ben_jones

Many software companies lack formal training programs and documentation processes that juniors need to grow. They come to depend on informal training/documentation like tapping a senior on the shoulder to ask about a legacy piece of code.

The solution is to invest heavily in regimented training programs with clear KPIs (key performance indicators), better documentation, and a certain level of redundancy so that remote stakeholders can hold eachother accountable.

Obviously this isn't super attractive to C levels so they are trying to hire "Senior" developers who "don't need training". It's not working out great for them (IMO).

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Realize how I don't mention remote once because failures by remote worker are symptoms of problems that still exist even if everyone is in the same broom closet all day.

> "foo sucks but bar is actually great (btw I'm a bar)"

I'm a product engineer AND an infrastructure engineer in the common job-title sense, and if I had a dollar every time an infrastructure engineer/devops/full-stack introduced a complex service (elasticsearch/kafka/k8s/etc) without understanding how the service should be configured, maintained, or extended, I'd be able to afford a house in the bay!

Good product managers bridge the gap between engineering, sales, and the executive team, and can make a project successful just by managing the decision making process(es) well.

The bottom line however is that most companies have poor product management and poor infrastructure engineering which will lead to many more Theranos and Yahoo style messes in the years to come (and waste untold billions doing it!).

You're assuming a lot.

What about codebases with python2 third party dependencies that don't work in python3? Now you have to port that entire library as well, or write it yourself while crossing your fingers that it is well documented and easy to work through.

What about codebases without decent test suites? I'd argue most production codebases don't have good test suites, or at least the most complex of code is usually poorly tested. You'll end up spending most of your time digging for regressions especially if your code creates large amounts of user interfaces.

What about code bases that were written by scientists, mathematicians, or other professionals who may not be as fluent in writing "good" code?

IDK what they could do, I'm just penalizing them for such an egregious difference between Stadia marketing and Stadia the actual product. People expect startups and mom and pop shops to lie about their engineering, not big G.

If I was a billionaire I would pay security experts to make sure my workspaces were secure, things like locking down USB ports and blocking video/audio inputs that aren’t used would be a completely expected part of that. Still rich with irony though.

> The Pixelbook had a wired Internet connection that I was told was running at "about 25 Mbps" (Google wouldn't let me run a speed test to confirm the connection quality).

> In response to concerns that Stadia streaming might quickly eat up some users' Internet data caps, a Google representative told Ars that gameplay streams won't always require the "recommended" Mbps rates Google quotes for that level of video quality. A 4K, 60fps stream, for instance, would not use 35Mbps of data at all times, he said.

> The 60fps animation didn't noticeably stutter for the entire demo, and the apparent resolution didn't dip below 1080p either (though a Google representative said Stadia will sometimes lower that resolution briefly to maintain a smooth frame rate if and when bandwidth dips).

I could inject my own opinion into why I don't think Google Stadia will be a good thing for users, but I feel like these direct quotes from a senior editor at Arstechnica are more telling. They plan to get around data caps through degrading the game assets, and they are extremely sheepish to let anyone actually dig into the logistical limitations of the system.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/stadias-e3-doom-etern...

I'm confused as well. It seems like this website is there to sell me something in pursuit of business goals. What business goals are discussed at Google for Go's future?

People also underestimate how easy it is to cheat. One of the richest people I met in College was also on full financial aid and received in-state tuition despite being from out-of-state. All he had to do was lie on a couple forms. He was also on foodstamps so that he could spend more of his monthly stipend on drugs and alchohol.

There will always be bad actors in any system, and its still worth having aid programs even though a few people take advantage of them, but there needs to be serious checks and balances first.

TLDR; college organizations can't be trusted to audit themselves so we need a combination of government regulation with teeth, consumer advocacy, and full transparency, in order to achieve the best outcome of an initiative such as an adversity score.

I respect the name at this point. It won't go away - just like a real Cockroach and a distributed fault tolerant database system.

> As far as not giving a shit about Safari's ability to do WebRTC and PWAs properly

What's funny here is that many of Google's web initiatives such as PWA and AMP are at least partially constructed to increase Google's dominance and selling of ads. It's hard to fault any company that pushes against newer web standards and "progress" since it is so slanted in their competitors favor.

If you're a Google employee working on some such project you can probably convince me that the majority of the reasoning for PWA/AMP/etc are good, and assessed in its totality it is probably for the greater good, but you'll never convince me the mangers/directors/executives at the budgeting level of these projects are too dumb to understand and latter extract immense value at the expense of users as a final result.

All this stuff is too reminiscent of Facebook's Free basics project masquerading as Democratizing Internet "progress" with cool new features no user actually asked for.

1. Company is applauded for strong morals

2. Company raises a ton of money

3. ???

4. Company appears "divorced or original morals"

Not OP but CRM consulting work usually involves customizing existing CRM solutions (often Salesforce) for a client's needs. This means interpreting vague requests from usually non-technical users and finding a way to bash it into the really terrible developer experience that CRMs have.

The reasons its pays so well are several:

1) Most CRMs are initally setup by non-technical users and suffer from a litany of performance issues stemming from bad architectural decisions (i.e. lets do all our analytics in Salesforce Apex (java-like) code instead of a mainstream ETL solution).

2) The process of customizing a CRM is the epitomy of enterprise development, there is a severe lack of standardization and many examples of close but not quite: Salesforces SOQL is kind of like normal SQL but with lots of weird quirks, Salesforce lignteningforce components are like some front-end frameworks but not quite and with lots of weird quirks.

3) Most development knowledge is tribal, meaning you learn Salesforce by going through the trenches and then that knowledge lives or dies by you and your team. It's difficult to learn and train for legacy development (training docs are often for the ideal cases which rarely exist in the wild) thus you get to charge whatever you want. Often the really tough questions can only be solved by wading through the customer support muck (if your licensing allows it) until you get to denvercoder9.

4) Every few years the Sales reps of the CRM company shove new development techniques and methodologies at their clients which can mean a large refactoring or migration is needed.

> “Although we’ve seen no evidence of abuse, we will ask them to delete any member data they may have retained and we will conduct audits to confirm that it has been deleted,” the company said in the blog post.

I wonder how these "audits" are done? Force the individuals into a legal agreement through threat of a larger action?

What percentage of google employees do you estimate fall into the category you mention? From the outside it ALL feels like noise except for the seemingly few ~dozen who actually left their roles over the years for their convictions.

If anyone else was wondering, IC seems to mean Independent Contractor.

The frequency by which this project appears at the top of HN does not correlate with its production usage and thus feels like gorilla marketing, at least to me.

I think society has shown that it only works sometimes.

The biggest example in recent history was the kneeling movement in the NFL and the NFL's stance of blacklisting and penalizing prominent players won.

Similarly with the NBA, player agents have indicated an overwhelming support by players to NOT speak out for fear of losing their endorsements from Nike, Adidas, Anta, and other firms deeply embedded in the Chinese industrial complex. Even with the Commissioner coming out in favor of voicing the issues, its the big stars the fans care about and without them there will be a significantly fewer repercussions.

Isn’t it perverse that we need such optimization techniques so that we can sit at a desk all day.

I think it’s a wonderful technique but it makes me wonder why and if we’re just -not built for this-.

They're trying to make some extra $$$ before Chrome starts hiding the TLD for user convenience

“Iterating for 20 years” is the most polite interpretation. They’ve been shoveling out re-skinned games with massive performance and AI regressions every few years.

The original tech was awesome. The people at the studio are awesome. The Sega > Creative assembly executive teams, not so much.

I wonder if the merit of these exercises is from reading the candidate's reaction to meaningless and trivial tasks. If they take it with a smile, or better yet if they spent part of their free time studying it in detail, they will make a terrific cog in the machine...

I deeply agree, but dynamic scheduling can have a strong negative affect of causing you to always stay in "work-mode". If I spend my mornings doing errands, cooking, or hitting the gym, I may end up working well into the evening up to the point just before I fall asleep. Or more likely, I shave hours from my "work-week" working about 6 hours a day, and find myself working throughout the weekend without any "mental rest".

I think humans have always struggled with finding ways to be happy in whatever circumstances they are provided, and remote work and the new global economy are going to force us (through some struggle) to figure out the best ways for ourselves to get on.

Ultimately as I mention in my original post it's about self-discipline and structure to do what you know will make you happy, but strangely that can be pretty hard.

We distribute senior titles to people with three years of experience. We task junior developers with setting up and managing critical cloud infrastructure. Management has no idea how it all works.

It's kind of like we're asking for it.

Are you me?

Some of my personal anecdotes going through the exact same circumstances (I'm also currently applying for dual US/Irish citizenship):

1) I hate working out. I don't want to do it. But when I do, I feel momentously better afterwards. I have not worked out consistently in the last 12 mo.

2) I hate cooking and cleaning up after cooking. I don't want to do it. But when I do, I feel better afterwards. I have not done significant amounts of home cooking in the last 12 mo.

3) Despite being a severely introverted individual I've become the person to push for more outings within my (small) social group. And I feel better afterwards.

4) I've gained about ~20 lbs in the last 12 mo.

5) I am tremendously comfortable with my current remote work and decent salary but I am not at all happy in a general sense

6) I worry my career is stagnating as I near my 2 year mark in this role. Hearing about the salaries my colleagues are getting at other companies contributes to

7) I've been using Tinder for casual dating. Recently I realized I really, really, don't want to use a Match Group product as the cornerstone of my dating life so now I'm trying to do it in more "natural" ways, but due to the above I find myself not being a great candidate.

Overall, working remotely has contributed greatly to a sense of depression and anxiety I carry almost every day. However I've been dealing with it long enough that I think I have a good sense of it, I'm doing better these past few months then the rest of the year combined and have clear goals (like the working out) that will help me do better.

I hope these points aren't too candid, I just figured many in this community could be going through the same things and hearing a shared story would help.

What you call Wizarding I call "ordinary Software Development". A software developer spends ~70% of their time writing features and the rest mixed between organization/planning/roadmapping etc. A software engineer spends ~30% of their time writing features and the rest of it managing technical debt and making long-term investments towards better features and processes.

Too many companies need devs but have engineers, or they need engineers but only have devs :/

I'd imagine the priority might be:

1) Microphone all possible tables and have them record/signal when key words are overheard

2) Befriend/seduce/bribe wait staff and train them to roam around in optimal patterns to catch conversation

3) Some kind of subtle hearing amplification/focusing device

4) Record all conversations using a device on your person and process them later

Counterpoint: learning your first language and learning languages later in your career are very different processes and learning Haskell with a background in OOP languages may be harder then learning it as your first.

> Arguments over programming languages often become emotional and skip past many of the practical business concerns that make programming languages valuable in the first place

Is it not also because the government contracting system is FUBAR? I.e. only certain kinds of companies can contract on the big projects, you need certain clearances for certain kinds of works, and the pay gap between public and private sector SWE & security?

Also aren't their some pretty tough mandates like x% of companies must be minority owned etc. I imagine it allows those companies to charge extortionist rates because they hit the relevant quotas and nobody else does.

Baseless pricing structures make me livid. You get to charge for convenience, you get to charge for your head count, you get to charge for your pet projects and future growth, but if you try to charge me non-trivial amounts to insert a row into a database I'm going to take a work-day and attempt to build an in-house replacement (ymmv, only works for very simple use cases).

I wonder if the initial decision was made by Chinese Executives and Event staff without consulting corporate HQ, then corporate backed them since they have no obvious strategy for backpedaling.