jacobquick

valve's people aren't very young, mostly they hire senior people. the narbacular drop kids were an exception.

Senior linux system administrators are in very short supply. Companies have given up training people for that kind of work, schools don't teach it, and most of my sysadmin friends migrated to management or dev over the past few years. I've been looking around for a new gig in San Francisco (not south bay) the past month and sometimes it feels like I'm the only candidate and there's all these companies that can't find people.

It's nice feeling wanted but I won't do the work of five guys by myself and be the only one on call for years at a stretch, something will have to change soon. I wish Google would adopt that Lee Iacocca philosophy of training people specifically to spread their way of doing things across the industry, at least there'd be competent mid-levels around then, but they just churn those people on 1 year contracts like everyone else.

It has a few really nice use cases (legacy one-off winxp servers running software from defunct vendors, rhel3 host for old image software aquired by adobe and shelved? perfect in both cases), but the other stuff I've seen it put to has been horrible. jboss on linux on hundreds of hosts converted into a big blob of jvms running in vms...there's no point in giving up that much hardware when the number and config of the servers remains so consistent, and thanks to balloon memory vmware keeps stealing ram from the vms. it's a lot of money to solve the "I need a virtual kvm" problem(?)

It doesn't have a standard implementation, each company kind of makes it up as it goes. Google's is different from Microsoft's, though it's prone to the same issues on a smaller basis.

I forwarded Valve's employee handbook to an economist friend a few months ago, and he suggested that whoever set up the company was actively experimenting with public choice theory, and that from that perspective the good and bad things mentioned in the handbook were not that difficult to suss out from the structure.

"Yeah, this article reads like a propaganda piece."

Reason is largely funded by oil interests like the Koch brothers (one of them is on their board). They've been running pro-oil for at least 6 years or so (when I saw the first of the articles). Reason is a non-profit so you can see their contributors, and it's not hard to find other publications calling them out for conflict-of-interest issues.

...making it the best spam filter yet discovered

He wasn't asking the guy to take it down in this instance. He was directly responding to the legal threat. The history of the situation is there for context.

When I was working at startups in Cambridge, there was a company there that had a similar reputation called "JumpTap". They were in the same building as us and their people complained a lot a the nearby bar. Long hours, long weeks, no recognition, even guys on the same team sabotaging each other's projects to chase promotions. When I saw that comment "getting a lot of advice from JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon," I remembered that JumpTap was founded by a former Morgan banker.

At the time I knew some people at investment banks and they basically report the exact same environment. Right around then my friend went to JumpTap and lasted about 5 weeks before he walked out, reporting the exact same thing. So when they called to recruit me I knew it would be wasting my time to even explain to them I thought that they should fix their rep as an employer first - rapacious and exploitative is the only environment they know how to run. It works for Morgan's and Goldman and the rest of Wall Street so they bring it with them into tech. It seems to me that only about 5% of engineers are suited for it, that suitability doesn't correlate with actual technical talent, they don't really gain anything in the long run for the extra time they put in (JumpTap's never gonna have a big stock pop, and Square employees will never see a Google kind of IPO payout), so for pretty much everyone it's best to steer clear.

This was my first thought, too. First it's "why would GM want to hurt Facebook" but now I'm up to "which banks backed Facebook's IPO vs which banks are helping out with GM's reorganization" so I guess it looks like a little like Facebook isn't the real target.

I actually like seeing this development in tech because it shows we're not completely isolated from the broader social shift happening on the internet, as its culture starts to catch up with its user demographics, and the internet's brilliant information spreading capacity is being put to use by people who want to evangelize a more just and fair society.

If you're managing tech and wondering what the implication of this kind of public discussion is for you: get out ahead of it. The internet is making a CS major more and more valuable as an asset, but it's also starting to squeeze people who didn't major in CS to pick up coding...and half the users on the internet now are women, so five or ten years from now when you need to pad out a project team with frontend coders, you'd better know how to hire and manage any kind of person. Brogrammer is a marketing term for recruiters, it's used as a shortcut but it's nothing but a dead end. Hiring and building a team in an environment that will be toxic to anyone else will kill you three years down the line just as surely as hiring some kid straight out of college to do all your production releng will.

hey thanks for posting this, I'm about to start wellbutrin this month myself

"were"

there "were" plenty of casual ubuntu users. soon there will be plenty of casual mint users.

This kid's a...kid, I guess we shouldn't expect a long view from him. What he sees as a slippery slope is a normal part of education that's hard to spot if you're only in the system for four years.

Professors have been complaining for decades that students don't start their classes with the basics already down. Making a video version of this class, even one that only teaches the first half of the real class, means the professors will start to expect the students know that part already and the real class will expand to include even more advanced topics.

There's no danger of Stanford or Harvard or MIT or anyone else making things easy on their undergrads.

I'm not looking to move things to the jvm anymore, I can't trust oracle with the future of stuff I may need to update and maintain.

The blog post is long-winded but the site is dumb: "I'm not going to tell you what my site does but please upload me your CV."

How about you make a fake result set so I can see what you're up to instead of being another useless "social tool" begging for my personal info?

If you're a coder or tech just wait until January, companies start deciding who to hire and advertising work then. Until then just chill out, go to the movies, do stuff that isn't computers and decompress. The panic will pass shortly.

If you were close with your coworkers, invite them on linkedin and maybe ask if they all want to go get beer.

That's awesome to watch. If you start with an outline of statements you want to make, you spend less time picking through little clauses around the things you want to say. You have half an outline there to start with: your list of things to tell startups. There are other things it's clear you want to say: the quote from Paul Buchheit, mentioning this came from a conversation with a reporter, etc.

If you nested the list of things as one bit of the outline and then had the key phrase items of the intro as another, just don't worry about adjectives or adverbs or punctuation or flow or anything for the first pass, you may find you get faster overall, especially for longer pieces.

I for one made at least 30 accounts to request this evidence be presented forthwith