hox

"Older engineers are not smart in the way that start-ups want them to be..."

Sigh.

What was it about your standups that were hurting your team?

I'm on the fence with daily standup meetings. they definitely can help a team communicate when there are a large number of external forces at play in a larger organization and if there are no underlying asynchronous communication channels available. on the other hand, in a team that communicates regularly with historical communications available to new team members, they aren't as useful.

What about figure 9 that shows sustained 60+ hour work weeks drop productivity to 45% that of a 40 hour work week after week 4?

Additionally, you are never going to find research that discussed the magical unicorns you describe and not averages. That's not how research works.

The lack of remote opportunities at every Bay Area company, save for a few prominent ones, is disappointing. I live in the area but am frustrated by the commute, but also cannot afford the premium of living in SF.

But I should stop before this turns into a full on rant...

Seriously. I have a 3 week old right now and was taking BART in everyday. People who know they have contracted a highly contagious disease and decide to travel on mass transit the day after should really consider the consequences of their malicious (even if unintentional) actions.

One's core value cannot be quantified by an objective metric. We are not all computers.

We need far more discussion of this type in this forum, especially because the "FU money" and "technical master" roles are rare and difficult to achieve. These can be ideal scenarios for people, but we need to discuss that not achieving this feats does not equal failure.

Correct, but the site isn't following the terms of that license.

This really looks like maxmind city level, so... until we get confirmation from the dev on what db it is, assume this service can disappear at any moment due to license issues.

How often is the AS info updated? What source do you use, and how do you handle multi-homed IP addresses?

And presumably this service is just repackaging such an existing system. My old company had a tool to figure our what widely used geo db was used for these services (to properly judge it's value), but I no longer have access to this tool.

Interestingly enough, Alan Shreve gave a talk at RedisConf a couple of years back detailing something very similar used on the twilio stack to rate limit draining a queue: https://inconshreveable.com/talks.html

you just described slashdot!

also, you are crazy if you only take developers in the Bay Area seriously. I live here now, but that attitude completely blinds you to the vast majority of programming knowledge that exists on the planet.

Why correlate age to risk taking? And in this context, what is the risk of going to a twitter/Dropbox/box, which all have major funding and major revenue streams?

it really depends on the situation. of course I'm being g a bit dramatic; working long hours is really hard to not do as a founder, because it really is your life. but it's not 100% your employees' lives, and implied culture is just as important as that defined by company mission and policies.

You are correct, he never explicitly said anything about working long hours, but implied that only those that work "after 5" and don't indulge in entertainment such as netflix are motivated and "doers." I don't know how else to interpret that paragraph.

And I was a founder and worked for seven years for the still-successful company. we made it a point to set good examples of working only while productive, allowing remote work, and not making any hourly demands on employees. knowing when to NOT work is more important than working hard constantly, especially when you are in a leadership position and don't want to set implied expectations on employees.

Why does the perception exist that working longer hours equates to good forward progress? That unless you aren't willing to devote your every waking moment to an idea, you aren't a "doer?" This is such a ridiculous idea...

And? The article makes no mention of what each server is responsible for, how much redundancy is built in (this is AWS where nodes die on a whim), whether all of these servers are used for production or if there is a spread across dev and staging environments, etc.

When all of these factors are considered, 52 servers isn't a huge number.

Brands have value to consumers, but countless multi-billion dollar industries lie in the glue you speak of. We do not all share the interest of fighting for advertising eyes.

The government is not the media. Terrorism headlines are sensational and grab attention, thus advertising dollars. Don't confuse the two.

Damn you I was going to come post your storyboard. :(

Yet go is a dependency nightmare! Dealing with more than one developer on a project with dependencies is incredibly difficult due to the insane decision to not support locking a dependency to a specific version.

My advice:

1. As an advocate for a practice, ensure you use that practice in all that you do. Advocate for it in every team meeting. Try to stress why it is important, and how it can directly make things better, instead of just "making our code better." Provide research and numbers from prior projects that show how useful such a practice can be.

2. Provide good examples and guides to get the practice started. Some avoid a practice because they don't know the best way about executing a practice. If it's unit testing, show how one should go about determining edge cases and describe useful unit testing methodologies (mocks, stubs, etc).

3. Make it easy as possible. If it's unit testing, integrate a CI server directly to your SCM. If it's code review, adopt a practice that fits inline with your existing workflow and don't make it a ceremony - make it asynchronous.

4. Understand that it will be gradual, but every effort moving forward should push towards integrating the new practice. You can't suddenly have 100% test coverage after introducing unit testing to an existing project, but all code that gets included can include new tests, and old refactoring can have tests included to slowly build up the test coverage.

The cost you speak of is directly trading software quality for "speedier" delivery. Heck, this was even posted just yesterday: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2013/34-70694.pdf. One of the big problems was there was no code review being performed.

Also think of code review as a fantastic learning opportunity for the developers you are reviewing. Practicing an art can only get you so far as an expert, but being critiqued by others can help refine the rough edges you may otherwise ignore throughout your career.

Code reviews don't have to happen in massive context, either; why not follow a practice that every pull request (or whatever your SCM calls it) goes through at least one reviewer before being merged to master? And ensure your pull requests are frequent and preferably 100 lines or less!

A little bit goes a REALLY long way. Don't give in to the fallacy that your code isn't either worth it or is good enough to not be reviewed.

The entire implementation of sorted sets is really interesting, with a dual implementation of ziplists and skiplists being used depending on the amount of elements in the list. I've been meaning to write bit more about Redis internals lately; maybe I'll start on that in my commute hours.

I've got a couple of general articles on adding a command and adding a datatype to Redis at http://starkiller.net, but I don't get too into existing code. I'd be interested in writing a bit more about the other data structures as well as the multiple strategies used for EXPIRE (which recently changed I believe).

why didn't you? if you were in the US, you have 30 days to return and cancel contracts on all major carriers.

If I were looking for a job, I would really only consider a 10+ hour "take-home" interview if I already had extensive dialog with the employer, met their team, and determined proper fit given my background. I also don't know if I would be willing to put in the time if I was still competing with others for the same position. I know that I would not be able to put in as much free time as others, and devoting that much time to something that might only be used as a measure for comparison is a waste of my time.

I recently interviewed at a medium-sized tech company in Palo Alto that only had recent graduates on my interview schedule. I really don't know if I could have expected them to ask questions other than standard CS / data structures / algorithms questions.

Why those employees would be put in a position to interview with such a short time frame of professional experience, let alone recruiting experience, is beyond me.