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shawnps

602 karma · joined October 13, 2009

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shawnps··on Why Google Employees Quit (2009)
This is what I gleaned from the article:

Person 1:

* Pay/benefits

Person 2:

* Benefits

Person 3:

* Hiring process

Person 4:

* Company felt too big.

* Pay

* Company goals were too constrained

Person 5:

* Hiring process

* Benefits

Person 6:

* Hiring process

Person 7:

* Pay (international office)

Person 8:

* Cannot figure out why this person left, but it was after 11 days of working there.

Person 9:

* Pursuing different career path (overall was happy with Google)

Person 10:

* Hiring process

Person 11:

* Management

Person 12:

* Bad work/life balance

* Pay (other people paid less than what they deserved)

* Management

* Hard to get noticed in remote office

Person 13:

* Company was changing too much

* Management

Person 14:

* Hiring process

* Management

* Hard to get promotion

* Bad work/life balance

Person 15:

* Hiring process

Person 16:

* N/A

Person 17:

* Salary/hiring bonus/relocation

* Office benefits being removed

Person 18:

* Felt underutilized

* Management

Person 19:

* Management

* Lack of fun culture in remote office

shawnps··on Ask HN: How do you familiarize yourself with a new codebase?
Get it running locally and then see what happens when you delete some stuff, especially stuff that you don't understand when reading through the code.
shawnps··on A Go “clone” of the great and famous Requests library
Whenever I'm reading through Go code and come across something that uses this sort of abstraction library, I usually just close it and move on. The stdlib is really nice and I find code that stays as "vanilla" Go as possible to be the easiest to read.
shawnps··on Ask HN: Slow engineers, did you get faster? How?
I've only seen advice so far on how you can "get faster", but I believe the real issue here is that you are being perceived as being slow by a manager who might not know the value of what you are doing.

I had a manager tell me I was slow at one of my last jobs as well.

A few months later, I was having trouble convincing her to give me a promotion/raise. I knew I was doing the same amount of work as everyone else, if not more, and I was fixing a lot of bugs caused by developers 2 or 3 levels above me. Our 1 on 1 meetings consisted of me listing the reasons why I deserved a raise, and my manager telling me no, but never a good reason why. She even read me the guidelines for what the company looks for in engineers at each level, and I was doing all of it and more, but still no raise.

I ended up quitting (not just because of the pay), and taking my skills to an awesome new job where I was considered a top engineer, and I'm really proud of everything I got done there. The new company gave me a raise when I asked for it because they valued me more than my previous company.

My personal advice is to look for a new job where you can apply your skills where the company needs them, and make a good impression from the beginning. The added bonus being that you'll be able to negotiate a higher salary with the new job as well.

shawnps··on Ask HN: Self-doubt, inferiority complex is killing me. How do I fix that?
My advice is to code more. You will get more accustomed to the thought process that goes into writing code, more accustomed to your editor, and more comfortable with coding overall.

One thing that I did that helped me code more was challenge myself to code every day. Using GitHub helps because you can check your streak. My friend and I did this for about 2 months and we felt very productive. This is his blog post about halfway through: http://www.ironzebra.com/post/105/abc-always-be-coding

Your English is fine. I live abroad and meet people all the time who use English as a second language. Yours is by far some of the best English I've seen from a non-native speaker.

shawnps··on Show HN: Exchange Alert – Track exchange rates via email or Slack
Please excuse the ugly App Engine URL. If people end up showing interest in the app I'll put more time and effort into cosmetic stuff.

I built this because I live abroad and didn't realize until too late that the exchange rate back to USD had gotten really high.

Any feedback is welcome.

shawnps··on Go has a debugger and it's awesome
I also use a well-known debugger called fmt.Println
shawnps··on Proposed Who Is Hiring Spec
Is there a way to be more clear about whether the company will apply for an H1B for a candidate, as opposed to sponsoring an existing one? I have a lot of friends who talk to companies that end up saying, "we only sponsor existing visas."
shawnps··on Tell HN: Thank you whoishiring, a.k.a. Matthew Walsh-Cloonagh
I hadn't thought about this very much until I read this post, but I got my first job out of college through a "who is hiring" post back in 2011 (so I guess it was one of the first posts!) and that job changed my life. I flew out to California from the east coast, lived in SF, met a large number of incredibly smart and passionate people, and to this day the network I grew out there is hugely influential on my life and my career. So thanks from me as well!
shawnps··on Japan Bicycle Parking Technology [video]
I'm in Tokyo and I've never seen one before :) but I might start looking just to try it out.
shawnps··on Japan Bicycle Parking Technology [video]
Danny Choo did a post on this: http://www.dannychoo.com/en/post/26963/Japan+Underground+Bic...

Looks like you can find one of these in Shinagawa

shawnps··on Drop-In Coworking Spaces in Tokyo
I see, that makes sense. By the way, there's a burrito place 2-3 mins from there that I frequent:

https://ja-jp.facebook.com/burritastesgood

Staff and owner are very nice people, burritos are good, and they have a variety of hot sauces.

shawnps··on Drop-In Coworking Spaces in Tokyo
Do you know if it's pretty competitive to get the monthly membership at The Terminal? Only the first 10 people who sign up can get it right? ("毎月先着10名様となります。")
shawnps··on Japan maglev train breaks world speed record again
Often people are disappointed when they visit Japan to find that it isn't as technologically advanced as they had dreamed, and I do agree partially, but whenever I discuss it with friends who also live here we always agree: the trains are amazing. Even local trains (in Tokyo) come very often, are fast, and are extremely quiet. But I always look forward to riding the Shinkansen. If you're lucky you can even get a great view of Mount Fuji.
shawnps··on LA's Proposed Parking Signs
None of the signs I see on the webpage have those conditions, though.
shawnps··on LA's Proposed Parking Signs
How about an LED sign that just says "YES" or "NO"?

Edit: I guess energy would be a concern though :(

shawnps··on Japan to open first hotel entirely operated by robots
I haven't seen that (in my 2+ years living here). Recently though I've noticed a lot of stores showing 2 prices, one with tax and one without, but when I first moved here almost every store I went to only showed the price with tax included. I think the recent change is due to the sales tax increase.
shawnps··on Japan to open first hotel entirely operated by robots
FAQ for those who can read Japanese:

http://www.h-n-h.jp/faq.pdf

It says if you stay between 2 and 5 nights there is a fee to have your bed made (#43). I wonder if this implies a human will be doing it.

I don't see anything on there that mentions robots making the beds. Could just be that the robots do most of the cleaning and humans change the sheets or something.

shawnps··on Ask HN: What code do you frequently read?
Golang stdlib is an excellent reference for how to write idiomatic Go code https://github.com/golang/go/tree/master/src
shawnps··on App Container and Docker
Most of those lines added are appc getting vendorized
shawnps··on Excellent Open Source Go Projects
Hi, we're running gocyclo with "-over 10"

Test coverage is definitely something we want to add but we weren't sure if we could figure out how to run them in a sandbox properly in the amount of time we had. I'll probably research how the Go Playground does it :)

shawnps··on Excellent Open Source Go Projects
We built this for the recent Gopher Gala distributed hackathon. We have a long list of things we want to add or fix (the event is only 48 hours long). We'd love to get any feedback HNers have to offer!
shawnps··on GitHub's “hub” tool rewritten in Golang
Yeah, it gives you the ability on the command line to interact with GitHub functionality, like browsing issues, opening a pull request, and so on.

I'm not familiar with their Ruby implementation either, but hey if it works the same way, is faster than it was before, and some developers enjoyed working on it then I guess it's a net positive :)

shawnps··on GitHub's “hub” tool rewritten in Golang
Reasoning behind porting it to Go: https://github.com/github/hub/issues/475

"My Ruby implementation of context.rb is getting unwieldy and in hub v1.11 I feel I've reached the limit of how much I can speed up hub exection. I can't make it much faster than 50 ms due to Ruby interpreter slowness. Go port can execute in under 10 ms, and it's not even specially optimized yet. Go port can also be distributed as a pre-compiled binary, skipping the need to install Ruby, which can be especially tricky and error-prone for Windows users."

shawnps··on Japan records lowest number of births on record as population shrinks
It is not near impossible to get Japanese citizenship, but you are technically required to renounce other current citizenships. Permanent residency is a more attainable goal especially for technical workers in Japan.
shawnps··on Golang on GitHub
I'm not sure about that either, I have 32 commits:

➜ go hg log --user "Shawn Smith" | grep user | wc -l

32

Edit: I'm there now. Not sure what fixed it, starring the repo or adding my email address to GitHub.

shawnps··on Golang on GitHub
Interesting, I'll star the project and see what happens. I see other people's contributions showing up that are over 1 year old so I'm not sure if that is why.
shawnps··on Golang on GitHub
Just added it now, perhaps it will update. I'll check back on it later, thanks.
shawnps··on Golang on GitHub
Did anyone do anything special to get their contributions attributed to their GitHub account? Mine are not showing up here: https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors
shawnps··on Doing Business in Japan
I agree with this. I moved from SF to Tokyo 2 years ago, and for almost the exact same price as my studio apartment in downtown SF, which was tiny and the bathroom was covered in mold, I have an apartment about 15-20 mins out of Shinjuku in a building that was brand new when I moved in.

I was also pleasantly surprised at the cost and quality of food here, although some of my coworkers who moved here from different countries (South Africa, for example) have complained that it's too expensive.

My bills are also less expensive, and the quality of the services are better. Internet for example is very fast and reliable, and costs me about half the price as Comcast did in SF.

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