cblum

What is “Saturday detention”? That sounds awful.

University admission exams are very stressful, but they put everyone in a position where they know they have the same shot at getting admitted.

I’ve tried bringing up this point with multiple people and always get shot down.

When I compare the American system to my home country’s system, which based on thorough, objective testing, people tell me the US system is better in terms of determining if someone is “college material.”

IMO the extremely subjective nature of it only enables discrimination.

I’m surprised and sad that that’s still the case. I was the creator and maintainer for an open source application some 10+ years ago, and figuring out how to package it properly for Debian was essentially impossible.

It eventually got packaged by someone who had been involved in the Debian community for some time.

The problem in America is that those things are exclusively dependent on one’s employer. More developed countries like Finland or Sweden give everyone those things via national policy.

I probably have an “unusual reaction” to alcohol, since I don’t find it great. I’ve only gotten drunk twice in my life and it felt horrible, even kind of traumatizing. Not just the hangover, even the feeling of being drunk is very unpleasant to me.

My experience is of course anecdotal, but that’s not how I feel about alcohol.

I got drunk twice in my life. Once intentionally to see what it was like, and once by accident (thought I was having a couple beers, turns out they all had double the usual alcohol content so I was having twice what I thought I was having). Both experiences made me feel so bad that they were sort of traumatizing.

I’m not talking about the hangover (though that was awful too). The feeling of being drunk feels terrible to me. I feel like I’m losing control of myself. My face feels numb. People say that’s how it is, and I don’t understand how they can look forward to that.

Every time a discussion like this comes up I see a reply like this. Yet, it never offers a counter point, or suggestions on how to make things in the US work as well as they do in Sweden.

IIRC in the novel Tau Zero the world kind of decided to let Sweden govern everything because they were so good at it. It's not central to the plot though, it's just mentioned in passing (and again I'm not sure I'm remembering that correctly).

The problem with that is that it's regressive and hurts those who earn less.

Let's say sales tax is 10%. If I'm a high earner and buy a cheap Android for $50, the $5 I'm paying in sales tax has a much lower impact on my budget than it does to someone who earns less than I do and wants to buy the same phone.

At that point it's practically not C anymore :)

I'm not a fan of adding GC to C. I've hard my fair share of stress caused by GC issues. It's great 99% of the time but when you run into performance issues caused by the GC it becomes a very very leaky abstraction.

I wish! One of the coolest projects I've worked on used Lua. We wrote the core in C++ and then everything else on top of it in Lua.

Not sure if this is what you meant, but a lot of the stuff they added to C in the latest standards really turn me off. C89 has a special place in my heart.

I've been slowly making my way through A Tour of Go and I really like what I've seen so far.

That sets the bar too low for screening IMO. My wife has interviewed people who literally can't write a for loop correctly.

Man, I miss making a living as a C programmer. My happiest days as a dev were when my "stack" was Linux, C, Makefiles, and some shell scripts. Only thing I'd change is that source control was svn instead of git.

Sure, there was a lot more to type. Debugging was harder. But there was a beauty to that. A simple mental model. A sense of control.

These days all jobs seem to be sort of online crap. Piles and piles of layers and complexity and heterogenous frameworks and tools. Being on call. Never being able to truly master anything because everything changes all the time.

/nostalgia

I didn't know the safety net was minimal there. For whatever reason, I thought it was more like Western European countries.

Does that lead to a lot of homelessness and crime?

> The Singaporean lifestyle is one of the most stressful, competitive and insecure in the world.

I'm curious about this. Can you point me to any resources to learn more about that? Or could you elaborate on why it is so, especially the "insecure" part?

Also Point Roberts, WA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington

> Master Yoga

ಠ_ಠ

Don’t know about Google but I’ve seen that at HP.

I hadn’t even heard of it being potentially beneficial to prevent heart disease and cancer.

I take vitamin D because it makes a massive difference to my mood during the gloomy months in Seattle.

I think this might be a cultural issue. It's anecdotal but I think I can offer some perspective.

I've been living in the US for several years now, but I'm originally from Brazil. I started my career there.

In Brazil, my experience was always that people initially trust newcomers, and only lose their trust if they fuck up. I always felt trusted when joining a new team, and thankfully I never fucked up. But I saw people fuck up, and other people lost their trust on them very quickly.

In the US (and I think Canada, both countries seem to have similar work cultures), it seems to be the opposite. When you join a new team, you have to prove yourself worth of their respect. You have to do some initial labor to show that you deserve your place in the team. That's been the case in every team I've joined so far.

I don't know what it's like in Israel, but I wonder if the author of the post had a similar experience to mine.

> Exceeding expectations for your current position is how you get promoted.

That was exactly his point though. He hoped that he would get promoted by doing an awesome job, by going beyond what was merely expected as "done".

I know where he's coming from. I've had one job in my career that was exactly like that (and I miss it dearly). I never really worked on promotions while on that job. I was very passionate about the stuff we were doing and made sure we were always building the right product for our customers, made sure our code was excellent, made sure we fixed bugs quickly, etc. And I didn't do those things by going around politicking. I just came in every day, sat at my desk, wrote code, had technical discussions with other folks, did code reviews, etc.

I got two promotions while on that job. They always came as a surprise and came with a brief talk with management about how much they appreciated my contributions and my technical skills.

These days I just dread all the career stuff. Thankfully I'm in a position at my current company where I can just "park" for the rest of my time there if I want to. The last thing I want to do when going to work is politicking and forking alliances and whatnot. I want my technical work to speak for itself. If that's not enough, I don't care. I make more than enough to make a good living.

I thought the part where they offered him an SDE I position despite his 10 years of experience was pretty bad.

It does seem like standard policy among tech companies though. I came to the US to work for Microsoft (I'm no longer there) as a level 59 (lowest SDE level), despite having almost 6 years of experience at that point. My wife (an SDET) had even more experience than me (she was a Senior SDET before we moved here) and when she got a job her company did the same thing.

That moment when you happen to know the person linked, but in a totally unrelated context (our kids are friends).

Now I've gotta find some time to watch or read this :)