fatnoah

It's been a few years since I worked on wearables at Meta, so things may have changed, but the goal from the beginning was to move as much compute off the device as possible to deal with the related problems of power consumption and heat generation. For the particular wearable my time was very focused on at the time, heat was actually the larger issue.

> But I guess it's mostly a problem with the tooling not being there.

For me, it's the tooling plus AR glasses that have roughly the same form factor as my safety glasses. Having plans in front of me, ability to measure distance and angles to within a centimeter, etc. would be nice enhancements to my workflow. A "where did I leave that tool?" feature would be very frequently used.

> However, it seems like I'm stuck at my level.

Have you gotten any feedback in your current role about why you're stuck? The reasons can vary from the difference in expected behaviors from level to level, no room at level +1, your current company/manager not really caring about your advancement, etc.

> I have no managerial experience, hence I can't get any leadership roles (either people or software)

Is this because you don't (or haven't had opportunities to) step up to lead/own chunks of work?

> I'm not a good enough software engineer to do complex stuff

Do you plan to do anything about this? It's hard to advance without some amount of self-improvement?

> I have a SaaS that generates pennies...[snip]...I tried to bootstrap some projects, but most of them are hit and miss (more on the miss side).

This seems to conflict with some of your earlier statements. Are you saying that you're motivated enough to try to bootstrap multiple projects, and have started a SaaS that actually has paying customers? It seems to me that if you have that motivation, you should be able to improve and grow to learn the things that you think are holding your career back.

I had a Subaru that required over $1000 in labor replace a $13 master wiring harness that was chewed by a rodent.

Of course, nothing will beat having a rodent die somewhere in the engine, and not noticing it until exiting the car after a 45 minute highway ride and making my in-laws neighborhood smell like someone barbecued rotten meat.

> The only way to escape is to be clever about preserving multiple 'zoom' /C4 levels of diagram.

Fully agree. Having gone through startup funding rounds and acquisitions, that's the set of diagrams that I have ready or prepare for each one. The "suits" like the higher level stuff, while the people digging into technical due diligence or post-acquistion integration like the more detailed ones. They're also adaptable at many levels for any domain-specific "enhancements" that are necessary, such as a data flows, security flows, and the like.

> That said, you probably don’t want to be making theoretical architecture diagrams most of the time.

My take on this is that it's really hard to have one diagram to rule them all. I think there's a time and a place for different kinds of diagrams, and I think it's ok to tell a story with a couple different ones. For example, a conceptual diagram that complements the actual "as implemented" diagram. One is a big of a "here's what we were thinking" and the other is "here's how we translated that to actual architecture".

In my role of frequently having to manage up to executive management, investors, onboard new people, etc. the combination of conceptual plus actual is powerful. I can describe the problem we're solving, provide a grokkable format for most levels of the org chart, and then have the details for those who want to dig in to discuss how we built (or plan to build) it and why.

I'm 50 and grew up in a medium sized New England mill town. One of the few memories I have of my grandfather is taking a quick trip to the local egg farm to get some eggs. These have all but disappeared from New England.

> To this day however, I still get very car sick trying to read my phone in a moving motor vehicle, so I don't know.

I find this fascinating. Reading in cars, riding in boats in heavy waves, and anything like that does not give me motion sickness. I made it through 45 years of life without even knowing what that was. However, ten minutes of Minecraft in VR was enough to make me sick to my stomach.

(It was also amazing, BTW)

> The point of the Jones Act—or at least that one particular section that a lot of folks tend to talk about—is to have US citizens and US ships available in case of war. But given US prices relative to the prices for other countries, it costs more, and the US has not been willing to pay the premium to support that readiness.

While we didn't get the ships, we did get a 100 foot railway in Canada: https://maritime-executive.com/article/judge-rules-that-cana...

Wow, payoff after 15 years. Congratulations!

I worked for a large company that committed to a >$400M spend with AWS. Even though I owned a very tiny piece of that pie, I could get my account manager and a technical resource on the phone at pretty much any time.

> I've always been dismayed at the misdirected fury around corn syrup as if it is somehow worse than any other sugar.

My main issue with corn syrup is that it just feels different in my mouth. It has a "stickiness" to it than regular sugar does. I guess that's not exactly a bad thing since it effectively ended my soft drink consumption.

> Some time not far in the future, we are going to accept that this is not the same thing at all as computer science and give the computer scientists a curriculum that is a lot heavier on math and theory while adding elective or core courses for non-major students on programming.

I graduated from an Engineering focused college in the late 1990's, and many departments offered exactly these types of courses in addition to the standard intro courses. They were typically named something [domain] [course #] for non-majors.

You would be correct, though I guess it's now the M in FAANG.

> Is grinding code at a FAANG really that different?

It probably depends on where you're coming from. I was an Engineering manager at a FAANG, and roughly 80% of my 1:1's with my team revolved around their performance, or lack thereof, with 5% devoted to supporting mental health, and 15% around general topics such as what they were working on.

I had 3 managers in two years, and with one we mostly talked about strategy, goals, and what we're working on. With the other two, it was always about my performance and that of my team.

It was a very high-pressure environment. The types of people who succeed long term are those that are good at playing the game or who naturally will do the required things to get good ratings.

In return, you get fantastic pay. I didn't quite hit 7 figures in compensation, but if I'd stayed another year to ride more of the run-up, I would have come close to $2M for a year.

All that said, there was some really interesting work and great teams. While it sucked as a manager, I think 30 year old me would have loved it as an IC.

> That these two people see this as a work of art, instead of a practical thing that humans need to interface with

As a Boston resident that has had to conduct business at City Hall many times, I couldn't agree with this more. The lower level interior spaces are dark and somehow cavernous and confining at the same time, while the upstairs spaces are more of a warren of rooms and hallways. Nothing about walking in the front door makes you feel welcomed into the space. Either the actual use of the building was totally disregarded in its design, our our standards for how we expect to interact with buildings have dramatically changed since its construction.

Speaking as a resident of Boston and the neighborhoods near city hall, that plaza is such a contrast from the rest of the area. Everywhere around it has shops, alleys, and interesting things to see, whereas that plaza was an endless sea of bricks. They've dressed it up better now, but it still feels more like a missed opportunity than a useful civic space.

According to the West End Museum site, the project created more housing units, but also led to a population decrease, most likely due to the decrease in the number of people living in each unit.

This document is a fascinating read: https://archive.org/details/westendprojectre00bost/page/n79/...

Comparing what they proposed vs what resulted is very interesting.

Probably even more years ago at Uni, my senior project group built an automated analysis system for a large (literally large,club to stadium sized) speaker company.

It was a very cool project that spanned multiple disciplines as we built a phased microphone array, a system to tilt and rotate the speaker, and programmable logic and software to generate and analyze signals.

It was proof-of-concept quality, but was later made real and reduced analysis time from dozens of hours to about 45 minutes. Two of the project members were even hired by the company.

> Where AI really really shine is to help an engineer get proficient in a language they don't know well.

I used GitHub Copilot in a project I started mostly to learn Go. It was amazing. I spent not so much time fiddling around with syntax, and much more time thinking about design.

> Healthy orgs must have slack in the system and allow teams and individuals to do a little chasing of fun or meaningful things that give them intrinsic pride and motivation.

As an Engineering leader, I try my hardest to make sure this Slack exists for the exact reasons you listed.

Am I the only one that thought of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Query_Language

I definitely have a "favorite" but that's because it was my first user-facing race condition error in a picture messaging app where part of the resolution was an official letter to someone's spouse to explain that they image they received was not, in fact, the one that our user was trying to send to them.

> Hated myQ even before it went subscription.

My openers have myQ and it worked so terribly I gave up on using it. The opening/closing worked intermittently, and the monitoring of open status only worked once, and never again. It was so bad that I spend 5 hours to get my in-car controls working with the opener instead.

I can't imagine paying a subscription for that.

My previous job search in 2019 yielded 2 FAANG offers, 1 exec role at a $2B public company, and an "almost" from another Seattle-based big tech company.

This September, I finished up a 10 month job search (had a job that was going nowhere, so looked for another) In that time, I started with careful analysis of each role, custom resume building, and applying to one or two jobs a week. When that yielded no results after a few months, I crafted a few resumes to match the broad categories of roles that I saw that were good matches and started applying in bulk. That yielded much better result in terms of actual human contact.

I did also leverage my LinkedIn network, and that yielded lots of nice reconnections with past coworkers, but zero job opportunities. The one reach out that led to anything was to the manager for the FAANG job I rejected in 2019 (always say no very nicely!). That manager made it to VP in that timeframe, and a VP recommendation to the recruiting team WILL get you in the door to talk to someone. Of course, a multi-month process resulted in a kafka-esque situation where the team that wanted me got laid off and that killed the entire process. Oh well.

In the end, I'd sent out over 300 applications, had a few dozen recruiter calls, and 7 full loops (4 offers, one of which was a lowball and 3 that all happened at the same time). Ironically, the job I ended up taking came as an inbound opportunity via LinkedIn from a recruiter at the company.

The good news seemed to be that by the August timeframe, activity had really picked up. The same resumes started getting a lot more traction.

Fellow man pushing 50 here. I'm caring for my mom who has COPD and is starting to show signs of dementia. She lives a couple hours away and I just started a job that's 3-4 hours in the opposite direction, so I'm balancing a long-distance weekly commute along with weekly trips to cook, clean, do shopping, etc. Due to how this eats up most of my free time, it's actually made me better at squeezing "self care" into my schedule since it's become clear that it's not something I can defer to later, since "later" may not come for several years.

It's not at the same level as your dealing with, so I'm writing this mostly to offer support and to be glad that you've found some activities to help center you. I do encourage you to try to find some help, even if it's just for some small part of the care, like cleaning, shopping, bathing, whatever.

A recent experience I had came while walking in a forest with friends about an hour from Seattle. While walking, we heard an animal sound of some kind that cause an immediate "hairs on the back of my neck standing" up reaction along with what felt like an adrenaline rush (time slowing, narrowing of focus, etc). All of this happened immediately, and it took a few moments for my conscious mind to catch up. My friend and I looked at each other and walked briskly away from the sound. It wasn't until we encountered another hiker that we found out a mother bear and cubs had been spotted in that area.

This was unlike any other fear of animals, jump scares, or even near-miss types of experiences I've had in the past. It was a very primal and immediate reaction to a sound I've never heard before.

Fortunately, I did learn early on that stressing about sleep, especially as I lie awake in bed, was making things worse.

Great, another source of anxiety to make it harder to maintain a consistent sleep schedule.

Personio | Engineering | Full-Time | NYC (hybrid 2-3 days)

We're one of Europe's largest Unicorns that provides an all-in-one solution for HR, and we've recently expanded our tech presence to the US, with an office conveniently located across the street from Moynihan Train Hall in NYC.

As part of a larger initiative to establish a solid technical foundation for growth to IPO and beyond, I recently joined to build out a platform to provide reliable, scalable, and governed access to all of the data used by our products.

If you have a passion for building software platforms, thrive in ambiguity, and are interested in taking projects from ideation to operation, then you could be a Staff Engineer that I'm looking for to join my org: https://personio.jobs.personio.de/job/1461433?display=en

We also have other open Enginering, Product, and Design roles in NYC and Europe: https://www.personio.com/about-personio/careers/product-engi...