notTyler

They're running employee testimonial ads about how great it is to work at their warehouses on national broadcasts pretty regularly now. That's all I needed to know that it's going downhill faster rather than slower.

In the context of China's facial recognition capabilities, social credit score, and general ability to make people it doesn't like disappear, to me it's a lot more than just a face mask ban.

This isn't nearly as bad as the others here but recently our scrum master came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively over pointing stories because apparently it looks so bad to management if you don't complete something within it's estimate.

A week later I finished something early and was instructed to not bring anything else into the sprint because, you know, visibility is more important than actually being productive.

I get that deadlines and metrics are important. And I get that managers/mgmt will never see eye to eye with developers about how long stuff takes. But this is just sheer idiocy, encouraging doing the bare minimum and a culture of fear instead of rewarding good work. If I actually told the next up the chain about it, they'd absolutely sweep it under the rug.

So yeah I'm interviewing looking to go somewhere way, way smaller at this point.

It really feels like democracy is slowly dying all over the world.

This! I had an hour plus commute living outside of Beantown when I first got out of college. I just don't want to do that again.

Also one of my friends just bought for the first time and he indicated it's expensive as hell. As a single person I'm not sure I want to get into that type of financial commitment when I have a sneaking suspicion the economy's about to collapse.

The insurance companies are for profit corporations who pay politicians so they can keep taking your money when you're healthy and cutting you when you're not. The army is not, as far as I know, a for profit enterprise.

"Shutting down thinking." Reporting on transgressions and laws designed to hold parties accountable is designed to shut down thinking now, and how those who would be affected by it are literally trying to kill the bill is considered "shutting down thinking." This is literally what you just said.

I assume it looks bad if a candidate someone hires ends up being a terrible fit. This is basically how it goes everywhere else at larger companies. Visibility is more important than getting things done.

Like, I'm staffed at a company that isn't Arthur Anderson right now on an internal project and our SM/PO came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively overestimating tasks to make sure they got them in on time. If you finish early you get pushback on starting something else because it looks 'so bad' if work goes from one sprint to the next.

Slow work and hitting metrics > everything, I guess.

On the one hand, I believe it's definitively a good thing that these services will be allowing for creation of niche content. I have long believed that your broadcast networks / USA / TNT just straight up cannot make good content because their expectations viewers wise are so high they end up trying to please everyone and make really, really generic television.

So yeah. I like that. But what's the endgame? Is this high profile Battlestar reboot supposed to generate enough subscriptions to cover the cost or is it just getting people involved in the NBC / Peacock ecosystem? Like, this is the same company that routinely cancels (nearly) every good show on SyFy (where, you know, I would kind of expect a Battlestar reboot to actually be) because they aren't getting enough viewers.

Now that it's a streaming service and their collecting the money directly from the viewer rather than going through Comcast does it make that much of a difference?

1) They have perceived value, which for children who don't know any better, is really important. 2) In many cases you can cash out. Fortnite accounts with'valuable' or rare skins getting hacked and sold is a real thing. Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2 both have real actual economies where things that come out of loot boxes have listed values that someone will probably pay you for in REAL WORLD DOLLARS. 3) Gambling is gambling regardless of whether it fits into your worldview and these companies shouldn't be able to sidestep defined and enforced regulations that exist for a reason. That's the issue here.

Warframe is pretty guilty of the many resources trade off, and starting out the game you're basically forced to pay for more warframe slots because you don't really have good enough loot to grind the good loot that people will trade plat for. It's a strange design decision because one of the main draws is how fun/different the different frames and weapons are. I'm hopeful they will address that in the future new player experience rework because I believe they make the majority of their money from the primes and cosmetics.

They support the hell out of their game though. I just started playing again and there's so much new stuff to do.

I've always wondered if uber were to abandon their ongoing development efforts and focus on support and maintenance, would they would actually be profitable? It seems to me they would need a fraction of the tech workers they currently support.

I very much want this, but I very much don't want to buy an iPhone when my pixel 2 still works as well as the day I got it.

I certainly have sat in on interviews and think it's valuable experience for a senior, especially when you're looking to fill a particular gap on the team. I was more pointing out that this is a very generic comment around a very complex problem.

'Get involved with hiring for your team and company, and maintain a high bar for hiring quality candidates.'

Posts derailing this 'high bar' are posted semi-daily to Hacker News, no? It's a really big dilemma (extensive hiring process that weeds out good candidates due to time and frustration or take risks) and it makes it sound like it's just something, you can, you know, do on a Tuesday in your spare time, and then on Wednesday you can solve the architecture problem.

And that's pretty much this list summed up. It's nice on paper, and maybe it will make a difference if someone consults it when making tough decisions. Thanks for your effort.

This and the Uber 'proposal' coming on the same day! Does the 2019 corporate playbook say cover your ass because regulations are coming or something like that?

There are commercials and ads everywhere on how easy it is to get a mortgage from Rocket / Guaranteed Rate etc. Ever since that started happening I kind of assumed this was coming down the pipe.

I am a lifelong gamer and for about as long, my parents have hated it. I remember one time they made me read about Korean guys packed like rats in computer labs, chainsmoking cigarettes and farming gold / whatever you farm in WoW for 18 hours a day. They were paid next to nothing and largely used their spare time to also farm to make money on the side.

I wrote it off at the time because reasons but to think that society, parents, or getting a low score on a single test would all but force them into a position like that is mind boggling. This was over a decade ago too, I can only assume it's gotten worse for a lot of people.

I can't see anything like this happening in the US because of half the country being red states that would be appalled at the thought of not getting married and having kids.

I used to think they would follow the xanga / myspace train and be blown out of the water by something but that's not the case anymore. They have proven they can just buy any competitors or quickly copy their features, and "all my friends are on fb/insta/whatsapp" will keep the vast majority of the users entwined in one way or another. Regardless of usage metrics, if you only use their apps for social, that's a win in itself.

I mean, I'm not taking the blame away from him and this is a terrible look to be getting paid so much after a colossal screwup, but, in a company that size does the CEO really have any idea of the day to day or inner workings of the company? I worked at a much smaller company and it was pretty clear that they didn't.

The gif search is so bad too, for whatever reason.

Yeah, this was a big issue about a decade ago when police officers could sue someone for recording said officers doing something illegal in Massachusetts.

So they redacted that law then had to fast track an updated version of it a few years later when someone got arrested for taking upskirt photos and then it wasn't illegal. My cousin was an aide to a state lawmaker and had to explain to his boss what it meant at the time.

I very much believe the only reason smartphones aren't listening to us and recording us constantly is due to battery purposes. When you plug something in, yeah, I have no trouble believing they're recording everything and storing it somewhere.

I'm starting to think these huge valuations and buyout prices are basically ensuring this will happen. Is Corel really gonna generate a billion dollars in profit for this company when free cloud-based alternatives exist to almost all of it's products?

I can't speak for everyone but I haven't worked anywhere I thought top level management wasn't making wildly misinformed decisions out of desire to save money or (seemingly) straight-up misunderstanding of their business. A lot harder to be engaged when that's the case.

I am not a Senior. Not junior, not senior. I have been interviewing lately after my company staffed me as the only remote member of a team based in Argentina. (Live in the midwest USA, don't speak a lick of spanish).

I typically won't do programming challenges. I don't believe it's fair for the applicant, because if it becomes the industry norm then applying for 10 jobs means 10 separate programming challenges just for the opportunity to get an onsite. But, recently, during a phone interview with a shipping logistics company with a common first name in their name, I vibed with the lead I spoke to and decided I would give their hackerrank a go.

There was an interpolate json feed into an object question. There was a semi-complex array sorting / manipulation question. There was a javascript quirks question. There was a sql question that I probably would have solved using both code and sql rather than just sql. The solution I came up with was using a temp table, that hackerrank permissions did not allow. The array question, my (working) solution timed out because one of the tests used an array with several million units in it. There was no indication of a certain time this should run under. It took about five minutes after submitting to realize a way that probably wouldn't have timed out, but at the time I was happy with my solution given the whole test was timed and I had written six lines of code to solve this problem.

The final question of the test, after all of these and a few I won't go into, was to write an html form field that updated a list via javascript and had alternating CSS colors. I was so frustrated that they would throw in something so very menial and time consuming after the rest of the (timed!) test that I didn't even attempt it. (to be clear, basic javascript knowledge had already been demonstrated on the prior fizzbuzz).

I had really thought my answers would grant me an onsite, but it didn't. So yeah, back to not doing stupid timed tests.

This was a month ago. The position is still open and I expect it to be for the near future.

If anyone read this far, I have given some thought about my various interviews after some interesting ones recently (another recent time at a .net shop I was asked to demonstrate sorting a list so i did a toarray() then sort and they were like no, do it manually).

I'm probably going to put together a blog about my interviews over the years since I've had all sorts. I feel like as deep as retrospective as I can remember over my decade of interviewing might give me some insight as how I should be better.

Reminder that Facebook opened lower than this and was lower for years before they started growing. Granted, FB can, you know, make money.

It seems like all big companies have to do is create a press release saying reports of your illegal activities are false, then rely on lawyers, spokespeople, donated lawmakers and spin to face little to no consequences.

What are the odds that the US actually puts something like GDPR with the current campaign finance system as it currently is?

I used CK the past two years and started getting a ton of robocalls and credit card offers. Not to mention my college that never had my phone number previously started calling me on a weekly basis hounding me for donations.