1,869 karma · joined September 1, 2011
I personally witnessed Vint give valuable advice to managers like me, often in difficult cases. It sounds banal but often in a large corp you know what you need to do, but will have a lot of - justified or not - doubt about whether you can get through the bureaucratic molasses and the political interests of your higher ups. Vint's backing enabled a lot of people to do what's right.
One of my colleagues has printed and framed a reply from such a thread, where he offered an opinion in support of another manger. Vint replied "This is good advice. V.".
I hope he enjoys retirement, well deserved
It's actually relatively simple to follow the rules that lead you down the well estabilished residency paths if you do the opposite of what the article suggests and leave enough of a buffer for every required number, so you don't need to think about it and the precise count can be handwaved by the officials.
Conversly, if you try to minmax the rules, you might find that most important systems still have an arbitrary human decision maker, who simply decides whether to apply a complex ruleset to the letter, or to be lenient.
> Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free.
For a couple of my university years I had nothing but free Google t-shirts. They were throwing so much of this crap around that my closet was halfway to 20k. I only lamented they never gave away Google trousers or briefs.
They have a fair shot at competing with Google on quality of search and they should focus on that. If they think they can complete on AI, email or swag - good luck, and I hope you have a good money printer.
I have no illusion of being irreplacable, or of the FAANG companies going down. Even if my departure would create a ripple, hiring is not, and will not ever be a problem. There is an endless supply of purely financially motivated and reasonably talented people. To leave would be to let a worse person fill my seat. Conversly, I get to work with a lot of honest people towards better things, in the scope we have control over. You can't fix everything, but often you can really make a difference on what's right in front of you.
For Cloudflare HTTP/3 accounts for 28% of the traffic (https://radar.cloudflare.com/)
QUIC actually lets you migrate between connections (because the packets are identified by a connection ID in each UDP packet rather than a 5-tuple). Clients will typically re-test a connection occasionally and downgrade as needed for this to work.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/cron...
It's weird because I'm not even that old, and this kind of planning or refactoring was definitely a part of the curriculum at my definitely-not-Ivy-League uni.
The control panel has:
* 6-8 buttons for switching between different MMI modes, labeled
* 4 universal buttons, function contextual to the current screen
* 1 return button
* Turn/press controller
I can navigate 90% of the menus blindfolded. Despite my older MMI not being a marvel of UX, I can access functions 5 actions deep, while driving, from pure muscle memory.
At the same time there are about 2 million rail customers a day, so the 9€ ticket will bring 18M€. I'd say they probably break even.
Math is fun, but the entire point is a bit moot. Germany is a civilised country and if you laid off the entire staff for three summer months with no pay, the union would eat you for breakfast.
A few suggestions to improve:
* Consider that most users rank 1-10 to stack rank their own games. BGG explicilty encourages this, insisting it's YOUR rating and there is no wrong way of arriving at it. I'd try to normalize for this (i.e. convert user collections from ratings into stack rank percentiles, see where games end up on average).
* Board games objectively got better over the years. There is more material on mechanics, it's easier to publish than ever, simulating and playtesting games is easier, etc. When I look at some (not all!) old games on top 100 I always think "come on, it's a good game but has no place here". It would be interesting to see rankings based on ratings assigned in a specific year.
* Drop the notion of complexity as something to correct for. As others mentioned this is a very inconsistent data point. Personally I'd rather play two 8.5 games in an evening than one 9. Perhaps fun per hour would be better, but this is personal bias, no matter how you assign the weight you will get complaints :)
* Kids and party non-gamer games are almost a distinct universe from gamers games. There is no way to fix or account for that. It has nothing to do with compexity or play time. I think this is more down to a combination of how well the game was playtested combined with the distribution channels available to the publisher. Gamers will happily play 15 minutes gimmick games, non-gamers will pull out Monopoly in a pub and go throught this monstrous waste of cardboard while downing pints.
At entry level you typically manage a two-pizzas sized team in one fairly limited domain. "Have this desk and a bunch of people, figure out how to run a worldwide wiki" would be a typical senior manager/director assignment (a.k.a. middle management).
If we set aside an argument about IT salaries fairness, I think people at Wikimedia deserve some thanks for taking a salary cut to undeniably make a difference on the world.
In all of the following I got a new thing looking for some new feature or because I could I guess, and had the older device outlasted the newer one: Bose headphones, any mobile phone really, Thinkpad laptops, Audi cars, Brother printers, any and all household appliances.
I simply am surrounded by tens and hundreds of sort-of-broken devices that don't force me to replace yet, but are not fixable either. The laptop overheats, phone compass never works properly, one port in the TV is dead, there is no light in the fridge (but it still works). The list goes on. I just want a world where stuff lasting a lifetime exists.
I started my career in Poland, just before the foreign startups decided it's an interesting market to outsource to. A number of US owned startups and medium-sized tech companies started offering salaries 2-3x higher than the local firms. I moved from a place where my last conversation was "No web developer can hope for more than $4/h rate, come on" to, well, a $10/h place. A lot of this was made easier by EU, a lot was just US companies being encouraged by the economic growth, stability and the prospect of saving the half of their bottom line. With salaries at ~$20-30k a year everyone was happier than before.
Then a natural thing happened, the market became increasingly competitive. Ten years later, a good senior developer in Poland could earn $60k, but crucially, costed the company close to $100k due to employer taxes and other costs of running business. Some companies are fine with it, but some understand that it's ever closer to what an employee in their HQ costs, and some are slowing down the growth or moving out alltogether. Surprise, over-the-pond communication is not so easy even on a good day, and there are cultural differences to deal with too. Some moved further east, I'm curious to see how that plays out.
Going back to the remote work pushing down the salaries, I think that's unlikely to be the reason, because lower wage locations are rarely saving that much in the long run. Maybe we see a temporary dip, but I also look forward to moving out of big city and lowering my cost of living.
What I think is more likely is that the economy shrinks and the endless supply of engineering jobs dries out, moving us back to employer's market. That can have all kinds of ripple effects on the local and outsourced jobs.
Conversly, it's really easy to sound as if you don't care enough, or be openly frustrated and deflecting responsibility to someone else (especially if that's justified). This way you end up with people angry at individuals, and not thinking about the next steps (whether getting their own career in order, or continuing the project in a different setup).
Lying, or being wishy-washy is the path of least resistance. I think managers are getting paid to do uncomfortable things and with time might become awesome even in these hard situations, but YRMV.
Here comes my favourite brain freeze moment - recently my parents asked me to explain this to them. How do you construct a good search phrase? My brain blanked. I HAVE NO IDEA. It seems I have learned fluent Goonglish without noticing, and now can't explain the grammar or vocabulary of it.