fivedogit

Hi, I'm the hiring manager for the sales engineer (some call it "solutions engineer") position and want to put in a shameless plug. As concisely as I can put it...

Requirements:

- Technical background

- Problem-solving ability (intelligence)

- Energy, proactivity, extroversion

Duties:

- Be on sales calls and in sales meetings, offering technical consultation for our platform and services

- Listen for and suggest new opportunities the non-technical folks involved might miss

- Assess solidifying opportunities for feasibility and difficulty given our existing toolset

We look forward to receiving your resume!

Honestly, I am coming around to the idea that there's one "golden" technique with many riffs: "convince them they're under attack"

War on Christmas, foreigners pouring in, secilarism, socialism, sharia law, "inner cities", "gun control", the gays, "nanny state", "liberal media" etc

Once the public feels sufficiently threatened, they'll do anything you want.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Improved Unity launcher usability

- DESCRIPTION: As far as I can tell, you can drag/drop items to the launcher, and rearrange the buttons on the launcher, but changing the icon (or setting one at all) and getting the launcher to actually launch the thing you want is unnecessarily difficult, requiring .desktop file edits that I can never seem to get to work anyway. I still have to run /home/myname/eclipse/eclipse from a terminal on one of my machines because the launcher is not working/non-intuitive and I don't have the time/desire to stop what I'm doing and figure it out.

Also, expandable/group launchers (many apps under one launcher square/icon spreading into multiple items) would be nice.

Otherwise, great work! Love ubuntu and Unity.

Hey piper! Didn't know you were with Consensys. If you're in NYC, hit me up. fivedogit at google's email svc.

I work here (in solutions engineering and professional services) and it's the best job I've ever had. Strong trajectory, great management, smart peers. On top of that, we're solving a real problem: matching skills to jobs which -- just look at this thread -- is such an incredible hodgepodge right now.

Anyway, feel free to ask me any questions.

Been using these for the past few years at both home at work. Yamakasi Catleap q270, 2560x1440 for $250. Probably cheaper from overseas on eBay.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00KX1FZEW

The stand is crappy and don't expect much from the speakers, but otherwise I love them.

>Exit polls seem to suggest that plenty of people understated their support for Trump

This is incorrect. People stated their support. Poll models just underestimated how many of them would vote.

"confirm possible"

100% airtight

I'm glad it's not just me. I think it's been about an hour now.

I did a ctrl+f for the word "hipster" and here it is. Have an upvote.

Usually pg's essays are spot-on. But this one, I feel, is based on a false premise: People aren't upset about startup founders getting rich -- in fact, society loudly applauds it. What people are upset about is legacy capital growing and growing and growing while the poor and middle class stagnate or even contract.

On this subject, I always think about farms.

Back in the day, it took ~100 people to work a large farm. Now it takes one (or a few) guy(s) with some machinery. All those farm workers aren't now out on the beach somewhere -- they've migrated to the city to drive cabs, etc. The wealth generated by this astounding leap of productivity went entirely to the shareholders of the John Deere corporation. (edit: Yes, cheaper food benefits everyone. I meant the share of the revenue generated by the farm going to its workers, vendors and shareholders. And the farm owners obviously benefited, too. Farmhands? Not so much.)

And that was great! Good for those speculators and innovators!

What I think most have a problem with is 7 generations later, the John Deere family (<-- edit:metaphor) still controls all that capital and pays taxes at 15% on capital gains while losing count of how many homes they own.

I assume you're exaggerating slightly and that you mean "couldn't code as well as the resume suggested". How certain are you that the pressure of the interview (which often means broken concentration, poor sleep the night before, etc) and the unfamiliarity of the setting (even typing in a Google doc without proper spacing, syntax highlighting and auto completion can be incredibly disorienting) aren't a major factor? Isn't it conceivable that some worse coders are better under such circumstances than a great coder who suffers mightily under them?

I can't upvote this enough. In the age of Github, if a candidate has an impressive body of work and can "talk the talk", a coding interview is wasteful, potentially misleading and insulting. As soon as enough candidates balk at them, companies will stop doing them.

You're exactly right. And it comes down to simple economic truths. If mass amounts of people could "easily" make 130k out of college on a path to 250k then the hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world would give up their ~$100k jobs and go do that. But they don't. Just look at glassdoor salary averages! It's right there in black and white! The sunny salary numbers he posits are, as you said, out of reach for most.

(It should be noted that I completely agree with the article's conclusion. I've come to feel that the EV of buying a startup lottery ticket is woefully lower than pg, sama or [insert vc/angel here] assert. If you can land a solid and interesting bigco job, that's probably your best bet.)

I think you should sidestep into a related but more appropriate job.

Above all else, engineers should be obsessed with the proper functioning of a system, throughout all aspects - speed, security, robustness, etc. What tools are chosen are chosen only for the purposes of enhancing those goals. An true engineer senses these needs and works towards them uncompromisingly. To choose otherwise - for any reason - is to be a bad engineer, which it sounds like you are (sorry! Just being honest!)

The good news is that having an insatiable appetite for novelty has its place in this world. Could you work as an angel scout? Or a tech crunch (-style) writer?

Read this a few days ago. So good. Everything I've heard otherwise in the media has been superficial by comparison.

TL;DR ISIS is a doomsday cult analogous to David Koresh's. They interpret the Koran exactly literally and any deviation from it is punishable by death (this includes AQ and all shia for modernization offenses). They believe they are a primary actor in the prophecy that'll bring about the ultimate battle with "Rome" at Dabiq, Syria and the judgement day.

My take is that while modern mainstream Christianity laughed off the Branch Davidians as crazy people who offered nothing, mainstream Sunnis see IS as similarly crazy with the important exception of "well at least they're fighting the Shia". In other words, there is some tacit support for IS based on millennia-old factionalism, (edit: which is how they've grown from a small cult into a significant movement).

An interesting point in the article is that while AQ can hide underground and never be fully eradicated, IS has to maintain land and provide government services under the caliphate to remain legitimate (according to the Koran, of course). This makes it an entirely different enemy that can, in theory, be destroyed.

Further, no peace can ever be negotiated because the borders of IS have to keep expanding or the caliphate is no longer valid. That is, Muhammad says all non-believers have to be converted, full stop.

Anyway, the article is outstanding. Take an hour to read the whole thing.

"At launch, a slow-burning fuse was lit; its length was calibrated to the estimated time to arrive over German-controlled territory. At first, the balloon rose rapidly and expanded in size until an internal cord tightened and preventing further increase in altitude beyond 25,000 feet (7,600 m) by releasing some gas; the balloon would then begin a slow descent due to the hydrogen gradually leaking away.[4] After a while, the slow burning fuse would release a bung in a can of mineral oil; as the oil slowly dripped out, the balloon's payload would lighten arresting its decent. The same slow-burning fuse was also used to release the balloon's weapon."

Obviously these aren't drones by today's standards, but they did have automated mechanisms to control flight and drop incendiary devices.

By some force of habit, I still visit yahoo.com every now and then. I guess it's about as close to "what normal people are into" as I'm going to get these days without TV.

I'm struck by the juxtaposition of Marissa Mayer's place as a historically important woman in tech (which she has personally embraced) and the sheer number of "Kardashian" and "Jenner" mentions found on the Yahoo front page. Seriously. CTRL-F "Jenner" at any time and see what happens. 5 mentions, minimum.

"What's wrong with that?" you might ask. Everything. The Kardashians -- OK, primarily Kim has made a career and massive amounts of money from voluntarily making herself into a vapid sex object. Sex tapes, jilted husbands, nude PR stunt magazine covers... it's the lowest of the low. We all know it and that's fine. If the world pays for that, whatever. That's capitalism.

But Marissa...

I'm always conficted about Marissa. Her job depends on an unholy convenient alliance with the Attention Hounds of the World to bring eyes to her basically-worthless-without-Alibaba-investment company's website. Does that not keep her up at night?

So when a story like this comes out: "Look at me! I'm blazing trails for women in the workplace!" I just remember all the Kardashian-enabling and then it all rings very hollow.

A YC founder once told me: "YC doesn't make a company and definitely won't fix a company... they invest in companies that are already working. That's their secret."

Granted, these companies aren't soaring into the stratosphere yet. "Already working" can simply mean a few early customers, a functional and polished prototype, or even just a really good idea and a (very) proven team. The point is that YC, like any investor, tries to minimize risk as much as possible, even though they're in the riskiest layer of professional startup investing.

I used to agonize over the fact that I never worked at a big name-brand company and that I haven't been able to hobnob with apex talent who might co-found a startup with me as I figured that was the only way to get into YC or TS. This one bit of advice (i.e. traction is everything) washed away that anxiety like night and day. The ability to succeed is in the founders' hands, not YC's magic wand.

Doubly so... because do you really want to take investment (even from YC) in an idea that doesn't have traction and isn't working?

I was in Owensboro KY today for a funeral and the experience was bizarre. Beforehand, I was WiFi tethering into my office, trying to commit some code. All of a sudden, it went down. I'm a cheapass on Straight talk, so that was my first suspect. Then I went to the funeral and asked to borrow a phone. Also dead. (Wordplay!) So was everyone else on all carriers. The only internet service was TWC through WiFi.

In my entire life, I've never experienced such a wide-ranging, universal outage for such a long time. 5 full hours in the middle of the day. Totally surreal.

All arguments aside, there's one fundamental way to answer whether companies' talent shortage complaints are "phony" or not: pay. If there really were a shortage, pay would be rising dramatically. Average engineers would make 200k, 300k... Just like doctors do. But it isn't happening. These BigCos just want more supply so they can pay even less than they do now. Plain and simple.

Edit: Doctors and lawyers make so much because of artificial governors on the supply. They're not absurdly more talented or educated than other people (e.g. engineers), there are simply fewer of them. In the case of doctors, med school is the limiting factor. The time and $ investment is nuts. For lawyers, it's the Bar exam. When there are too many lawyers, the Bar association makes the test harder. When there aren't enough, they make it easier.

This makes me want a standardized programming test so a) talent level could be gagued more accurately than a cursory glance at someone's github account and b) the supply of engineers would be choked off.

The first thing that came to mind when I read this headline was Valve's famous structureless work environment. If there's no structure, who handles all the grunt work noboday wants to do... like security?

Even if somebody is explicitly assigned to security, I'm not very confident they'd have the authority to make all these freewheeling ad hoc teams adhere to good practices.

But sunlight reflecting off a random planet (including ours) is not useful. Sure, you can detect it, but it doesn't say anything about whether the planet has intelligent life or not. It would just be noise in the cosmos, no signal.

I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that all EM frequencies -- visible light, radio, infrared, etc -- travel away from earth at the same speed (c). Since space has (almost) nothing to slow them down, then they'll just keep going forever. Thus, "strength" (however you want to measure it) is largely irrelevant so long as the signal it produces is detectable apart from all the other outgoing information. So the "light" broadcast from a TV tower is the same as the light from a spotlight at a shopping mall, in terms of its ability to travel through space and get noticed by aliens.

The only exception I can think of would be our atmospheric interference. Some light may penetrate our own cloud layers better than others. So all light may not be created equal, in that sense.

The earth is getting louder. 150 years ago, we'd have had almost zero light pollution. Nowadays you can't even see stars when you go outside.

Not only are there more lights, we are getting more efficient at producing energy to power them.

This is great. It's the natural evolution of going earlier and earlier into lifecycle of a startup (or even idea).

As a next move, I'd like to see them go "pre-team" and put talented individuals with complimentary skill sets together behind a single idea.

For the love of God, someone create a World of Warcraft where the quests are educational. Instead of "go kill 8 green dragons" the questiver says "Mata a 8 dragones verdes". The immersion and addiction to progression (i.e. unholy motivation) would have us speaking multiple languages in no time.

Please. I'm begging you to take my money.

For me recently, it's constant because I'm working with Spring Boot and ExtJS for the first time. So I'd say how often you're doing web searches is a function of your familiarity with the techs you're using.

"Please lead with the location of the position..."

Obviously this is just one vague, anonymous data point, but I deleted (not just deactivated) my FB account and I feel like a weight has been lifted from me. I don't have to look at a falsely curated feed of how great everyone else is doing anymore.

The more people flirt with quitting, the more they realize their feeds have been reduced to attention whores and babies (their real friends stopped posting long ago), the mroe they'll quit and it'll just snowball.

FB messed up by getting too big. I'm going to post my true thoughts when my grandfather might read them? Nope.

Smart analysis. I object to your classification of Twitter, though. I was originally a Twitter skeptic, but the truth is, they've built a central hub where Snoop Dogg, the Pope, POTUS and @pmarca all converse. Very powerful. They need to do more, but they own more than a fad, IMO.

I especially agree on Apple.

What Microsoft has done recently is great. I hated them with the passion of a thousand suns when I was in college, but Satya seems to get it. He knows that if you put out a browser that causes devs around the globe to have to program exceptions because it doesn't behave like the others, they will hate you for it. (Doubly. Once for technical reasons and again for acting like a monopolistic ass.) And what you gained from some niche technical benefit, you've lost 1000x in goodwill and, ultimately, bad PR. I'm actually rooting for them now. It's crazy.