romanows

I canceled my subscription due to their insistence on ads at any level of support (I asked their customer service about it). Stuck with the Washington Post which seems to be okay with charging more and displaying zero ads.

Agile is the opposite of "closely scripted, narrowly defined workflow is a one-sized-fits-all solution to optimizing teams under all circumstances and contexts." You're thinking more of Scrum?

I guarantee there were some technical people saying this was a waste of time and money.

What interviewer isn't going to dig into their concerns anyway? I mean, if you can read the person and they seem like they'd be down for "let's get down to brass tacks" kinda talk, go for it. Maybe it makes you seem like a serious person to certain kinds of people.

It might be a little uncomfortable for someone like me. I'd rather you ask, "what are your favorite qualities in your best employees" and then respond to that.

Maybe it's just my area of work but I can't imagine caring about previous experience, degree, or anything. I mean, the candidate has gotten past the resume screen already so you're just living up to that impression and other candidates at that point.

I would think that the difference between a towel and water alone for cleaning hands is smaller than the difference between water alone and water with soap.

When I was commuting, I had a theory that looking out the bus window or biking into work was important because it forced me to be aware of the distance and time separating my home and work. It allowed me to transition between the two, whereas being deep into a research paper or carpooling with a nicely chatty coworker did not.

Thanks for your comments in this thread. Some people seem to have an axe to grind concerning the hubris of software hackers and are pushing that debate rather than addressing the question.

I wonder how long it would take to teach someone to be more help than harm? After 30 intensive days of training, what would candidates lack?

Instant messaging is synchronous two-way communication like voice and video. I'm not sure what you mean by "fluid" conversation, though. Voice is good for people who aren't good at typing or expressing themselves via text. However, I don't see what additional conversationally-useful information is conveyed by video of people's faces.

Maybe I just spend too much time listening to the radio and podcasts? Maybe it was growing up in an era where voice phone conversations were more common than texting and facetime?

I vastly prefer text. Sometimes I need to extract information out of someone who doesn't do a great job of communicating via text and voice helps. Sometimes it's clear that there's a tone-based misunderstanding and that the easiest solution is to switch to voice and make it clear that the tone behind comments isn't sarcastic, dismissive, or whatever.

I really dislike video chat for full-time remote work. Video chat is still too lo-fi to approach the utility of in-person meetings and has the same downsides (grooming, dress, other appearance-based stereotypes). What's wrong with voice?!

"Several grumpy opinions about remote working tools at Tailscale" would do it.

Social security?

I'm suspicious that it's difficult to know someone's work-related emotional state if you're in a position to affect it. And are you in a position to do anything about it if you find that they are stressed? Just ask in a more-frequent one-on-one if you have an employee who is hard to read but be prepared to follow through on supporting them. And (assuming you are their manager) tell them your frustrations and stresses proactively to model what they are allowed to tell you.

Note that protecting the company from being sued can mean protecting you. For example, a harasser might be fired to avoid a lawsuit. But you hear stories about HR people putting the company in legal jeopardy (e.g. not firing a harasser) due to their own bias, laziness or in-company relationships.

Just give your opinion as you would to a coworker on your best day. That's what any reasonable interviewer is looking for unless otherwise stated. Similarly, you can tell a lot by how your comments are received.

FYI, there will sometimes be nice comparison tables to make comparing software easier. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_deep-learning_so...

Non-IT person here but their security updates seem very nice if you are dealing with systems that store sensitive data?

You're just doing work on your personal laptop? That doesn't mean you own the work you produce so I think it would complicate ownership of the non-work you produce. Best to use the work laptop for work and the personal laptop for personal stuff both for IP and company policy reasons.

It's bad that there are half forgotten systems but almost every sizable business that has been around for many years will have this. On mobile, but there's a famous story of a server that had been drywalled over and had been running just fine, unnoticed and unattended, for years.

It's good to see that maintenance is rewarded at Google at least occasionally. I only ever hear that it is only new products that are rewarded. And I notice new people piling on to issues in their product trackers that I've been following for years.

The article seems contradictory. Is it really estimating if you drop features you can't finish to ship by a deadline? Is a 16 month estimate worthwhile when you screw around for 12 months before getting serious and then getting it done? If the upshot is just to keep a conversation going with stakeholders and always be working on the most important functionality, isn't this mostly accomplished by 2 week sprints with a touch of externally set deadline pressure (e.g., WWDC)?

Taxes are more about having the right training/mindset when approaching a potentially complex set of instructions. It's more about how daunting it feels. Same way I've talked myself out of putting in the work to think long and hard about some proof I had to complete for homework ages ago: "I don't know how much work I'll have to do and how many sub-problems I'll encounter and that stresses me out".

100% agree about probability and stats, that stuff is not intuitive nor easy to pick up outside of school.

Soylent tastes good. I actually crave it some days. Feels like there is plenty of room in this market without resorting to negative advertising but maybe it'll work for you...

In my darker moments I think people don't want to take the time to type a good question and only commit to it when they believe I'll be faster than grep/google. Not sure if they realize that now I have to sit through that typing time in addition to providing help.

Some people advocate that microservices own their data and only provide it through an API. In this scenario, Service B would need to query Service A for the authoritative copy of the record. I think the standard way to deal with the query and network time is, yes, to wait until Service A provides the data and timeout if it takes "too long".

Then your question is about optimizing on top of the usual architecture which hopefully is an infrequent source of pain that is worth the cost of making it faster. I could imagine some clever caching, Service A and Service B both subscribing to a source of events that deal with the data in question, or just combining Service A and B into one component.

Heaven forbid that someone responds to a point made in another post. On a public internet discussion forum. In a discussion about the context and effects of divisive and difficult decisions. /s

I do that with a monthly clothing service and it works pretty well, so I guess YMMV.

s/J/Sh/

Could you ask this question directly in an interview? If you have to assume the response is actually talking about "white males" or that the respondent is confusing bias with ping-pong tables, perhaps you are not being direct enough or are speaking to HR instead of a manager?

Maybe it'd work best asked in an abstract, impersonal way: "I've had friends whose contributions have been dismissed because of their gender; what kinds of strategies can combat bias and create a positive environment for all employees?" Ideally this would lead into a nice 5 minute discussion where you could get a feel for their thinking.

Matches mine in Austin.