leothekim

“The members of Away’s board say they feel as if they fell victim to management by Twitter mob.”

This statement speaks volumes about the efficacy of board governance.

‘Compounding success (which means “growth” in the case of an early-stage start-up) solves almost all internal problems, particularly hard ones.’

I’d say that growth can compel you to ignore internal (and external) problems more than solve them. You don’t develop the right culture that can stand up to adversity or attract the right talent, your growth (and success) isn’t sustainable.

Try "The Manager's Path" by Camille Fournier.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920056843.do

When I toyed with the idea of getting a PhD, I spoke to a professor at a CS conference about what it's like to be on a conference committee. One of the first things he said was "Well if my paper doesn't get in another professor's conference, there's no way that professor's papers are getting in _my_ conference." (Double-blind notwithstanding, the research topics in this particular conference had known investigators.)

As much as I enjoyed the toil and reward of seeking novel results, I decided at that point that I could enjoy computer science and work on interesting (possibly novel) things without having to be a part of academia and the petty politics that drive a lot of it.

It really depends on what you define as "interesting" and what you want to get out of your investment in time and energy towards your studies. In a lot of ways, there's no better time to be alive as a software engineer than now. You can apply those skills in such a wide variety of industries (multitudes of AI applications, VR, health care, transportation, etc), many of which are getting new or increased investment from VCs. You may not work on something specifically interesting, but your contribution to a larger goal or mission can be greatly satisfying. I'd say pick an industry where you can have even a small impact as an engineer, or a company where you may have exposure to many areas and drill down into things that interest you.

This. Even running your own IRC, while not "hard", is a PITA enough that companies will shell out a chunk of change to have someone else do it for them. And, they may even get better features as a result.

Empire BlueCross/BlueShield's site is down. Not quite in the same category but sucks if I want to file claims.

https://www.empireblue.com/

"XYZ considered harmful" is the other one I see in various papers and online posts. Boy does that one get mileage.

https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

If only that were titled "'Considered Harmful': Considered Harmful".

Serious question - Why put off DeprecationWarnings to 3.9? If these modules are as dead as this PEP claims, then I'd wonder if Python scripts using such modules would be actively looking to transition to 3.x in the first place.

> The fact that software engineers are in a good position market-wise, doesn't mean you can say whatever you like to someone.

The fact that software engineers are in a good position market-wise is a position of leverage to ask questions to make an informed decision when taking the next step in their career.

Frankly, if a CEO found any questions like these arrogant or out of line, I'd personally wonder if I, as an engineer, could do my job effectively or believe in the company's success. But, to each their own!

Will you share slides from the last board meeting?

And remove `Optional.get()`.

The most succinct thing I've come up with is: "You're an influential engineer if an engineer magically becomes better just by sitting next to you."

> Job titles squash the peculiar strengths and differences into a label and make organizations treat people as fungible units of work.

I'd think having clear job titles and differentiation would have the opposite effect of treating people as fungible units of work. I'm sorta with you on job titles, but my experience is that they enable organizational clarity, and people tend to like to show this reflected on their resumes/CVs. I'm curious to hear more about your thoughts on this.

As an alternative to calling it "pretty weak reporting", perhaps viewing it as a list of brief summaries of what's happening in NZ related to the Christchurch shootings might make this web page more digestible.

Formal statement from the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/u...

I'd be happy to see carried interest tax reform first. Even Trump wanted that. But yeah, didn't happen.

One consideration for me to live in the NYC area is the general level of tolerance/acceptance of diversity. Certainly it isn't perfect here. But having grown up in the mid-west in an immigrant family, I have strong memories of being rejected by classmates and the local community (daily taunts, regularly being told to go back to my home country by kids and adults alike, people vandalizing my house, etc). I strongly believe this was a function of being in a community where people from foreign countries was uncommon, and back in the day in podunk mid-west, this was very uncommon.

Now that I have a family with (bi-racial) children, I would be super reluctant to consider a place where my own children would encounter that kind of hostility. Nashville I'm sure is great, and maybe I'd love living there, but I would personally think twice - for a reason that the author of this article didn't at all need to consider for himself.

Doesn't sound skin deep to me. Why do you think it sounds like that?

I used to be dislike the idea of being an engineering manager and wanted to stay in the code. Interestingly enough, having children completely changed my perspective on management. Some important management skills - e.g. patience, delegation (babysitters!), investing in someone's overall productivity and long-term success (Schools! Extracurriculars! College!), prioritization (family comes first!), sometimes cleaning up after someone else's messes (with kids, literally!) - come from being a parent.

I'm half joking, but only half! I believe part of being a good engineering manager is having had hands-on software development experience so as to better keep a check on velocity, code quality, and overall tech decision-making. Much in the same way, I feel like I can be a good parent and can teach my kids how to process their world because I've lived it before.

I don't see any stats showing a trend over time. This YouGov report indicates piracy is actually dropping in one country over the past 5 years (from 18% of Britons to 10% of Britons).

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2018/08/02/number-britons-illegall...

Yep. Doesn't mean there isn't a bench.

The security update was written by.. a VP of product management[1]. I would have thought they'd have a bigger bench for their security team.

[1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/

Definitely, great point. For Facebook + WhatsApp, I'd bet that this is a case of Mark having a giant ad revenue hammer, and everything else that's corralling eyeballs is inevitably going to be a nail.

Heh. The "shouldShowAlertForRequest" function is checking if a userInfo.message key equaling "Not authorized to view user". I would have expected something a little less dependent on a string isEqual check against an English phrase.

I can't help but go back to Mark Zuckerberg's letter when Facebook was preparing to IPO:

"... we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

"And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits." [1]

I mean, there was no way he was going to drop $22 billion dollars on something and not get a return. But I can't help but notice how the article depicts him as someone who is thinking more strategically, contractually, and businesslike (i.e. profit-driven) than someone who would write something like the quote above. Whatever he was then, he seems to have taken a step away from it and become... a CEO.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg%E2%80%99s-ipo-let...

Also, I gave a bad example for empty try catch. In this case, I would want a runtime exception thrown. Apologies for misleading the conversation.

Yes that's a bad example for an empty try catch, in that case one should throw a runtime exception. Apologies for the misleading example.

Nothing about checked exceptions inherently prevents the failure scenarios you list, particularly the one about the power failure.

My point exactly.

That's an entirely appropriate failure mode for my case. If my app can't find an important file, then it should fail immediately, alerts then go off, dashboards are bleeding, ops is getting paged, etc.