196 karma · joined June 28, 2013
Call it proximity bias to having just seen High Rise, but this sounds pretty Ballardian to me.
> A top tier college will get you out in front of more employers...
...when you don't have anything more impressive than your college choice on your resume.
Harvard students will always beat out comparable state school students to get that Microsoft phone interview. But they won't always beat out the student who ran a full-scale web app after sophomore year to help students plan courses if they don't have comparable experience. Another thing I love about tech is as many strings as you can pull to get that initial phone interview, you're on your own from there. In my experience I've done general website applications and called up friends of friends and once you're staring at a whiteboard it makes no difference who you know or where you came from.
The two part related problem to this is a recruiting one. If you use a resume as a litmus test for "smart programmers" as opposed to those faking it, you're undoubtably going to get a bunch of people who went to the best possible schools. This also means you wind up with a lot of candidates who had the means to go to really good schools. Maybe there's someone just as smart at your local state school who couldn't afford CMU who would bring a completely different mindset and style of thinking, but you'll never find them.
Honestly I'd be surprised if there are radical differences in how prepared you are for industry coming out of undergrad from Harvard, MIT, or an average state school because tech is much more of a meritocracy than a lot of other career paths, and because their undergrad programs are notably underwhelming (while their graduate programs are phenomenal).
I think recruiters see top-tier college graduates as one of two things. Either they come from a good school so they must know their stuff so they must be able to pass (making the recruiter's ROI more secure) or they come from a good school so they know how to play the acceptance game, and their pedigree alone will legitimize our program by association (our internship program hosted 3 MIT students, 5 Stanford students, etc etc). I don't agree with either of these metrics, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were common thoughts among recruiters.
> I don't know some of what I'm missing because I'm not at Harvard or MIT but I don't know how my school would be a negative at most places.
I think if you were in a field other than tech or were relying on your academics alone you'd notice how easy it is to get that first phone interview. As is, I don't think it ultimately makes much of a difference. Also, your alma mater creates your post-graduate immediate network. Getting in touch with a "fellow" Stanford graduate is probably more valuable than your average state school graduate depending on the industry. However, I believe that if you were to do research at these top-tier places you'd notice a huge boost from being at a university that gets huge endowments and talented professors. That's the one other exception (to me).
Note: I don't mean that Stanford students are smarter or more capable than state school students, only that the association of getting into a high pedigree high cost school probably means your peers are well connected and/or wealthy. Maybe that's not a fair assumption.
While I understand your point, I take some issue with:
> the middle and higher income brackets (middle and upper middle suburban class) is the bracket that is hurt the most by college costs
Your points are all well made, but I'd argue that being lower class you're entirely dependent on financial aid and tuition subsidies if you get them at all. In the middle and upper middle class your fear (from anecdotal first hand experience) isn't if you'll go to college (which is a huge indicator today of whether or not you'll be better than your parents -- education), but where you'll go to college. I know a lot of peers who went to state or safety schools because of cost. I don't know a lot of peers whose family is in that same tax bracket that just didn't go to college. I do know many friends who couldn't feasibly go to college at all, and it's stripped their career growth and job opportunities. Not trying to argue, just facilitate discussion by voicing a dissenting opinion.
I have friends who would be mechanics, Peace Corps volunteers, electricians, or plumbers if they hadn't instead gone to a private 4-year institution, pressured to attend the best schools possible because they did well in high school. The permanent solution for this is either adjusted student loans or free community colleges, or some combination of the two. People on the opposite side of this issue I've talked to have often expressed concern that the bachelor's degree will basically become devalued if everyone has access. My response is always "it already IS devalued, but hardly anyone has access". It's near impossible to get a job in a desirable field without a college degree and relevant experience, but it's also prohibitively expensive to get a degree. Where will the 22 year olds with $100,000 worth of debt working at McDonald's going to be in 30-50 years? I have friends who in their early 20s are recognizing it's worth accruing more debt at even higher education in hopes of getting a job that will make the investment worth it.
> Unless we make college affordable for people of all financial means, opportunity through higher education will be a false promise.
But this is half of it, right? Plenty of people who walk out of colleges with no debt still can't find a job because the market is changing so much. As today's jobs move towards automation, I think most here can agree that current careers will change forever (frequently on HN the conversation steers towards more technological jobs). What I don't frequently see posted here is that automation will free up creative jobs where going to college is a necessary path. Writers exposed to other young writers can become inspired for life, especially given the opportunities. This turned into sort of a soapbox and is mostly anecdotal, but I think most would agree a national conversation needs to be had about this.
Your point is well-made, there are a lot of benefits of micro service architecture, but fast startup with few engineers is not one of them.
This is another vastly understated benefit of working at a company rather than starting a start-up.
You not only get to see what code at-scale looks like and deal with it everyday, but also management. You can either learn good or bad management techniques watching your own manager interact with your team. Same goes for how the org is structured and how the stresses of that structure trickle down to grievances at the Software Engineer I level.
I think this might be the root of the benefit of being young and working at an at-scale company. I'm the youngest engineer on my floor, and the amount I learn from my coworkers is staggering. A lot of "a-ha" moments for me are status quo thinking patterns for them, and I get a lot from leveraging their knowledge in conversations and working on projects together.
> Try to spend time in many situations. But above all, seek out and cultivate relationships with mentors who can help you grow.
Well said.
It's interesting, I've learned a lot about what works at scale when you have thousands of engineers and by practicing some of those techniques on side projects I've learned what doesn't work when you have less than 10 engineers.
> For instance, micro services and an extremely complex distributed architecture will add a lot of overhead and points of failure when a monolith is probably the best route when you have a few engineers. In a startup implementation speed is usually the most important aspect of your development project. Hacking usually trumps engineering in terms of value-add to your infant company.
This is on point. The real question is -- will I learn the best technique for writing code in a monolith that lends itself to being converted to a microservice architecture.
I agree with the article, at least as far as technical knowledge goes. Some friends of mine who I graduated with are starting an Instagram for music app called Cymbal in Brooklyn, and I talk to them somewhat frequently about what's going on tech-wise. They're seed-funded and have runway for the next while, and have produced a really quality app. Whether or not they'll succeed, I don't know, but I know the quality of their work isn't in question.
My takeaway from conversations with their back-end engineer is that he's getting a lot of experience building an infrastructure from the group up that's taking a lot of traffic, learning what to do and what not to do by things failing. He's developing the "right way to do things". By contrast, my time at Twitter as a backend/fullstack engineer has taught me a lot about what that infrastructure looks like when it's mature, and I've learned the Twitter-approved "right way to do things". We're both learning what scalable robust infrastructure looks like, but while he gets the benefit of familiarity with every part of the stack and learning first hand what works and why, I get a huge jump in general knowledge with less details.
Which is arguably better? We'll only know for certain when I start my own startup in a few years, but my gut feeling is that the skills I'm gaining here by perusing scaled-up systems that face hundred of millions of requests every day will serve me more. I've learned so much about good ways to build things in just my past few months that have already radically changed how I face my own personal projects, that I can't imagine sticking with code I wrote before I had this knowledge.
I know the article is more about industry experience as applied to creating a network of peers and the business side of things, but I'm confident it extends to the technical side as well.
Thoughts?
I'd imagine it's because the credit card companies have less restrictions on what they can do here compared to Europe, so they can afford more extravagant offerings.
I sit in the school of thought that says you need a co-founder to disagree with you with a passion you won't find idly perusing Reddit, but you raise a few good points. One thing you don't address is the overwhelming feelings of "I can't do this" or "I shouldn't do this". Those are the points where you need someone you trust to be on your team, because it's likely these moments of despair won't sync between the two of you.
It seems like the article is just blanket recommending caching as a load-time fix, which can introduce overhead. Anecdotal case and point, I used to run a web app for fellow college students to get their cheapest textbooks. I saw that the load times for the page were so long (2+ seconds) that people were navigating off before it had even loaded. And, most of the time, they were just trying to go back to see what they had looked up for their courses. So I started utilizing localStorage to keep hold of loaded data from the client. It went great... until the next semester when everyone had the old cached data. I misappropriated localStorage and, because of it, screwed up royally.
I'm hardly advocating against caching, obviously, I just hope there's nobody currently working on an unfinished app who implements caching far before it's needed (and in my case, incorrectly).
> So how do I measure?
> Stopwatch. Multiple runs. Median.
> If it gets to the point where you can’t press the stopwatch buttons quickly enough, it’s time to go home.
This part confused me. Isn't it somewhat trivial to use something like `selenium-webdriver` and time the shell command to run your script that calls it?
> I'd rather have confusing software that does what I want, than simple software that doesn't do what I want.
Of course you would, or I would, or anyone who browses HackerNews would -- but it's not necessarily the best UX.
This is also, per the article again, undertaken while one has a job.
Not playing sides, just adding context -- I have no affiliation with the company.
1) People who regularly use one or a couple of package managers who can update all packages with a few commands.
2) People who regularly use packages from a variety of many different package managers, for whom running `update` for each one would be more cumbersome than just running updates on the packages themselves.
I don't know which way I lean, but I don't see the harm in having a self-update in the package so long as you can also update via gem, but maybe I'm way off-base.
While avoiding 'to do' additionally aides in specificity, I believe avoiding 'to be' has a bigger impact, and avoiding both near impossible.
Could you make a market like this anonymous in the same fashion? Even if the Feds seized one node they'd have only seized one node?
The author here will probably pursue legal recourse against that individual as well. It's a two-part problem: 1.) The leaser may have violated the lease as laid out by the author by effectively ruining the home. 2.) AirBNB reported a leaser as 'verified', which is important because of the implication that the leaser won't do certain things like ruin your home during their stay.
Unfortunately per 2, this isn't actually what AirBNB claims to mean by "verified" [0]. It's unfortunate because of what happened, but you are indeed correct -- technically speaking AirBNB is not responsible here. It sucks, and it certainly means I won't be using AirBNB, but they've done their job of protecting themselves.
These are the kinds of points I've been thinking, but wanted to make sure I wasn't overly confident in thinking. It's very very nice hearing it from someone else. Thank you for your time!
We spent the past year on textbooks alone because we knew the space and had the code. As the year and summer progresses, we will be moving more permanently into the geographically-based marketplace space, with an emphasis on the Craigslist style of meeting someone at a location to exchange goods, or pick something up. Starting with colleges (because it's a community of people who generally have good reason to trust one another), I'd like to see us develop a product that allows students to resell textbooks to one another, sell furniture to one another, etc.
That said, obviously it's a space heavily occupied right now. My guess is (if you'll read my response) you'll hardly change your mind, and that's great too -- the fact you responded at all means a lot to me!