jrott

> Most networks weren't designed for everyone working from home. It just wasn't seen as in the realm of the possible.

This totally seems to be the case. I've had way more problems to the connection from home being slow then I've had because of the corporate network. This also seems to be true for everyone that I've worked with. At this point I don't think there would be much benefit to upgrading the corporate network it's just not where the bottleneck is.

> It doesn't matter if someone is privileged or not, recruiters _are_ bottom feeders. Its a shit job that nobody wants and anyone with a modicum of ability seems to get out of asap in my experience.

It's totally a shit job in a ton of ways but the best recruiters absolutely make a killing. It's a sales job though so what makes a recruiter good from an engineers prospective is orthogonal to what actually makes them good.

It was an interesting article in a lot of ways but it definitely didn’t mention any of the more black hat tactics that companies have used for marketing.

It's always pretty shocking. You even see it at big companies where you'll only have a few engineers working on the core product and then a ton of people working on supporting infrastructure (analytics, marketing and what have you) around them.

> Why do managers spend 70% of their time on mysterious external meetings? What are they actually doing?

usually they're either trying to get there team politically important work or to get out of politically unimportant work. If things have gone really wrong in some it's time spent not getting stuck with whatever giant sack of shit is rolling downhill at that moment.

The just so story that is told about this is with no non compete there would be no Intel. The founders would have all been stuck at Fairchild.

They can always hope for the sweetheart public private partnership if we ever get universal health care

> If I am at my limits for direct reports, I can start having people report to one of my reports, and my status grows. Just like multi level marketing.

Absolutely it also makes it way easier to argue that you should get a promotion when you are a manager of managers. Inflating the title's of the people under you is the quickest way to get your own title boosted.

Approval workflows have so many problems. I've seen people that have to make tons of approvals but it's not there real job just approve everything that comes through since they don't want to break things. Almost completely destroyed the security point of making people review stuff for access control. It does fix things in a pure compliance sense so it'll continue.

It's such a difficult line to toe. Especially because people like working with new technology and it does seem to help with recruiting even if it makes actually operating the business harder.

I'm not sure if my 11 year old knows what a channel is now. A couple of years ago I remember having to explain what a landline phone was.

This was a super fascinating article. The whole model is very different from what you normally hear about. In many ways it seems like the closest that VC has come to bringing back the commercial lab.

The sum of it seems to be that you should strive to be really good at something. Of course that’s not super profound and I think most of us could come up with it.

Seriously in any big company who can you go to ask what acronym $TEXAS means is an important question.

At this point I think it was an amazing feature that became a mediocre product. I wish dropbox felt like they could make enough money just being the best in the world at syncing files.

(On the other hand, the process could be captured by incumbent employees who do have that incentive).

That seems to be way more common than most people want to admit. So many software engineering interviews have very little to do with the job. Worse of course is when there is no process and it seems like the whole thing is just designed to get the hiring manager friends hired.

Well Facebook has to be happy at least. Oracle has to be the company least likely to run TikTok well.

so if you read the license file can you not license any of your stuff under the spite license

This is really good. It's one of the best descriptions I've seen of what being a staff engineer is like.

When I came into the role I was stunned at the amount of time that I ended up talking to people and just trying to figure out what is going on.

Yeah this seems like an ok experiment so they aren't totally dependent on google for income.

Absolutely. It's totally a cultural thing I've been in the opposite situation as well. The culture really has to be that getting someone new onboarded is the most important thing and not somebodies side project.

I work for a non tech fortune 500 company and was committing code by day 2. It's really about being willing to figure out what the blocker's to access are and making sure they are taken care of before hand.

An Oracle database expert, who doesn't understand the necessity of having a primary key? A Java developer who never heard about Map, so he kept implementing it over and over again as a set of methods, for each variable separately?)

Neither of those examples surprise me that much. It’s not that uncommon that being able to produce something that vaguely works well navigating a messed up organization is what it takes to be productive. The bar on not being a totally messed up organization is low but tons of places don’t clear it.

There are also a lot of software developer's that have contracts where they can contribute to open source but it has to go through legal. Which makes it to much of a pain to actually be worth doing.

This is awesome. I love how it provides structure for thinking up startup ideas.

Free software has definitely created some weird economics. Like I can't imagine paying money for a programming language on the other hand I don't blink about paying for Jira.

I don't think they can compete on ecosystem. However they can win on not having a problem with fakes and actually handling all of the orders themselves instead of being a marketplace for third party sellers.

News Corp is impressive I think they are the only company that can actually make Facebook look sympathetic.

The very short menu is an interesting change as well. It makes sense in a couple of ways I think. First it signals that they've really thought about what you should have and that they are super practiced at making it. Second it makes things cheaper and operationally simpler for the restaurant. I'm not sure which of those is a bigger deal.

This is a huge part of the problem. The amount of risk that exists in legacy systems is actually pretty huge because of the amount of interdependencies that exist.

It's the sort of thing that people who operate those systems know but that knowledge doesn't seem to spread beyond that.