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polymerase

3 karma · joined December 21, 2017

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polymerase··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2019)
It's in the apply link: "All U.S. Digital Service positions require U.S. citizenship."
polymerase··on The Enormous Numbers Behind Amazon’s Market Reach
Is it me, or is traditional news always attacking tech?

Why don't I see the same fervor targeted at the likes of Walmart, who dominates traditional retail? Or Comcast/AT&T owning our internet infrastructure, continuing to acquire other massive companies? They have massive media holdings now. Or CVS acquiring Aetna?

polymerase··on My Cognitive Bias – A cognitive bias explained every time you open a new tab
Author uses I/we but I couldn't find a name anywhere on the page.
polymerase··on Steps to Building an Engineering Competency Matrix
"Consistently writes production-ready code that is easily testable, easily understood by other developers, and accounts for edge cases and errors."

That should be the bar for an E1, let alone E3.

polymerase··on [1986] Interview with Bill Gates
"GATES: Before I sit down to code something, most of the instructions have already run through my head. It’s not all laid out perfectly, and I do find myself making changes, but all the good ideas have occurred to me before I actually write the program. And if there is a bug in the thing, I feel pretty bad, because if there’s one bug, it says your mental simulation is imperfect. And once your mental simulation is imperfect, there might be thousands of bugs in the program. I really hate it when I watch some people program and I don’t see them thinking."

"INTERVIEWER: Does accumulating experience through the years necessarily make programming easier? GATES: No. I think after the first three or four years, it’s pretty cast in concrete whether you’re a good programmer or not. ... There’s no one at Microsoft who was just kind of mediocre for a couple of years, and then just out of the blue started optimizing everything in sight. I can talk to somebody about a program that he’s written and know right away whether he’s really a good programmer. If he’s really good, he’ll have everything at the tip of his tongue. ... To this day, I can go to the blackboard and write out huge slabs of source code from the Microsoft BASIC that I wrote ten years ago."

Think he still holds this sentiment today about what makes a good programmer?

polymerase··on Fitbit employees charged with stealing trade secrets from competitor Jawbone
California is not a right to work state.
polymerase··on Has Vue passed React yet?
Provocative and simply wrong.
polymerase··on Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
This is shortsighted because the employee may already be sitting on an offer/is willing to leave. If a good employee asks management for a raise outside of the annual performance review cadence, and is rejected with "Ask me after performance review", management shouldn't be surprised to receive the employee's 2 week notice.
polymerase··on The World’s Emptiest Airport Is a Red Flag
/s ?