meritt

I know these feel-good anti-whiteboard blog posts are in vogue right now, but the harsh reality is we're entering a recession. If you refuse to do whiteboard interviews, or complain about employers who want you to work hard, or only looking for jobs that'll let you unnecessarily rewrite their stack in Rust on k8s, or feel that FizzBuzz is beneath you: you're gonna be in for a rough couple years.

Unless we want to take a permanent hit to overall productivity and profitability, yes, most people will return to the office real quick. Trying to be efficient while hunched over a 13" mbp at your kitchen table while your children and spouse expect you to be available even though you're "at work" is near impossible for most people.

I've worked from home for 9 years and it took a long time to get to the point I felt just as proficient as I used to at the office. That didn't really happen until I had a dedicated office in my home, a good desk, a great monitor, and an amazing chair.

Credit card chargebacks are going to put that company out of business.

> That's slightly horrific.

I'd argue that the contemporary infatuation with mastery of complex toolchains as being the only possible solution to modern technical problems is far more horrific.

Smart businesses focus on simple, effective solutions and avoid hiring engineers who obsess with rewriting everything using the latest over-hyped technology.

Laying people off isn't necessarily a sign of distress. It may also be aptly observing the marketplace (e.g. the article suggests the layoffs were mostly in recruiting roles), and taking preemptive action. There are many of us who think this recession is going to last a hell of a lot longer than a single quarter, and if we're going to make cuts, earlier the better.

"Management teams that cut expenses first are advantaged as it is an area under the curve problem. The earlier the cuts, the less deep they have to be and the better positioned the company is for the recovery. Bad management teams cut late and deep, which leads to them really suffering in the upturn." [1]

[1] https://medium.com/@gavin_baker/thoughts-on-navigating-a-bea...

> which is totally doable at even half the salary you’re talking about.

Half that salary? That's $150k, or after taxes, about ~$8k/mo. or $3k/mo for everything else after your alloted $5k/mo. Yes, people can survive on a lot less, but why in the world would you want to live in the Bay area just to eek by on such a paltry net outcome without nearly enough to set aside for the rainy day that's coming soon.

And more importantly, that I think the vast majority of SF/SV kids seem to forget is, what happens when your cushy job disappears? How long can you survive dropping $5k/mo for a house that you could be paying $700/mo in a small town.

For sure. I'd just hate to be someone who thought signing a 30-yr note on a modest $1.5M 3-bed/2-ba home was a sustainable decision, and is now faced with the almost certain deep recession we're heading into.

> big leagues and land that $300k FAANG job that allows you to buy a home and raise a family in the bay is infinitesimal.

$300k/yr is nowhere near big leagues to buy a home and raise a family in the Bay area, just fyi. It's more like a comfortable single income where you aren't worried about paying rent or going out to dinner.

You try and raise a family on a mere $300k in SF/SV, you're one layoff or recession away from being completely screwed.

Zoom should have just called it 'Autopilot' instead of end-to-end and HN would have defended it to the death, despite that not actually being what was offered.

Yeah, just shouldn't be solely a moderator job. You'd think the userbase would stop upvoting the same damn story and/or not flagging the dupes.

Another Zoom article, and it's a dupe with one already on the front page! This is insane. I haven't seen HN so virulent over a topic since their blind faith defense on any criticism of Tesla.

Correct. When a given user downloads chat history, it downloads everything they can see: public chat and their own 1:1 conversations. Zoom has plenty of security and privacy issues, but this is not one of them [1].

[1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004792763-Savin...

In addition to the healthcare workers, we're going to look back a few years from now and recognize all the delivery drivers, package handlers, and grocery store cashiers as the "First Responders" of this crisis.

If it wasn't for the reselling market, there wouldn't be the same level of demand for sneakers. They're just shoes.

I have about a year of near daily anecdotal evidence to the contrary. So, in my experience, yes it works extremely well. I'm not saying it's better than Teams at all, I've never used that, and it looks pretty awesome from their marketing page. Microsoft has really stepped up their software quality game recently.

I can say Zoom is way the hell better than: Slack/Screenhero, TeamViewer, join.me, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Skype, Google Hangouts, BlueJeans, ugh the list goes on over the past years.

It works really well.

One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Also a really nice feature, again for phone conferences, is when people dial-in I see their phone number handle in the UI. But during the call as they introduce themselves or I look up their number, I can then rename their user to something recognizable. Now if I'm on a call with 5 people at another firm, I appear really impressive because I know who each person is by their name. When someone is speaking on the conference call, their icon lights up. If someone has a ton of background noise I can easily mute them.

Zoom Phone (addl paid feature) is awesome too. Virtual phone numbers, IVR, call routing, busy hours, I can instantly turn a 1:1 conversation into a zoom meeting that other people can join, etc. Zoom Phone works on my iphone like a regular dialer, and I can place/receive fully digital calls on it (pretty similar to how Google Voice works), so it doesn't matter if I have actual cell service.

I've never used Microsoft Teams, and does look really snazzy, but Zoom is an absolute joy to use compared to every single other conferencing software I have ever used. The video chat and screensharing is fast and responsive and just works exactly like you would expect it to.

Can NPM not just override "core-js" when performing dependency resolution and point to a maintained fork?

JS and php are perfectly suitable general purpose programming languages these days. And given they're both turing complete, they implicitly cover advanced use cases too.

So that leave us with "sound in its design" and I'd argue the absolute unmitigated disaster of python 2 vs 3, the numerous competing competing package managers, and the abundance of really bad code examples due to the influx of the mathematics world (just look at R), I fully disagree that python is a good choice.

But then again, that's just my opinion, but setting people off on an unnecessarily biased path with the assumption that there's only one way to do things definitely sounds like a pythonic behavioral trait.

MySQL 8 has ANY_VALUE() [1] to do just this. Also your example does not work any longer unless that now-deprecated behavior is explicitly enabled.

    select a, any_value(b), any_value(b) from table group by a

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/miscellaneous-functi...

My bet: remote-only for most companies won't last. If there's one thing I've learned over the past 8 years running this company, is most people really struggle at remote. They don't have the dedicated work space, they lack the necessary self-discipline, and many people really start to falter without face time and social interaction. I suspect once this virus is solved, we'll see a flood back to in-person jobs.

React was just a glib example anyway, I purposefully stay far away from anything trendy. I'm hiring people who are data smart, can think in SQL, and fully understand that AI/ML/NLP is smoke and mirrors bullshit in the vast majority of contemporary applications.

Anyway, I guess my broader point is: When every single PE/VC is battening down the hatches, firms are preemptively laying off people by the thousands before their clients even start missing payments, and a large number tech employees are in mortgages/leases they cannot sustain without those aforementioned salaries? We're about to see a tech bust and housing crash far worse than dot-com. Things are going to get really bad. Programmers are about to be competing head-to-head with front-of-house restaurant employees for gig-economy jobs. Thus, I can afford to wait a bit to find the right people.

As the owner of a fully remote, revenue-funded, and profitable startup that wants to hire, my concern is one that won't be particularly well received. I don't want to hire people, yet, because they're still thinking that https://levels.fyi is realistic. I'd rather wait a few rough months, have the pool of talent grow rapidly and people will start realizing that maybe paying $350k to a green React dev isn't very sustainable.

We're going headlong into a recession and I imagine an overwhelming number of firms are going to take the same stance.

I understand this stuff is "cool" but this is only one step removed from db->query(input[sql]). I'm not talking about SQL injection either, I'm talking about wholesale data exfiltration of your entire database because you've auto-generated some slick GraphQL API and you don't take the time to think through what should, and should not, be exposed to end users or bother to implement any form of access control.

I think you're reading far too much bias into this. The only individual being attacked here is McConnell and the primary target of criticism here is "the government". The article specifically mentions there are opponents on both sides of the aisle in both the House and Senate, and their dissent has been ignored while it's continuing to be pushed through. It also passed 278-136 [1] in the House with a nearly even allocation of D & R for both yays and nays.

Protecting (or eroding) privacy has always been a bipartisan issue.

[1] http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2020/roll098.xml

This is a great move but I hope everyone is ready to hear a lot of "those west coast liberals are suppressing our freedom of speech!" for the foreseeable future.

The US has major public leaders [1] and news organizations actively suggesting to people this is overblown and that they should go continue about their normal lives. We are so completely far from that step happening on a national level.

Edit: Source added.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/03/devi...

Nothing exists yet [1]. Verily (an Alphabet subsidiary but essentially "Google" for all intents and purposes) is working on a triage website with a limited focus on the Bay Area.

Ultimately it's going to be a slightly more complex variant of "Do you have a fever?" with a map showing nearby testing locations when someone clicks yes.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-coronavirus-screening...

Let's not forget that retailers are making their parking lots available, Google has deployed 1,700 engineers to build a flowchart website, and the US is buying up oil reserves.

I think this epidemic is pretty much solved, don't you?

Forget how they're going to learn remotely, who is going to watch and feed those kids? A very significant portion of US lower and middle income families depend on the public school system do those exact things while the parents work. They quite simply do not have a parent who can stay home with the kids unless they want to lose source of income.

The severity of the impact on the livelihood of these people and the residual impact to the economy cannot be overstated.

> WHO's excuse of not declaring it before was that it didn't reach Antarctica yet

You're going to need to cite a source because there's no chance anyone remotely educated would make that statement.

> shows MsgPack is more space efficient

While I see the same numbers as you do, there's no way a format that includes plaintext keys alongside the values is going to be smaller than a format that only includes a packed field number+type and the corresponding values. There's something fishy going on here, and I can't seem to find a link to the source behind his benchmarks?