bambataa

You can do that, yes, but it’s surprisingly tricky and stressful to manage.

Bear in mind that most of the people there won’t actually realise that they’re low skill level. In fact, they probably think they’re high skill level because they’re working in a bank and banks are elite, right? That is a toxic combination.

So actually you spend much of your time fending off requests to change your work in stupid ways or making futile attempts to avoid the codebase turning into spaghetti code.

It’s not the case that you can just turn in two hours’ code and everyone’s happy with your day’s achievement.

It is exhausting to have to argue the case for every minimal piece of good software design (eg validating inputs, designing minimal interfaces, avoiding god classes).

Eventually you give up and/or they think you’re stupid because you find their spaghetti code hard to understand. The app becomes increasingly slow, hard to maintain and full of weird bugs. Everyone wonders how this could have happened and the rewrite begins.

That’s a very good VP level UK salary, at least compared to JPM.

However, I wouldn’t go back to an IB if I could avoid it. Fundamentally tech is just a cost centre and they have very top-down corporate cultures. Everything is intensely political.

Back when I had Facebook, I had a contact who posted quite a lot. Often quite interesting stuff so I would read it when his stuff appeared in my newsfeed.

So Facebook just made his posts my... uh entire newsfeed. Like my newsfeed would just be 5-10 posts from this guy, some political bullshit and then another 5-10 posts from the same guy.

Even if that were the stuff I was engaging with, surely it is obvious that I don't want it in that quantity.

I'd love to hear from Facebook newsfeed product managers as it really seems like no humans actually contributed to decisions.

There may not be as much Icecast stuff but internet radio is doing very well.

Someone else has already mentioned nts.live (it has a huge range of stuff, more like a radio station) but other UK-based stations are balamii.com, supremefm.com and rinse.fm (Rinse used to be a pirate radio station but went legal).

Internet radio stations are the go to for up to date music really.

I have a theory that many of these ludicrous spirals are caused by self-proclaimed “allies” taking on the mantle of others’ oppression and calling out behaviour that is actually fine.

The original blog post behind this case (where the woman wrote about how foreign India seemed but how excited she was to visit) is a perfect example.

The people calling out her “colonialist” references to Mars claim to be speaking on behalf of their friends. Then you have actual Indian people coming along later, wondering what the fuss was about and welcoming the author to India.

My theory probably doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny but it useful to ask “is anywhere here actually saying that they’re personally offended?”.

Interesting that the OP liked Monzo so much. I have heard consistently bad things about their tech culture.

In the UK, recent tax rises to pay off some of the Covid debt were pretty openly designed to avoid asking older people to contribute. (Roughly, national insurance, paid by workers, went up rather than income tax. Only after opposition in Parliament did they extend it to include over 65s who still work).

Young people are definitely extremely aware that they sacrificed a lot over the last two years to protect the elderly and now the elderly are not being asked to contribute back.

This is before you consider climate change, about which young people are generally much more informed and concerned.

Boomers don’t care because it won’t affect them. I know that sounds hyperbolic but I genuinely think it’s true. Those who are aware of the problems focus on helping their immediate descendants.

That’s the problem the GP is describing though: it’s easier to get a promotion externally than internally. Their proposed solution wouldn’t really improve things but companies have got themselves into a really weird position when boomeranging is an efficient promotion path.

That raises an interesting question: what would be the declarative framework easiest to minimally reimplement?

I’m thinking you could have a single file, jQuery-based, hand rolled version of some framework and get many of the benefits while still technically complying with the “no frameworks” rule. In the same way that you could reimplement Redux easily if you for some reason weren’t allowed to use it.

I suspect diffing performance would be the bottleneck but I wonder if you could come up with some weird half solution that worked for your particular use case.

I was thinking about this the other day. In a React app I had state stored in a component and had to extract it out to a Context so it was accessible globally. Sometimes it’s frustrating to know what you need to do but have so much boring typing to do.

Perhaps that particular thing is fairly mechanical and could be done with static analysis. Does anyone know of attempts to do such a thing? It seems not that much more difficult than IntelliJ style automated refactoring.

But in general it seems that AI-assisted code tools could help us write programs at the speed of thought.

There is also the issue that big companies are usually watched more and have regulatory teams making sure they follow rules. I believe in the UK that small businesses are far worse for minimum wage violations.

Is there any example of a technologically superior and higher quality option winning over a cheap and simple one? (In media recording and replay, at least).

This seems to happen again and again, with the cheap and simple option always winning.

While we’re discussing datepickers, the new iOS one annoys me. When I have to put in my birthday, it defaults to the current date and wraps any value past that back to today. So I put in my day and month of birth, have it wrap back to today and then start again by setting the year first.

I assume this is configurable and developers just forget to set it, but it’s a weird default.

> started prioritising news links

It probably helped their short term metrics but it really seems like this decision was terrible in the long term.

I and a lot of people I know began to disengage when Facebook mostly became people I didn’t know so well posting political crap.

Because you can not only inspect the relevant values, but also the whole call stack to see how the erroneous value was generated. You can step through the program to see what path control followed and quickly work out what’s causing yous problem.

I mostly use browser debuggers and even then I only use a small fraction of their capabilities, but honestly they are just more effective that printing values.

You can get above £100k fairly easily by working in finance or even just a profitable PLC in London (eg I know of Sainsburys offering that several years ago albeit for an EM role). Even if you don’t like investment banking or hedge funds, high street banks also pay well and have generous pension, annual leave etc.

Never seen £470k TC though!

Is that higher TC on offer from an American firm? I didn’t realise such numbers were accessible from the UK. Even FAANGs in the UK seem to top out around £200k for mid level.

I wonder if a lot of the original Buddhist cosmology was based on the experiences of meditators having what we now call psychotic episodes, which they would have seen as a glimpse of reality.

> I often tell myself I'm smart and that I deserve my very comfortable life, but I also have to wonder if something about my brain chemistry or environment makes me enjoy reading HN and coding all day, while others hate that.

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that you live in an environment that plays to your strengths, and that it’s somewhat arbitrary.

I have an aptitude for academic study and have always simply enjoyed it. Happily, I live in a society that rewards that. I’m also short, left handed and wear glasses. I would have fared less well in pre-industrial times. I’m extremely fortunate to have been born when and where I was.

This is why I am confused. It just seems so absurdly incompetent that I can’t quite believe it is all true.

I realise that stupid things happen during war, but it’s only a few days in and surely this is the kind of thing they train and plan for.

That tweet has been shared a lot but is there any indication that any of it is true?

And even if it is, doesn’t that just mean Russia will move from the quick strike strategy to a more bloody, full assault?

Are any of those listed qualifications valuable? I already know that Prince2 isn’t going to be the bulwark against an invasion.

The “kerb” in the UK is the step between the road surface and the bit the pedestrians walk on. More properly “kerbstone” I guess.

I’ve been using Proton VPN with no major issues. Would be interesting to know what others here think of them.

I’m a bit put out at paying £50 for Skyward Sword. I did get 50 hours of gameplay out of it, but it felt steep for how little effort they’d put into the port (it would have been great to have no loading as you fly between locations)

I loved Pokémon as a kid, but that was because I had the time to do the levelling up grind. Couldn’t imagine doing it now.

At the risk of sounding like someone who clearly doesn’t have the skills you’re talking about, what do you mean by “reading the room” here? Knowing when to push things, when to drop them, being trusted enough by management that they don’t blame you for failing to meet absurd requests?

Also keen to know this!

Facebook killed the value of their own application for me.

It’s strange that they didn’t spot this happening. They do now, at least!

> Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled.

IBM seems like a really interesting case study in parasitism at the organisational level. Just moving around, feeding from host to host. I wonder if anyone’s studied it in those terms.