idoby

Learning how to use the compiler and type system (if your language has them) to get as close as possible to "if it compiles, it works", is invaluable.

Novice programmers just want the code not to error out, and compile, they just want the compiler errors to go away, while more experienced programmers learn to use the errors as a todo list of sorts, at first, then as a guide for refactorings and fixing bugs.

Learn to harness the compiler and type system to help you, and your coding will improve 10x in both velocity and quality.

You wouldn't, to be honest, since I don't have a website, twitter or FB at the moment, and it's on the backburner. Besides, it's probably way too cynical and toxic to actually publish. Just look at the responses here.

Also, I'm planning for that book to have a slightly narrower focus, so I may have not done the project any justice.

I do have a lot of tech machiavellianism to write about though, from the small, but notable tech community in my country (Israel).

It might become treatable soon, but I'll be too old anyway. Good thing being a pilot was never a dream of mine :)

I wish I could upvote you twice for the irony

There's a certain truth to be considered that there are some things you will never be able to master, not even after 20000 hours. Usually people identify these things early on in life, but sometimes it takes a while.

For example, I realized early on that I would never be able to become a fighter pilot.

I've worked $150k/year jobs, the expectations of work pace/output are implied, but completely there.

They'll pay lip service to mental health and work-life balance, but you'll see the real incentives in who gets bonuses/promotions and who gets "managed out".

Try to have a minor mental health episode in a tech company. Just try. Then tell me how long the line is at the unemployment office.

I just read it as short for "cloud infra project with controls modeled after popular PaaS products"

I've been doing this for a long time, rarely with good consequences for myself. So thanks for the positive comment.

I'm actually writing a book about this.

It's great that you know this about yourself and have been lucky enough to be able to make these kind of tradeoffs. You are in a much better place than a lot of others.

True, but being able to BS is a great reason why people would pay you more.

Higher paying jobs don't pay higher for no reason. One of those reasons could be that you have unique skills worth paying for. Another reason is as compensation for squeezing every last hour of work out of you. Not saying you can't get a higher paying job and be happy with your work-life balance, but buyer beware when it comes to this. You might actually be in a good place in this regard.

If you start a business, you might get the opportunity to learn a bunch of things you never would have in a corporate environment, and if the business succeeds, you might have the time and money to do the other things on your list. If it doesn't succeed, you'll certainly have the time when you decide to shut it down.

Another option is to start a side business while working for your current employer, if your contract and legal environment will allow it.

Your mid-twenties are a great time to figure out what you want to be by the end of your thirties.

Most people, even in tech, consider their job to be just that - a job. In the worst case, they hate it.

Also, you seem to be content with being an individual contributor engineer, which is perfectly fine, but if you want to get ahead, you're not going about it the right way.

Only if you do it badly. It's very likely that the people at the top of this "small world" in your town have done exactly this to get there.

They do it because it works. Yes, they're bad teammates but they will move up, and they don't care about you or how it feels to be their teammate.

That depends on what you want to achieve with your time. Want to do something meaningful? Start your own business/startup, volunteer or become a cancer researcher (all debatable of course). Want to survive and get promoted in a corporate world? My recipe will get you there. 1 part work for 9 parts politics. If that makes you feel bad you can water it down to 1/8.

I define "corporate" as any human org greater than 100 members, including non-profits, academia, military, even your damn scout troop.

Also: never communicate early. Communicate after you've solved the issue to look like a go-getter, avoid prolonged discussions and prevent people from taking credit. If you manage to take credit for someone else's hard work (say, if they're not a good communicator), all the better. That will help with maintaining a low work/politics ratio.

There's another issue to be considered: a manager whose employees constantly discover and solve problems by themselves or as a group without involving the manager, will generally assume no problems were to be had. This is very bad as these invisible problems will not show up when your skip-level or committee reviews candidates for promotions or bonuses, or just generally can make you appear to be low-performing just because you're a quiet, competent problem solver. I've seen this happen on too many teams to count.

Always make sure to do your work and to communicate effectively that you're doing your work, facing hard problems and working hard. Communicating this effectively is far more important than actually doing it, so I'd recommend spending 90% of your working time on this communication, and no more than 10% of your working time on actual problem solving. You are a salaried employee. The only thing you really need to care about is how your manager and their manager feels about you.

Man, you sure put a whole bunch of words in my mouth. All I'm saying is that unions are created in order to block change that they perceive to be in opposition to their interests. This applies to wages, automation and other things. This is literally what unions were and are created for. Police or otherwise.

Are they good or bad? Depends. If you're in law enforcement, your employer is the government and you probably don't have a lot of choices of employer besides the government, so I'd say in that sector, it's a good thing to have. And the opposite for tech, where competition for workers drives wages and benefits up, and unions would only get in the way of that, and drain resources for their fancy offices.

And last, not everybody lives in the US. I happen to live in a country whose growth and prosperity is directly hindered by unions who spend lavishly on offices and cars for their officials, but do very little for the rank and file, while stifling innovation, of course.

This is not ideological flamebait, this is historical truth.

18th-19th century trade unions, of which this union is a modern descendent, can be directly linked to Luddism and other forms of anti-progress mentality. Examples also abound throughout the 20th century and today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union#History

So this is basically a bot that opens PRs to add contributors to your readme under different headlines. Nothing specifically about recognizing code or non-code contributors.

Are we really too lazy to open vim and add a line?

Because they're being hypocrites: they're not putting skin in the game, they're not resigning, they're just virtue signaling. So they don't actually care about what FB is doing.

This is why they're being dismissed while Tim Bray received mostly applause.

Disagree with the overall "do I have anything more compelling to do" notion.

You can have a perfectly good and valid life as a human on earth without having set foot in a university. When you decide to attend a university, you always do so at the expense or other perfectly valid things.

I think everyone should go if they can, and simultaneously I think three- and four- year degrees are too long for most people. We need to establish a program to get degrees in shorter installments, say 1.5 years each.

In other words, tech companies should seriously start considering hiring people with Associate's Degrees (or equivalent) where applicable, to turn this degree into a real viable option. I can take anyone with a brain from zero to working coder in 1.5 years of full-time study, including the maths.

I can't speak for other fields, but for tech I'm pretty confident this will be great.

Anyone should be able to sacrifice a year and a half and a reasonable tuition to be able to get the college experience. I think we can make it much more accessible.

Sorry to read that, mate. FWIW I don't think your government had a course of action that would have made a lot of difference. It caught everybody on the planet off guard and exhausted already-provisioned healthcare resources pretty fast.

I'm sorry you feel this way, but it kind of feels to me like you're linking everything back to a political landscape that you don't like, but which doesn't have a lot to do with the current state of things.

I'm not too happy with the govt in my country either, but I realize 90% of my situation would have been the same under most possible govts.

As a non-American, why do you care about who is in the white house so much? How does it affect your life concretely?

Try watching less talking heads/browsing Twitter less, maybe, and you'll feel better?

With psych stuff, I can't help but wonder how much of it is shooting the arrows and then placing the target...

True

I love initiatives like this, but IMO if you're doing a self-study "degree" aimed at practical AI knowledge, I would:

* Drop the compilers and database courses.

* Add an intro to statistics course.

* Pick one domain, since you'll need deep, proven domain expertise in one area to get hired without a real degree. So doing both NLP and CV, for instance, is probably a bad choice if this is your endgame.

* If you choose CV, add a traditional image processing course. I don't recommend to rely on whatever happens to be included in the DL for CV course. You might also want to add a good general purpose DSP course.

* Substitute exams for projects. Exams are adversarial so they don't make sense to give to yourself. You'll learn more more doing a project than you would cramming for a fake exam.

* Try to finish the whole thing in 1.5 years, not 4. Spending 4 years on a practical curriculum that doesn't yield an actual degree is a huge waste of time. Try to get the theory out the way in a year and a half so you can jump into real life projects/research. With dedication and without a rigid university schedule that forces slow progress, this is completely doable.

Couldn't find the info on the website, does the JS shown in the samples run in the client's browser? If so, I'd be coupling my client code to the implementation details of my server side DB. Nope, no thanks. Too many scars to fall for that again.

If the language barrier is the only reason keeping you from applying to the Technion, or any other university in Israel, graduate courses in Israel will generally be given in English if a non-Hebrew speaker is present. It's standard practice, just email the instructor in advance. Besides, Haifa is a very nice city.

You should also check out professors at Ben Gurion University, Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University who might have similar interests, IIRC. Feel free to hit me up if there's some page in Hebrew that doesn't translate well.

I believe the author is referring to the year MMDCCLXXII. I have no idea where this 2772 comes from.