smithkl42

Swyfft Insurance | C# Developers | Full Time | 100% Remote (US only, sorry!)

https://www.swyfft.com/careers

Salary: $100K-180K

Swyfft is an Insurtech, primarily focused on Homeowners. We're not as well known as Lemonade and Hippo (we'd rather keep our equity than give it away, if it's all the same), but from an actual business perspective, we're arguably doing better. We've already got a number of smart, friendly and hard-working developers on our team, and need more.

Our backend is C#/.NET Core/SQL, our front-end is TypeScript/React. The positions we've got are mostly focused on the backend, but some good full-stack or front-end skills would be great. Insurance experience would be great too, but, well, I didn't have any when I started either.

If you check out our jobs (https://swyfft.bamboohr.com/jobs/), ignore the "city" in the job description - that's a limitation of the HR platform we're on. We've been fully remote since long before Covid, and you can work from anywhere in the US.

As it turns out, Daniel Bennett is an atheist materialist crank who has developed evasive "materialist arguments" which apparently tell us that the universe has no cause of existence, which turns out (shock, horror!) to be the standard atheist cant that he already believes, and so his arguments tell us nothing else...

(Sorry, couldn't help myself.)

Heck, still is. C# is a nice, pragmatic, practical language, and the VS/Resharper combination can't be beat anywhere, period. I love how lazy it lets me be.

I'd hire in a second anybody who's thought this hard about how to critique their own code.

Commenters have mentioned "Chesterton's Fence". I'd add a reference to another of GKC's observations:

"When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws."

And FWIW, I remember complaining about this to Don Syme something like 5+ years ago, and while he gave lip service to the idea that F# needed better tooling (and better tooling interop with C# specifically), I don't think he was really convinced.

It's the "Go to Definition" and "Find all References" pieces that are so annoying to me, and slow me down tremendously. It means that (practically) you have to do your whole solution in one language for it to feel like a unified solution, and that makes it hard to start by bolting an F# project onto an existing solution.

I've successfully used Pivotal Tracker for my last three startups. It's an opinionated tool whose opinions don't always match mine, but it works well, and I've scaled it to teams up to about 15-20 participants. Beyond that, it seems to get bulky and hard to work with, but I don't know if that's so much a limitation with Pivotal, or with how I've tended to use it.

I've been using TS since it's .8 days, and love it - but I think it's stretching things to say that it's an excellent language. It's a pragmatic language that makes JavaScript (which is an awful language) tolerable.

Azure Table Storage? Uggh. Nasty. I've tried half a dozen times to use them, and every time I've given up. Great for write-only data that you never want to see again. Horrible for real-world querying.

Not necessary, but it's pretty widely agreed that he was a mediocre CEO, no?

If there's so much plastic in the ocean, and if it's (obviously) possible for something to evolve in such a way that it can use plastic for nutrition - it seems like we just need to wait a bit, and we'll get some bacteria or weird fish or something like that to solve our floating garbage problem for us. No?

It's quite possible for someone to be a mediocre CEO and still do good, smart things. This is a good thing, and smart.

That's a great point about the similarity of the two problems. If we didn't already know from intimate personal experience that there is such a thing as consciousness, no amount of physical observation could ever be sufficient to prove to us that it exists. Similarly, if we weren't well prepared (on other grounds entirely) to assert that certain things ought or ought not to be done, no amount of observing the actual state of things could be sufficient to show that there is actually good or evil in the world.

Not quite true, or at least not so baldly. Job describes the "satan", or accuser, in a manner that clearly anticipates his later depiction as "the accuser of the brethren" in Revelation. And while not providing a name, the descriptions of the mythical falls of the kings of Babylon and Tyre in Isaiah and Ezekiel seem to draw on legends similar to the later Christian elaboration of the story of demonic rebellion and exile.

I use Powershell as my default command shell (via ConEmu). But its verbosity makes it a pain to work with as your everyday shell. For instance, in cmd.exe you can say:

dir /od

But in Powershell, you have to do:

dir | sort-object LastWriteTime

I totally get the Powershell verbosity when it comes to writing scripts. But it can be a PITA when you're using it interactively.

And yet somehow, within a decade, we've redefined (almost out of existence) the single most fundamental human institution, an institution which has lasted for thousands of years and which virtually every great thinker prior to the last 15 years has understood as the prerequisite and foundation for any civilized society. This radical redefinition of marriage - and in its wake, of what it means to be human - couldn't have happened without incessant propagandizing and cheerleading from every element inside our popular and our news media. And yet how often did you hear this media allow through a coherent statement of the views opposing SSM, as expressed by, say, Ryan Anderson? How often was debate shut down a priori, as mere bigotry?

Careful reconsideration? I don't see how that played any part of this recent shift.

Just one point - "maths" is in fact the correct (local) term in Commonwealth countries - sort of like how they refer to "sport" instead of "sports".

What you call "social schism" I call liberty.

I think the universal availability of public schooling is, in general, a great good. But the idea of the government telling me that I can't home school my children makes my skin crawl. The US constitution correctly defines strictly limited roles for the government, and carves out huge spaces for individual liberty - liberty which is meaningless if I'm forced to allow the government to indoctrinate my children in ways that I may strongly disagree with.

Turn it around. Imagine that schools taught a sort of religious fundamentalism that you found abhorrent. Would you want the government to be able to force you to send your children there?

Making home schooling illegal turns the government into a master precisely when it should be a servant, and a jailer when it should be a helper.

The fact that you think the reasoning behind traditional marriage is "just plain stupid and cruel" is probably the best example of Chesterton's Gate I've yet seen. It indicates that (a) not only do you not understand the reasoning, but (b) our society has changed so much, and so subtly, that it's almost impossible to get anyone to understand that reasoning. Needless to say, I don't think this bodes well for us over the long-term.

(Ducking all the incoming downvotes - I'm keenly aware of how unpopular this position is, and how bigoted it seems to most folks these days - which sort of proves my point.)

Mostly because I wanted to hear what some real experts thought of the evidence presented.

On a side note - you do know that Santa is real, right? He was a real bishop in Turkey in the 4th century, participated in the Council of Nicea, and was even reputed to have thrown a punch at Arius on the council floor.

I'm not actually sure how common it was for the government to intervene in families' home lives, even, say, at the height of the middle ages or the Byzantine empire. That said, to whatever extent it did happen, it was wrong, and the Catholic church acknowledges as much these days.

On the other hand, I think the history of humanity, which involves nearly universal belief in some flavor of divinity, is all-but-conclusive proof that your second point is incorrect. That doesn't mean the x-theists are right: just that religion is quite obviously the default state of humanity, and irreligion is the exception.

Catholic theologians have spent a lot of time analyzing this problem. The short version is that there's a pretty big moral difference between giving money to somebody (even if you know they're going to do something evil with it), and arranging for the evil yourself. You may have a pretty good idea that your employee Bob is going to spend his paycheck at the local saloon and whorehouse, but that's rather different from personally opening up a tab for him there.

Adults also get personal choice as to which TV programs they watch, which beverages they drink, which candidates to vote for, whether to join the military. The option is not whether to constrain the choices available to children - it's a matter of who gets to decide. Remember, always turn things around: how would you feel if the religious right got to tell you that you couldn't raise your children as atheists or agnostics?

That's kind of overstating things, isn't it? Yes, what HP did was balls-up stupid, and I'll think hard before buying anything from them, but companies have liberties too. They have rights to free speech (you don't want the government telling newspapers what to print), and they have rights to sell what they want, just as we have rights to not buy the merde they try to force on us. Twitter has the right to shut down speech on its network that it doesn't like, and that's not a First Amendment issue. Nobody's liberties are being taken away: rather, someone's liberties are being exercised.

Now, I do think that a lawsuit may be in order here, because it seems quite plausible that HP acted deceptively. But that's not "our rights being taken away", which is primarily an issue related to the guys with guns (i.e., the government). This isn't that: rather, it's a company lying to us, and trying to get us to buy their product on false pretenses.

Good point. And I can see that I would have made different (and probably cleaner) design decisions in certain places if strict null checking had been a part of our code from the beginning.

Huge TypeScript fan here - been using it since its 0.8x days. And I'm very interested in the new --strictNullChecks compiler flag. But I'm trying to implement that on our current codebase, and I'm coming to the conclusion that it's still a bit premature. There are a lot of very common and harmless JS (and TS) patterns which this breaks, and for which it's been difficult (for me at least) to find a workaround.

Turning on --strictNullChecks flagged about 600+ compiler errors in our 10Kloc codebase. I've addressed about half of those so far, and I can't say that any of them have actually been a real bug that I'm glad got caught. On the contrary, because of the weird hoops it makes you jump through (e.g., encodeAsUriComponent(url || '')), I'd say that our codebase feels even less clean.

Though presumably not $6+ trillion, right?

In hindsight, I'd certainly agree :-). At the time, given what we were trying to do, it was really the only platform available to us, as it was the only way (at the time, or since) that we could get raw access to local audio/video streams and manipulate them.