latencyloser

Anecdotal, but I have an uncle who, is a very good man but completely illiterate in terms of technology and closely resembles a "Larry the cable guy" stereotype, bought a surprising amount of bitcoin and then called me to ask how it worked, what make the price change, etc.

It seems shoe shiners can come in many forms. But that was the particular one for me to unload all of my bitcoin and other crypto and get out while I was ahead.

I too rejected a job at Google after feeling like they just wanted to pigeon-hole me, so to speak. But, as a former Microsoft employee as well, it's not all sunshine there either. While experiences tend to vary, there I was crammed in a small, loud room with too many other people who I'd argue were more complacent than content. Similarly, I've had colleagues at Facebook describe it more as "exhausting" than high energy.

I've come to the opinion that, unless you're a "famous" engineer, or very senior one, that can command a lot of respect and autonomy, most of these "dream job" companies are going to feel a lot more like a well paying sweatshop. At least, that's been my experience as someone with only several years in the field.

I remember in college reading "Laborem Exercens", despite it's very religious justifications, had a major point that resonated with me about the "dignity of work". In my interpretation of it (as a 20 year old), it argued that much of man's (and woman's) meaning in life is derived from the work that they do because of the interactions with the earth that work often creates. If you take that away, much of life's meaning tends to fall to the wayside as well.

That being said, if I stop to think really hard about whether I'd enjoy 12 hours of farm work or 12 hours of video games, I can't say I really know which one I'd prefer. A tired, overworked me says the video games. But I know having had several days of uninterrupted laziness before, that I'd quickly feel lost and unhappy with the video games as well because there's no "larger" gratification from them than whatever immediate feedback the game system provides.

As a former Microsoft employee, my experience was that the longer a product was around, the harder it was to figure out who understood any part of it well enough to change something.

I would guess I averaged about 10 lines a month on my project that had been around for decades. Making even slight tweaks required dozens of meetings, design discussions, functional and performance testing, etc. etc. It took an eternity.

To add on: I just moved to Seattle from Chicago where I lived for several years. In Chicago, I used strictly public transportation or walked, it worked great because I never needed or wanted to leave the "city" in general. If I did, it was infrequent enough to warrant renting a car. All my errands could be done on the walk home from the office as well.

Now that I'm in Seattle (well, Bellevue), the beauty of the PNW has me going on several hours of driving and exploration every weekend. Good luck doing that without a personal vehicle. Also, my commute is agonizing, but even in a personal car it's still orders of magnitude more time efficient than the public transportation options, and I can get all my random errands for the family done during.

I'm probably preaching to the choir by replying to you, but my car is now an indispensable part of my life. I could only imagine not having it being in the densest and most "isolated" American cities at this point (Chicago, Manhattan possibly).

Anecdotal, but my mother was a mechanic, my uncle a cryptographer, another uncle was some type of police on base, my cousin is a drone pilot and just sits in an office like building despite technically being involved in combat I suppose. Several former colleagues mostly did admin-type work while enlisted. The last person I know to have actually seen combat was my grandfather in Korea--but he knew what he signed up for and it was fairly deliberate at the time, he had wanted to be like his cousin that had fought on Iwo Jima years prior who was also a volunteer. All used their GI bill to get an education.

My point being, there's tons of military jobs that don't involve violence. For each job that does require violence, dozens more auxiliary positions are required to support that job.

I worked on the exchange side(CME Group) and we used BigDecimal (and an in-house version that worked in a very similar way) quite often... Worked just fine for us as far as I know.

That being said, I agree with your sentiment that there are faster/more efficient ways to accomplish this. For something like smart contracts, I'd think they should be able to abstract this line of reasoning into an API that's consumable for those of us that aren't as familiar. Or is at least worth having the option of.

As a fellow Microsoft employee, my blood boils a bit thinking of CodeFlow. My team has an "interesting" code review process that is 1/2 git diffs (via VSO Pull Requests) and 1/2 CodeFlow through TFS. However, I'd take PRs over CodeFlow for a few reasons:

1) All accessible via a browser instead of Desktop App. 2) PRs are all queued up nicely and easily searchable in said browser instead of littered all over a folder in my email 3) PRs can have rules that don't allow merging without reviewers having accepted the change. CodeFlow seems to ignore this in my experience and 'required' reviewers are more just suggestions and people just check in their code whenever anyways.

It's entirely possible my team, myself included, don't understand how to properly use CodeFlow though so take my opinion with boat load of salt. Similarly, I'm sure my third issue could be fixed by improving our review process as well, rather than switching tooling.

When I first lived in Chicago, this was _awful_. Even with Chicago's grid system, Google maps would only show like every 3rd street or something--even when zoomed in as much as possible. Not knowing the city, I'd frequently go the exact _opposite_ way intended because I'd incorrectly remember "oh wells st is between these two..." when in fact it was between the two streets on the opposite side I was headed. I'm pretty decent with directions in general, but this often led to many extra miles being walked.

I suppose I was thinking in terms of the alternative being alcohol. If I were going to choose between a night out drinking, or a night out having smoked a bit, I'd go for the latter. I'd rather feel a bit hazy the next day than be sick to my stomach or have a headache--which I get even just from ~3 beers over a few hours. I could of course opt for neither, but social norms being what they are.. there's some pressure there but that's a separate issue.

That being said, I may have exaggerated the memory issues. It isn't like full blown amnesia. More so it just takes longer than usual to remember things. I'd compare it to a cache miss. Smoking clears my brain's cache the next day and I end up feeling like I am pulling short-term thoughts and memories from colder storage.

Anecdotal, but I can't imagine living a normal life while regularly using though--even if regular is just a couple days a week.

It's legal where I live and the handful of times I have used during the week, I can't remember what I did the day before as well, or what my tasks for the day are. My performance at work noticeably degrades. I'm also more tired the day after, despite generally getting more sleep.

It's great for the weekend when I can just sleep it off or my only tasks are to go for a hike and get groceries though. Better than alcohol at least.

Also, many companies that are competitors to Amazon in some form or another. Those tend to be the larger customers in my experience.

Source: Am MSFT dev on the Azure side of things.

Yes, I think you're lucky to be in a somewhat unusual position that let's you regularly work with problems like that.

I'm merely a junior level developer working on database engines. Most of my day-to-day involves maintenance of decades old code where the 'hard problems' have long been solved. I imagine my codebase ancestors might have needed thorough knowledge of trees at some point :)

This doesn't align with my experience. I just interviewed with Amazon a few days ago, just testing the waters to see what's going on in the rest of the world, and it was very 'leetcode'-ish. So much so that I ended up just telling the recruiter I wasn't interested in the position anymore. One question more or less required me to code up a BST from scratch and traverse it. I felt like I was back in my undergraduate algorithms class.

If I ever really needed another job, I guess I'd have to suck it up and refresh myself on that stuff. That's a shame.

Where'd you learn this stuff? As someone who recently ended up a family man, I'm definitely interested in keeping my place more secure.

Would remote work help? I would think encouraging or allowing more 'white-collar' workers to be more spread out throughout the country would help increase demand in places other than large cities and tech hubs.

I, for one, miss rural life (wide open space, less traffic, mom and pop stores, etc.) but unfortunately my career as a programmer doesn't cater to that lifestyle all that well.

I'm just above entry level, but by no means a recent grad. Not all of us were lucky enough to land a big software gig right out of college ;)

My family probably wouldn't be too happy to suddenly have roommates. Hah. But yes, if you're young and single, that's a solid option I would think.

I'd give anything to work remote here. My partner and I have discussed buying a small 'ranch' on the other side of the cascades as a 'weekend home' and downsizing to a small studio here on weekdays. We figure the two combined would be about what we pay in rent each month now, if not a little more, but at least we'd be able to escape on weekends. We love pnw, but hate having to live in the most crowded part of it for the sole purpose of making our commute tolerable.

Seattle is quickly becoming 'bay area'-ish from what I can tell. Housing is certainly becoming difficult at incredible rates. Here in Bellevue, a colleague of mine bought a house for ~400k, it's now worth well over ~500k only a year later. Many houses in that area also sell for at least 700k+ assuming you can even get an offer in before a cash buyer grabs it. Don't even get me started on the traffic. I run as many of my errands before 8am as possible.

I personally know I will never be able to afford housing close to work based on how things are now. Currently I'm just saving my pennies and hoping I can move to another job with a lower cost of living somewhere else in a few years.

Edit: For reference, I am just a just above 'entry level' engineer at Microsoft. I'm paid well, but not well enough for the housing around here.

Various forms of financial planning was what came to mind. The predecessor to robo-advisers. The guys I know that are really killing it in this have a few dozen clients investing several million each with them. Their commissions from this sort of thing are large enough that they only need to have this occur a couple times a year to be well into six-figure territory.

Depending on the area, finance has many opportunities for "consultant" like work where a significant portion of your income can be commissions or performance based. This is where the real money is and the people I know that are successful in this make multiples more than me and my "big 4" programming job--even at their relatively small firms.

When I ask them, their passion tends not to be "finance" so much as "helping people" in various forms. Whether that passion is sincere or not is a separate argument.

Personally, that sort of incentive one of the major motivators that's missing from the pure software industry imo. When I worked in derivatives trading as a programmer, I made a good chunk of change finishing projects early, with high quality, etc. At my current position, there's no such obvious incentive. Promotions and solid bonuses could require years of this type of work as a prerequisite and may not even be recognized at all.

To add on a bit, I frequently have packages delivered (edit: by Amazon delivery) to the wrong apartment or building entirely. I'm thankful my community now is friendly and it just takes a day or so for me to track down who ended up with my package (using the delivery picture and trying to match it with someone's doorstep). I've lived in several places where those items would have disappeared forever.

I think the 'way too plugged-in to email' is what bugs me. I'm the recipient of _hundreds_ of PM emails a day. As an engineer it's easy to see this as lots of talking and little doing. But you're right, it's probably a result of not being able to have more tangible results.

Hmm. I can't get into detail. But we use it for things that are mostly 'experimental' for the customer. Let's take the all-to-common TODO MVC app and say I add a caching layer between the app and the database. I would likely add a feature flag to enable or disable retrieving or storing results in the new caching layer. Or, I add a new button that lets the customer multi-select TODO tasks, that would have a feature switch, etc. The reason for this is that it lets us enable these features for customers who either insist on having them or are excited to try new features without exposing the entire customer base to the risk of these features.

The big problem with this is: you end up having 'if(feature)' type statements _everywhere_ for each of those experimental buttons or extra components or whatever. It creates considerable debt that the team has to be accountable for cleaning up as those features start to stabilize.

Probably because the salary is comparable to dev, but with potentially a fraction of the work.

I still don't fully understand the PM role here at MSFT. At previous companies I was at, the nearest equivalent of a PM was involved closely with engineering to organize projects, discuss features, etc. Here, they're just in meetings all day and emailing each other rhetorical questions. Having attended many of those meetings, the value-add seems trivial to me.

Maybe their job is actually really demanding and I'm just way off the mark though. It also likely varies from team to team.

The project I work on at Microsoft uses feature flags. I see it with many Azure services as well. I can testify that it is absolutely if-statement hell, at least in the areas that rely on these feature flags. However, I will say I think 'lazy programming' is more the issue than the flags themselves. For example, isolating feature specific behavior to it's own impl and using an abstract class to share common behavior--that sort of basic stuff gets skipped in favor of 'time'.

Thankfully these are all obscured from the user for the most part.

We have a 'control panel' like thing that we used to enable/disable feature switches. It works well for its use case and let's us enable/disable with as much granularity as we want.

In my experience, pretty positive. I see Macs around campus frequently. In my team, people mostly use Windows, so there's definitely no alienation there. However, when people notice I mostly use Linux, I usually receive a chuckle for not using Windows--either out of irony or since we are highly encouraged to dogfood everything here. But that's usually the last I hear of it, so I don't think anyone sees anything wrong with it.

I'm in a similar predicament to OP. I prefer Linux in most cases, it's what I'm used to. But I need or would vastly prefer one or the other depending on what I'm doing. A VM is fine for just checking outlook..or using Skype for chat and things like that. But the second I need to use an IDE for Windows development, it's too slow to bear. Having better interchangeability between these two would make my life significantly better. Whether that be a stronger Linux subsystem for Windows, or a Windows subsystem for Linux.

Of course, I work at Microsoft. That being said, many devs I see are open to or enjoy using Linux--myself included. I think, and hope, we'll see continued growth in support for it. Though, I have little to no influence over such things.

Correct. The project I work on at MS is 3 repos all by itself.

Definitely depends on the group, but I think mostly just whatever building you happen to be in. The building I'm in is newly remodeled. Meaning entirely open-office.

In my opinion, my building/group/whatever does it wrong by jamming so many bodies in the same room together. There's 26 desks here in a room that looks as though it could comfortable fit about half that many. I've since adopted big sound-proof headphones and a wall of monitors that eliminate most distractions. But the biggest annoyance to me is that there's constantly a line for the bathrooms. Too many people for what the building was originally designed for, I think. Assuming we better limited the room capacity, I could likely tolerate this just fine.