skylark

I used to love teaching people things, but as I've gotten older I've gotten more jaded. We all want to work with people in the bottom right square - those with potential and tenacity seeking to accelerate their progress. But the reality is that the vast majority of people (I'm guessing 95%+) are on the left side - they just want to be sold a dream.

At least for me, it's too soul crushing to work with people who completely lack motivation.

When links and text are available together, many of the top level comments will be direct responses to the original poster's text rather than discussion about the link itself.

By forcing the original poster to follow the same commenting rules, it greatly cleans up the top level discussion by confining direct responses to the poster in their own tree.

This is one of the reasons why the AskReddit subreddit moved to the headline-only model: It encourages people to share their own stories at the top level rather than respond to the poster, whose comment also needs to be able to stand on its own merits rather than get a default high visibility position.

Salary * 0.6 is a fairly close guesstimate for take home pay in San Francisco if you're making low six figures.

I don't have strong feelings about the original memo, but the media coverage has been an absolute circus.

Google's hand was forced because of the negative PR storm that happened, not because it systematically suppresses the voices of its employees.

> This algorithm is tuned by an internal team of evaluators. If the company silences dissent within its own ranks, why should we trust it to manage our access to information?

I'm almost convinced that this is satire.

If it's a one-off thing, probably $200 per hour. I don't suspect 200 lines of front end code would take a full hour to review unless you're doing something far out of the ordinary.

If it didn't have to make any money and was guaranteed to have visitors, I'd make Reddit with autogenerated subreddits.

At the start there's one community everyone is a part of. Every week, the community is split into children based on voting patterns, grouping people who are more similar. Communities can vote on a name, and anyone can see any node in the tree.

There would have to be periodic resets, but I think it would be a fun social experiment.

First, make it fun. Teach through examples and explain stuff later. As interest grows, the desire to figure out the "why" also increases.

For most people, "fun" is building something you can play with. Web development falls nicely into this category - even now I'd still recommend learning Ruby and then Ruby on Rails for a first language/framework. Ruby is a beautiful language and RoR lets a beginner make working prototypes without overwhelming them.

Others might enjoy parsing large sets of data, making games, or other things. Figure out what they enjoy and the rest will follow.

People use Medium because they want to be heard. Marketing is hard (although this author doesn't seem to have problems with that.)

I think I'd go nuts in my open office without noise cancelling headphones.

I'd recommend the Bose QC line. Sennheiser wins in audio quality, but the noise cancelling on Bose can't be beat. Both the headphones and earbuds work great, so go with your preference.

I think you worded it a bit strongly, but I tend to agree with you.

Science: Aspartame consumption is correlated with weight gain.

Journalists: Does aspartame cause weight gain?

Readers: Aspartame causes weight gain.

I know it's up to the readers to draw the correct conclusions, but it feels a little bit dishonest for journalists to "let the cards fall where they may" so to speak.

If you can't get in despite your best attempts, then maybe it wasn't meant to be. But let them be the ones to say no. Never disqualify yourself before you've even tried.

Completely agree. If your social life can take the hit, waking up as early as possible is probably the way to go. I've never been more productive than the period of my life where I woke up at 4am everyday to hit the gym and work on my side project before work.

I've worked at a variety of companies, large, small, tech, and non tech. On a professional level, I've never seen my older coworkers be treated any differently from the younger ones.

I'm sure age discrimination does exist on some level, but I don't think it's the complete showstopper that some would have you believe. From talking to my friends from various companies, it seems that competent developers with some experience still have an easy time finding jobs in the bay area regardless of age, sex, or educational background.

225k total comp (salary + bonus + equity) for Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Apple sounds about right. I've personally gotten offers from those companies only slightly less than that with only 2 years of experience under my belt.

If you're curious, hop onto Glassdoor. It's really accurate for the tech giants because of how many datapoints have been submitted.

I find bootcamps to be an interesting industry.

The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies.

Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have stepped in to bridge that gap - they essentially screen for people who learn quickly, teach them the bare essentials, and send them on their way.

This means bootcamps have a symbiotic relationship with the quality of students they're able to attract. The best bootcamps turn out the highest quality students, who then get the best jobs, which makes the bootcamp look better.

Dev Bootcamp was always in that awkward position where it was trying to be one of the "premiere" bootcamps, but never actually made it to tier 1 status. It's always lived in the shadow of Hack Reactor, Fullstack Academy, and to a lesser extent, App Academy. Having personally worked with Dev Bootcamp graduates, I've felt that on average, they were much weaker than the graduates from the other bootcamps I mentioned.

Since Hack Reactor in particular has been expanding its reach to additional locations, Dev Bootcamp was probably getting boxed out of the premium bootcamp space. The founders were unwilling to be relegated to tier 2 (or the demand was dropping too fast) so they had to pull out.

It's a shame, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised.

> A high-tech garbage service may sound ridiculous to the uninitiated. But it’s no joke to customers like WeWork, Whole Foods and SoulCycle that have signed multi-year contracts in exchange for RTS’s flexible pricing options, along with notifications about when a truck has arrived and reports about exactly where their waste is being sent.

Their target seems to be commercial waste removal, which seems like a better play than residential.

This is a perfect example of how strong software engineering from competitors can result in you getting completely left in the dust. YouTube and Spotify have great algorithms for suggesting new songs - I feel like when my current song is done, I have a really high chance of hearing another song that I've never heard, but will enjoy.

This is not the case on SoundCloud, where I'm almost always jolted back to reality when the next song comes on.

I'm not part of the recruitment process, so I can't speak at all about how resumes are screened and what might give you an advantage.

My personal resume consisted almost entirely of my work accomplishments with a few lines for my education. No side projects.

I used JavaScript because I'm most comfortable with it - I believe you can use any language you want, but you're better off if it's one the interviewer knows (Java/C for back end, JavaScript for front end.)

I personally applied as a front end engineer, but the only difference is that the system design interview question gets swapped with a front end focused one. Within Google my official title is still "Software Engineer" and I'm expected to work across the stack.

I'm honestly not sure what to tell you - the recruiting side of things is so opaque that I'm not sure what you can do to get past the initial screen. I personally had a strong referral at Google, but everywhere else I applied through the front door and had no issues.

If I were to take a guess, I'd say that I got a bit lucky - right place/right time sort of thing. I had a few years of experience under my belt, which separated me from the new grads, but not so many years of experience that I'd be competing with senior engineers. On top of that, I applied for front end positions, which I think tech giants have only recently started to value - this has left a bit of a void that needs to be filled, which possibly made it easier for me to get the initial recruiter calls.

My resume was also relatively strong for someone with two years of experience. Solid university, strong GPA, and at my previous jobs I always tried my best to wiggle myself into taking on large projects and write tooling to make everyone's lives easier. This gave me a lot of stuff to talk about during the interviews and made for some impressive looking bullet points.

Yep! That's the exact one I have.

slither.io is a great one that's probably as popular as agar.io, but since you didn't mention it I thought I'd throw it out there.

Usually the only people who want work samples are freelance clients. I've never had a company recruiter ask me to show them a live demo of the work I've done. Just tell them what you did.

Nothing too exciting. Perhaps counter-intuitively, tech giants are the most straightforward to get into because their interview focuses so much on whiteboarding ability. I personally know people who have gotten into Google/Amazon/Facebook straight out of bootcamp because they had great ability to solve these sorts of problems.

My personal journey took ~2.5 years. I didn't think it was possible to get into a tech giant out of bootcamp so I never tried. Worked two different jobs for a year each, figured I'd give the interviews my best shot, and got accepted.

For background knowledge, I used Algorithms 4th ed. as my textbook. My source of practice problems was LeetCode - did a few/day over the course of around 6 months leading up to the interview.

Took me about 2.5 years, but I wasn't actively trying to get into a tech giant the entire time. I personally know people who went straight from a bootcamp into Google/Amazon/Facebook because their ability to solve algorithms was excellent.

I have a copy of CLRS on my desk, but I actually found Algorithms 4th ed to be the perfect level of difficulty for someone with no math or CS background.

I don't have a CS degree and currently work at Google.

I used a bootcamp to get my foot in the door. I studied college textbooks in my spare time for a few years to fill some of the gaps in my knowledge, and then hardcore interview prepped for a few months leading up to my interviews. I got accepted into all of the tech giants and ultimately decided to go to Google.

This is by far the best job I've ever had, and I couldn't be happier with how this all panned out.

People vastly overestimate how much you need to know to get a job at a tech giant. Not everyone at Google is a computer science or math wizard - in fact, the number of jobs that require people with highly specialized knowledge is quite low. Most people are doing the same app development you'd do anywhere else.

I can't help but feel like all of these posts are a bit overly dramatized.

As much as people complain about Angular, I think it's completely fine for the majority of use cases at large scale. So is React. So is Vue. Even Angular 1 is fine. In practice I've never run into most of the issues people preach about. Two way data binding isn't the devil. One way data flow isn't a panacea.

My developer happiness has always been contingent on the quality of my coworkers, and not on the framework itself (all of which, I feel, are great in their own ways.)

Strike a better balance between studying and socializing.

In the real world nobody cares that I was a nearly straight A student, and my grades haven't helped me move forward in my career in the slightest.

I should have taken more time to cultivate my friendships and get out more.

I'd avoid going out entirely with the goal to network - it puts you into the wrong mindset, and people will pick up on it. The majority of people don't enjoy networking for the sake of networking.

Go somewhere people gather. Bars, clubs, meetups, work functions, really anything is fine. Be social. Expect nothing. Followup with the people you have a genuine connection with and they'll introduce you to their friends when the time is right. If you don't make a genuine connection, move on.

If you consistently do this, you'll build out a useful, large group of friends who actually care about you. Hopefully you care about them too.

It doesn't have to be so black and white - you don't need to invest small or go all in. I setup an automatic transfer which happens the day after I get my paycheck. Over time it's added up to be quite a lot of money.