TwistedWeasel

I can't speak for the community at large but I can tell you my path, my plan and my worries about that plan.

I just turned 36. I had been a manager for seven years across a few companies, managing teams ranging in size from 4 engineers to 35 (five teams underneath me). I reached a point in my last job where I was spending 80% of my week in meetings and the other 20% trying to stay on top of what my team was doing technically. I found myself becoming less and less useful in the technical discussions as the team was building up skills in new technologies that I didn't have time to learn.

I felt like I was losing my ability to be an engineer and therefore my ability to be a good engineering manager. I was not enjoying any part of my job at all. The rare opportunities to write code and learn new things were my only time where I felt good about the work I was doing.

So, I quit and got a different position as a senior developer. I told my new employer up front that I had been a manager for a long time and I wanted to be more technical again and focus my career on technical expertise. I my new position I am able to lead and set technical direction without being a "manager" in the traditional sense, people don't report to me but I help define what we're building and how we're building it. I am able to write code, learn, teach and explore ideas without feeling bogged down by management. My goal is to grow technically as much as I can and avoid becoming a manager that spends all my time in meetings again.

However, I am not sure how long this can last. At some point career growth seems to always steer towards doing less hands on and more managing of others, so perhaps i'll just need to find a way to enjoy that.

Quite right, learning from our mistakes is what makes us better.

The article assumes that the best people to hire are twenty-somethings that want to live in the city. What about catering to the 30 and 40 something senior engineers? In my experience it's much easier to hire a newly graduated, smart young engineer than it is to hire somebody with 10+ years experience.

Those people may have a family, and would much prefer a suburban home in a good school district.

Apple isn't part of the tech _startup_ scene, it's been around a long time and they know the value of retaining experienced engineers.

I dont get why 5 is a reason. I can currently move freely all over California and the rest of the US. How would splitting California up make movement between these areas any more free?

Exactly, even if it's not their own story, if they are able to talk intelligently about the subject matter and explain the problem and solution well then i've gained valuable information about the candidate.

Unfortunately i've had a couple of candidates who's response to the question was "I don't really write bugs". Those are the ones I know for sure are lying.

My favorite technical interview question is to ask the candidate about the worst bug they ever wrote. I let them choose their own definition of "worst", and see if they choose something that was hard to debug, or caused a lot of trouble or was just something they thought was a dumb mistake.

It usually provides them with an opportunity to talk technically about something they know and helps me understand how well they communicate problems and solutions. Plus, it's sometimes fun to hear the stories.

My own personal worst bug (where by worst I mean "had the worst impact") was when we disabled a large chunk of the southern Beijing cell phone system for a short time during the night whilst deploying a field test of new base station hardware. That was a stressful rollout.

No Microsoft.com? Late to the party?

I was thinking about this too, and I'm guessing that dumb 20 year old me would have sold those domains in the late 90's for thousands thinking I was making a huge profit instead of waiting a few more years until those Coca Cola people got desperate.

you read "audio" books?

When will we reach a point where the use of WebGL is no longer a headlining feature? WebGL is cool and all but I have never wanted to play a game based on the current coolness factor of it's underlying technology.

Games should be about fun.

I'm interested in WebGL but i'd rather be seeing links to posts about how people use it and how they performance tune it than just links to games built with it. I don't learn anything from just playing it.

If you don't like reading idle speculation then you should probably avoid 95% of tech blogs.

Apparently you can buy fish online.

http://www.pikeplacefish.com/buy/

I worked in the games industry for 12 years and I know a lot of designers that fit this criteria. They had no programming or art skills so they became testers, after that it seems the career path for a tester is either QA lead, or designer.

Probably 75% of the designers I know had a background in QA. Some of them were good designers, most were not. The ones who did have an art or tech background tended to be more grounded in their designs because they had a better idea of what is really achievable with the current tech.

So, they want lots of engineers to do work for them and then only pay the one they like?

You may not care but your employer might.

I think it's a bit of an overused term: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22...

Sublime Text Version https://github.com/jisaacks/GitGutter

I never found the keymap cheat sheets useful. It tells me what happens if I press a certain key, but what I need is the reverse. Tell we what key to press if I want X to happen.

When using a cheat sheet like that I waste a lot of time scouring the image looking for text relating to the type of operation I want. I'd rather have a list of options grouped by operation type.

Maybe co-sleeping is great for some families, maybe not for others. My kids (4 and 2) are impossible to sleep next to, they wriggle and kick and force me to the edge of the bed. In their own rooms they sleep just fine but they are still the primary cause of any bad sleep patterns I have.

I consider both my children to be fairly good sleepers but they still get up at 6am every day no matter what and when one of them is sick, or teething, or just too wired to sleep then multiple wake ups per night are possible, even if they go back to sleep without intervention I still wake up myself.

I could do any number of things to help improve my own sleep patterns but they are all moot until my kids get older.

That makes more sense to me now. Thinking about it I see it being useful to help with some currently painful tasks like converting old wiki content that has a non-standard wiki markup syntax (or no markup at all) into markdown.

It's interesting and seems well implemented but I don't understand the use case? Why would you need this?

If you want plain text inside HTML isn't what the <pre> tag is for?

I had never thought about it that way. We've found ourselves in a situation where we're more embarrassed to be caught watching something with nudity than violence because we made assumptions about other people that may be incorrect.

It's always amazed me that we seem to try harder to protect children from seeing a nipple than we do to prevent them from seeing depictions of people being killed.

Don't Macs come with an Internet Recovery partition? It's about 500Mb and boots to enough of an OS to download the rest and reinstall needed.

You can always use the inedible parts to make vegetable stock

All of the above, but most of all not keeping within the required parameters that would have made their solution usable.

Spending money on research is always good, Microsoft Research has always had a lot of good ideas and generated some truly amazing prototypes and research papers. It's a good thing for the community in general the have people working on this stuff but it's not necessarily a good business investment for MS if they can't leverage the work into viable products.

Many companies like to fund R&D divisions as a means to attract the best minds from the academic community in the hopes that they will benefit from their talent in some way. It's often not directed work but more of a recruitment tool. The best professors bring with them the best students and many of those students end up working on products not just research.

However, in my time at Microsoft I worked with the research team on a couple of occasions trying leverage their ideas into real products with little success. We would send them some interesting problems (in one case we asked them to spend some time on snow accumulation algorithms for a snowboarding game) and they would disappear for months and return with a cool demo that was impressive but usually failed to meet the given criteria that allowed it to be used in a shipping product. e.g. speed, memory efficiency, data size requirements etc.

Thankyou.

I find it somewhat frustrating to follow a link that sounds interesting only to find a slide deck that makes little sense to me without the talk that goes with it.

Honestly curious - what kind of abuse could cause a calibration error?

My kids abuse my iPad pretty heavily but generally smacking on the screen with their hands and fingers a lot but I still have never seen it mis-calculate a touch.

The consumer electronics industry has shipped hundreds of millions of touch screens in the last few years and i've not seen a single article complaining that they opened up their new tablet/phone to find it mis-calibrated and that their touches were off my such a huge margin. Why are voting machines apparently subject to calibration problems that other touch screen devices are not?