCs to screw you.

So, given all this, should you waste your time interviewing at companies like Stripe?

Actually only a few companies will pay as much as Google (Google salary is low but they pay a ton of stock you can immediately sell for cash, so it’s effectively cash). Most people seem to overestimate how fun it is to work at Google but underestimate how much Google pays and how much more it is than most other companies.

The engineer personality profile is basically allergic to organizing. Too passive and introverted, or delusionally individualistic. Silicon Valley engineers see themselves as temporarily embarrassed hotshot entrepreneurs. The funny thing is to the extent engineers do organize it’s usually leftist organization for the lower wage workers (tech workers coalition), which is noble but doesn’t advance engineer goals. Police, teachers, doctors, all have political organization and therefore voice but tech workers cede that voice to their execs. I fantasize about changing that but I’ve come to accept the personality profiles of engineers make it an impossible problem.

Exactly! They sent out regular email to all employees asking for contributions to NETPAC when I was there. But now don't discuss politics among rank-and-file - they just want to control the dialog and power among the execs.

I couldn't agree more strongly.

I tend to get harshly downvoted when I bring up Google on Hacker News (since it employs a disproportionate amount of Bay Area engineers that hang out here and then get defensive about it), but no other company did I see quite the disconnect between what they SAY they aspire to and how they ACT.

Google has built an incredibly strong PR brand on being the "good guys", a "not a conventional corporation", "don't be evil", etc. But in a way it's far more dangerous. At least we know what Goldman Sachs is about, making money, the employees there largely know it, the world around them knows it, people know to be on guard when dealing with Goldman because you know what their motives are.

With Google, having worked in NYC with finance companies and spent many years at Google, people are Google are as obsessed with money, success, and prestige as any finance employee. But they SAY they are about making the world a better place, responsibility etc. Where this leads is not, Google doesn't do bad things, but the much scarier, they do wrong things but saying they can't be wrong because Google is the one doing it, and Google is supposedly good! Taking a page from Nixon, "when the president does it, it's not illegal."

This came to a head during the Maven debate over using Tensorflow to build auto-aim killbots. The most common ethical defense amongst employees was "well, if we don't do it, Amazon will do it, and that would be worse! Because we're Google, and we're the good guys." Now if a crack dealer said, it's alright for me to sell dangerous narcotics to these children and addicts, because if I don't do it, someone else will. And that person could be even worse! Would ANYONE accept that argument as ethically coherent? Of course not, yet these otherwise very intelligent Google employees seemingly swallowed up Google's absurd logic without thinking. You become the good guy by NOT doing the bad things, not by doing the bad things while claiming it's alright because you SAID you're the good guys.

Now, to pre-empt people accusing me of derailing, I'm not because this is extremely relevant to the original article being discussed here. This is banks leaders like Jamie Dimon following Google's lead. You don't have to actually take any REAL moral stand, you don't have to make any real ethical decisions, all you have to do is TALK about it a lot. Control the message. It's dishonest and it's hypocritical but it's worked out very well for Google. Compare Google to Uber. If you just look at the facts, between the Kelly Ellis accusations, the Andy Rubin thing, many more examples, Google's sexual harassment FACTS are actually WAY worse than what Uber was accused of. Yet Uber now has this awful reputation for being terrible to women while Google gets way less flak in both the tech community and the broader world - why? All because Larry and Sergey played the PR game way better than TK, they were the cool hip burners who cared about progressive stuff, while really they run their companies with the exact same corporate malfeasance, profit at any cost strategy of any NYC financial institution.

Bottom line, we need to hold companies accountable with ACTIONS, and if they give us WORDS instead of ACTIONS we should be MORE critical, not drop our guard and be LESS critical.

I agree that Schmidt is a good example of someone who's already demonstrated willingness to use his power to bully those he perceives as political opponents, but the principle that access to such an incredibly dangerous power exists, and that existing regulation can barely if at all limit it, is really the problem. Forget any specific individual and ask yourself if we can trust every high level Alphabet exec who could pull some strings and make sure it doesn't get "leaked" that those strings were pulled in decades to come.

This might help you:

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

If Facebook has such a tool, it's certainly not public knowledge. The parent comment was clearly meant to make a point that Facebook could have such a tool, even if it's not public knowledge. I was expanding on that point that Google could as well. Hope that helps.

Google scares me much more, for me, my data on Facebook is nothing compared to the amount of my personal data on Gmail and Docs. Having worked at Google, a regular cog in the wheel engineer getting access to sensitive user data is carefully monitored and logged for appropriate usage, but I also strongly suspect that if a powerful player like Schmidt/Brin wanted to get the dirt on private user data they would have no problem, because there is a strong culture of secrecy that labels any sort of whisteblowing as "leaking", considered the most cardinal of sins by most Googlers.

I worked for a startup with a well liked paid product built through iteration (test prep product). Then it was dropped on the ground and discontinued cause they raised a hundred million and now needed to build the founders vision, a free consumer project designed and built for years without showing it to potential users. Didn’t work out. So I’ve seen that happen.

Google was and likely still is in the running for JEDI, because Eric Schmidt is an advisor for the DoD and nudges them towards Google, and JEDI was the whole point of signing the relatively small Maven contract. Google offers pretrained AI models and hands-on consulting to put AI on drones, and in exchange the DoD gives them a piece of JEDI. But Maven turned into a huge controversy which doesn't make Google leadership look good in the eyes of the DoD, and they probably wanted to go all-in with the market leader anyway (seeing as they're very conservative), so now maybe Amazon will just win the whole thing.

Because software engineers are so dumb they think they're so smart they don't need to organize/unionize.

One correction: the military absolutely does not have any more advanced technology than the private sector. Very much the opposite, they've been totally incompetent at figuring out how to build software, or even buying software from the traditional contractors, which is the motivation for eric schmid'ts defense innovation stuff and Google's project maven. Many of the statements of the current DoD secretary flat out admit this stuff (plus if you've had the misfortunate working for a traditional DoD contractor it's also laughably obvious).

Downvoted but true, look at direct physical threats to Damore in the lawsuit by people Google still employs. Yet he got fired for violating code of conduct...are threats not violations? It's a double standard, if you threaten people deemed conservative there are no repercussions, even though I consider that far more hostile than a doc.

I believe employers have a right to fire employees for speech. But as we see industry power condense to a few megacorps, ones that play gatekeeper to information access, we should look at why we value freedom of speech at the national level and be more open minded about freedom of speech and political expression in other contexts. I don't buy the cliche "it's not freedom from consequences" argument (government couldn't say jail is just a consequences, so freedom of speech does imply no consequences within its context) and I don't buy this "we can't tolerate intolerance" argument either, as there seems to be an increasingly narrow point of views that at least some people won't label intolerant (or more common, smear by association by implying your views are associated with intolerant ones)

Yep I tend to agree. The fact that someone programmed an AI to make that art is part of what make it art. The artist is the programmer essentially. But it's also ludicrous to me to think that AI art would somehow replace other art or music rather than just living along side it.

Went through this exactly. My guess is because founders select for overconfidence (necessary for pitching investors maybe?) It also ties into founder worship which seems really common (people always dropping reasons founder is some uberhuman).

I just felt like my intelligence was insulted. I also found out a lot of the other people who "bought into" the "mission" were really just playing along.

We also did a lot of "agile" that wasn't agile at all. Make "MVPs" that weren't shippable, do work in 2 week "sprints" but never talk to customers for months etc

Like you said, I'm much happier at a place that takes a critical eye at its own projects, is actually willing to change the plan according to feedback rather than assume we're building the founder's "vision", actually dont' take ourselves too seriously, etc