danwee

Europe probably.

I think all the jobs I have had in the past (over a decade) as a software engineer were BS.

- I have worked for a bank. You tell me why do we need yet another bank nowadays, and why on earth do we need to make a fancy SPA with effects and all? Anyway, they paid good money and I gained experience

- I have worked for an e-commerce platform. Again, if it disappeared from the internet no one would complain. We were into "let's build more microservices" mindset. A waste of talent (the engineers I worked with were intelligent people) and time. But hey, I was a Staff engineer, and so I got a bunch of money in exchange for my wisdom in distributed systems (but I still wonder why do we need distributed systems when a one big machine or a couple of them would have done the job)

- I have worked for a SAAS company. The classic pay per customer per month. Totally useless as well (there dozens SAAS companies like us out there). In this one we were more worried about using "boring technology" (PHP, nginx, Postgres) instead of asking ourselves why do we even exist as a company

- And a long etc.

In every company I have been I never felt we were doing something meaningful for the society. I don't feel bad, whenever I see around I see useless companies (not only in IT). I just take as granted, in the capitalist society we live in, that people just want to make money, send their kids to good schools, enjoy vacations in a sunny place, and then retire in peace... so useless jobs/companies are needed.

What makes me a little sad from time to time is to see us, the human race, spending brains, time and billions in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, while we don't put the same amount of resources to solve a real problem like what's going in Israel/Palestine/Russia/Ukraine where people are dying.

The post talks (mainly) about documenting code, but what I usually miss is documentation about the whole repo/project/service. For any piece of code, I can manage to figure out what's going on (unless it's written in a way that's actually on purpose deceiving), but to understand how multiple modules work together (or why), to understand the purpose of the whole thing, that's rather difficult or impossible to know just by looking at the code.

So a big README.md file explaining the repo (why it exists, who are the interested parties, etc.) is better than the "little" documentation here and there about types, functions, examples, etc. Obviously I would love to have both, but the former is more useful than the latter imho.

How so? If there are boring bugs to be fixed, someone will need to fix them regardless of the methodology used.

> You are welcome, I just saved you weeks of onboarding, confusion, and devs passing around .envs on Slack.

Don't get it. At one company I worked, .env files for the DEV environment were open (the file itself was stored on Vault, so only engineers had access to it), and one could only access DEV resources via VPN. So, starting a service using the DEV .env file was rather easy an uncomplicated.

> When you call a taxi company there's no certainty if or when they'll actually turn up.

Ah, that's a good one actually. So, with Uber is there any certainty? Do they give you money back or something if the Uber doesn't appear on the specified time?

It has happened to me that I have waited a bit over the usual time for my taxi, but not very often.

I have never taken an Uber. What am I missing? It's just that they are cheaper than conventional taxis?

I never had a bad experience with conventional taxis either: I just get in, say address, pay, and get out.

Google?

If you analyze the situation from the perspective of "Who benefits from it?", then the answer is clearly: Google benefits from it (they are so good, they can mitigate gigantic DDoS attacks). So, I don't think it's that crazy to think this is all a publicity stunt .

> Just the other day I was trying to update eslint dependencies in monorepo only to have builds broken, tailwind stop working on next.js project. Then little tailwind prettier plugin fell off. Some things support ESM, others not yet.

Perhaps that's the problem. Tons of moving parts => more chances for something to go wrong.

> I seriously hope that something like bun will become a one single tool to use. One tool that works with TS, supports linting, testing, tailwind, etc, etc, etc. One single fucking thing that works.

I wonder why Node doesn't do that. They have an advantage point of being THE platform for JS development: `node lint`, `node build`, `node foo`, etc.

I love to try multiple color schems for code and the terminal... but if I see no actual screenshots then I'll pass. I mean, isn't that "common sense"? The very first thing one wants to see in a colorscheme is how it looks like (not the hex codes)

> Online job platforms like Monster, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.

Maybe that's the problem. Those platforms are full of garbage job ads. I've never used such platforms (but again, I could be missing something).

I don't think this logic is solid.

> Avoiding the stress of multiple interviews is almost certainly costing you tens of thousands per year

If we are still talking about Western Europe, where almost no one reaches the 100K eur/year salary, saying tens of thousands per year (e.g., 20K? 30K?) implies a power of negotiation of 20%-30% (or even more if we are talking about base salaries of < 100K/year which are the most common ones) when negotiating a salary. Maybe in the US you can negotiate that when applying for a job, but around here I think asking for more than 10%-15% already is basically forcing your employer to pass on you (unless you are the Michael Jordan of software engineers).

> So shifting through many garbages to find the one(or two) golden ones is a good effort.

I guess that's my trick, then. Somehow I can filter out garbage by just:

- reading the job ad

- reading the company's website/social media

- checking who's working for such company (e.g., linkedin profile of employees)

It takes around 1-2h for me to check a company. That's why I only submit very few applications: because I know the companies I'm applying for are not the bad ones.

Is it only me the one who finds the usability of cameras on smartphones unbearable? I'm not talking about the software but the hardware: smartphones are thin and not as easy to grab/handle as real cameras. Anything that takes more than a few pictures is uncomfortable.

Congrats for launching the product!

> These days it is common to apply to dozens of positions (some users track over a hundred opportunities).

Honest question: is it that common? I'm an average software engineer in Western Europe. When I was junior (around 2010-2015) I usually got a job after submitting ~3 job applications (mainly, because I was accepting anything at that time). Nowadays, since I have more experience, whenever I want to switch my job, I know exactly to what kind of company I want to apply to, this means I don't send a dozen applications; rather I send usually 1 or 2. But I do my investigation on that 1 or 2 companies I'm applying to. And I never interview with more than 1 company at a time (it would be very stressful for me).

So, I've never had the struggle of "keeping track" of job applications. I've never worked for FAANG, though (not sure if this has anything to do). I thought my situation was more common, but based on your statement perhaps it's not.

Depends on your contract I would say. I'm working for a company (not FAANG) that has recently mandated RTO (partially, 2 days/week) but they couldn't enforce to some employees like me because in our contracts it's stated our regular place of work (in mine, it's the city in which I live, which is around 300KM from the nearest office). So, I'm still working remotely.

This in Europe. Perhaps it's different in other places.

Noob question: why don't governments issue a private key to every citizen so that they can identify themselves "easily" in web forms and the like? The government would keep the corresponding public key.

You could go in person to any government building and request a new private key to override the previous one if needed.

> It’s relatively straightforward to find a url friendly string representation that is shorter.

Are we talking about shortening the whole URL or shortening specific UUIDs? If the latter then I imagine one would still need to keep track of the mapping UUID <-> shorten version, somewhere, right? If so, why not just add yet another field/column for an old good numeric integer that can be used for filtering? Would that work?

It's easy to distinguish which jobs are fake and which are legit. At least in IT I can do that. Linkedin is crap, but it's one of the places in which you can get to know which companies are out there.

I won't be the one defending Linkedin, but:

- I got all my jobs via Linkedin (e.g., either a recruiter reaches to me, or I reach a recruiter working for company X, or I search through their job ads, etc.)

- I do not use Linkedin for anything other than job search. So one can easily not look at their timeline nor stupid social posts (linkedin notifications are off, and I do not receive any notification via email)

So, yeah, it sucks if they start asking for phone numbers.

So, how do you guys use UUIDs for real? I worked in a company in which they were using UUIDs in Mongo, and of the most painful things were implementing API endpoints that filter resources. Imagine you have an endpoint in which you are filtering by resources A, B, C and D. Ideally you would end up with something like this:

    GET /filter?a_id=X&b_id=Y&c_id=Z&d_id=w

But in practice we were using POST and passing the ids in the body payload. Why Because my old team said "the UUIDs are long, so we may reach the maximum URL length if we pass them as parameters". I didn't like it, and I still don't like it at all.

Am I the only one who either:

- waits ~6 months (from release time) before upgrading to a major macOS version

- usually skips 1 version in between (e.g., I'm on macOS Monterrey, haven't updgraded to Ventura. I'll upgrade to Sonoma in a few months)

The rational part of my brain says: networking matters, for obvious reasons.

Having said that, I have over 10 years of experience in the software industry, and my network "size" is essentially zero. I get along well with my peers when at job, but once I switch to another job, the only "link" between my old peers and me is linkedin. I have never relied on others to get a job, I have never recommended anyone... not because I don't like to do those things, but simply because I could get a job the usual way (Apply button). I've attended a couple of conferences (but only because the company was paying and because I was going already with some of my peers).

I don't keep the contact with the people I met at university either (I live now in another country, although this sounds more like an excuse in the era of the internet).

No. But people in my area were laid off. This is usually not a huge deal in western europe because of the notice period. In Germany it's usually 3 months, so if the company tells you "You're out" (which is extremely unlikely btw, you are laid off either if a) you did something terrible, or b) company goes bankrupt), you still have 3 (full) calendar months to find a job and all. Since the 3 months notice period is quite standard in the country, when you apply for a job, they understand that you may join only 3 months from now.

The main (perhaps the only) reason I would never work for American companies is the lack of any laws that prevent them from firing me without notice. It's just so backwards.

That's right. It won't make you rich. Just take into account that 100K eur/year is unheard of in other european countries.

I didn't mean that there is a problem with such countries. I meant that prices are generally more or less the same (e.g., in the supermarkets, the price of an iphone, cinema tickets, etc.) but salaries are lower (at least in the IT industry, I see that one gets around 30% less in countries like France, Spain and Italy compared to what I could get in Germany, but definitely the cost of living in Germany is not 30% higher than in such countries).

From my limited perspective (non-German software engineer working in Germany), Germany is still a great country for people like me:

- prices are not that expensive like in the nordic countries. If you cook at home most of the week, you can easily spend only around 350-450 EUR/month eating healthy food

- renting is still hard (it's not so easy to find an apartment), but you can get a decent place for around 1.5K EUR/month (or less). I pay 1.2K/month for a 80 sqm (not city center, but not outside of it neither)

- if you have > 10 years of working experience, you can definitely reach the 100K EUR/year (not FAANG). It's not easy, but not insanely difficult. Reaching 80K EUR/year is even more standard. This puts you on the top 10-5% of earners in Germany, so you get to save a lot of money per month

- electricity/gas bills are getting more expensive, but still you won't notice with your kind of salary

- health insurance is good enough

- public transportation works just fine (not the best, but surely good enough). Tons of options (bus, tram, trains, bikes)

- big cities in the west are welcoming to people who don't speak German

Compare this with the situation of other european countries like France, Italy (a bit cheaper than Germany in general, but salaries are way lower in IT: around 30-40% lower) or even the Netherlands (not cheaper than Germany, and salaries are usually ~15% lower in general for IT). So, if Germany is doing bad, I cannot imagine how other EU countries are doing.

The only thing Germany needs to fix is the winter time (you cannot expect to have healthy people when the sun sets at around 3-4pm in winter).

P.S. And I love the work culture: "9-5 -> work. Outside of working hours -> don't even bother reaching me, I won't answer"

Where one can learn more about this (using books)? For instance, if I would like to learn more about processes and TLBs and context switching, I know I can learn about it from the Tanenbaum's book, from the OSTEP book, from the "dinosour book", etc. But I have no idea which book provides the fundamentals about Linux interfaces for virtual networking.

> Removing your information from all databrokers https://easyoptouts.com / incogni / deleteme / optery

How ironic. In order to remove my data from the internet, I first need to give my data to that random website.

My domain provider used to offer free email as well, but not anymore (now they are charging like $5/month for that). Since I'm using apple devices, I gave iCloud+ a try: so far so good, it's just $1/month for email (with your own custom domain if you have one). Also, I find Hide My Email very handy and the 50GB of cloud storage doesn't hurt either.