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eshyongon Salary Stream – Software Engineer Offers

Yeah, I just started started working at Twitch about a month ago, and while I was interviewing with them I found more accurate results when I searched for Amazon salaries instead. I think part of the problem is there aren't many data points for Twitch on levels.fyi compared to other companies.

eshyongon MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small

Plus the fact that protobuf is more flexible about interface changes. My previous company had countless incidents that happened when new code deserialized msgpack records with unexpected fields from redis...

eshyongon Do whatever you can't stop thinking about

The author is not selling you anything. He is not saying that hard work is bad. His _whole argument_ is that we should work on projects that excite us and benefit us, as opposed to working on Rails because it's trendy and has lots of stars on Github.

To be honest, I think you would agree with the author if you focused on the overall message rather than specific points in the post.

eshyongon Do whatever you can't stop thinking about

No, the author is suggesting that you work on projects that are intrinsically motivating, i.e. things that you would want as opposed to problems other people want you to solve.

eshyongon Do whatever you can't stop thinking about

Yep that's what I took away from it too.

eshyongon Do whatever you can't stop thinking about

Except that's the opposite of what he's saying. Instead of valuing feeling productive, he now values feeling energetic and excited every day. I think you may have missed that part.

Not everyone wants to get swole or be a rails core maintainer.

eshyongon Not being an asshole will make you more money

I'd guess that most people would be ok with not getting to the top. Most would be happy to have a few million dollars in the bank by the time they retire.

America seems to have an absolutist mindset. Being a billionaire != success/happiness in life. There's a lot of grey between the black and white.

eshyongon Robinhood Is Down Again?

Their director of infra tried to recruit me and basically said that they wanted to replace every relational data store with message queues instead... that struck me as a bit weird and overzealous.

eshyongon Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

Still, looks like a nasty injury. That's enough to make anyone ponder life

eshyongon Robinhood Is Down Again?

That was probably a joke, see Robinhood's reply: https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1234861941413351434

Seems like infra problems.

eshyongon “We already store data. In a database. It works well”

Unfortunately, the original poster appears to genuinely believe in the power of blockchain. Cryptocurrencies seem to attract a certain crowd which is extremely technical but also surprisingly naive about the way humans work. The result is you have a lot of idealistic techies who propose blockchain as the solution to literally every hard societal problem you can think of.

eshyongon 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

I hope you've found success and happiness in life nowadays! Honestly interviewing is in some ways closer to dating than contests of skill. Sometimes your area of expertise is just not what the team is looking for. Sometimes that company just wouldn't be a good culture fit for you. I've had similar experiences with rejection and I've since learned that interviews are really bad at sorting out good engineers from bad engineers, and that networking goes a lot further than raw coding skill (although you still have to know some leetcode, unfortunately).

eshyongon 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

Agreed with your points, although I wouldn't use the word "lie". "Marketing yourself" would be a better way to put it. It's not about falsely representing your experience; it's about knowing and emphasizing your strengths, and aligning that with the needs of the team.

eshyongon 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

I don't think the fact that Dan posts the least controversial ideas detracts from his point; publishing one of them is admirable in itself. Putting yourself out there is better than not posting anything at all.

eshyongon 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

I agree that the author isn't totally rigorous in his methodology, which I understand is frustrating, but I think you're missing the bigger point he's trying to make. As I interpreted it, the article is mostly about self-improvement and the fact that even at 95%, there's still a lot of room for optimization between 95 and 99. He's saying, "hey, even this competitive Overwatch streamer makes game-losing mistakes, but it's very easy to improve on these things, if you have the right mindset". In other words, instead of focusing on your rank, you should be focusing on the low-hanging fruit, no matter where you land on the spectrum of talent.

eshyongon Ancestry lays off 6% of staff

Come on man, be sensitive. This is people's jobs we're talking about.

eshyongon Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

No problem!

eshyongon Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

I think you meant "rate"...

eshyongon Microsoft's Three Browsers

> I don’t see the benefit of Edge beyond Windows users dealing with a less shitty browser out of the box.

That's a huge benefit, considering > 75% of the world still uses Windows.

eshyongon How the Digg team was acquihired

Probably the latter. Once you have that big a userbase + not much competition it's hard to go down unless something catastrophic happens.

eshyongon The dark side of GraphQL: performance

Is PHP Ents a type of webserver FB uses?

eshyongon We 30x'd our Node parallelism

Yes, I agree. I'm arguing against your characterization of node as a poor runtime. For many line-of-business applications node is a fine choice. However, plaid has to integrate with many banks which only expose web pages, not APIs, so I'm guessing that they have to do a non-trivial amount of CPU work to scrape and process HTML responses. For this, it may not be such a good choice.

All I'm saying is that the choice of language is (usually) not the issue. Poor architecture design causes a lot more problems than whether you choose python/java/ruby/node for your webapp.

eshyongon We 30x'd our Node parallelism

I mean, running multiple node runtimes (aka multiprocessing) actually sounds like a reasonable compromise for parallelism. That's the standard solution for dynamic languages without great multithreading support. If you needed great multithreading support then Node probably wasn't the right choice for you in the first place, but for most applications, it's probably fine.

However, running multiple containers for parallelism sounds a little bit crazy. In the worst case, each container may be running on its own server, but even assuming multiple containers per host, I'm guessing they were running an insignificant number of instances, which is probably why they were able to save $300k in server costs.

eshyongon We 30x'd our Node parallelism

I feel like this article is missing a crucial piece of information: why was integration code was blocking the event loop in the first place?...

eshyongon Why the ‘Queen of Shitty Robots’ Renounced Her Crown

Ahh, interesting insight. I hadn't considered that case before, but in that context it makes sense.

I'd definitely be annoyed if I was a professor/doctor and strangers were being overly familiar with me.

eshyongon Why the ‘Queen of Shitty Robots’ Renounced Her Crown

Isn't that a good thing, since they're getting more recognition (people learning their first name), or am I missing something more subtle here?

eshyongon Engineer admits hacking Yahoo accounts searching for images

I was able to see it in autocomplete, so that's something:

https://imgur.com/a/dJFuNqW

You are right that simply typing "work" and hitting enter returns no results, though.

eshyongon Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

Ironically, your comment is an example of a narrow view mindset that software engineers who work on React and Javascript are somehow not equivalent to "real" engineers. I don't think that's a balanced view in an industry where a large percentage of companies have web-related products and employ engineers to work on them.

eshyongon Why Generics?

If you read the article more closely, it says that Borg was written in C++. If you watch the video linked by @tuvan below, you'll hear the speaker (who is a contributor) mention that the original authors of Kubernetes wrote the first version in Java, which was rewritten in Go.