Whats even more ironic is that their business is about extracting, fixing, and repairing data using AI. They had a chance to dogfood here and missed it.
484 karma · joined August 17, 2012
I get the sentiment and I think it's a socially-conscious investment method, but also a great way to lose all that money and potentially friends when their businesses fail.
Leading up to selling the my previous house I had literally every person I talk to tell me I should keep it as an investment. It's in a HCOL city, but it's a townhouse in a slightly rough neighborhood. Great starter home for my family, but not a rental I wanted to manage. Being a landlord in this city is also fighting upstream against the politics.
The money dropped into my account a few weeks ago from the sale. The profit on the sale was not mind blowing, I bought and sold it for a fair price (2018 -> 2024).
Zero regrets.
I believe in making my own decisions that work for me and my family, not just blindly following the crowd. It's working well so far.
On the flip side, there are great days too. Take advantage of those and get a little more done in the gym. Overall it's about consistency of the practice, not about an individual session being great.
I worked for Tableau before the acquisition and left a year or two after. It was pretty clear to insiders that there was never a good path to a smooth integration of Tableau into the SF platform. The teams have wasted years on that and are still struggling.
There is a massive amount of actual tech debt on the Tableau monolith side that just can't be overcome without huge investment. Tableau spent years trying to fix that and couldn't make a dent, SF brought an even more short-sighted planning process in and only made it worse.
Granted that Tableau could never fully commit to the efforts and the highest level of executives were only interested in making Tableau an attractive acquisition target. Exception being Francois, who still seems to care about Tableau the product.
Also, the author has even written an article titled "Don't Believe Self-Reported Data"[0]. In light of some of the other comments about the data not quite stacking up, perhaps he should take his own advice.
[0]: https://guzey.com/statistics/dont-believe-self-reported-data...
The parts in this post about the 90s Mac fanaticism are spot-on. I remember having many arguments with friends and neighbors that all were "Winblowz" users and my feelings of smug superiority over them.
I can poop outdoors on backpacking trips using natural materials to wipe, I can poop in busy airports and I can poop in stinking 100 degree portapotties.
But I have a really hard time pooping in gleaming offices where all my coworkers can see me walking into the bathroom and emerging 10 minutes later. I hate it!
> A June executive order signed by Trump requires all federal agencies to slash a third of their independent advisory committees by September 30, with the goal of ultimately reducing the total number of such committees to no more than 350 from about 1,000 now.
That indicates that Trump is directly responsible for these events. How is that politicizing?
To be frank, if an interviewer began asking me questions with that assumption, I would not be offended and would be able to back up any part of my resume with deep answers (or else I wouldn't put it on there), but I would think less of the company and think less of the interviewer.
If no benefit of the doubt is offered to me, I will most likely reciprocate and would assume the company doesn't trust employees to do their job. I'd probably be correct too.
* Max ESPP, max 401k, max Roth. No excuse for not doing these if they're available to you.
* No debt. Paid off student loans ASAP after college, which were not huge, but I also lived on scraps in college, lived in cheap dumps and worked during the summers and holiday breaks to make ends meet.
* Very moderate living expenses. Seattle area. Our rent is $1700. My share is $950 and my fiance pays the difference. Got lucky with the place, but we also don't live in a sexy neighborhood and my fiance is a bargain hunter.
* Excellent compensation package, although not out of band for my experience level.
My timeline is 5-10 years to be safe (age ~40). However, I get satisfaction out of creating and delivering software, beyond collecting a paycheck and don't have any intention to stop working - just not as a wage slave once I've reached my number.
I am hard-pressed to think of mistakes that software engineers would make that people in other professions don't make - there are the usual things like buying too much house, too much car or letting someone else spend your money. Perhaps the only unique-ish mistake would be to assume the large salaries will last forever and not save for contingencies. My impression of people in finance is that they know they're worked like dogs, so they are trying to get out as soon as possible. Tech is so cushy that people can get lulled into forgetting that there's more to life than foosball and free lunch.
The test was a JSFiddle pre-filled out with Angular boilerplate. It had comments in places where things needed to be added and filled out. Just to be clear, there was no gotchas or tricks involved. It was very simple: "get JSON from this public HTTP endpoint, display it on the page in a table and then add a filter field. If there's time, add some CSS to make it look pretty."
Candidates were encouraged to use docs and Google if they couldn't remember off the top of their head how to do those. More than one candidate copy/pasted from Stack Overflow during the interview and while I wasn't impressed, I didn't count it against them.
Several candidates completely failed at it and I suspect it was a combination of nerves and lack of experience (one candidate it became clear that he had never used Angular before and he never got past the "get JSON from an HTTP endpoint"). During the test, I was more than willing to talk through the code with them and help them figure out the best way to do it. The one candidate who passed it was hired and they were very successful at the company.
If the engineer can't convey why it took a week to find that one-line, they should work on their communication skills. A good manager can help set expectations for an engineer who has underdeveloped soft skills.
I just spent a week and a half tracking down a bizarre issue in a 3rd party library and filed a fix for it. It was simultaneously frustrating and fascinating, but I never once was worried that the team didn't support my effort because I kept the team in the loop during daily standups. I've also been lucky to have excellent managers who believe in letting the engineers work.
The way I get the most out of it is to pause the video after you outline the project spec, implement the whole thing in my own (bad) way and then watch to see how you do it.
Congrats on the raise, I can't wait to see what you guys do in the future!