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amursft

131 karma · joined November 2, 2019

https://amursoftware.com
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amursft··on Google pilots a feature that aggregates short-form videos from TikTok, Instagram
Is there some agreement with Instagram and TikTok to be included here? Or are they just crawling and displaying?
amursft··on Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
They're clearly putting on an air of authoritativeness, but yeah exactly. I read this more like a very extended Glassdoor review. You're getting one person's perspective. Interesting interview, big grain of salt.
amursft··on Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
This seemed like a fairly normal level of knowledge to me, honestly. There's a lot of public information about the company, and you work there so you want to learn and know more - from both internal/external sources. Anything you found particularly surprising?
amursft··on What Will Happen in the 2020s
I recall seeing that they were experimenting with it. Yep, here's a story from August.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/china-s-p...

amursft··on What Will Happen in the 2020s
Good predictions.

Didn't mention distributed/remote work. Not sure if that's because it's so obvious a trend as to be boring?

I think he's early on the plant-based diet prediction, but correct in 20-30 years. Actually a lot of these seem like trends that might take more than 10 years, but have a high chance of being correct eventually.

amursft··on Ask HN: Do you see your team or company becoming remote-first in the new decade?
I think it probably happens gradually a lot. And I think many companies will go by team or by function like e.g. support, dev

Companies that want to hire remote or offer it should publish numbers on percent working remotely. Good marketing and helpful for the industry if you think remote work is net good.

amursft··on Ask HN: Do you see your team or company becoming remote-first in the new decade?
I see my employer becoming remote-friendly, and remote-first on a team level.

On teams vs companies...

I've been putting together a list of the biggest distributed companies https://www.amursoftware.com/biggest-distributed-companies. What I realized is that big tech companies where some employees are distributed like e.g. Microsoft, Dell probably have a lot more distributed employees in total number than any company on my list. Like by a factor of 10x.

amursft··on Slack have blocked using the website on mobile
Slack continue to make product changes that speak loudly. Listen to what they are saying.
amursft··on Gail.com
When your blog is getting beat by a typo website to the tune of thousands of visitors a day...

I love old-style internet websites like this. It makes me happy they haven't sold it and share some of the numbers.

amursft··on Apprenticeships Beat Classrooms
That's awesome to hear! I'm recalling history, math, science lectures, english classes. Just thinking back to both high school and college there was a lot of lecturing.
amursft··on Apprenticeships Beat Classrooms
It's crazy to me that modern adult life is nothing like a traditional classroom format, and yet we spend 18 years preparing our kids for it by having them sit in a room and get talked at. Sure, there other kinds of activities but lecturing takes up such a huge chunk of the time spent in the educational system for most people.

Alternatives or complements like apprenticeship that can teach in a different way are really interesting and exciting to me.

amursft··on End of a Decade
Haha, thanks. I did. Do you mind if I incorporate your point? I was speaking a bit colloquially, but the correct number would be better.
amursft··on End of a Decade
thanks for the critical feedback and thoughts.

as another poster put it, perhaps disintermediation would be a better word to describe it. Individuals now have power to do things that they didn't before, or for much cheaper. Can see this happening in healthcare once 'big tech' is involved. It will be good for healthcare costs at least in the United States.

any suggestions to improve it? or do you think the decade will be remembered for totally different things?

amursft··on End of a Decade
Yeah, this would totally have been a better / more nuanced way to put it.
amursft··on Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
Just on your last point, I think that when we have the next economic crash some of these people, and also talented engineers as well, won't stick around in software engineering. Careers in technology have stages and not everyone stays a developer their whole career. It will be impossible to measure what exactly percentage what people without "a good CS background" leave.
amursft··on The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
Paul became incredibly successful. I wonder what he thinks his own bus ticket was?

Going deep on a topic seems like great advice with kids, and I wish schools allowed for more of it.

amursft··on The Remote Work Report by Zapier
Good question. They did it through Harris Poll, which should make it relatively balanced. Sometimes you see these surveys and the population is sourced from customers/audience of the company, which obviously tilts the kind of responses you're going to get a bit.
amursft··on The Remote Work Report by Zapier
I was pretty surprised by some of these numbers about remote work in the U.S. For example, 31 percent of Millenial knowledge workers surveyed work remotely full time. 27 percent for Gen X.
amursft··on It’s a Disservice to Urge Young People to Become Entrepreneurs?
Don't really disagree that older founders are generally going to be more competent/experienced, but is an alternate interpretation of the data that as people get older their appetite for doing risky things decreases?

Failure is less costly for 20-something entrepreneurs than 40-something with family and mortgage to pay. And so you get more "starts" by young entrepreneurs where failure basically doesn't cost a lot. And less "starts" by 40-somethings unless they really think they have something worth taking the risk on.

amursft··on A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
This is a bizarre article because in some sense getting a computer science degree has advantages to teaching yourself to code, but I don't think the article really says any of them and instead pinpoints other things that as a self-taught coder were not an issue for me: teamwork, time management, people skills, translating skills, negotiating skills, etc.

What I think I missed in a CS degree was study of lower level fundamentals of operating systems, compilers, databases, algorithms. Things that you don't necessarily get exposed to at a deep level building out a Ruby on Rails web app. And teaching yourself to code you can still seek those out to, that was just my particular path into software development.

I think the article could be strengthened by mentioning and focusing on some of those things.

amursft··on List of the biggest distributed/remote-first companies
If not Gitlabs, what do you think is a good policy for setting salary rates? Paying based on SF/NYC rates seems ... dumb. Maybe companies should choose a salary that's competitive in any mid-tier cost of living American city and leave it at that? I'm genuinely not sure.
amursft··on List of the biggest distributed/remote-first companies
To me most of this is basically a sign that more companies who are hiring should try to shift to remote asap, because of the talent pool you get. Also, taking 2 months on a reply to schedule an interview is crazy.
amursft··on List of the biggest distributed/remote-first companies
> However, it's difficult for me to identify which problems are caused by the remote-first culture, and which problems can just be attributed to the company itself.

This really resonates with my experience. What is my mindset vs what is inherent in the company/remote-work in general?

amursft··on List of the biggest distributed/remote-first companies
thanks for mentioning! Added.
amursft··on Ask HN: How to get better at taking notes?
Single notepad that fits in a pocket and a folder at /notes seems to be all that work for me. My naming scheme is always YYYY-MM-DD Some Note Title
amursft··on Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?
I'm very curious what (if any) user testing resulted in this change, because I really don't like the sound of it. Domain is a lot of how I try to judge the quality of a result.
amursft··on Gaggle monitors the work and communications of almost 5M students in the US
Creepy. Who's working on homeschooling?