johan_larson

I'd say the real place goes to 0x0B all day every day. The valley runs on hype and all-nighters.

"Silicon Valley" is like Silicon Valley, but it goes to 0x11.

I once had to design a function to open a series of nodes in a displayed tree from one given node down to another. Not so hard in general, but because of how the system was set up I had to do it using callbacks. So tell the first node to open itself and when done call the callback that tells the second node to open itself and when done call the callback that tells the third node ...

I have to wonder how many of the top 50 or so tech companies have really sterling reputations for warm-hearted goodness. Powerful organizations usually end up stepping on somebody's toes either in getting to the top or staying there.

And really, where else are you going to work if you are a developer and want to make money? One of the big banks? Plenty of dirt there. A defence contractor? Ditto.

Is there no HQ at all? Even for the executive team?

I've seen various performance management systems at eight different employers now. My conclusions:

1. Some feedback is useful. Sometimes it's hard to be sure how you're doing, particularly if you're not super-sensitive socially.

2. More is not better. Once a year is plenty.

3. It's mostly subjective. Trying to draw clear lines is probably a waste of time. A very experienced organization may be able to create some guidelines, but they should be guidelines, not rules.

4. In the end it's all about whether you are making the boss happy. The only reason to involve anyone other than you two in the process is when some of your work is genuinely out of view of the boss.

Here are two scales, two buckets, and two knives. Whoever bleeds the most, gets the HQ.

It has happened. Remember White Flight?

You'd think the low salaries and easy immigration would have put TO over the top.

Implicit in that article is the idea that if as a chef you're not working at a top 20 restaurant, you don't even count. That seems questionable. I could see someone who enjoys cooking liking the work in a decent but not famous restaurant, just as there are those who enjoy teaching high school rather than being Ivy League professors or being nurse practitioners rather than surgeons. And in each case there are many such lower-tier opportunities.

Oops. My bad. Sorry.

OK, I'll bite. Do you live or work in an environment where you could call someone ignorant and be understood to mean only that there is some specific bit of knowledge they don't posses, without making a larger accusation of intellectual incompetence?

Where?

I try to be sensitive to issues of usage like this because civility does not come easily to me, and I have to be careful of what I say lest I inadvertently offend. And I am confident that when I have heard the word used, it is almost invariably in the larger sense. Use in the narrow sense tends to be by foreigners, who seem to be looking for a translation into English, and could easily not know the broader implied meaning.

> BTW, ignorant is not a pejorative term. If you think it is you are ignorant and you need to go look the word up in a dictionary.

Did that. The Merriam-Webster, in fact. Here's what they said:

> There are several meanings of ignorant, all of which are concerned with a lack of knowledge in some sense; some of these are more insulting than others, and care should be exercised before applying this word to people who you do not wish to offend. Saying “They were ignorant of most of the laws of physics” means that the people in question did not have a specific body of learning. Saying “You are an ignorant person” is possibly describing someone as primitive, crude, or uncivilized.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ignorant

I'm going to resist the temptation to call the original author ignorant since I don't want to spawn some sort of infinitely recursive ignorance-accusation chain. Instead, I'll call him unintentionally rude.

Lisp: gnosticism for programmers.

Agile methods do have a bit of a problem with the concept of authority. They really really want to believe that at least within a development team, everyone is equal. That's not a great fit to actual dev teams in companies where there are junior devs, senior devs, architects, and managers.

I've worked at four companies that have claimed to do agile development. Not one of them has deeply embraced the principles of doing so. Generally they have added a few easy practices, like stand-up meetings and sprints. They've kept large-scale chunks assigned to specific developers, defining both the work to be done and the time to do it, and substantial design docs. Unit testing tends to be spotty.

We're not living in Agile World. We're living in Fake Agile World.

I have some reservations about true-blue agile, but I'd be willing to give it a shot. Let's do Fundamentalist Scrum once. I'd be up for it. At least I'd know whether it works or not.

Cultures change. When I was growing up, we had a class of milk with lunch and dinner, and often ate cereal for breakfast with milk. We don't do that any more. We still sometimes eat cereal with milk for breakfast, but the glasses of milk with lunch and dinner are gone, replaced by carbonated water, apple juice, or wine. Repeat that times a hundred million people, and it's no wonder dairy farmers are hurting.

This is too minor a matter for Finns to bother discussing. Those doing the talking must be FSB infiltrators.

Yeah, even MIT eventually gave up on using Scheme as a first programming language.

The Lisp community may have the worst ratio of self-regard to actual accomplishments in our entire industry. Not one of the great companies is built on Lisp. I don't think it's even a second-tier language at the FAANGs.

If your boss tells you to do something, you should do it. "Make your boss happy" is generally the way to thrive in a hierarchy, whatever the stated principles of the organization or how they formally evaluate employees. If your boss is happy with you, it will all turn out ok; if your boss isn't happy with you, nothing will save you in the end.

I understand the initial project you're assigned may not seem terribly important. But that's because you're new and you don't really know how things work yet, so they can't assign you anything really complicated. Do the initial not-quite-busywork successfully, and more important and interesting work will come along.

Well, the author does go out of his way to say how the Chinese will own future of this industry, so if he's shilling for anyone, it's them.

Absolutely. No doubt about it. If you want something to become true, just repeat it over and over.

We regret to inform you that we have decided not to proceed with your application for the position of Junior Online Troublemaker.

The writing sample you supplied is simply not up to the standards of rhetoric and general wordsmithing we expect of our junior troublemakers here at Middle Kingdom Troll Farm and Heavy Industries.

We wish you luck in your future endeavors.

I don't remember, exactly. I think we had a one-year cliff at the time and then quarterly accrual. I definitely took a pay cut when I left, though.

I left Google after three years as an SDE because I had really really had enough of my bosses, I wasn't promoted when I figured I deserved it, and a project that meant a lot to me wasn't getting the staffing it needed to succeed.

I left for a more senior position at a smaller, less prestigious software company, though I've moved again since. Right now I'm working remotely from Toronto for a Silicon Valley start-up.

Ultimately, I wish I had approached working for Google a bit differently. I thought it was sort of an overgrown startup, and you were supposed to look for something that needed doing and do it. No. Google is a large highly structured company with a distinctly process-oriented culture. It's a place where you do what you are told. That famous proverb about Japanese nails absolutely applies. I eventually figured that out, but by then it was too late.

Yup. Last time I looked, Seattle paid twice what Toronto did. Seattle was more expensive, but only about 25%.

Canada just doesn't have the sort of top-tier companies that go head to head competing for talent that the US does. Hence, rates are lower.

Long live Queen Saga, founder of the Second Swedish Empire. Pity about those border wars with China, though.

I've seems criticism of the idea that an MBA makes you ready to manage anything, without any particular domain knowledge.

The part I find unsatisfactory about MBA training is that it seems to be two degrees fused at the hip. Some people pursue one because they want to work in finance, whether as traders or analysts or some sort of deal-makers. Others pursue one because they want to be managers or executives in industry, running companies that are responsible for a wide variety of products or services. It seem like these two tracks should be disentangled.

Do you by any chance have a reference for how much standards were lowered during the surge? I knew they were lowered some, but I thought it was a little bit, not a huge amount.

I recently tried a bunch of knock-off MREs sold to civilians. As far as I could tell the contents of the kits were the same stuff as in real MREs, but packaged a bit differently.

My take is that the components that are naturally dry work best. Cookies, crackers, raisins, nuts: all of these are fine. Things get weird and unappealing once the components have to be wet, which is a problem because most of the main dishes are basically stews of various sorts.

I can appreciate that the MRE designers are facing a hard problem: making food that is shelf-stable for years yet palatable enough to be eaten for weeks on end. But the results really aren't very good.