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downriveron 10x (engineer, context) pairs

Engineers often overestimate how bad the “greenfielder” is for the business. In most cases you aren’t selling an elegant technical solution, you’re just selling a solution. And if you don’t ship it ASAP you won’t have time to worry about maintainability, you’ll be bankrupt.

For most businesses, a greenfielder is a 10x engineer.

(This is just an aside, I agree that there exist “true” 10x-ers having had the joy of working with 2 of them over the last 20 years).

downriveron Ask HN: How to advocate for prospective employers to show us their codebases?

And it’s (often comically, always depressingly) necessary for this exact reason. In a recent interview my company conducted, the candidate clearly submitted code they had not written as if it were their own. One might be surprised at how well folks can talk, that cannot actually write relatively trivial code.

downriveron It matters how you raise your kids

> They’ve focused a lot on IQ and personality — both constructs which were designed to be robust, i.e. hard to change, over time.

I thought this was an interesting observation that suggests that a lot of “conclusions” in this space are actually tautologies.

If nurture easily affected personality, we wouldn’t call it “personality” - what we call personality is exactly that which is unchanging in the face of a dynamic environment.

downriveron Notion Acquires Cron

Do you disagree with Coca Cola calling coke “the real thing”, too?

It’s marketing. Read the qualification as “good”, and trust it as much as any marketing.

downriveron I quit the tech industry (2015)

There’s not one “tech industry”, there’s just a bunch of companies and people, all unique, all flawed in their own ways. So join a company, and if you don’t like it, quit and try a different one.

downriveron I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig (2018)

It’s the “everyone doing awesome stuff is privileged” trope. Ignore it.

Agreed re: Zig!

downriveron Building an App with Next.js and Electron

Managing navigation state via the familiar URL-based approach. You have to manage “where am I in the app?” somehow.

downriveron Books I’ve read

I think it’s reasonable to distinguish reading a book and listening to a book. I don’t particularly think one is better or worse, but certainly they are objectively different.

My sense is that when people talk about gate keeping there’s necessarily an emotional component. In this case I’d guess perhaps there’s a sense that “reading a book” is valuable or prestigious and they don’t want to exclude someone from it.

But to me it’s just an observation of how you consumed content, free of emotional charge.