fancyfish

This. This just nails it. I honestly was in awe when I saw this repo, you don’t see these very often on here. So much Tier 1 talent in all aspects - product, UX, and tech.

Flawless execution on all fronts. I’ve always wanted an easy way to preview a repo in VS Code and this is it.

Awesome question to ask.

Anecdotally in the financial industry, the corporate IT mindset is rampant even at supposedly “cutting-edge” algo trading shops. IT draws very bold boundary lines (no root access, unable to use new third-party libraries without a song and dance with InfoSec, locked down Windows machines that must SSH into Linux hosts for dev work, etc) and it sets the entire engineering culture.

This question will tell you about the culture as a whole, beyond how smooth/frustrating your developer experience will be. A good gauge for how modern or stale the stack is, whether continuous deployment exists, how top—down or bottom-up the culture is, etc.

It's a bit hard to find, but the page comparing languages is found via the main page -> "Which are fastest?"

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

I’ve become a big fan of this multigenerational lifestyle which you’ve described, especially with remote work. You can truly have your cake and eat it too by having parents give free childcare during the workday. I have little ones running around like banshees also, and it really helps when my parents look after them 3-5 days per week so I can focus on work.

Definitely the SEO backlinks- for example one profile I see is linking to an Indian escort service in the profile.

Really happy for the team and especially for the founders. They proved to be very technical and assembled a truly impressive engineering team, culminating in a huge exit.

The founders deserve every penny of that $3.2b and deserve the very nice lifestyle that will afford them. A great story that will inspire others including myself.

Agreed - I’ve learned that interviewers care more about getting the end result in the time window than demonstrating lower-level skills.

Choose 1) The easiest high level language you can, and 2) the language used by the interviewer/firm.

Think of it like trying to be as much like the interviewer himself/herself, in both coding and communication.

Thank you. The lack of the capital V also turned me off as a potential user of the site. Not only was it wrong once, but multiple times. I think it's mistakes like these that need to be really examined as a site owner.

This is great. It's critical to bucket engineers into levels with a checklist like this. Are they eager to explore every corner of the problem, from networking to the browser backend. But not in too great detail - not focusing on one topic too much. But you also don't want them talking too much - a great engineer asks questions as much as provides answers.

Agreed. Problem solving is a skill separate from IQ and unlike IQ it can be developed over time. If you want to level up your problem solving skill, carry around a small notebook and pay attention to the problems you see in other people, or in the office, in public, or in yourself. Write down the problem and its cause, continually drilling down into root causes. Then make a graph of problems and root causes, with directed edges showing causation.

Within one or two years of doing this you will recognize patterns others do not see. I have improved my problem solving skill by at least 7-8% by doing this. The key is iteration.

My IQ has been stable like yours, around the 96th percentile, and despite being a Tier 1 top-talent engineer, I’ve had to actively improve my problem solving ability over time.

Do you think some of these issues could be ameliorated by setting out guidelines in the very beginning such as sticking to a simple business model, saying you won’t scale past a small size, and outsourcing business-related work to 3rd party services? Many engineers probably identify with your quotes about “building something no one else has” and “freedom to work on what I want.”

I think many of us would find guidelines like that useful! Because to a corporate engineer drone like myself, starting something small like Pinboard sounds rewarding.

This is a good way to look at it. I’ve given up Twitter and much shortform news for mental health, and haven’t had a good response to others saying it’s my “duty” as a citizen to stay informed.

You can stay just as informed without giving in to doombait articles. You are just as valuable in the public sphere if you don’t succumb to attaching yourself to the firehose of daily information and tweets.

This. Think of the marshmallow study where long-term planning kids turned out richer than the short-term minded ones. We need to push back against the Idiocracy mindset.

It is our prerogative as the less reckless to breed and propagate our genes, and teach our culture to our young. As you mentioned, the force of nature is against that, so we need campaigns, perhaps by the State, for the “careful thinkers” to breed and hold control over culture.

Thanks, we started using Clubhouse about 7 months ago and have very few complaints. The main thing being it doesn’t have multi-second Lang after creating new issues.

Clubhouse is the first Jira replacement we’ve tried that the devs actually like using. Doesn’t have the laundry list of features Jira has, but meets our needs (team of 20).

This, so much this. The main hero image is a tad pixelated to me and while not a huge deal, could be cutting into conversions.

GP, to simplify the main hero consider making it a png. I know as a user seeing a slightly pixelated gif screams out “unpolished” engineering and design.

Thanks for sharing, and I just want to say I love Edubase! As an adjunct frustrated with Blackboard, I basically went rogue and started using Edubase for my courses, converting a few faculty along the way.

My favorite part of Quiz is how easy it is to set up special answer types, such as matrices, equation editors, etc. And the editor is a dream compared to Blackboard.

The Blackboard -> Edubase Classroom switch resulted in 80% fewer student support requests (like trouble turning in assignments, questions about grade details, etc.). And with competitive pricing to Blackboard, it was a no-brainer.

Just wanted to give a shoutout and say Overleaf has been a great product for me and my team so far. Incredibly easy and clear collaboration. And if I need to go look at change history over the last six months, it’s there within 2 clicks.

Not to mention, the UI is easy and (shockingly in this day and age) gets out of my way so I can focus on the content.

And easy pricing tiers. For just $15 a month I get a 10-collaborator project. Thanks Overleaf team!

Here’s what has had me looking to leave in the past, make sure these don’t happen:

Being paid less than the market and not receiving raises in line with my growth. I got a 50+% raise by jumping ship. If you don’t pay well, people will jump ship unless there is something very attractive intrinsic to the job (like working on a niche loved technology). If you don’t offer raises in line with growth, leaving is the only way for an employee to earn their worth.

Having no vision for the tech org and letting flashy tech-debt laden projects get the most recognition. There is a tricky balance between fostering bottom-up innovation and letting “get recognition quick” projects get the focus. Good engineers who really care about your product and maintenance will be turned off.

Poor dev tooling. Locked down PCs where devs can’t install the tooling they like. Centrally controlling the libraries devs can use. Paranoid security that gets in the way, leading people to give up or build hacky workarounds.

Focusing too much on new features and building up a backlog of bugfixes and reliability improvements.Not realizing the cost of tech debt.

Allowing nontechnical management to drive technical decisions. Not listening to those of us in the trenches, who see how things are day to day.

This will be a growing model in the next decade and is imo much more sustainable for founders because the core business model isn’t torn apart and it’s easier to sell to $MED_CO or $BIG_CO as the exit.

Build a small team, grow to $20-75m valuation then ditch to a bigger co. Easier to pitch this to some of the less unicorn-y VCs like Arrowbridge, etc. I like to call it the bluebird strategy.

Seconded. Tracy stands out among all the startups I’ve worked for as being ambitious, approachable, and someone who seriously respects the opinions of everyone. My time at PlanGrid was uniquely more fun and productive than many places I’ve come across in my career.

Cheers, Tracy!

Herein lies the basic problem: you are an expense to the company and will be paid as little as possible for the output the company wants and the cost of replacing you. Usually this means of course the going market cost of an engineer at your skill level, seniority, etc.

The negotiating power is on the company’s side, save for some wiggle room. You can indeed negotiate that you provide more value than you’re being paid, and may successfully get a raise, but the cost of replacing you is always a factor.

I think the intentions of mainstream mindfulness programs are to introduce the very concept of meditation to those who wouldn’t otherwise consider it. If firms reached out with less practical forms of meditation, there would be lower uptake. Compare a weeklong silent meditation retreat vs easy mindfulness training that you can do 10 minutes/day. There’s just going to be more workers taking up the more efficient option.

Through that lens, mainstream mindfulness programs make sense as part of a work/life benefits package.

I wish I could find/found a sort of engineering collective, owned by the employees and with a focus on work/life balance to alleviate the meat grinder that is modern work. I’d be ok taking a pay cut.

The modern workplace is a sick system [1] designed to push you to your limits holding onto a semblance of a comfortable life as inequality rises.

[1] http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html

It truly is fascinating, the world of tools and ecosystems built up to sidestep inane security rules in organizations.

Spoken from experience, this includes things like Anaconda in orgs where devs can’t use just any Python packages, or scripts from the internet copied and pasted into files because the firewall blocks git cloning. One could even consider AWS as a platform for devs to get around InfoSec red tape and have some semblance of control. The goal as a dev here is to fight the fewest fights to make tools available, by getting access to the biggest “bundles” of tooling they can.

In such organizations, there is either no concept of cost/benefit of overly restrictive firewall rules, etc, or the culture is such that the security team has become entrenched and unquestionable.

I also had this conception, then learned most if not all of my items have been from Stitch Fix’s internal brands and that’s why I didn’t recognize any of them. I thought they were a curator of brands and styles I might want to check out, but it seems to me they’re running it like a D2C high-volume fashion label.

So I’m guessing by owning the brands themselves they get even higher margins than if they were buying unwanted brands in bulk at a discount. And each of the brands goes for a certain generic style, e.g.: “Even Tide brings the vacation to your closet with a mix of coastal colors and mid-century modern inspired lines.” [1]

Kind of a let down for me as a subscriber, but I still buy quarterly as I’m so bad at picking a wardrobe out on my own.

[1] https://www.stitchfix.com/men/blog/the-service/exclusive-bra...

I use Blendle for this very reason. I read from a variety of sources and don't want to pay subscriptions to all of them, since I don't read all of each paper and wouldn't get my money's worth. Happy to a few dollars for a good handful of articles, but not north of $100-$200 when I only really read one section or selected articles.

This. The US has an abnormally high social mobility, even compared to the EU. You have a better chance of moving to the top 1% here than anywhere else. I'm a Tier 1 FAANG engineer and worked very hard to get here, coming from a middle income family. By first studying hard and building projects to get into a Tier 1 university.

Tier 1 top-talent engineers are just worth multiples more than lower talent people and deserve to reap from their hard work and expertise. It's unfair to me and other FAANGs to say we don't deserve our lifestyle and are silver spoon.

This, I’m convinced UX is the main source of trust for a software business, and managing the solution’s complexity is a core part of that.

My team at FAANG uses reclaim.ai pretty heavily to protect our calendars from corporate bs. We find it easy to maximize our time for working and being in the zone. Other FAANG or startup engineers would find this product useful to auto optimize their schedules. Especially if they find their calendars sprinkled with meetings with small gaps of free time in the day. I like to block off my afternoons as personal dev/work time.

Reclaim Assistant is free through January 2021, give it a shot. Reign in those Zoom calls that break your concentration throughout the day.

Happy Axiom customer here. Its main selling point: absolute ease of use. Like a point-and-click selenium. Our analysts , who are doing quick analytics or analytics without the need for a long-term engineered solution, are very satisfied with it. I find it powerful enough for production use (it works with IG and even FB to some extent).

Only downside I can think of: pricing is a bit opaque, outside the “desktop” license.

Agreed. Shoutout to AirBnB management who made the best of the tough situation and did the right thing.