Best article I've read in years
91 karma · joined April 13, 2021
- Steve's company got acquihired by Amazon, granting him a free ticket in without all the torment of the multi-stage interview pipeline.
- It's a well known fact that it's easier to jump from one FAANG to another, so while interviewing at Google he had significant advantage, plus the blog gaining popularity.
- All of this has caused a deep down imposter syndrome, which resulted in an attempt to "improve" an interview process from the inside - but the wings were clipped pretty quickly by the corporate politics. It turns out that lawyers are not planning to reinvent anything there and hence are somewhat more important than engineers.
- The post itself is an self-applause over essentially a failed effort. "I've tried"
Everyone's a grifter nowadays, innit?
So nothing really changes lol. Just a couple of paperwork remarks
Giant wall of cunning metaphors to attract reader's attention just to end with a literal flop at the end:
> For now, I suppose, we can carry on...
That's simply not true. Big companies have special vendor management departments, their incentives are literally built around cost optimizations. Smaller startups have CEO looking at their billing and complaining about "why do we pay so much to vendor X?", check the most recent rant by DHH on Datadog:
Dude. You're just an engineer from an Engineering department of some company.
Nobody's gonna read & apply any special rules of communnicating with you, especially written by yourself (sic!)
- writing everything in lowercase - helps reduce depression and anxiety
Doesn't mean one can't become a sellout eventually.
Especially in Green's particular case - he had invested a lot of attention to Margaret Salter, e.g. https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/13578907313697095...
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/17883860908411619... https://twitter.com/evacide/status/1788040276331884593 https://twitter.com/naomibrockwell/status/178863495226900939... https://twitter.com/paulmillr/status/1788563576455610552
(I'm pretty sure the list goes on)
(to be fair this is already mirrored in the several rules, Rule 8 and others)
Managers are hired by the corporate "monarchy & nobility" - founders, board, shareholders etc. And there are many valid reasons to do that - lack of technical skills, efficiency, even laziness (you pay money to someone else to care about something more important to yourself).
Fun fact is that all those groups on the top of the food chain are also managers, but in attempt to crash the feudalism you're targeting the powerless middleman.
"However, Kremlin psyops..."