mepiethree

conversely, I'm a boomerang Googler who worked there in 2015 and again now. In 2015, I felt like no one cared, that Googler engineering skills were overrated, and 17/23 people on my team quit in a year. In this stint, however, I'm amazed by how smart and passionate people are about a variety of different technologies, and enjoy collaborating across many teams on different things.

I think the takeaway for me is that, in a company of hundreds of thousands of people, these experiences are more situational/random/based on what energy you bring to a space/team-based/seniority-based than they are a symptom of universal company culture.

Yeah, and the other side of the coin is that there are tons and tons of people who left Google to pursue their passions and failed. And the third side of the coin is that there are many people who invented things within Google, were successful in doing so, and have stayed (e.g. Google Meet)

Yeah I recently left a startup that I worked at for 6 years to join Google. At the startup I was overworked+underpaid, generally found it impossible to eat more than 2 meals a day (and difficult to eat more than one), usually worked on Saturdays (and always on Black Friday), rarely made time to visit family, and always lived on tenterhooks thinking about the next RFP we had to win. I did care about the mission of the startup but I am significantly happier now that I'm eating 3 healthy+free meals per day, working out, walking my dog during long breaks, using great build tools and learning new things while still generally having enough focus time to meet the expectations of my role. Google doesn't seem that bad to me as I sit here on Thanksgiving weekend, between hangouts with my extended family, with enough compensation to treat them all to great food.

> and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now

This is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I think that it's funny that many engineers care so little about business that they stop listening after the "do what's best for user" part and then get surprised when the "at least for now" part kicks in.

Is it really burning a bridge though if >90% of your coworkers (and even bosses) agree?

> generally regarded

Source?

The current Chinese dictator does many unethical things, but ascribing the actions of a ruler to an entire race of people is fallacious. Akin to saying that Trump’s philandery applies to all Americans globally. As the other commenter said, China has a long history of studying ethics, morality, and philosophy.

I’m not really a “PC” person but broadly saying that ”Europeans […] are more ethical than Chinese” is a white supremacist statement. I’m not saying you’re a white supremacist, but your comment is.

I think he means "if I start going off" in the slang sense like "if I start angrily venting in a tell-all about all the ways they are stupid and wrong". But who knows really.

I agree with your general point but will note that Google has been working on smarter traffic lights (albeit with much less funding than Waymo)

https://sites.research.google/greenlight/

There are any number of counter examples to most of these metrics, but I think the extreme counter examples are often in bad faith. You can’t convince me that a JavaScript engineer who consistently authors 1 commit a month is productive. At some point, you need to stop talking about stuff and actually build stuff

Of course you can’t determine the best person by lines of code (package.lock files lol) but you can often make a guess at the worst person

If you have to do it for 8 hours a day anyway, might as well enjoy it

> Who are these businesses?

Gas stations, parking meters, and ticket dispensers at most train/bus stations. They should replace them but I figure the problem is that they are built in to giant kiosks

They extended the option exercise period to 5 years

Late November is a crazy timeline. I have my personal website, wedding website, and tons of other projects on Heroku free stuff. So now it’s $7-$16/mo per app… thousands of dollars per year. Which is a reasonable price, I guess. It was probably entitled of me to think I could host so many websites for free.

…except now I have to migrate them in fucking 2 months of weekends or everything will be deleted?! Thanks for ruining my weekend plans, Salesforce

For small startups: check out Elemental Excelerator (I work for a great company funded through that)

For large startups: climate unicorns https://climatetechvc.substack.com/p/-climate-unicorns-take-...

Big tech: Google X Tapestry, Tesla, or any large solar company like Sunrun

If all we are doing is guessing, I would also guess that people being stuck at home with nothing to do but mess around with Robinhood played a big factor

Totally, as I said in my comment, I would have done that in retrospect. The trouble was that we didn’t see that as a risk, since everyone was telling us that there wouldn’t be any issues

I really like this, the Dropbox career framework, and the Monzo career framework. I synthesized all three recently into one that I keep for our company, and the work pays such dividends. We do quarterly performance reviews and not only does having a consistent standard make these fair, but it reduced my time to write them from 1 hour per report to about 30 min.

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ https://github.com/monzo/progression-framework

And my nascent adaptation.. https://kevala-progression.herokuapp.com/

I’m sorry that things are the way they are :(

One time I tried telling someone that I wanted to interview them but also point out that they had a typo in their resume and they responded something like “I’m a bad ass mother fucker with experiences both military and civilian. Good luck finding a worker with your attitude.”

Another time I just got a multi paragraph email back arguing with my points.

Lots of people respond favorably to feedback, some don’t. Those who don’t can be draining and I just don’t care to deal with it anymore. The decisions are hard enough already

We lost several weeks for about 10 new devs at my company who started in May/June because Apple only sells M1 now, so that’s what the new devs got, but all the old devs have x86. Poetry+geospatial libs+other stuff didn’t work at all and the new devs struggled to fix it because while they may have had 5, 10, 20 years of software experience, they didn’t know all our stack and didn’t know M1. The remote environment made debugging very slow.

In retrospect we probably should have forced all devs to switch to M1 at once and upgraded everyone’s laptop, but we saw all these posts about how everything works on M1 and that just wasn’t the case at all in our experience.

Form Energy is a unicorn company that exists specifically to solve this problem with their multi-day iron air battery. I’m sure there are other companies working on this as well..

Do you work in clean energy tech by any chance? Software people who know these things are like unicorns

Yes? Many stocks are down >50% and companies are announcing hiring freezes

Maybe we just work at completely different kinds of places, but I’ve worked with a ton of people who don’t know what patterns are and very few who over-apply them

Meh. 16 people from work came to my wedding (including my best man). You can be social at work without it ruining your life

11 days ago they said "While we confirmed that the threat actor had access to encrypted Heroku customer secrets stored in config var, the secrets are encrypted at rest and the threat actor did not access the encryption key necessary to decrypt config var secrets."

I guess that was a lie?!

The article is titled The “Other Kind” of Staff SWE. Presumably the “first kind” is the definition to which you are referring

Woah… this would be an amazing thing to open source

Do you know people who work or have worked for him? I work in the clean tech industry and know several people who work(ed) for solar city or Tesla. Musk is, I hear, a great recruiter, but then overworks his talent and eventually they burn out.

A home, yeah, not a home in downtown metros. My uncle is a teacher and owns two houses in rural Ohio with his wife, kid, and two dogs. Living the American dream.

Ughh here I was at 1:30AM after a hard week, checking the news one last time before going to bed, and see this. I hate this dang industry and regret ever becoming a tech lead. I know the Heroku engineers have it worse and all, but just venting.