opportune

Sure, but it has plenty of other desirable outcomes (some of which are more for your employer than you):

1. There is a risk that the stock loses value but stocks generally have positive EV.

2. Since stocks vest over time there is some intrinsic value in being able to simply walk away if the stock crashes (dropping your comp going forward) but being able to stay if the stock surged (greatly increasing your comp compared to your market rate). It’s kind of like having a long-dated option.

3. It generally takes months to a couple years for stocks to change in value enough for it to put you over market rate. It takes similar amounts of time for you to fully ramp up and start adding value to the company. Generally you tend to get into golden handcuff range right around the time you start settling in. Getting paid above-market in a role where you’re doing well is great.

4. You may not have enough influence to really move the stock up but you often do have enough influence to move it down (like being sloppy or doing something destructive like leaking).

5. From the employer perspective, aligning your financial interests with the board/founders/investors/execs probably means you’re unlikely to try to unionize or get angry at the company when it gives you only a 5% salary bump in a year where the stock increased 100%. Generally speaking the worker:exec relationship is less combative since there’s less of a conflict of interests. As an employee there are nice aspects of this, like the whole company having a more collegiate or team-like atmosphere.

They are relatively rare in big tech, and the culture of being nominally “anti MBA” is pretty aggressive in big tech, but there are a lot of them still there. I think there is some bias to not notice them because usually middle and upper management at big tech are the movers and shakers of 20 years ago during dotcom and such when the companies were growing rapidly and SV was a lot less corporate. And if you’re a peon, you probably don’t interact with management much beyond your director, which IMO tends to be a soft ceiling for advancement for technical non-mba types these days.

It’s pretty common ATM for product managers to not have direct programming or software backgrounds and instead have a career like “MBB consultant -> MBA -> product manager”. Big tech companies also insource a lot of “strategy consulting” which are MBA types. And marketing/biz dev have plenty of MBAs too.

While someone like a “director of engineering” probably doesn’t have an MBA, there’s a good chance their boss does (especially since these days VPs seem to mostly be former product managers rather than former software engineers).

By the way, Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Andrew Jassy, and Cheryl Sandberg all have American MBAs.

I have a more pessimistic take on this KPI stuff.

You absolutely can get great outcomes without putting KPIs or metrics on a pedestal. And for sure, metrics should work for the employees; employees shouldn’t work for the metrics.

The problem is that this kind of falls apart in large organizations because, from the perspective of CEOs, execs, and upper management, leaving wiggle room requires placing a high degree of trust in line teams or unscaleable micromanagement. And you can argue that the high degree of trust should be given, but bluntly, unless your employees are very well coordinated and your management team is really on top of their game, a lot of teams will flounder without clear goals.

Now as an IC that sounds like bullshit, but let me ask you: have you ever seen a team that seems like they basically didn’t do anything? What did that team have in commmon? Usually it’s at least two of 1. a lack of clear goals 2. low to average levels of motivation and personal ownership 3. low to average levels of skill. If you’re on this website discussing software and KPIs in your free time you’re probably above average in motivation and skill. But I’m sure you know that without clear goals, people just working to put food on the table tend not to have the business interest and drive to create actually-valuable work.

If you can keep your business small enough that pockets of low-productivity can’t fly under the radar, or somehow hire only motivated, skilled people that stay motivated and skilled years after they’re hired, you probably do need thing like KPIs to hold teams accountable. Not your team necessarily, but if say 10-20% of teams will flounder without KPIs, it’s probably just good policy to have it, even when it annoys the other 80% of teams, as long as you don’t add pathological processes around the KPIs.

I wish more engineers thought this way. As someone who works in infrastructure it’s the story I tell myself to justify/rationalize my place in the world. When I ship big infrastructure performance improvements it’s not about the speed or money saved per se, it’s less CO2 in the atmosphere and more human life (amortized over millions of people) spent on something other than waiting for a computer to respond.

We aren’t doctors saving individuals’ lives but what we can do is give people fractions of their lives back. Some software is used by hundreds of millions or billions of people, so small changes there can save many “lives” worth of time.

Not only that, but there was trade and migrations across the Bering straight before Columbus too, as evidenced by the spread of the Yupik people/Paleo-Eskimos.

Indonesia (Makassar) also traded with aboriginal Australians but this started in earnest in the 1700s. Still, it’s reasonable to conclude the entire earth was tenuously connected (technologically and historically if not actively) already even in the 1400s aside from some very isolated islands.

Very cool, I have an abandoned web game side project and may try to run it on this!

One question, am I correct in understanding you bake in the assumption that 1 lobby = 1 container? I can see how that’d be desirable for the nice properties it gives you architecturally but if your game isn’t very demanding (mine’s turn based) might that end up stranding a lot of resources?

Modern designers would think it’s terrible because it gives you too much information, and suggest putting in way more white space, hiding things under menu bars. I wish I was being facetious but sadly it’s a sincere statement.

Completely agree though. Information-heavy pages for desktop consumption were wonderful. It truly feels like we’ve regressed. Just loading that gamespot link honestly filled me with an immense nostalgia for the web of 10-15 years ago

suppose NP-complete problem X is in NP but not P. From this premise I arrive at a contradiction and conclude X is in P. Thus P=NP with no polynomial algorithm for solving any NP-complete problem provided

Can you explain your comment? NP-completeness to my understanding simply means that there exists a polynomial time reduction to SAT. How can SAT constructively get a P algorithm implementation merely from proving that an NP-complete problem has a solution in P without the algorithm itself?

I don’t want to accuse you of being incorrect if you’re alluding to something I’m ignorant of, but since it’s certainly possible in my mind that an NP-complete problem could be non-constructively proven to be in P, what you wrote doesn’t sound right.

I agree. I think it’s just laziness or being asked to square a circle. During the post-9/11 period there was immense political will and pressure to stop terrorism, and it’s really fucking hard to stop that while abiding by the constitution, so they chose to break the constitution to stop terrorism.

Is it theoretically possible to stop terrorism/catch and guys to the same extent without breaking the constitution? I think so, but it would probably require a lot more boots on the ground, and a lot of creativity and smart thinking from individuals to be able to get as good outcomes as you’d get from just looking at data when you aren’t supposed to.

I think what makes the topic complicated is that the high vs low context dichotomy is actually split across multiple dimensions rather than being an overarching single dimension.

For example, in educated coastal-liberal California asking for favors or for hospitality (eg can I get a glass of water) is low context but certain topics like religion or most politically controversial things are generally off limits. Conversely in the South, hospitality has a decent number of high context expectations, but religion or political discussion are more acceptable for discussion. And of course every culture has common cultural/historical references that are implicitly known and sometimes implicitly referenced without explicitly making the reference or expanding on all the details.

That’s why I think a lot of cultures see themselves as low context compared to others, except perhaps the most pathologically high context ones (Japan), because we all have blind spots about where we’re actually high context.

I don’t know about neither, but I think there are people who are “both” like expats or people who emigrated from China at an age (say 20+) at which they could have credibly fully understood what it’s like to live there. You could also include people like ABCs with strong familial ties to China although I think those are more firmly outsiders.

In any case it’s rare for either of these groups to be fully candid with non-Chinese, or at least bold enough about it to broadcast is via eg news media, anyway because of the cultural taboo on discussing politics and risk of negatively affecting relatives back in China.

Mm, not necessarily all work contexts IMO, I just think it’s particularly helpful in software because software itself is highly semantic and software teams tend to not all come from the same exact background.

If you were doing something like sales, where both all your salesmen and clients were locals with the same social expectations on how to communicate implicitly, there wouldn’t be any direct benefits to trying to communicate explicitly, and doing so may come across as rude or offensive.

Asking isn’t necessarily transactional.

If I go to your house and ask for a glass of water, it’s because I’m thirsty and I know it’s NBD for you to get a glass and put water in it. I’m not expecting to give or get anything else in return, nor am I trying to be rude by insinuating you should have given me a glass of water. The thought process goes:

1. I am thirsty.

2. I don’t think it’s rude to ask for water since it’s effectively free and only requires you to have a clean glass to serve it in.

3. I ask for water.

Community and trust is all well and good, but most of my social circle are transplants from all over the country/world which all have different social mores. There is no common or universal social dance about how to behave when you want something from someone else or how you should be polite when you go hang out with someone in this kind of setting. And if someone does try to fit their specific background culture into such a setting in a way that makes it so they’re offended when I ask for water or a favor, it’s on them.

That’s not say I think Asking is “superior” but just that it’s not transactional so much as it is pragmatic (but potentially impolite) especially in certain situations, like socialization within a highly diverse-background group.

The problem is that the pro-China position almost always comes either from an outsider (who isn’t really credible) or an insider (who is scared of giving even meek criticism or caveated opinions).

There are not really insiders willing to offer those nuanced opinions. Instead it’s up to the rest of the world to figure out what’s true and what’s not, what’s omitted, how to reconcile the two differing opinions, but without the context.

And I don’t agree that the same applies to the USSR in the modern era. I thought it was common knowledge that in post-soviet countries a lot of especially older folks held mixed opinions on the USSR (liking the safety net and sense of personal security, hating the shortages and queues, liking the international prominence, hating the corruption, etc).

From someone who’s seen how the sausage gets made, I both agree and disagree.

A lot of Google’s practices really are good software engineering practices - provided you have the money to invest in replicating it to a high degree of quality, which could be substantial and better spent elsewhere. When you have one of the most lucrative business models of all time you definitely have the money to invest in trying to make it as stable to maintain and easy to add value onto as possible, so it was definitely worth it for Google in many cases, but each other company will have to determine the costs vs benefits themselves.

Replicating Blaze and Forge seems really expensive and hard to get right (though it can be tremendously valuable for development on a large codebase). Postmortems, containerization, servers-as-cattle, gradual non-global releases… those aren’t as expensive to set up and have great cost/benefit ratios. It’d be stupid to not do these just because Google does them (and in some cases invented or popularized the practice).

Some teams in Cloud suck but the core engineering teams have some top talent and solve some very hard problems. Keep in mind Borg and Spanner are both “cloud”, but so are many field sales teams with an average tenure <2y

The “policies don’t scale well” section is inaccurate.

There are plenty of policies floating around that don’t scale well, and plenty of migrations that are still forced on internal users rather than handled magically by the migrating team. The reality is that Google is such a big company most of these fly under the radar of whichever person actually enforces these policies, and it becomes a whole thing to escalate up to whoever enforced them, and then there’s potentially a political battle between whatever director or VP is in charge of the bad actors and the enforcer (ideally they get away with not allocating HC to the internal migration and amortize it across all their users, so that HC can work on flashier stuff).

I think one reason Google has a proliferation of bureaucracy and red tape is that they do not “review” postmortem action items very formally. They are only reviewed as part of the larger incident postmortem review process and the tooling is way overengineered such that performing that review beyond a perfunctory once over isn’t easy to do. So you end up in a situation where “we need to do something” and whichever person handled the incident has to suggest a way to make sure it doesn’t happen again - the easiest of which is to introduce some CYA process. The other reason is that non-coding EMs introduce processes to show some kind of impact on their team.

Also, the existence of the monorepo, global test runs, forced migrations, etc makes it so maintaining a mothballed project incurs some inherent engineering costs - IMO it’s a non-negligible reason Google kills products that could instead simply exist without changes. It also makes it so Google doesn’t really “version” software generally speaking.

I kind of disagree in the sense that readability indirectly forces someone who has been at Google for a while/ is more experienced to have to sign off on new people’s code. Without it, you could have some very junior members with OWNERS reviewing other very junior members’ code.

And there is more to style than just linting, IMO. For example in C++ there are some complex macro-based test predicates that are hard to learn and use but which greatly simplify/improve on naive testing. Part of the point of C++ readability is that people who understand this stuff teach new people how to use them, or at least introduce them to concept, during code review

Tell me exactly how these companies are destroying the earth. Snark isn’t an argument

My point isn’t even about shareholder value. Both consumers and very many employees have benefitted from these companies’ existence.

Those companies have generated hundreds of thousands of extremely high paying jobs because hundreds of millions of consumers/many businesses chose to give them money.

Unless you live in a tunnel, who cares? If you’re hosting a basic portfolio and personal site you don’t even need 2 9’s of reliability

Micropayments aren’t more of a thing already for a reason. There is friction and overhead with signing up for a 3P subscription service even if the actual dollar cost is negligible.

I think the type of young professional that lives in NYC mostly would prefer SF over a 3rd place, ignoring costs, or at least enough of them would that SF would get a leg up in attracting talent.

I also don’t mind tech all the time, and I also see it as competition among cities for young talent.

I guess my line of thinking is that young professionals will eventually find SF trendy again once NYC becomes passé for being too expensive, overhyped, attracting too many of the charlatans and clout chasers. People love different parts of the country for many reasons but I think in aggregate SF is generally a number 2 choice after NYC for many young professionals if cost is not a (big) factor. Which is why I think if the trend continues and NYC gets more and more expensive vs SF, 23 year olds will start picking SF over NYC

I don’t think you can ever really learn from what a person says helped them do X. You have to look at the person themselves and try to figure out what about them made X happen - people have too much of a blind spot comparing themselves to the world outside their bubble, or understanding how other people perceive them. They lack the perspective to really know what about them is different

For example most successful founders and CEOs in my experience may say taking meeting notes or setting a high bar helps. But really what helped is that they had personality traits leading to these behaviors which are what truly drove the benefits - they are meticulous and detail oriented so they want to use writing to nail down ideas, they set high standards for themselves and others so they do whatever it takes to avoid a bad hire or lazy decision. It would be considered impolite for the CEO to say that about themselves, and maybe they don’t even notice how much of an outlier they are in those traits, so instead you get told the effect rather than the cause of their success. Someone without those traits trying to ape out the processes won’t be able to realize the benefits.

Similarly I think to a degree the whole “be connected or privileged from birth” is meant to be taken implicitly rather than ignored altogether, sometimes. Nobody wants to launch into a discussion about social class or inequality in some PR puff piece that’s like “oh mr startup ceo why are you so rich and successful”. Like in tennis nobody is going to say the secret to success is to have tiger parents and access to facilities and training from a young age that 99% of people can’t afford. When people say “leverage your connections” they’re kind of saying Joe Average without connections is out of the game until they build those connections, but politely.

I think it’s not that people with prodigious abilities don’t want to attribute that to their success so much as mentioning that as a factor comes across as very narcissistic and unlikeable (even if it’s true) unless you are literally an Einstein/Von Neumann type. For example, even Terry Tao has enough humility to self censor himself not to attribute his success to being a far-outlier-genius.

In fact I’d bet a lot more people think to themselves that they are only successful because they are a genius than there are geniuses. Because it’s even more likely that coming from a highly rich or well connected family is truly the key factor in their success, and people would would much rather attribute success to talent or intelligence than daddy.

It is definitely true though that prodigious talent isn’t by itself sufficient to be successful. Also, intelligence helping you is kind of a given - it’d be like an NBA player saying “being 6’8” really helps”. There are a lot of really tall people not in the NBA and a lot of prodigiously talented people who aren’t conventionally “successful” either.

SF residential rents have stayed relatively flat vs NYC and it’s frankly a place many people prefer to live in over other major corporate nexuses like Chicago and Seattle. Eventually the pendulum will swing the other direction and SF will be the hip and hot place to be vs NYC. Of course both have been popular for early career/recent college grads for a long time, but anecdotally NYC has “just” began to attract more 20s people away from the Bay Area since 2020, and it’s getting expensive.

Once the cost of living difference between SF and NYC becomes large and well known enough, companies will start hiring more, or choose to start, in SF vs the current trend of picking NYC because talent will begin to prefer it.

The biggest issue I see with per-100g is it can allow trans fats to fly under the radar by including slightly less than 0.5g per 100g. If the true portion size is 300g then it’s much harder to hide trans fats

If incumbents are delivering a terrible product because they’re chasing 4 commas I will happily settle for 3 commas to provide a basic “shopping but on the internet” experience people actually want to use.