4,766 karma · joined June 6, 2012
Please keep up the good work.
While print is exactly the medium I want for something of this sort, I do think it would be wise to look into some sort of digital subscription / supporter option.
It wasn't at Apple or anything approaching it, but I had years of similar treatment - expectations of 24/7 availability, continuous last minute, personal service to executives and never-ending crunch time.
I didn't have kids or a mortgage to worry about and I had enough in the bank that I could probably have spent a year or more unemployed without much concern for money.
For me, it was several things.
* Pride in being dependable and capable of delivering on whatever was asked of me.
* A not entirely conscious expectation that I would eventually be rewarded for such sacrifice.
* Genuine enjoyment of much of the work I was doing.
Needless to say, my outlook has changed a bit in the years since, but looking back, I don’t think it was having a child or any other responsibility that did it.
More than anything it’s probably the simple realization that deriving enjoyment from something doesn't negate its cost. Moderation is straightforward for things which are easy to categorize. The difficulty in categorizing ‘enjoyable work’ is implicit.
I think that saying to the effect of ‘find a job you love and never work a day in your life’ is only talking about a certain part of your mind. Your body and all the unconscious and unobvious bits that make up your life are not immune to wear and tear by virtue of your positive perception.
Next would be understanding the diminishing returns and potential negatives of hard work. In short, if you’re going to work hard for someone else, aim high, help that person succeed and see that their success is tied to yours. Being too valuable to someone with low aspirations is career poison.
As stated, that's very typical but no less appalling non-management.
Cover yourself with a speedy reply while deflecting onto a sacrificial subordinate in one move.
It only takes a few minutes to ping your reports and determine which of then can/will reply before CC'ing one of them a grenade.
I'd liken the search for 'smaller subreddits' to zooming to the 'bottom' of a fractal. Cool for a while, but eventually you either understand what you're dealing with or simply tire of the self-similarity.
Except he didn't say that.
It seems you couldn't be bothered to spend 2 minutes reading ~500 words and decided to compare on headline alone.
It's not just advertising. I'd wager it happens many if not most places where there are contracts to be awarded or specific talent to be retained.
I'd imagine that the folks expressing disbelief are either inexperienced or so obviously 'square' that they're kept totally in the dark about such things.
I've seen one place where it was nearly a standard of 'culture fit'.
Note: I don't mean to condone this sort thing, just to bear witness to its prevalence.
I'd wager that this - the notion that school is for a degree, abstract from challenging oneself to learn anything is a healthy contributor the apparent glut of 'uderemployed' graduates.
>A few years from now no one will care about your GPA, let alone your final year project.
Perhaps, but they'll certainly have more to gain from someone who cares about doing quality work and is willing to challenge themselves.
Further, it's not an entirely safe assumption that you'll even be capable doing 'the cool stuff later', particularly without having tried.
I think this is actually worse than that.
Strength, smarts and expertise are positives that are generally implied as possible to build or at least quantify.
This is more an absolute negative judgement, shaming even "You have chosen to fail." as if success is as simple as flipping an intangible switch inside.
I think it's hard in general to see the world through another's lens.
I expect the very successful are particulary prone to this as they have both a strong, but narrow 'proof' of their own authority on the matter and an endless supply of people seeking their approval - not the sort to give criticism.
Seems pretty polarizing though, among the people I played with many stopped playing long ago while others remain completely immersed.
At the moment, I'm more interested in what Google is/was getting out of it? I haven't kept up, but I can imagine all sorts of interesting data that the game could generate from the obvious cataloging of landmarks to path finding or network effects in the distribution of invites and codes.
I can't help but wonder if this feature is a move toward putting the game out to pasture in a way by putting content generation in the hands of the players.
To go off on a tangent...
I have a couple of CFLs that have been going since 1997 in my first apartment while most of the CFLs I purchased after my last move in 2009 have burned out.
None of my LEDs have gone. Not the ridiculously expensive ones from a few years ago or the current "almost, but not quite cheap enough for the whole house" ones I've been testing out.
My impression is that there's a sweet spot in relatively early adoption for many technologies when you can get nearly all the eventual performance with much higher reliability. A point where manufacturers are perhaps over-engineering or at least have not yet dialed in their cost-cutting trade-offs.
Of course, whether this is worth anything depends on the context - my 2004 Linksys AP, 1997 bulbs and 1999 DVD player are fine for my purposes, but my tank-like 2009 Motorola Droid - not so much.
We're in an industry where modeling, A/B testing, logging, trending and engineering for redundancy is implicit - except when it comes to hiring apparently.
If a load balancer assumed to split 50/50 was actually operating at 80/20 someone would notice. If a particular demographic were bouncing from the landing page at disproportionate rates, someone would figure out why.
Both problems would be broken down empirically and solved with a thorough post-mortem published on the company blog.
To this point, those same sort of issues applied to hiring have been largely addressed with "We've got to do better" and "The problem is upstream" with barely a word about how things managed to creep so far out of whack to begin with.
It's really refreshing to see admission of an actual (potential) problem and some of brains being applied to mitigate it directly.
I'd guess it's related to LinkedIn or GitHub as this particular address is only publicly/semi-publicly used on those two sites.
If you're of that era you likely also remember...
007 373 5963
...and...
JUSTIN BAILEY
------ ------
Experiencing some small scale analogs to this is what taught me to really appreciate the sort of simple, manual rigor that I often see from (much) older engineers.
That's not to say that such things weren't done here - who knows. It's more a thought on what I sometimes perceive to be over dependence / confidence in automated testing.
Now...
Is there a term for the sort of "If X was Y then..." conjecture we have dotting this thread?
Here, in relation to Apple it's "If Steve Jobs was alive...". In boxing it was "If Cus D'Amato was alive..."
I make a point to read TempleOS' comments. Looking past the frequent nastiness they're sometimes interesting and even poetic, in a way that's as sadly familiar as the intonation in these videos.
I've lived my entire life in areas that show as white on this light pollution map [1]. I've certainly never seen the Milky Way.
In the city, you'd be lucky to make out any stars at all. Jupiter is visible when it's high in the sky, but that's about it.
In the suburbs which are genreally red on the map you can make out the main sequence stars of bright constellations, but something like Andromeda (M31) needs the help of binoculars or a telescope.
You're probably safely certain you couldn't do it tomorrow, but that says little about your ability to do it 9 months from now and nothing about what the next person is capable off.
Ask around and you'll find supremely productive people who do both.
Every few years I Google for happenings on the EQ server I frequented in 1999. There have been all sorts of mergers and consolidations, but it appears a number of people are still playing regularly 15.5 years later and still arguing about the exact same things.
It's like dropping onto Skull Island[1].
Hardware, software, anything really - there's probably an analog to this in most things.
Personally, what I run up against most often aren't questions about fulfilling the initial requests, but the aftermath of someone focusing on specific details to the exclusion of the bigger picture.
An organization spending a few million on software licenses, but nothing on staff / support being the most common example.
I feel like people in tech are particularly prone to this for whatever reason.
I'd wager a person will typically to sustain more criticism for a sub-optimal, but complete, functional implementation than a disjoint pile of fine-tuned components that doesn't add up to anything.
Not much that I'm aware of. Being "tough on crime" is still pretty popular depending on political affiliation, Joe "Concentration Camp" Arpaio is still a sheriff and GEO is up 15% YTD [1].
However, there's been a fair amount of recent coverage around stepping back from some of the policies that got us here [2] so there's reason to be hopeful.
1: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AGEO&ei=5BgaVMjANtOQ8...
2: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/12/6139819/bill-clinton-violent-cr...
As an interviewer I've done something like this when needing to hire for a very straightforward job with very little time and an effectively endless supply of candidates.
This addressed the problem of our time crunch, but I doubt it helped the selection process overall.
I think this sort of testing is subject to all the same issues as most any other method of interviewing, but limited to a much smaller sample size.
Basically, it's arguably good for the interviewers and a coin flip for everyone else.
As an interviewee, I haven't encountered a test like this, but I expect my response would almost surely involve questioning the architecture decisions that led to such a problem in the first place.
What really sets this book apart, in my opinion, is just how readable it is. I haven't run across anything with quite the same combination of style and depth for Linux.
You could read through something like The Linux Programming Interface [1] or Understanding the Linux Kernel [2] and with effort extract much of the same information, but without the pace/structure/commentary that I think this book does so well.
Thing is, conceptually much of what you'll read in this book will be applicable to Linux just fine and having read it will make it far easier to grok how/where the two differ.
1: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1593272200 2: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596005652
The size and heft of the print book is a welcome surprise, it's something that you could toss in a bag and hold to read without support (2.7 lbs, 9.4x6.4x1.4) - relevant for something that will eventually be shelved among stuff like "The Linux Programming Interface" (5 lbs, 9.5x7.2x2.3)
The last big vendor PO I had to look at put every professional services line item at $300-360/hr with $320 being about average.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_%26_Watch_games
I can't help but think that this case is more of the same.
If the work isn't getting done or it is of poor quality - make that the point.
Unfortunately, enforcing accountability for that sort of failure is non-existent in Government whether the workers are in their cubicles or in their pajamas.
If the only verification of work you're doing is something that could handled with grep, you don't really get to complain.
Spot on.
Years ago, I maintained a couple of desktops in a sort of 'job center' where people could submit electronic applications for various low-end, entry-level positions.
The most common issue - no email address. Second most common - has email, but has to take the bus to the library to check it.
Cheap smartphones have been a boon at that level. There's a whole segment of the population that was missing out on all the benefits of being connected until very recently.
I'd be overjoyed if I never had to admin Windows again, but it's a bit unfair to frame that as an OS comparison.
The most basic of direct from TechNet 'best practices' would reduce the impact of a failure of that sort to minutes.
That said, that sort of failure not at all uncommon. Further, I expect such disasters would happen far less often if an existing, poorly implemented Microsoft environment could be remediated into something better as directly as anything unix-like.
In any case, the book is worth a read. I had a copy forced on me years and didn't crack it open for ages - I wish I'd started reading it sooner.
This is obnoxious, way too common and as another comment points out seemingly aloof to the fact that the article is 8 years old.
Please, just to stick to self-promotion [1][2][3][4].
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6560909 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573974 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8086250 4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8200975