noisenotsignal

Sorry, I didn’t remember the start of the thread by the time I got here. But in later comments you said “in addition, if you are 400k+ you'd probably enjoy the privilege of skipping the interview and even having a position opened for you” and “or you are in the > 400k camp where you don't have to worry about job availability”, both of which I disagree with and provided counter examples for. So, one being in the 400k+ camp does not make it any easier to find an equally well-paying job, hence toleration for being treated like a child.

>400k and fully remote is still not easy. Most of the obvious high payers in big tech (e.g. Meta) have required days in the office, and I can think of very few high-paying companies that don’t have N days RTO at all levels (literally only Netflix off the top of my head).

It is also not the case that such people get in without interviews. Senior+ (though largely staff+) is generally when you can make 400k and there are definitely still grueling interview loops at those levels.

Sorry, I meant replay really broadly because I could not come up with a better term in the moment. For example, a password can be leaked in many ways (guessed, by a breach if the website has poor password storage, etc) and be “replayed”, as in the attacker just enters the password themselves. A code does not have that problem because it is temporal.

That’s the trade off being made for convenience. It’s still somewhat multifactor though (I’ve seen people call it 1.5FA); authentication codes have the benefit of being resilient to replay. So, you’re not pwned even if someone steals your password somehow.

Even if someone steals your phone, you should have a passcode. If they know or guess your passcode, well… someone could steal your house/car keys too, and we still carry them around anyway :)

My university had lecturers that were precisely this (masters in CS, focused on teaching intro undergrad courses).

However, I think there is still a lot of benefit from having researchers teach upper level courses. Firsthand experience in research brings an additional dimension that can be appreciated by students who are beyond the introductory level.

There are also tenured professors who are good at both research and teaching!

4 engineers for an entire phone company sounds scary. I’m sure your engineering is robust enough such that outages are minimal, but that still sounds like a lot of on call (rotation of 4 = once a month?). Even if you only get paged once every few months, you still need to worry about getting paged until your shift is over! Even if you don’t worry in the psychological sense, you still have to schedule around it.

Years of study are definitely not required to get up and running! I attended a 3 day workshop for TLA+ and spent ~2 weeks modeling a new project that my team was working on. I found lots of potential edge cases that would result in data inconsistencies without even having to write tests or think about how to articulate the issue in the first place, as the model checker is able to output the exact program flow that results in the error.

You still need to make sure your implementation matches the spec, but that’s an easier task than squashing concurrency bugs, let alone figuring out how to repro in the first place! The hope is that by writing the spec you avoid a good chunk of errors from the start instead of encountering them one by one.

Ok, I’m sorry for not enumerating all possible itemized deductions when we’re talking about charity specifically.

However, charity is probably the most well-known deduction that you can control (in contrast to stuff like state taxes, which are more or less predetermined). And even among the deductions you control, those deductions require some spending. Can a non-rich person really spend enough to itemize beyond the standardized deduction? If you know how, please let me know because I’ve never gotten close to the standard by itemizing! Even when I’ve had large purchases to compute sales tax for I’m still far away.

Otherwise, it’s pretty clear that, generally speaking, charitable donations aren’t helpful for reducing one’s taxes. I’m sure people donate because they want to, but the tax benefits are not part of the calculus.

You can’t deduct charitable donations unless you don’t take the standard deduction. Instead, you must itemize your deductions. In practice this means you take the standard deduction because most people don’t total more than the standard deduction when they itemize (you have to be decently rich to afford to donate that much!).

Last year you could deduct up to $300 in donations on top of the standard deduction, but I didn’t see it this year.

Right, and further not being perfectly financially rational is quite fine! Finances aren’t the only factor in any decision, nor do they need to be the primary factor.

This seems a bit extreme. If you can afford to move, does interest rate really factor in? If rates get worse you’ve still locked a better rate, if rates get better you refinance. Besides, there’s plenty of reasons to move besides for a job (and not everyone can work remotely or get a remote job with comparable compensation).

Yeah, you’re going to pay some more interest if you get a new mortgage, but don’t you just adjust your monthly finances and eat it? As long as you can hit your long-term financial goals, the “once in a generation” rate doesn’t seem so important.

It makes sense why someone who is good at LC via pattern recognition might not be as good at competitive programming. However, it’s not clear why the reverse would be true. Surely someone good at solving unencountered algorithmic problems would be good at LC?

Are those “with a track record of making a difference” also ok with interview tests, white boards, and/or take homes? I don’t know if viewing excessive tests with disdain is a characteristic solely exhibited by ex top tech; I feel like that’s a universal sentiment among top talent regardless of their background. Not wanting to be burdened with unnecessary burden is a good thing!!

I also don’t think people generally have a problem with interviews. You have to be assessed somehow, obviously, and people at top companies still get interviewed when jumping to other top companies. I’ve really only seen serious complaints (that is, beyond mild grumbling) when interviewing is a huge time sink for a specific company, especially when that company’s compensation is lower and/or the communication process is poor (e.g. ghosting).

Why in the world would anyone interview with you if your company offers less than top tech for equal or harder interviews? (Spinning your rhetoric back at you for added effect. I don’t know what your hiring is like.)

This isn’t necessarily a useful anecdote though. If your previous payment processors weren’t using a bank that failed during that time, then you getting paid on time isn’t a sign of redundancy; they were just fortunate!

It might be fair to say that Rippling failed by choosing the wrong bank, but that’s a very different argument than saying that Rippling didn’t have a good backup plan. If all you’re going by is that you’ve always gotten paid (vs say knowing who your payment processor banked with and what their Plan B in case of bank failure was), for all you know your previous payment processor had no backup plan either!

Can we assume that Facebook did a good job onboarding remotely? I guess maybe the argument is that given poor onboarding, in-person is better than remote, and going back to in-person saves having to invest in better onboarding. But that’s just an argument that the status quo is easier - of course it’s easier to keep doing what you’re used to, and of course traditional onboarding is geared towards in-person! And that’s quite unfortunate because you do have companies onboarding remotely quite successfully so there’s possibly nothing inherent to remote onboarding that makes it strictly worse.

There’s also relocating across machines. For example, maybe your build environment has access to internal registries but your release environment does not. I naively thought you could build your venv and just copy to the new machine (both environments were Ubuntu) but ran into errors (due to links breaking). We also used pex for a bit, which is kind of like building a binary of a venv, and that eventually stopped working too when the C ABI was no longer the same between environments. There didn’t seem to be an easy way to pick the ABI version to target when creating the pex file, so I gave up and just downloaded the wheels for internal packages in the build.

I guess your system works, but I hope you’d agree it’s quite the hassle! It also seems you’d be ok with paying fees for pure money storage, though hopefully you can see why the average person would hate such a setup.

I think from your POV that banks are horrible, thinking that even depositors should lose their money is in fact a defensible argument. So I concede that your view is one I can respect despite disagreeing.

But in my view, banks are a useful fiction because of the utility they provide (specifically easy storage of and convenient access to money). Even if a person can buy property to reduce bank risk (again, a super inconvenient workaround!), I’m not sure I want _businesses_ to be doing so, especially in light of the likely resulting impact on property values. I acknowledge a system relying on banks indeed has risks, but to me that’s a stronger argument for better regulations and protections to mitigate the risks than it is an argument to dissolve the system and lose its benefits.

I understand the mechanism that occurs in reality, but also in practice the average person puts money in the bank primarily for storage. If you ask someone why they have a bank account, odds are the answer is not “to make money”. They do it because it’s commonly held financial advice that this is better than putting cash in a box under their mattress (not just for returns, but for safety and ease of access). It is not fair to lump these people in with shareholders, in terms of profit expectation, and say they have just as little right to their money back.

But perhaps this is a learning opportunity for me. I’m sure you have a stash of money somewhere for paying bills; obviously you need relatively quick access to this stash. You probably also have a larger stash as an emergency fund, which doesn’t need to be as immediately accessible but still needs relatively quick access (so a CD won’t cut it). Where are you putting these stashes? (I guess your personal stashes might be small enough to be FDIC insured, so maybe pretend to be a small startup with a couple millions in cash.)

And regarding your point on banks hating to sit on money - they have to make money somehow as they have bills to pay. They can either charge a fee to hold your money or try to make money off deposits. The latter is obviously riskier, but the former is on average worse for consumers (they lose money by having money..?). If you would rather not pay money to have someone hold it for you, fractional reserves are a necessary construct.

Edit: > Looks like we live in such a world already

Not if the FDIC successfully makes everyone whole without spending taxpayer money! Which, again, seems like a positive outcome no one should be rooting against.

Depositors don’t put money in a bank expecting profits!! Yes they might get interest, but the main goal is safe storage of easily accessible money. Where exactly do you expect people to put money if not a bank?! And do you really expect, and want to live in a world where there is such an expectation (due to unreliable financial institutions), the average startup founder to spend time hedging bank risk?

Not to mention that depositors can get their money back without taxpayer money being used. That’s the whole point of the FDIC stepping in. SVB’s assets have value and can be used to give money back; if another bank buys SVB, odds are depositors will get the vast majority of their money back. It’s not a bailout if the government is not spending money and I don’t know why even a positive, non-bailout outcome seems to be viewed unfavorably.

Any reason why you would use jq over Python? Certainly this can be attributed to my lack of knowledge in jq, but anything beyond a simple query is going to be done with Python for me. Beyond not having to look up query syntax, doing it in Python (or any script) is easier to read (both during and after writing it) due to auto formatting in an editor.

Agreed, when I commented earlier I was also thinking about mentioning something similar with regards to classes of bugs due to interactions between systems.

Unless you have a setup where you can easily run one system with a debugger attached while connecting it to everything else, you’re basically restricted to running a debugger for bugs that can be reproduced locally.

I think it’s dependent on the person learning the material. My college had a similar course and it was also highly regarded as useful by students. However, while I found the course fun I already knew most of the basics from my research job, and the advanced stuff hasn’t really come up again even in work (e.g. fancy git or gdb commands), so I’ve entirely forgotten it; my biggest takeaway is probably ctrl r for searching in shell. But I can see why a guided intro would be really helpful to someone who had no experience or some trouble getting started learning this kind of material (which is very different from programming or computer science).

There’s probably an aptitude threshold past which the course’s value diminishes - don’t mean any disrespect to anyone, just trying to expand on your point. The top students either have already figured it out or will do so easily, so they might be better off doing something else with the time they would’ve invested in this. But for a lot of students learning about these tools and concepts can be a real force multiplier, more so than a random upper level course.

You don’t need breakpoints all the time though. If you’re familiar with the code (or just “talented”), you might have an intuition for what the problem is and it’s faster to just think through it (and maybe write a few quick prints) instead of interrupting your train of thought setting breakpoints, clicking continue, waiting for the IDE to freaking load the debugging session (cough Visual Studio), rerunning the test, etc.

Besides, every IDE has a different way to debug, so they might just not be familiar with the interface. I can’t tell you exactly how to debug in VSCode even though I’ve used it the most. I’ve had to run a debugger only a handful of times in the past couple of years and it’s always for codebases that are more tangled (e.g. .NET where there’s interfaces everywhere).

Broadcast-type announcements can be a little weird to announce in a group chat though. A very basic example, but let’s say you’re in a group chat mainly for gaming together. Are you going to be the first to make a big personal announcement, like “I just bought a house”? You could, but it almost feels weird in that you’re specifically putting the spotlight on yourself and also soliciting direct responses (some of which might just be a token “congrats!”). Whereas if you post a similar announcement on Facebook, Instagram Stories, etc, nobody feels compelled to respond unless they really want to.

You could say “if you don’t think people care, only tell your close family and friends”. But broadcast announcements can cause more spontaneous reactions from people, and I often find myself reconnecting, even if only in a short conversation, with people I don’t generally talk to otherwise. It’s a better way for staying connected with old friends, who you might not have reason to talk to frequently (e.g. via group chat), but would happily spend a day catching up with if you were in the same city.

I mean, sure it worked before Facebook, but having grown up using Facebook, it feels much more natural to use social media than a Christmas card, email list, or whatever! Besides, those alternatives still feel intimate - you made an effort to reach out - and now you have to consider whether the other person wants that level of intimacy, will feel obligated to respond, etc.

The value that Facebook brought is now people can _choose_ to respond to you, and you can also silently see what others are up to without needing to explicitly catch up. It’s kind of like bumping into someone you know in public, and the resulting interaction (e.g. comment or DM from seeing the update post) feels much more organic as well.

There’s ID.me [0], which the IRS uses. They seem to be geared towards government services but I’ve always thought a natural extension is auth for other sites.

[0] - https://www.id.me/

If you are in multiple group chats and have something to say (e.g. a life update), do you post in each individually? Or do you pick and choose which groups get the update? If your groups overlap, now some people get the same update twice - are they supposed to react in both?

Group chats are intimate by design and don’t seem like a good fit for “broadcast” style updates like “I bought a house”, “moved to CA”, etc. That’s the value in the Facebook feed of old. Something like that also helps you stay connected with more distant friends/acquaintances, people you might not talk to daily but you would still be happy to see how they are doing in life.

You should not be taking over the keyboard!! If you are typing, they are not learning, they are spectating.

If there’s something that’s just annoying and not super relevant, like a command they don’t know, you can paste it in the chat. In the absolute worst case (I’ve done this ONCE in 3 years), I’ve used VSCode Live Share [0]. I’m sure you can probably use GitHub Codespaces too now.

[0] - https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share

As long as you have shared hours for collaboration, this still seems achievable. The “standing over a chair thing” is just a ping, call, and screenshare away.

I’ve been both a new grad and mentor to interns and entry/mid level hires all throughout the remote era. On one hand, a junior can learn equally well by being proactive about asking for help or getting mentorship. On the other hand, experienced engineers can be more proactive about checking the status of their mentees. We don’t get to physically see others get frustrated or stuck, but good communication ensures that we can detect when people are stuck almost as well as when in person.

An interesting side effect - when we do get lunch in person, we don’t have to talk about work! By then they’re already unblocked :)

This is cool to see! I’ve been working on a website for online ordering, and a key requirement is free hosting [0]. After some searching I figured fly.io + SQLite would be enough for my use case but I can’t be 100% sure until I actually deploy, which I haven’t yet. It’s nice to know someone else has done it this way successfully!

[0] - It’s for a small business not in the US with no serious requirements on availability etc so free, or close to it, seems achievable.