quantumhobbit

I don’t like adding low content comments, but I have to say this whole series is great so far. Im about 50% through.

This is a weird answer. But it was probably the project that almost ruined my career.

I once started a project to add in A/B testing to a legacy platform that really wasn’t supportive of any such changes. The project was a technical success but a political disaster. The aftermath made it very clear that my manager was hoping I would fail so that he would have an excuse to manage me out. When it didn’t fail he became a lot more obvious in his attempts to get rid of me. I also suspect that some of the issues that happened during the project were setups, but I can’t prove it.

Why am I proud of that clusterfuck? Because it proves that I can still succeed even when powerful people dont want me too. The problems I had at that job were political and not due to a lack of ability on my part. I’m not saying that I am without fault in allowing my relationship with my manager to degrade to tgat point. But I gained a lot of confidence from delivering a working product despite adversity. That confidence led me to a much better job.

Completely agreed, but that isn’t what seems to happen in reality. Im not a hiring manager but what seems to happen is when presented with too many candidates, hiring managers redefine qualified to be more like themselves.

I think we have seen that an excess of qualified candidates, for some values of qualified, leads to problems with diversity in tech.

After all if you have enough candidates, you can choose to only hire clones if the founders. And completely miss out on the benefits of diverse experiences bringing out creativity.

Disposable Diapers are surprisingly high tech, or at least well engineered. See: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xYNX8y6lQMc

I hate the whole api copyright stuff, but part if me is hoping this leads to a decline in popularity of Java.

I don’t even hate Java that much I just hate the Java is the only “serious programming language” attitude so common in this industry.

How about, your task is to program a thermostat, but also keep the thermostat from mining bitcoins because an npm module you downloaded has been compromised.

There are pyopencl and pycuda. Not sure what the best tutorials would be though.

I don’t know that the people making the decisions care all that much. Even though programmers are expensive, most managers seem to prefer to hire a dozen programmers where far fewer would get the job done if given access to better tools. They look better leading a bigger team regardless of the teams output.

The incentive exists for the shareholders, but they are not the ones making hiring decisions and choosing tools for programmers to use.

Scott Meyers' Effective C++ books are really good for learning the "right way" to code C++. He has a good intro to c++11 and 14 too, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22800553-effective-moder...

Don't worry about not taking the time to properly learn C++ . It is a huge huge language and trying to learn it all at once from first principles will take you forever. Just try to do things in the most memory safe way possible.

I keep a notebook partially to help myself but also to protect myself James Comey style. It really comes in handy when non-coding managers ask what I do all day or when they try to gaslight me on my commitments.

And yes, I am looking for a new job.

Companies definitely try to inflate their rankings with fake or forced reviews. But these are usually pretty easy to spot. They are often short vague 5-star reviews.

Read longer reviews and judge for yourself. Don’t trust the star ratings.

He highlights the speculative nature of the theory quite frequently within the article. It would take pretty poor reading comprehension or deliberate misreading to conclude that he was presenting established scientific facts.

Lots of what we now consider symptoms were thought of as diseases until the underlying problem was better understood. It wasn’t that long ago that your fever example was how people thought. The fever was the disease regardless of the unknown underlying cause.

That depression is considered a disease by itself and not a symptom of many, possibly related, problems suggests how little we understand it.

Let’s not forget that it often makes sense to call in sick just to be able to complete work that requires concentration in a quiet environment.

Headphone jack. Escape key. MagSafe charger.

What's a good resource for learning about expert systems? I'm curious about this "dead end" but most of what I've found online has been about the ai winter and not the technical details of expert systems.

My two year old will not fall asleep without at least 1 sometimes 3 readings of "snuggle puppy".

I definitely recommend any of these books to parents of toddlers.

I'm in Richmond VA.

I've recently started mentally comparing tech companies that complain about the "lack of talent" to SUV drivers who complain about the price of gas.

There is so much low hanging fruit in terms of improving engineers productivity, but the companies refuse to even consider the possibility. If you offered private offices or remote work and the opportunity to use more productive tools, candidates would line up to apply. And would need fewer workers because they would get more work done.

I'm in a pretty small secondary market and was recently advised by someone who knows what he is talking about to never accept less than $200/hr for contract work. That is the going rate around here and accepting less signals that you don't know what you are doing.

Perhaps the $100/hr isn't as much as you think it is. More so if you are somewhere expensive like San Francisco or New York.

If you want better than mediocre employees then guess what the solution is? More money!

Although mediocre employees can often become great employees with some training and coaching.

I have R in a nutshell. It is a pretty good reference but maybe a little brief and outdated.

"Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can."

Should cover open offices

True, but still very common in this industry.

I'm fond of "sneeze distribution center"

My wife grew up with a border collie. Her grandparents kept chickens, fluffy white chickens, and to the dog they were tiny sheep. So the dog spent hours herding the chickens, kept them in a group. Of course chickens are not sheep so they would bolt as soon as there was an opening, so the poor dog couldn't rest for a second. After several hours they literally had to drag him inside so he wouldn't die of exhaustion.

Crazy smart dog, allegedly he would escape their fence and go hitch hiking along the highway. They didn't know where he was escaping to until a friend told them she saw him on the road and he jumped in her car.

I would ask why is there a set cycle for raises? If an employee is valuable enough for a raise why wait and risk a competitor poaching them before the cycle comes around?

That may sound far fetched but my current company has a very rigid and well known cycle and I swear that recruiters know about it. I get way more recruiter calls leading up to raises than afterwards.

Good on you for noticing that the annual review data is artificial. I suspect that is why these processes exist. Companies want to base there decisions on data and don't care if that data is meaningless.

Aka a blueprint to turn your efficient company into a bloated office politics obsessed enterprise.

I have never seen a company with such a structured review process not have the review process gamed by political players. Especially peer review, that is just asking for gaming.

Annual or semiannual reviews are way way too infrequent. Just pull up with the employee when any problems occur. Or have weekly one on ones (props to the article for mentioning this). Just don't what 5 months to ding an employee for an event they no longer remember.

I wasn't familiar with "Chatham House rules". But it is allows members to present controversial arguments but prevents anyone from associating their arguments to them after the fact. For example, I can cite the argument later but not say who made the argument in order to prevent them from political repercussions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule

Certainly very weird that the environment was that charged politically that these rules were needed.