throwaway9191aa

I very much recommend this book as well. Great read. Thanks for writing it!

Why are these comments saying that not doing a small part of a job that your boss doesn't want you to do is means for dismissal?

If something you are doing is being thrown away, you should change focus (like pulling back on quality of life arrests, and focus on real crimes).

If your boss is destroying all your work, you're going to get fired for not producing anything. I'd recommend you figure out what your boss cares about.

But that isn't what appears to be happening. Their "boss" (the DA) is the one saying "I don't want to". When your boss gives you clear incentives, like not prosecuting (throwing out) portions of your work, you are going to stop that work and focus on other things.

My other option was AWS though. That $700k is like 4 years of effort, and I get vacations. Actually realizing a sale on a billion dollar company after 4 years is just incomprehensibly low. TBH Amazon is also less work than running a startup. If you think AWS oncall is bad, think about having even less people on your team to handle the load, or to build the product durably in the first place :)

Also, I have no way of knowing if the same ownership thing is going to happen again. Giving me another 0.5% of the above calculation. Sure, lots of people make millions in a startup. Way more people make millions, although over a longer time span, in tech companies and index funds.

This is why I joined AWS 9 years ago, and left the startup world. I own (still?) 15% of a company as a founding engineer (with no voting rights). As part of a raise, the company sold its IP to another company for a 0.5% stake in that company. So now I own 15% of 0.5%....... I just didn't understand the business side of all this at the start. As I understand it, the raise wouldn't have happened and the original company would have folded if the deal wasn't done, so you can't really argue fraud.

Since then, I have seen similar things happen more than once to other friends. I can only imagine that as the number get larger, the problems become more complex.

I agree this is a great question. Maybe more for managers, but it let's people think "This is day 2 of that blocker, I need to step in". Sometimes junior devs will let external asks sit too long and write it off as "blocked on another team". Managers can manage this.

These three questions are intended to keep standups short. I haven't, personally, been on a team that sticks to this format. It always ends up with individuals talking about their individual implementation thoughts on whatever they are working on. During this time, others zone out, missing anything that could be important. Nobody learns anything, and nobody is able to fully concentrate on their tasks.

I purposefully schedule meetings after our standup to make sure I cut it off after 30 minutes. Our team of 11 will go for almost an hour if nobody cuts people off.

I started doing the listen-only as well! By this, I mean I just don't look at the screen, I'd love to know if there is a way to setup a listen-only option.

I've also used Jumpspeak, which is an AI conversation partner. It works ok, but the speech recognition is... not great. But you can have a conversation and practice listening and responding. I was able to treat the AI as an uber driver and ask about places to go in Peru, and how to get there, and why they were nice.

Our team had so many planning poker sessions where we spent 12 people * 2 dev hours trying to figure out whether stories were a 2 or a 3, management finally said it is always a 3. We were literally spending more aggregate time trying to decide effort, than the actual effort it took to complete these tasks.

2 and 3 are equal. 5 and 8 are equal. The question is simply "Is this a couple days, the whole week, or the whole sprint?".

Almost 25 years ago I worked at a little startup. I started to build a network management system using ..... tcl/tk some open source HP Openview, what was the name?

Anyway, I had a neat display showing live nodes as green. I was redirected to enhance that display with graphs and charts and linking the nodes, we bought a TV to display it on... long story short, it was more important to show this awesome graphic tool to potential investors then to know whether our systems were actually down.

Some things never change.

This is something my company's internal RTO channels seem to have missed. What if large corporations really *did* collect enough data during covid to justify working from home? Now faang can justify outsourcing the rest of US based jobs.

Force RTO in the US, replace those who leave with less expensive resources.

> In the office they are.

lol what are they doing? Staring at the ceiling? What makes them always available in the office and not always available at home? How is this still a thing being discussed? Perhaps, at home, they are actually able to get some work done.

Again, this is my office. I'm sure there are some offices where people legitimately aren't doing much of anything at home. Statistically, that just has to be true. Maybe this is the wrong company?

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.

The reason it isn't, for me, is that I'm usually answering questions about Why we do something, or How something is supposed to work. I'm usually giving a quick response, with a link to a design, or a code snippet, or a git commit, or a Code Review link, or something online. So I have to provide an online response whether you ask me in person or not.

If I'm in a 1:1, yea I totally agree I'd rather just talk about career growth and that stuff in person. But.... I mean now we are walking down the already-well-discussed path of Manager/IC and how these jobs are just different.

I don't know for sure, but I think this is the experience of many senior developers.

[edit] > I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online

I mean, this isn't an RTO discussion. If your SME is slacking off that is a different problem. Assuming best intentions, you would walk up to that SME's desk and there would already be 5 people waiting with a question because the SME can only talk to 1 person at a time.

I can slack with several different folks, so long as they can just wait a second while I type. The worst people (so sorry, there are some great TAMs) are the ones who page you as soon as they need something because they don't understand you are busy with a different project.

I had never heard the "superman" part of that, I always thought it was Stussy. But I knew exactly what you meant! Turns out both were accepted origins, but not necessarily true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S

I'm just moving into this phase as well. The same parents that said it was ridiculous kids have phones, are now getting their kids phones. I've heard that not having a phone is essentially like knowing the whole school is invited to party, except you. I'm really not sure what to do.

IME at startups (well very small micro startups) you focus on quality at first, and wait for the company to go bankrupt. Then sell the IP to another company you happen to own. That second company focuses on marketing without having to worry about the ownership %'s afforded to the engineers at the first company.

I made it for a little over 6 years as a full time freelancer before I went full time (about 6 years ago).

If you are going freelance to avoid getting laid off...

Since I became a full time employee I have actually gotten paid every month (almost never happened as a freelancer). I have never had to find a new contract, or had a contract fall through after turning down other work. I haven't had 90 day payment terms.

I just never found that magical "pick up work when you want, and actually get paid on time" sales pipeline. You are not your own boss. You have clients, who have deadlines, who are paying you to meet those deadlines. If you don't, you suddenly find yourself in violation of contract law. At your full time job if you miss a deadline, how often do you get fired? That has never happened to me. But I have absolutely not been able to deliver on a contract and not gotten paid because of it. Once a client thinks "We don't actually want to move forward with that project", they try to find a way to get out of the contract. There are no severance packages for freelancers. Just months of wasted time that won't be compensated.

I just disagree entirely with this. Isn't Esperanto that planetary language? Or possibly even English? Apparently it doesn't scale a 8 billion people, and I'll say that is A Good Thing.

What if what humanity needs is to realize that you don't have to scale to the limits of the planet for something to be worth while.

Maybe the "time better spent elsewhere" should be spent learning that we are all humans with amazing cultural backgrounds, and what could be a better way to engage with others than through language?

I've just been reading way to much history of South America recently to accept this idea, but let's be honest, the entire world is based on this concept. Every time somebody tries to setup a "Planetary Language/Religion/Culture" it comes at the expense of "the others". Fuck this idea.

This is precisely my fear using an AI model. I don't want to end up in some local minima where I endlessly misspell Snow, and get forced into aggressive weather training.

Through italki (spanish) I make tu/usted (informal/formal) mistakes, I make plural mistakes, and I make gender mistakes. My italki instructor still understands me and we can focus on other things.

Thanks! I had 4 years in High School (well, 3 years took me 4 years :)). That was 2 decades ago. Some of it, apparently, stayed in my head.

I have learned WAY more with Duolingo in 6 months (10 to 15 mins a day, but I started slower) than I learned in 4 years through High School (US). Just one data point, but I've heard similar from friends. TBH I am more motivated today than I was in school, so I'm sure that plays a part.

I'm a little over six months into Spanish and I feel like I'm learning a lot. Although I seem to get stuck in weird sections like weather for a week at a time. I have been in Diamond league for 2 months now. I'm a bit worried Duolingo is geared more for answering easier questions quickly, rather than learning at a more accelerated rate.

When I speak with an actual person through italki, I never talk about weather. I find out I need to learn how to recognize Haber, Poder, Ir, and Tener in preterite and future tenses at conversational speed. Otherwise I can't hold the context for whatever is going on (we tend to talk about what I did the last week, which I love. Throughout the week I lookup words and build a vocabulary in anticipation for our conversations)

I'd really like Duolingo to focus more on audio lessons, and answering questions about stories. I pay way more attention for those questions and really feel like I am getting better at hearing the language. However, I spend more time, and I do better at those questions. I fly through the other questions and tend to make typos which are bad enough where I get the question wrong. I don't know if this trains the AI to keep giving me easier things that I don't pay much attention to.

I don't know this person, and I'm glad he writes children's books.

I wonder if he has been shot by a six year old while writing any of those books [0]. All while the government actively undermines all the work he does.

Any teachers here? Or folks married to teachers? I can't cite all the horrible pay, and parents ridiculing you, but it happens to my wife almost constantly. I doubt it is very different for other teachers.

If it is so noble maybe they deserve some more money and respect. I wouldn't stand up to this governor in a state that elected him. Maybe I'd move to another state and get a teaching job there (which I could not do if I picked up a felony in Florida).

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teacher-shot-6-year-old...

More plus one :) The secret is, once all us wayward youths find each other, we are more interesting than the typical advanced high school => ivy league => enterprise developer. I work with so many people who have never had a job outside of software development. It is all about work, except for that time they brewed their own beer for a couple months.

Kinda judgemental I know. Just know that you should never be afraid to re-invent yourself. There are more of us out there! Find us!

Nobody "made" them do anything. I never graduated college, I barely made it out of high school. Where did I acquire this knowledge to save money and live reasonably, while these other software developers are "made" to obtain these lifestyles requiring $300k a year?

My guess is that these people, who are "doomed", don't actually exist. I have a strong suspicion that, over the last few years, most folks got in while it was good, and are happy they were around while it lasted.

Saying they would have been better off with a "regular job" is pretty presumptuous. What if these folks are actually smart people who just saved up while FAANGs were offering huge salaries? What if this isn't actually a big deal? What if it was a good thing that ICs were getting paid a lot of money for a bit, instead of having wages suppressed by investors to prevent situations like "probably wouldn't have happened to them if they had another, more regular job."

Give me the money. Let me choose how I spend it. Don't pretend you know what is best for me.

I'm also 42 years old. None of this happened overnight. It is one of those things where you have to ignore where you will be in 5 months, and focus on 5 years.

My best time ever was with a large group of folks on a route with about 5000ft of elevation gain, and we did it in just under 5 hours. By myself much closer to 6 hours of ride time plus breaks. Doing a century is awesome, and then everyone says a double century is the same, just longer. I want to keep going and see how far I can go. I would much rather do this than learn a new programming language every year.

What are your times? What was the first greatest thing?

This sounds like AWS, but probably resembles most large companies. Hire great people down a level, and suddenly you are raising the bar. However, you are also grouping folks with 10+ years doing great work with folks who just got promo'd on their first job out of college.

I have not quit. Instead I became a high achiever in other aspects of life. I listen to folks at work talking about programming podcasts and online tech conferences..... I won a bike race last year and podium'd in a 100 mile off road race. I can cook pretty quickly these days, which results in making healthy, tasty food that my kids actually eat (along with the kraft mac n cheese which is an anchor nobody can escape).

Anyway, once you step away from computers life is huge. Give your job what it needs, and give the rest to yourself.

I couldn't find the study from the publication mentioned in the article.

I have a gas stove and I cook all the time. The stove is probably burning for upwards of 20 minutes every single day. Is that really a cause of asthma? If 20 minutes does it, wouldn't cooks (presumably with burning stoves for hours and hours 6 days a week) experience it far greater? Maybe professional kitchens have proper ventilation, so it doesn't matter.

I'm assuming the original study would answer some of these questions.

That article says “We recently had the opportunity to incorporate Employees’ requests to enhance campus. We converted a basketball court into three pickleball courts – a growing request by Employees over the past few years."

What is your dream though? Not to discount what you're saying, but so many people talk about saving to achieve their dream. From what I can tell, these folks' dream is actually: to save money so they can some day achieve their dream.