trowawee

> Is the Tucker Carlson story [...] true?

No

At least here in the US, it absolutely is. Kids get hit by cars and die on a semi-regular basis and basically no one is ever held accountable for it. From Chicago, just a few weeks ago: "Driver issued no citations after fatally striking 2-year-old riding mini-scooter in Lincoln Square"[0].

[0]: https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2022/6/3/23153664/lincoln-...

Feedbin as a backend/web interface, Reeder on iOS.

Completely outsourcing your process for surfacing interesting information to someone else's algorithm feels like awful idea (and I actually mostly like Twitter).

I also had this come across my feed. Always funny to see articles about the death of RSS in my RSS reader. Honestly, the idea of using the web _without_ RSS is entirely alien to me at this point; I don't understand how people keep track of what they've read, what they're going to read, what they liked, etc. without a feed.

Readdle's Spark[1] has been my Inbox replacement since Google killed it. It has pin/snooze functionality and a similar concept of grouping emails by category and letting you easily mass mark-as-read. Plus, you can connect multiple email accounts rather than just being limited to your Gmail account. It's also nice because you can have a "team"; my wife and I use it to share important messages and help each other draft or review emails. They have really nice apps for Mac and iOS, too.

[1]: https://sparkmailapp.com/

Seriously, just say "I like money and interesting technical problems and don't really care about the bad stuff FB has done/is doing/will do." At least people who work at Exxon and Raytheon and Altria (the artist formerly known as Phillip Morris) don't publish little screeds about how important their work is, and how they're just misunderstood.

I understand the thought, but a weird reality about book writing is that, since the author bears the cost for fact-checking books, they're often less extensively fact-checked than longer reported pieces for newspapers or magazines.

"grrrr, I sure hate how the people providing free recipes for me make me scroll twice to view the recipe"

Super gross framing, especially when you're yanking the content those other people actually created to siphon off their traffic.

...do you seriously believe that software is more complex or has more moving parts than the human body?

I've done this for my current job and the job I'm about to move to. It works pretty well - my recruiter sources gigs for me, starts with a decent idea of what the TC will be from the outset, gets feedback from the companies and pokes them to keep the process moving at a decent clip. I'm looking at a 20ish% raise on this next job hop, and the process has been easy. We just email/text/call, I haven't actually "applied" anywhere, didn't do any Leetcode/Hackerrank BS, just did a few interviews. I've got four offers right now. It's not FAANG, but I have no interest in working at FAANG. The process side of things was a big sell for me - I gave him some guidelines about industries I wanted to avoid (payday loan type companies, adtech, the defense industry), he brings me potential places, I pick the ones that sound interesting, and we start running down the track. Low effort, high yield.

People here frequently seem to interpret the law like it's a videogame that always executes in a reliable way and can therefore be gamed through obvious loopholes, rather than being a series of guidelines that give the people enforcing them a useful/terrifying latitude in both interpretation and enforcement.

Just shy of 200k in TC, heading higher after accepting my next offer. 36ish hours a week, without any real oversight on actual time (I'm currently interviewing and I'm not sure anyone has noticed that I've been dipping out for an hour or so/day for interviews and prep). "Unlimited leave" for the last five years now across two jobs, which as we all know is a scam, but I try to take at least 30 days off per year, usually in two week-long blocks and then at least 1-2 three or four day weekend per month.

I said this elsewhere in this thread, but in tech in the US, you can now live almost anywhere (except for SF/NYC/Seattle/maybe LA?), make an amount of money that will put you in the top 1-5% of wage earners wherever you are, and still have a pretty chill life. I don't know if that'll still be the case in five or ten years—there is so much money sloshing around right now, it's unreal—but for now, I think it's foolish not to try to catch the wave and bank as much as you can.

I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy here (in your comment, and in a number of other comments here). The choice in tech isn't between "good life, low pay" and "bad life, good pay". I can almost guarantee, in the US, if you are not already pulling down a total comp >350k, that you can find a job that will both pay you more and keep a good quality of life. I can also almost guarantee that, unless you work for one of the tiny handful of companies that are super aggressive about keeping comp in line with the market, you will never get an internal raise that will match what you can get on the market every two years.

Personally, I hop about every two years. Work-life balance is super important to me, and I do not invest myself overly in my job. I have consistently scored 30-40% raises on those hops. The absolute best raise I've ever gotten internally was 14% and my boss (probably the best boss I've ever had) had to go to war for it. Even including that 14% raise and a 9% raise offered at an earlier job in similar circumstances (i.e. active fear of losing headcount after people started leaving), my average internal raise is still only around 7%. If you aren't moving, you're leaving a substantial amount of money on the table. That can be justified, but quality of life is not the justification that a lot of folks here seem to think it is.

Some combination of market pressure and regulatory pressure. Market pressure: it'll be harder to attract people to a position without a listed salary band once they get used to listed salary bands. Regulatory pressure: the law in Colorado isn't being enforced too strictly, per bkjelden elsewhere in the comments, but the law does require "the hourly rate or salary compensation (or a range thereof) that the employer in good faith believes it may pay for the particular job"[0]. If you post a ridiculous range, you're playing with fire; one report and one pissed-off regulator later and you might end up being the poster child for the state's enforcement of the law. I would personally not want to be on the receiving end when they decide to make an example of someone.

[0]: https://www.skandslegal.com/sks-blog/2021/1/15/colorados-new...

Your first point is really the most important part for me. I've been in tech now for around a decade; finding new work isn't that hard and I know roughly what I'm going to get paid wherever I go. But "does this company treat its workers well?" is frequently a trickier thing to get good signal on, especially if you don't know anyone there (more common now in the new mostly-remote world), and "role open to any state but Colorado" is now a useful data point (and an immediate red flag).

Or gossip! Gossip gets a bad rap, and it can certainly be toxic, but it was the only semi-reliable way to get info about some of this stuff back in the day. I know everyone moans about social media and the mediated self and whatnot, but I kinda like that you can tell people what's going on in your life in a broadcast form and they can follow you and it doesn't always have to be high-touch.

The thing about parsing your social network down to just a tiny group of close friends is A) it makes it harder to develop more close friends, since friendship tends to work like a funnel where you start out shallow and become better friends through time/exposure, and B) eventually you start to lose friends, whether to physical distance, falling out, life events, and eventually death, and if you only have a tiny group, it's easy for the bottom to fall out of your friend group entirely.

I've watched this happen with a lot of older adults I know, which is one of the reasons I've deliberately made some efforts to keep a pool of shallow friendships. Some of them have already deepened into actual friends, some fall off and that's ok, because that's kind of the point. Casting a wider net is part of a strategy to not end up in my later years with 0-2 total friends in my life.

I mean, I have a lot of friends who I don't live near who will periodically post pictures on Instagram or updates about their lives on FB. Scanning their feed for a few minutes if they're active on social media is a good way to make sure you're at least a little up-to-date on what's going on in their life, and will frequently give you a good hook for a conversation (i.e. how is little So-and-So?, or I saw your trip pictures, how was Wherever?). Also can help you avoid a faux pas. It's never fun to ask someone who just got divorced how their spouse is doing.

I sorta feel like you answered the question in this comment, despite saying that you don't have the answer. The answer is because you want to stay in touch, because humans (mostly) crave contact with other humans. Loneliness is endemic in a lot of places right now. Many people feel alone, and many people feel like they are "bad at staying in touch", and maybe a tiny handful of people are naturally good at it (altho in my limited experience, the ones who are good at it are usually using some system, even if it's not quite this technical).

Personally, I use Monica and regularly make lists of people that I want to stay in touch with, and then periodically go through those lists and reach out to them. It doesn't have to be a huge personal missive, just a text or an email that says something like "Hey! I was just thinking of you. How are you/you and the family doing?" If something more deliberate triggered the desire, I include that. And it frequently triggers conversations that, like you experienced, were a lot of fun, and end up actually feeling energizing, rather than draining.

Is the issue, possibly, that virtually every company has decided that hiring people and training them up in the requisite skillsets is an unreasonable ask? Despite that being the pattern for employment for most of the history of employment as a concept? Where do you think the population of junior engineers is going to come from if everyone thinks it's unreasonable to "foot the bill to train them"?

Drives me crazy that people don't want to hire entry level engineers, don't want to train people, and then complain they can't hire anyone. I was a bootcamp grad, and I was pretty useless for at least the first 6 months after I got my first job, as are most entry level engineers. Since then, I've been a pretty substantial bargain for every company I've worked for, based on the fact that I've managed 25+% raises at each subsequent job hop. I'd still be working at the first place I ever worked if they'd just kept my comp roughly in the same ballpark as what I was being offered.

I dropped out of law school before ending up in tech, but my parents are lawyers, my sibling is a lawyer, a large chunk of my social circle are lawyers, and I act as a go-between connecting my lawyer friends and family with non-lawyer friends who need some legal help (and also someone who speaks lawyer fluently enough to translate to normal people). All of this is just to say that the ideas that:

1) change tracking is easy to use and universally understood 2) timestamps in document names solve the version problem, and 3) that emails traded back and forth work as a document history

does not at all mesh with my experience or with the complaints I hear from friends and family in the legal profession. Even just when I'm helping friends in software negotiate contracts, which usually just involves me, one other engineer, and one lawyer, changes pretty frequently get lost or go unnoticed. Versions frequently get mixed up (altho the blame for that usually falls on bad search engines in email clients). Lawyer friends have complained to me about conflicting timestamps and about larger documents with hundreds of changes being tracked that work slowly and are difficult to parse.

I definitely think engineers are too quick to throw a "one easy trick!" at a big messy problem like this that obviously has a bunch of social/network elements in addition to technical challenges, but saying that the current situation is functional for most participants doesn't really seem to be accurate.

I think that was the least-accurate part of a mostly decent answer. VCs, like most people, are trend chasers who live in a fairly constrained bubble, no matter how much they want to portray themselves as enlightened Renaissance thinkers who span across human experience and thus can offer useful insight anywhere. Sure, if you're in a trendy space (and in the Valley or one of a handful of other locations) and you refuse investment, they might throw that money at a competitor. But there's a tremendous amount of money sloshing around the world in so many more un-trendy industries and un-trendy places than anyone really realizes, and it's honestly not that hard to tap into those money flows and make an extremely comfortable life for yourself. It's just that most of the people doing that don't talk about it constantly, and they're living comfortably well, rather than making a billion dollars and buying islands.

So, a few answers.

A) most of the dependencies that Faker has are common with lots of JS projects that I work/have worked on in the last few years. Looking at that dep list[0], I'm familiar with most of them. They're mostly common packages. To some degree, I'm relying on the thousand eyes here.

B) In terms of security risk, Faker runs in test suites to generate data and locally on dev machines, sometimes, to populate sample DBs. It lives and runs in managed environments and doesn't get packaged into prod anywhere. The risk profile isn't nonexistent, but it's also not a massive risk.

C) I really think we're underrating the amount of work that would required to recreate this project (not uncommon here). Faker can spit out 205 different types of random data in 46 different languages/dialects. Building that is not a two day project (evidenced in the fact that people have been working on this for years now); making sure you can generate all that data correctly in all those different languages is a non-trivial task; building and maintaining it internally will take dev time and energy and will continue to require that time and energy on an ongoing basis.

You're talking about this choice here and in other comments with an air of "silly JS devs, just build this easy thing!". I don't know if it's your intention, but you're coming off dismissive and ignorant. People think about these tradeoffs all the time, and sometimes decide to use packages like this. I think it might behoove you, if you find someone's decision confusing, to start from the position that they are also reasonably competent professionals and see if you can understand why a competent professional might make a different decision than the one that seems obvious to you, rather than assuming that if someone makes a different decision they're stupid and/or incompetent.

[0]: https://github.com/faker-js/faker/blob/main/package.json

> I’ve built mini APIs to do this in several previous jobs [...] Each time it’s taken maybe two days of effort

So...just you, in your career, have spent between 1 and 2 total weeks of developer time building the exact same functionality, and you're curious why an open source project that cuts that time down to like an hour is popular?

I'm also a little suspicious of the claim that it's the exact same, because Faker has a lot of functionality under the hood, but you've more or less demonstrated why it's useful in this comment.

You're assuming that a company has to interview all candidates the same way regardless of what job they're actually interviewing for. A frequent complaint, voiced all over this thread, is that interviewing like that makes no sense. If the job uses 100-level algos all the time, then sure, let's talk algos (also, kinda weird, but I'm sure there's something out there like this). But if you're bringing me in as an SRE and we spend a bunch of time on LC questions and much less time on my experience with AWS, Terraform, and CI/CD work, the interview is bad for me (because I don't work with low-level algos and probably won't know that stuff, _unless_ I've been grinding LC) and bad for you (because you don't have much signal about whether I can do the SRE stuff).

I don't think that FizzBuzz/similar gotcha-type questions like that are useful, especially since most of them are all over interview prep sites, so I don't use them. But I've definitely interviewed people with impressive-looking resumes who straightforwardly didn't seem to be able to code; they couldn't respond to simple questions ("You mentioned you used Language Y in this project; what do you like and dislike about that language?") or were clearly bullshitting their responses. I've felt insulted at times when I get FizzBuzz in an interview, but I kinda get it.

All that said, this is a systematic issue that gets blamed on individual interviewers when the blame should fall on the company. I'm a decade into my career, worked at companies of all sizes, and I've never had or heard of anyone getting trained in interviewing. Outside of informal efforts with coworkers, I've never had a job provide me with a rubric for what I should be interviewing for (shit, I usually find out I'm interviewing someone day-of or day-before). If companies gave a damn about interviewing, I think the process wouldn't be so slapdash, and fewer interviewers would fall back on crap like FizzBuzz.

My PM doesn’t tip me when I complete a ticket quickly; I don’t tip QA when they catch a bug in my code; the on-call engineer doesn’t tip me when some docs I wrote save them a few hours of time fixing an issue I saw during my last on-call rotation. And yet! The company seems to keep making money and doing well, and we all seem to like each other (mostly, except for that one guy, but he doesn’t like anyone).

My wife and I spent most of 2019 traveling through Europe on a mix of backpacking and remote work, and while there was an adaptation period - American servers interact more with the customer, altho after Europe, it frequently feels pushy and overbearing - the service was, on average, pretty good. Much like in the US, there were places where the service was phenomenal, places where it was average, places where it sucked. There was no common denominator (again, exactly like the US).

This argument always feels weird to me, because most customer-facing jobs in the US aren’t tipped, and most of the people working in them still work hard and try to do a reasonably good job.