pcsanwald

+1. I'm a musician who has released albums and I'd never use something like this, because who wants to manage distribution for every platform?

DistroKid/CDBaby are a much better way to do this.

I found this article quite interesting, it's about implementing an analytics system at stackoverflow: https://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2015/02/12/providence-failure-i...

Being a "tech luminary" is a pretty high bar, no? Who would self-identify as this anyways?

I graduated from NC State in 2000 and I've had a really awesome, rewarding career filled with interesting problems and fun. As an engineering manager I've had many, many colleagues who have advanced degrees from fancy schools that I never could have gotten into (or afforded). I use stuff that I learned at NCSU in my job every day, and am extremely thankful to have gotten such a high quality education at such a bargain basement price (in-state tuition was very cheap, I used to put it on my credit card). I've never felt like my degree or lack of a fancy school has hindered me.

As a hiring manager, unless the person is coming directly out of school, I don't even look at their education. There's a great many people that I've hired where I had no idea if they had a degree at all, much less CS.

I would upvote this by 1000 if I could. I lived in the bay area for 2 years, and one way streets + right on red is a recipe for disaster for pedestrians because drivers will never look to their right.

Interestingly, people in SF rarely jaywalk, and I wonder if it's related to this.

my .02 from having been CTO at a SaaS analytics company for a long time: "we want to see how your algorithms made their decisions."

that's great product feedback. and a problem you need to solve. You shouldn't solve it by handing out your source code.

I agree, although if the company asking is not engaging with an aforementioned auditing company (Mitre is the one I've dealt with the most), then that would be a red flag to me.

in my experience, a couple reasons:

1. It's far easier to raise money from VCs if you are located in SV/SF vs anywhere else in the country.

2. Once you raise that money, the only thing you are going to spend it on is employees. Infrastructure costs, real estate costs, etc, are comparatively cheap.

3. People starting companies rarely look around and decide where they should strategically be located based on costs. A few do, including my last company which was located in baltimore, but not many. Most people want to start their companies where they already live, and have a network for hiring, etc.

These 3 things, and probably others, lead to a significant amount of new companies getting started in SF/SV.

You could make the same argument about most programming languages. I hate to sound like I'm parroting Spolsky, but, he's right that the reason that the reason every developer ever wants to re-write the code they inherit is because it's easier to write code than it is to read it.

It's obviously an exaggeration, but not by much.

When I worked at a large investment bank we spent a ton of time and effort on a system that allowed equity analysts to use excel and sync their data back and forth to the firm's centralized system. it was a great approach because it kept the analysts happy, who were all masterful excel users and thus very efficient and happy with it.

Joel Spolsky's essay "Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy" comes to mind.

package management is a harder problem than most people seem to want to admit. I've run into tons of issues with every package management system you can think of: rpm does some extremely dodgy caching stuff at times, navigating maven dependency trees to identify the offending version of slf4j that is harshing the vibe, etc.

I can't think of a single package management system that works well and people seem to love.

In the poorer areas of NYC there are few, if any, healthy options. Access to fresh, healthy food is a big socioeconomic problem.

yeah, I guess my point is that maintaining internet and general office stuff is not "free", in that it's costing you your time or money. I don't spend much time on office stuff, but if the office is just software engineers, it's actually pretty expensive for anyone to spend any time on office stuff.

I am not saying it's more expensive than wework, but it is damn sure more expensive than just looking at rent + monthly bills.

sure, I've subleased a bunch. my experience with that is that two kinds of companies generally sublease: places that are growing and will eventually want the space you're occupying for themselves, or places that aren't doing well and will eventually fold. I've subleased from both :).

it's for sure a good option if you want a very short term thing, but it's a tough spot when you probably want > 1 year but 5 is a stretch.

exactly. Finding less than a 5 year lease in Manhattan is extremely challenging in my experience.

instead of non-relational, think of it as denormalized. I also can't think of any cases where you wouldn't want some relationships. I can absolutely rattle off tons of cases where applications benefit greatly from some kind of denormalization.

In years past, people called these "data warehouses" and essentially took snapshots of their production DBs and denormalized the hell out of them so that aggregations wouldn't crash the server.

I agree. I wonder if most people in this thread saying that renting your own space is cheaper has ever really done this. I have, a bunch, and keeping the lights on is not free in terms of time/money. At a small company, this means either you hire someone to handle all this stuff, or make the employees do it. Either way, running an office yourself ends up being expensive.

Do they seriously claim this? It sounds like a pretty far-fetched thing for them to say. I've opened several offices and moved my company around a fair bit, and I don't know how WeWork or anyone else would have their "foot in the door".

Any company approaching the size of twitter is going to contract those services out and either beat them down to very thin margins or manage the services themselves. very little upside in that.

I'm pretty sure at least a few people genuinely wanted to. they ended up being pretty happy as they ended up working at our company for many years.

I have no idea how long you've been working, but for myself, my wants and desires have changed pretty significantly over the years. Plenty of people (not just in technology) want change in their career, and are more than willing to trade off the freedom of running your own business with the freedom of being an employee, and not having to worry about the 10 zillion things you have to worry about when you're running the show.

I've also hired plenty of technologists that had similar experiences with management. Do anything long enough, and the grass on the other side starts to look a whole lot greener.

I had the same experience, although I didn't end up using wework because they gave me a runaround on location (I wanted manhattan space and they were clearly trying to get ppl to lease in dumbo, this was a while ago).

I 100% agree that the switching costs are very low in this kind of market.

It's good to hear their execution has improved. when I asked them if they had space in a manhattan location, they essentially couldn't (or wouldn't) tell me.

I've hired lots of people that used to run their own businesses and want to go back to being an employee.

this has been my experience exactly and a great summary. starting your own business vs being an employee is not about being your own boss, it's about trading one boss for many bosses (your customers, your investors, the bank, etc).

all tuning is relative, of course, but my comment is thinking about singers or horn players that play consistently sharp, for example.

I've hired 5 people from flatiron school, all of which worked out very well. desperation had nothing to do with it, I found the folks there were very helpful with matching potential candidates to what I was looking for. Additionally, I found candidates to have more diverse backgrounds on average and that was a positive thing for me.

Of course, anyone coming out of a bootcamp (or undergrad if they have no work experience) is going to be a relatively inexperienced hire, and not all companies have the inclination/ability/experience/desire to support these kinds of hires and the mentorship they require.

I've been a hiring manager for a very long time, and my opinion is that it's foolish to dismiss any potential source of candidates, especially one where you are not directly competing with google/facebook/amazon/goldman sachs. Many people from flatiron have engineering or math degrees, and realized after school they loved to code.

Also, back in the day, when I was a sophmore in college, someone hired me to be a sysadmin when the only experience I had was running the network in my college dorm for 6 months. Within a very short time I was writing all kinds of code, learning a ton, and making small but meaningful contributions. I've worked as a software engineer ever since. My first boss took a risk on me, and it worked out really well for him, and me. Some of the best hires I've ever made had skillsets that didn't, on paper, line up very well, but they turned out great. These experiences are why I'm willing to take risks in hiring.

I think most hiring managers are far too narrow minded when it comes to this stuff, although I understand why that's the case, too.

agreed, but even in classical music it doesn't really bother me that much sometimes, some of my very favorite string players have occasional intonation issues (who doesn't?). And think of all the jazz records with an out of tune piano!

The ubiquity of auto-tune is particularly interesting because most people don't seem to have a lot of pitch sensitivity. Tons of very famous recordings are slightly out of tune and no one seems to complain, ever.

I'd imagine its popularity is more due to convenience rather than demand.

I read the parent comment as don't, on average, make money for their employers. Which I assume is the way that Taleb points out, which is make a little most of the time and occasionally lose a lot.

Couldn't agree more. The only thing I know about the situation is what I've read, but many in this thread says "clearly he's a brilliant engineer" and yet, after reading the article, it's less clear to me that he's personally done as much amazing engineering as everyone is saying.

I said fund managers, not funds themselves: John Meriwether raised a new fund just a year after LTCM collapsed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Meriwether

The skillset is fuzzier, but the results are not fuzzier, as reflected by common practices of sales compensation across the industry.

Having done a lot of hiring in SF, NYC, and Baltimore, it's not clear to me that optimizing financially means avoiding SF and NYC.

Market salaries for software engineers in Baltimore are quite a bit lower (like, 40-50% lower) than SF or NYC. Whereas for companies located in NYC/SF, they understand cost of living is high and are thus willing to pay a premium.

I'm not making a counterargument here, just saying that salaries in different areas aren't usually apples to apples.

Also, cost of living is relative: For 10 of my 17 years in NYC, I lived in a studio apartment with a 1k/month mortgage, and no car, no kids, and a lower cost of living than most of my friends in other cities. So it really depends on your family situation and what kind of environment you want to live in.