tenpoundhammer

In 2019 I was an SE2 the thing that turned it around was reading this one book https://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Corner-Office-Strategies-Bus... . Based on the title of the book it's easy to misconstrue as a guide to using underhanded tactics to get ahead but it's not. It gives you the tools and strategies to understand how people actually get ahead working in corporations today.

I'm going to assume for this conversation we are talking about a software engineer that is able to build products very quickly and with relatively few major problems.

At the end of the day I believe the common threads of these type of people are experience, motivation, and direction. For reference, I started my full time career as a software engineer in 2012 and worked my way from SE to Senior Engineering Manager, I have come in to contact with a lot of software engineers.

There is nothing magical about highly effective software engineers. They are usually * Experienced something like 5 - 8 years * Good at self improvement * Focused in one area and one set of tools * Hard workers * Motivated, driven by something inside themselves to code * They are given clear goals and outcomes

Some of the highly effective engineers I've worked with are highly independent and difficult to work with, some have been kind team players, some have been always on the cutting edge and some have gotten really good with one tool and never wanted to change. People who are good at things are still just people and come in all shapes and sizes and personalities.

If you’ve faced a lot of rejection in your career or life it can lead to self evaluation that is not accurate. A therapist, counselor, or career coach can help you get a better sense of your actual position in the world and what to do to improve it. I’ve there and the most important thing to remember is your job is not you. Your still important and not worthless no matter what you’re job says.

Fun story I've shared here before, at my first job I got a 1%-2% raise every year for the first 3 years. On the third one I said, "if I don't get a better raise this year I will find another job". I got another tiny raise, found another job that was a 20% increase. My boss comes to me and said "how much more do we have to pay you to stay?".

They could have easily paid more that entire time but thought I was a sucker. I felt deeply insulted at that point and just told him it's too late. Best move I ever made.

I was fighting all year to hire mid-level software engineers

I have an Oculus Quest 2 and me, my wife, and my kids all love it. The biggest gating factor in our enjoyment is lack of content. If there were more AAA titles I would spend way more time with my oculus. It is the most immersive and intuitive gaming experience I've ever had.

That's actually really interesting how subjective reading experiences can be. It's amazing that we basically had opposite reactions to these books. I wonder what is the best approach to sharing subjective reviews? It would be nice to give reviews in a way that helps others make a better choice.

As a counterpoint to the praise of "The name of the wind" I read it on an HN recommendation and didn't enjoy it. The writing, characters, and story were all boring and poorly constructed, I kept thinking to myself, 'This is starting to get exciting I bet something good will happen' but nothing ever did. The world building and magic system was pretty well thought out but within the confines of 'The name of the wind' it was never put to good use.

If you like great world building and magic systems I would recommend Brandon Sanderson series 'The Stormlight Archives' or 'Mistborn'

There is a youtube alternative that some creators are using called odysee. https://odysee.com/ . It still has the dislike button.

"Although the detailed analysis by the Max Planck researchers in Göttingen shows that tight-fitting FFP2 masks provide 75 times better protection compared to well-fitting surgical masks and that the way a mask is worn makes a huge difference; even medical masks significantly reduce the risk of infection compared to a situation without any mouth-nose protection at all."

Agree with this I think the other thing to consider is that this is probably a long term fee to help keep a niche business afloat. They probably can't keep enough revenue coming in to support the business long term just by device sales. I think it's hard for a business like this to survive long term without a recurring fee model.

There 3 Options: 1. Connect: $7.99 per month 2. Connect Lite: $4.99 per month 3. No Plan: but the device costs more

I dug in deep to find the prices so others don't have to. Personally, I'm fine with this model a lot of the great features are probably supported by doing compute in the cloud and there are also huge advantages to having storage in the cloud.

I haven't seen this comment yet, so here we go.

I live in a rural community of about 15,000 people, attend church, and sports for my kids and generally spend a lot of time with people in the community. These are people who don't trust the science.

They aren't stupid, they aren't uneducated, and they mostly aren't believing radical misinformation. There are two really important things to consider though.

1. They don't have experience with Science or Statistics. Outside of a high school classroom 20 or more years ago. [It's easy to get through college without any meaningful science education]

2. They have been screwed by the medical system, government, and economy.

Their decision making and behavior is primarily driven off of their intuition and second hand information from people they trust. The vast majority of unvaccinated people that I know don't believe in microchips or that the vaccine will kill them. They just think they don't need it cause they aren't at risk or because they have already developed natural immunity.

Some of them are right and some of them wrong. They are just people and doing the best they can.

I wish there were a simple answer but it's a complicated cost benefit analysis that has to be done for each organization taking into account their objectives. But most organizations don't have that many options because salaries are pre-defined and inelastic.

There really aren't that many options 1. Invest in training the people you have 2. Offer some novel incentives 4 day work week or something. 3. Compete on salary by paying more

In a lot of organizations 2 and 3 can't be changed by the people doing the hiring.

A quick breakdown from my recent experience hiring for 5 software developer positions.

Entry Level Engineers - Easy to find but expensive to train

Mid level engineers - Difficult to find but minimal training required

Senior engineers - Extremely difficult to hire almost no training required

For a software team to be successful you need at minimum a strong mid level to keep everyone moving in the right direction but it's preferable to have a senior level engineer.

I'd recommend everyone heavily invest in growing the people they have instead of playing the 'lets hire a senior lottery'.

I have seen the greatest success in self organizing teams when they have a strong leader with clear values that enforces a vision.

I think self organizing is a bit of a misnomer, it's more like self organizing within the system of checks and balances that the leader has developed to ensure the values are being played out in the day to day work.

For instance in our teams we've introduced one of our values as cross training, one person shouldn't own any part of the system. Our team leads keep an eye on individual contributors and if we aren't getting enough cross pollination the team lead will intervene.

I think your perspective shows one side of a continuum between Personal Freedom <----> Collective Safety. It would seem that at some point maybe in the 50's or maybe the 80's a majority of people decided the debate around this was solved and the US would favor personal freedom over everything else. It's clear that as a society we have decided to re-open this debate.

While the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle the most important part of this issue is the nuance. It's become very common to lash out and villainize people on the other end of the spectrum or just people in a slightly different place on the spectrum. I think we first need to carefully consider the variables and hedge our statements.

For example, a friend of mine in her 50s was recently verbally accosted, by an employee of the store she was at, for not being vaccinated because she was wearing a mask after it wasn't required . But she is in fact vaccinated and wants to continue to wear a mask because she has many health problems.

Just assuming the other side is needlessly putting other people at risk because they are selfish is overly simple and will fail to address the root issues at play. The same is true for the other side of the argument, assuming people hate freedom and want to make all your decisions for you because their evil or think your stupid is also failing to address the real issues.

With some nuance and understanding injected into these conversations we might be less polarized and have options that work for more people.

Have you been around people who actually use trucks for work or leisure? They aren't just hitting the side of their trucks with 2x4's or dropping gravel from ten feet in the air like commercials. Lots of people use their trucks for pulling trailers that carry thousands of pounds of their stuff. They use the bed of their truck for carrying things that are long, heavy, grain, sawdust, smaller animals, there is a wide variety of use cases for a truck and a lot of them don't affect the aesthetic of the truck.

I didn't grow up poor but we didn't have extra of anything and we sure couldn't afford to lose a paycheck. The thing I find absolutely unbelievable and will never understand is when people quit their job and just plan to relax for a while. What ??? You have a job you are making money, why would you give that up? I feel so lucky to have a job and to do something that isn't back breaking labor, I will never understand this and firmly feel like this is rich people stuff.

I agree with all of your comment. However, I think many people presume the purpose of the HN comments section is to have a robust debate that helps the community arrive at some conclusion. I think there is a lot of value in comments that simply share a persons point of view. I would really enjoy hearing others perspectives outside of secular scientific/evolutionary viewpoint and christian viewpoint.

Particularly it would be great to hear from people with hindu backgrounds as they often have a lot to say about our relationship with animals.

If your comment was some kind joke please disregard my comment.

Sorry to see you getting down voted into the basement, I too am a devout theist. I don't think the nature of your argument being theistic is the primary reason you are getting down voted though. I think if you built a stronger set of arguments about why this matters and how it relates to humans deserving a better level of treatment than other animals your comment would fair better.

A decent example might be something like, "As a Christian, I believe all humans are made in the image and likeness of God. This gives humans a special place in the order of the universe in Gods eyes and God asks us to respect that view in relation to how we treat other human beings. Giving humans a higher level of reverence than other animals. Being made in Gods likeness is also a reflection of the higher order cognitive, spiritual, and social faculties that humans share and other animals often don't display. Although we do see animals having some advanced emotions or social ordering we don't see them simultaneously containing all the high order functions that humanity does at once"

I wrote Christian because I'm a Christian, you might be part of any religion or none. Something like the above comment might be more constructive in the future best wishes.

I had the same problem my whole life up until about two years ago. For whatever reason my default mindset was that when I heard something I didn't understand or was curious about, I would explain my understanding and frame that against what I thought was wrong about their understanding. I then expected them to respond in a similar way. To the majority of people this seems confrontational and argumentative, so everyone just thought I was being a know it all jerk.

I changed to only asking questions and/or mirroring back what they said. The change in strategy answers my curiosities and helps people to feel like you are listening to them and care about what they have to say. Hope it helps.

I think attempting to hire people who are passionate is a by-product of an industry where it's been difficult to reliably hire software engineers at the level that the hiring manager's would prefer. There are a lot of problems with the expectations that hiring managers have.

Most hiring managers seem to be looking for candidates that can take a feature, ticket, or idea and just make it happen. Which often requires someone with decently mature experience and a variety of skills. They then use Passion as a strong indicator for this kind of success.

Passion can also be used as an indicator for people who are willing to work more than what they are paid for or a way to ask do you have responsibilities, limitations, disabilities that prevent you from writing code on the weekends and/or evenings?

I think it's safe to say, that if passion is being used as a gating question or primary metric for hiring decisions it's likely that it won't work to meet a company’s hiring needs.

If Passion is used as part of a constellation of data to help inform and build out a broader understanding of a potential candidate, it's likely to have minimal negative consequences and might even be helpful.

"Socialhome allows you to build a rich profile that federates across the federated social web. Your content will be available to millions of users that you can also follow and interact with their content."

I think this is the product pitch.

The software industry is starving for senior software engineers who can lead a team of software engineers. Brainy and skilled is where it's at.

As I manager I hear this sort of thing regularly,

1. Imposter syndrome, a large portion of developers have it and this could be you. Chances are if you have a job and continue to ship code to prod you are at least partially suffering from imposter syndrome.

2. Overwhelmed by the wide variety of skills, being a software engineer in a professional environment requires way more than coding skills. You need to be adequate with GIT, Programming Languages, Unit Testing, Various Frameworks, CI, Deployments, Team Dynamics, and more. If you are only able to write code every day will feel like a big struggle to get anything done. Identifying which area is giving you the most trouble and doing focused learning will help you.

3. Lack of methodology in learning, a lot of people rely on their feelings to help decide what to do next. For some people that means learning a bit of this and a bit of that but never learning enough to be productive. Having a plan for what you need to learn and the order you want to learn it in can be tremendously helpful for growing your career.

4. Lack of methodology in coding, most coding jobs have similar steps when solving day to day problems. Making your self a checklist of steps can be very helpful for taking the stress and guesswork out of your day. For instance, step 1 pick up a ticket and understand the requirements. Step 2 pull from the git repo and run all tests. Step 3 Right down a development plan. Step 4 write code. step 5 write unit tests. step 6 submit a pull request. These steps will probably look different for each project and developer but help to ease the tension of figuring out what's next.

I'm sure there are more things specific to your situation but don't give up and keep working towards your goals.

While monopolies are bad, I don't see what's listed in this article as monopolies. I see a series of small businesses that are more profitable when economies of scale are utilized. So, the small businesses are being bought up by a few larger players.

When saying this is bad, what is the author optimizing for?

This market consolidation should decrease consumer prices, as long as actual monopolies are not in place and price fixing doesn't occur. At the same time the individual owners are getting buy-outs they are happy with. Seems fine to me.

What am I missing?

The first question I have to ask myself about increasing taxes is,

can the government do a better job of distributing these resources than whoever is doing that Job now?

and what does better mean?

Living in the US with the government that is currently in place I feel confident that the government can't do a better job than the current system in place to handle inheritance, no matter what the definition of better is. So giving the government more money via inheritance tax is a bad idea.

I thought I was terrible at time management but I was actually terrible at saying no. I would just agree to do everything for everyone and then realize there was no way I could do it and then do none of that stuff and work on something I actually wanted to do.

I learned to say no to other people and that didn't work. Then I learned to say no to myself. That helped a lot.

Turned out I was saying yes to everything cause I liked the feeling of being important because I had a lot to do.

I do some hiring and we offer either whiteboarding or a take-home exercise, because of this exact situation. Anyone that you would enjoy working for would probably provide accommodations if you told them in-person whiteboarding gives you anxiety.

Also, we generally use whiteboarding as a way to understand how a person works, if they are on the track that's good enough. I would focus on getting better programming in general, by doing it, study interview questions for whatever you are interviewing for, and then try to take the pressure off yourself. It's ok to have imperfect whiteboard answers and the stress of the situation can make it harder.