leothekim

I understand the co-authors are research fellows at the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious

Justworks | Hybrid (US: New York City, Canada: Toronto) | Full-time | Multiple roles | https://justworks.com/careers

Justworks is helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. And, we are hiring across the board! If you’d like to work in a supportive and entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful, and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you!

- Engineering Manager: https://grnh.se/yzes4b8l1us

- Senior Software Engineer: https://grnh.se/lluz9tup1us

- Software Engineer: https://grnh.se/6q95fndp1us

- Engineering Manager, Infrastructure: https://grnh.se/qa3m2hxt1us

- Senior SRE: https://grnh.se/b6es9bfa1us

- Infrastructure Engineer: https://grnh.se/qadh1e1v1us

- Group Product Manager: https://grnh.se/3jlr8o3c1us

- Product Manager: https://grnh.se/1nkz4qef1us

Justworks | Hybrid (US: New York City, Canada: Toronto) | Full-time | Multiple roles | https://justworks.com/careers

Justworks is helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. And, we are hiring across the board! If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you!

- Engineering Manager: https://grnh.se/yzes4b8l1us

- Senior Software Engineer: https://grnh.se/lluz9tup1us

- Software Engineer: https://grnh.se/6q95fndp1us

- Salesforce Developer: https://grnh.se/k6o7ihti1us

3 years and $120MM later, <insert joke on Fast failing to fail fast here>.

I’ve worked with programmers in Spain and have limited salary information. They are definitely much lower compared to, say, New York. However, cost of living in Madrid was nowhere near New York. For example, I could get a beer and ham sandwich at Museo del Jamon for about 2€. Compare that to paying $15 for a salad.

“worst choice of career” rings of hyperbole. For many it’s a ticket out of their current career. For all their flaws, boot camps and Lambda School are popular for a reason.

This article just reads like sour grapes.

Or did he?

> This issue has also affected our ability to post updates to the Service Health Dashboard.

This is when you fall back to the Tumblr blog for status updates.

<rimshot>

Two interesting points:

“ AstraZeneca, which has pledged it won’t make a profit on the vaccine during the pandemic, has reached agreements with governments and international health organizations that put its price at about $2.50 a dose. Pfizer’s vaccine costs about $20 a dose, while Moderna’s is $15 to $25, based on agreements the companies have struck to supply their vaccines to the U.S. government.”

And:

“ The vaccine can be transported under “normal refrigerated conditions” of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit), AstraZeneca said. By comparison, Pfizer plans to distribute its vaccine using specially designed “thermal shippers” that use dry ice to maintain temperatures of minus-70 degrees Celsius (minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit).”

Important differentiating factor from Pfizer’s vaccine:

“... Moderna said researchers had found that its vaccine had a longer shelf life in the refrigerator than previously thought: 30 days, not seven. And it will last 12 hours at room temperature, the company said.”

“We have six main repositories at Pinterest: Pinboard, Optimus, Cosmos, Magnus, iOS, and Android. Each one is a monorepo and houses a large collection of language-specific services.”

What is an “iOS monorepo” supposed to be like?

Regardless as to whether this is legal, and assuming this is indeed true, I'm just curious - one of these jobs the person is probably phoning it in a little bit more than the other. Does anyone have insight here?

Austen definitely has an opinion: https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1311530531725602816

This appears to have been published in 2017?

I was around 25 years ago pushing bits around SunOS boxes and when people were still figuring out CMSes. FTP and BBEdit ftw. Definitely some things were simpler, but stuff would fall over in a heartbeat. I still think of the day of 9/11 when major websites couldn't serve their homepages because they were bombarded by traffic.

Kids in their rooms still do write the next big things. The difference now is they now raise a ton of money along with it. They scale a whole lot further, and much faster. There are more entering the engineering profession through Lambda School and bootcamps and what not. They also leave around a lot of shitty code that usually ends up building some business value. Much of this was true back in the day. It's just gained a whole lot more momentum IMHO.

Re: the sysadmin work, app developers have to worry a whole lot less about it, oftentimes not at all. In startups, that's a huge plus. I still remember servers going down because some workloads were destroying the RAID arrays s.t. that they were drawing down too much power and overloading the PDUs in their racks. I ended up having to hardwire the distribution of jobs to other servers while we (actually it was me, I was at a startup) got the PDUs upgraded by talking to a sysadmin on the phone. (Amusingly at some point we had to fix some DNS while restarting one of the boxes so I had to tell the guy what to do by dictating vi commands.)

But yeah it's like over time we ended up scaling the crappiness of software along with the software itself. At the same time, I'm inclined to believe that software development at large is in a much better position to solve a whole bunch of other problems than ever before. That keeps me motivated personally, though I get the frustrations for sure.

> Building software was never simple or easy

I think it’s gotten a whole lot simpler in the past 10 years. People used to have to rack their own hardware, install PDUs, check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the switches, setup RAID and backups, make sure you have that serial cable plugged in so you can telnet in in case the switches don’t work, and lock the data center doors without forgetting their keys back in the day. And this is before actually developing and deploying your application software.

Now you can just buy a bunch of db cycles and scale to >10000 qps without batting an eye (though you’ve got to watch your wallet).

I think because some of the hard stuff got a lot easier, the easier stuff got unnecessarily complex. And there are so many ways to scale things that some of these constructs and idioms used over time stopped being used because they mattered less if you could just turn a knob to scale your crappy code.

Possibly one of the most moving interviews I’ve seen was Dave Brubeck talking about returning to America after WWII and witnessing racism towards black veterans.

https://youtu.be/stadqAHRroA

The story he tells at the very end brings me to tears. What a genuinely good human being, and a musical genius.

Contrived sanctimony like this will not prevent police from killing black people either.

+1 to going off of Joda API. This is a very well-thought out datetime API with a fluent interface for building date/time objects in an immutable way. Just doing this would be a huge step improvement for JS.

I think he's referring to https://github.com/tc39/proposal-temporal/issues/707.

So glad to read that the core objects are immutable. This is probably my biggest gripe of other date/time manipulation libraries, eg moment.js.

"...bridges and civil engineering projects are designed to last, why can we also design software for it to last?"

Some software has lasted for many decades. This isn't necessarily a good thing. [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/ibm-scrambles-to...

Sounds like you’ve got alignment on these things at your startup but no one knows how to make time for it. What have you done to step up and lead your team out of the jungle?

I am not being flip when I ask this. I’ve worked at eight startups because situations like this can turn into opportunities if you put your back into it. Most of the work at a startup is about turning chicken shit into chicken salad. If your team had it all figured out, it probably wouldn’t be much of a startup.

From January 2020.

There’s a point in every company’s trajectory where you should decide if you’re aiding in the company’s success or hindering it, and I believe this is doubly true for founders. In my personal experience, almost every startup I’ve worked in a founder was pushed out by the board or by a cofounder, voluntarily stepped down, or marginalized, and often for the better. The one case it didn’t happen, it should have.

Some companies do great with founders still in charge. (Stripe, AirBnB). Others realized their full potential after the founders stepped away (Google comes to mind). Either way, a founder should know when their time is up and think about what’s best for the organization.

> But what specifically are you proposing?

> That you think more deeply about why Bitcoin is a good idea.

This pretty much sums up every conversation I have had with a blockchain proponent.

I get how the interview experience can be inhumane and all, and I’ve been through my fair share of shitty interview experiences. But feeling disappointed about not getting feedback from your performance?

You’d need to assume interview feedback is constructive and relevant to your professional growth, interviewers are well-trained, interview processes are fair, and candidates receiving feedback are capable and willing to act positively on it. From my experience, having all of these factors be true isn’t all that common, and one of these factors is beyond the company’s control.

+1 on this. The company has nothing to gain in delivering more feedback other than a thumbs up/down, and a lot more to lose.

Drive is down as well.

Disagree. You may listen to all this advice and follow through with engaging with your people productively only to find you’ve used up your budget or runway and have to lay them off. As you move up the ladder, reasons matter less and less. But outcome always does.