303 karma · joined March 13, 2017
I have no doubt that MS can spend billions in cash or RSU to compensate all of them, but I do believe there’s some gotcha if exodus actually happens and MS might not be so generous in throwing millions of dollar cash for a general backend engineer recently joining OpenAI.
This book focuses on the practical side like sharing useful feedback, smart recruiting strategy and meeting optimization, all towards the goal of greater outcome and amplifying team success, instead of just more activities entailed by conventional manager model.
There're times when I wished I had concealed myself saying certain things (or just haven't said it), and times when I felt the joy of recognition when people connected dots about me and became closer friend. Now as I'm getting old, it's just a habit, no longer about risks or rewards.
Yet, both younger me and older me will probably be very indecisive about doing this if they've never done it and are told about all the fortune/misfortune this has brought to me, including meeting my wife and thinking about suicides.
This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less time consuming short-form online contents, to the point that I even have more free time now! It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.
Why? Because exactly in China there was consolidation of food delivery apps into like 3 or 4 of them from 100+. But all of them are still burning lots of money from investors, except one - Meituan-Dianpin which built on this super app (first think of it as uber+yelp+groupon+tripadvisor+more) handling all kinds of life needs from food to labor service. Yet this super app barely started making profits recently after grabbing so much aspects of daily life, while its food delivery unit is still burning money, though contributing to the profiting units like ads.
That does far more than $1000 to relieve everyone and make it fair for those who have to take care of others in the family during such time.
How are you tackling the issue? It’s not like that one can find distributed system projects easily.
Due to the requirement for maximum restoration of manga contents, especially for those cross-spine scenes, the high speed camera-based solution like above or other places which focus on formal prints won't work quite well and that leads to two major ways in the trade for decades since some Japanese started this self-scanning thing around 80s:
1) Destructively break the book into unglued pages (which also invovle cutting the glue with heavy-duty paper cutter) and send them to scanner with auto feeder, (then try to glue it back if keeping the book is vital, at best effort). 2) Manually press each page on flatbed scanner (thus A3 scanner works better as it allows vertically scanning spine area usually with the greatest shadow) and scan each page using predefined rough area which would therefore include non-content area as shown in : https://imgur.com/a/2ITBlJg (left/right edge and spine).
Solution 1) works great in terms of efficiency but could be a pain for those who love to keep book still in the collection (though malformed anyway, and I myself might consider this when I get old and couldn't bear the effort). 2) would cost a lot more time (on average, #1 takes less than 30 mins per book and #2 takes at least an hour) especially for manually removing noises as shown above. I've tried some basic CV tools/scripts to auto cut at least the edges (middle spine could be troublesome and I'm fine with manually working on that), which work really poorly since content itself could also be largely variant if we try to determine "edge" by checking pixel distribution.
Hopefully before 2nd decade finishes, I either give in to destruction or find a perfect way to automate the noise-clearing process.
I did ask my current manager about this decision and he did mention that he wants to find a engineering project manager (we have PMs) who could technically manage projects with him so he's not overloaded. This person might become my manager in the future but not immediately (maybe after 1 or 2 years when he's going to assemble his own team).