jerglingu

Who? I can only think of Nero who sought only to "simply do harm." This is such a reductive way to cast people

Amazing read, and glad she could write this into history. It's amazing to me that Half-Life's status of immortality has more or less been preserved even today.

Damn, I love this. Information is dense and clustered, edges are sharp and it all feels so _human_. I can't stand the uncanny valley, fake minimalism lots-of-whitespace flat design bullshit that has taken over the web. This feels good to traverse through. Found a nice boxing channel I hadn't seen before

The degree of singular outrage this guy produces is something else. It's like a switch flips in peoples' brains and they go through a two-minutes (or maybe two hours in this article's case) hate session when they comment about him. Who else has gone from such adoration from the general internet to such revulsion?

An interesting Tweet where somebody approximates Eight Sleep sales/subs counts: https://twitter.com/laurenbalik/status/1727385607041667430

In your article, your points about managing stateful data operations vs stateless tools is right on point. It's the eternal and ever-repeating argument that has to be made in every data shop I've ever been in when inevitably a manager or senior person suggests moving to scrum, because of this propagated lie that data engineers are just like software engineers. Glad to see it in writing.

I indeed was a former “MAANG bro”, but this is sentiment gleaned from both a cohort of former coworkers who had stints there, along with general Flexporter attitude on Blind (which, for its imperfections and distortions, gives pretty good signal on company morale and culture).

Lines up with the sentiment about Flexport being a tech retirement home

I agree. The open source flavor of dbt Core is very well-designed and almost as complete as you would want it, but any competition is good competition

And it's not like they don't understand the importance of mods' free labor to keep subreddits clean of filth and users visiting/contributing. I know somebody who worked there years ago, and it was understood that they had to preserve the good will and trust from mods of subreddits to keep Reddit in a functional and orderly state.

Had a similar experience, but with the much more tame marijuana. It was a 6-hour long panic attack for me. Similar to the author of this, I read for years of how "the only way it could ever harm you is if you were crushed by 100 lbs of it" on sites like Reddit. It wasn't until after getting high that I heard about marijuana amplifying stress tendencies in a minority of people. I've always been high strung, and maybe my experience reveals something that needs fixing inside of me, but given how marijuana turned my anxiety up to a measure that has only ever been matched by an actual panic attack, I'll avoid LSD (and anything similar like shrooms) like it's a loaded gun pointed right at me.

The Substack throttling was not false. It was throttled before the decision was reversed

Twitch is probably at peak "enshittification." Disastrous business decisions, from both the degradation of the product in the name of profits, as well as the questionable way it has engaged with the growing discontent of streamers and its broader user base.

At one of the orgs I was with in Amazon, and we had some cross-channel comms and processes with them. It was always funny to us how Twitch employees wore their culture as a badge of honor (they never were really a part of Amazon, culturally speaking), but in practice they embodied the ugliest traits of stereotypical Amazon teams: zero trust or charitability from them, and the adversarial/transactional nature of meetings was cranked up to a thousand. They guarded their data and general information from us with a particular zeal out of a confessed mistrust. So you can imagine how ironic and funny it was on our side when their massive leak occurred.

I got jobs at my current and last workplace through a recruiter reaching out to me through LinkedIn. I'm not necessarily exceptional in my skills and experience, and I don't even have a profile picture. But for recruiters, it is a game of numbers, and all the fish are swimming in the LinkedIn pond. The utility is that LinkedIn greatly dampens half the strain that normally comes with the job hunt - one's own initiative in mass applying, curating companies, hell even finding companies.

This comment is perfect and elicited the long-buried inner rage I used to feel towards a former staff in an old company. I should not have had to navigate a staff engineer’s mind minefield like my BPD ex. Additionally, a person with that degree of influence should not hate directness and potential conflict more than he hates himself

Observation/mini rant: unfortunately the data industry is both very susceptible to fads and hype, and does not have widespread standardization or a generally-accepted set of best practices. The subset of data "influencers" whose discourse occurs mostly through Twitter and Substack have especially heavy sway in what is the current Data Big Thing. These people introduce new buzzwords and ride them to the mainstream, or redefine what were previously more-or-less anchored down concepts into new interpretations. It feels tepid and arbitrary, almost postmodern. On top of this, much of the "thought leadership" is being driven by individuals who lean heavily towards the soft-skill side. So we have a heavy overindexing on strong opinions around organizational methodologies, team structure and roles/responsibilities, and other Big Ideas without much engineering representation or consideration. What spawns from this are things like the "data mesh" and the bastardization of both data concepts and clear communication/thinking. The data mesh white paper perfectly encapsulates this[1]. I challenge anybody to try to read it and understand what the hell the author is even vaguely trying to say after a few passes.

[1]: https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-mesh-principles.html

One of the patron saints of 90's electronic music. God, this makes me sad. Rest in peace

This sounds similar to Flexport's CTO situation (he came from Amazon) and attempted microservice-ification of everything. Except it sounds like they weren't even able to get wheels up and are still floundering after years of planning and attempted execution.

I left about a year ago, but the universality of tools and stack was not a thing in the ~3 years I was there. Retail and AWS are split and use different stacks. Additionally, the company was in a drawn out multi-year process of deprecating old tooling (including Odin), so you had teams or orgs that were in-between these old internal services and new internal services (or off internal services altogether and on "native AWS"). If cross-team interoperability demanded that certain tooling was to be used, many times you could inadvertently hold back or screw over another team by deciding to stay or move to the new tooling.

Not to say it was all bad - some of it was certainly necessary. Especially for security - IMO the systems of Amazon are great with security, but not necessarily the spirit of the company. Without all that bureaucratic annoyance, there 100% would be existential leaks or breaches coming out of Amazon with how fast and loose everybody treated security in the name of "Deliver Results" .

Not quite the same as an entirely ex-Blizzard staffed group of people, but Riot Games and League of Legends as well. Tom Cadwell[0] was there from the very beginning of League's life and has had considerable influence over the development and growth of the game. Before that, he was on Warcraft 3's development team and supposedly (supposedly because I can't remember despite being on the War3 forums, and can't find evidence of it) had a hand in developing its fairly successful esports scene. And before that, he was actually one of the first Starcraft pro gamers in the late 90's, just before the explosion of esports in South Korea.

He's kind of a one-man army, but his influence definitely has shaped the more popular games and industry landscape today.

[0]: https://www.riotgames.com/en/who-we-are/riot-games-leadershi...

"join my webring" was something of a meme before memes were a thing

Bringing another life into this world is maybe one of the worst ways a person would try to solve depression

Any article about Amazon is guaranteed to inspire a grave post like this from a former employee. And as a former employee, I agree with the sentiment in nearly all of them.

The lifting-and-dropping process from transactional stores into analytics stores is usually the first step in analytics data pipelines. This appears to fulfill that initial ingestion step specifically for Google BigQuery. A lot of times these days this ingestion step is ran through some third party service: Fivetran, Stitch, Matillion, etc. Similar to AWS's offerings for Redshift, this looks like Google's "native" ingestion tool for BigQuery.

I'd be curious to know how it handles the wrinkles Fivetran effectively solves (schema drift, logging, general performance) and if it does so at a much cheaper price.

A shame, feel bad for Kyle and his family. I don't think the Navy or SEAL command should be at fault for this, though. Kyle made the decision to take the drug, and he did so (presumably) illicitly and in secret. The nature of special operations units is demanding and grueling, and the selection processes should always endeavor to mirror that intensity.

Special operations units will always attract people literally willing to die to get in or before they lose what they perceive to be a competition. I would know, as I was one of these people. I was with the 75th Ranger Regiment (2/75) for five years. The selection program at the time, Ranger Indoctrination Program ("RIP", now known as "RASP" these days), was basically a month-long PT-until-exhaustion hazefest. The first run we did on the first day of RIP in July Georgia heat was a 5+-mile run at a sprinting pace, and five people fell out due to heat exhaustion alone and were removed from the course. I was on the cusp of heat exhaustion, probably actually got it. But I wasn't going to quit - I literally committed myself to die before that happened. If I had a pulse, I was going to be a Ranger no matter what. This same attitude and a similar hot weather incident would nearly kill me almost a year later in Florida phase in Ranger school. I was a no-shit heat casualty, and I blacked out for a few hours. When I came to, I was told I was hyper aggressive with people, couldn't stand on my feet and was stumbling around, I cut holes into my uniform with my Gerber knife, and a Ranger Instructor forced me to submerge myself completely in a nearby stream. Nothing formally came of it, I graduated Ranger School, and always (and still do today) have to take special care of myself when it's hot. Running or hiking when it's 85+ degrees Fahrenheit outside is a nonstarter for me, and dizzy spells creep up pretty quick.

Not saying this to brag. This complete disregard for one's health to complete the mission and/or find glory is a common thread in special operations units. Jeff Struecker, a Ranger legend who was key player in the infamous "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia, recently said outright the Ranger mission is a suicide mission[1]. I was appalled when I first heard him say it so bluntly, but after some thought I think this is an accurate statement.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/company/legends-of-the-75th/videos/...

Blind is interesting. I'm grateful for the insights into total compensation it granted me, and Blind combined with a managerial stint gave me a very solid feel for both industry and company-specific bands. I also got notice of an impending reorg that was coming my way, and started early in looking for another home.

On the other hand, it only exacerbated the cynicism and burnout covid and WFH brought. Trolls are rewarded with attention through "engagement" with their incendiary posts, misinformation and speculation passed as dogma are rampant, and as you mentioned the collective priority in "the community" is this egocentric worship of money. It reminds me of the subreddit /r/relationships, where the number one piece of advice is to obviously break up or divorce because you're getting screwed over. Blind's number one piece of advice is to obviously grind leetcode and start interviewing because you're getting screwed over.

Fivetran has been diligent the three years I was tucked away in FAANG analytics. When I emerged earlier this year back into the world of normal companies, I realized there was a sort of holy trinity of companies that has completely dominated the analytics SaaS market: Fivetran, Snowflake, and dbt. I had only heard of Snowflake before.

I was generally aligned with you until I joined a very small SaaS startup recently. The cloud abstracts away so much which in turn frees up the attention span of those typically committed to infra setup and maintenance. Not to mention the proliferation of services that live in the cloud space that simply being on the cloud unlocks. I’ve made no attempt to formally quantify this, but if many old-world tasks are reduced to almost entirely passive monitoring and “one-click” adjustments, then the freed attention span alone might be worth whatever marginal on-paper excesses the cloud might bring. Personally, managing servers and diagnosing outages or degraded infra performance is some of the most grinding and existentially draining work there is.

But then again we don’t host videos. If this is a special case then I guess ignore everything I just said.

There may be no other sub-industry that desperately craves to abstract away as much complexity as possible

Holy cow! This was an amazing watch and I can't wait to see the rest of them. Thank you so much for the recommendation