SwSwinger

Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people who work on the compiler.

You advance in either lifestyle or risk (maybe both). Managers are better equipped to optimize and climb established business structures. ICs are better equipped to create new products or at least jump into a nimble team. Maybe you should take more risk on special projects in your organization, spearhead new technology shifts, or join a startup (giving substantial due diligence to understand the feasibility of a startup business plan from a technical perspective).

Strength Training @ Crunch Gym, 2-3x/week, 90 min each. I walk uphill or bike to get my heart rate up, then 1 hr workout. I used to do a wide variety of physical activities: tennis, rock climbing, dancing, golf, hiking, running. They were great for socialization but I didn’t really get a balanced fitness using them as my primary workout. Especially as you age, strength training is a great base. I do it solo because I don’t like the CrossFit style energy. It’s great for energy, anti-anxiety, focus.

Annecdotally, as an ambivert, my experience with chat apps (versus physical life) results in even more social anxiety. The amount of criticism on Slack is higher than I experience in physical life. When you see a person, you can pick up on queues that they are being sarcastic or recognize their individual speech pattern as something to minimize. Text looks far more uniform in terms of interpreting emotion/personality. Even when I post on HN, I’m not sure if some comment I tried to write in a measured way will be harshly criticized. When I say something similar in person, the hearer has a moment pause before saying something adversarial because they can see my face and humanize me.

This is a different age, but I think the same principle applies. When I was 20, I started getting issues from excessive keyboard usage. It stayed for 5 years even though I cut down substantially & tried massages. I ended up rock climbing and my issues went away with larger muscles. I’m in my 40s now and still use the same approach: where can I build muscle and make the pain subside. It doesn’t take much muscle, normally 3-6 months of practice @ 2x/week. The results normally stick pretty long, even when I back off the practice.

Given that there is tremendous code sharing of Apple's OS+AppStore software on the laptop and phone, I have not understood how both hardware products are not subject to the same rules. Phones are basically micro-laptops and should have similar platform expectations, legally.

When I see Vanity Fair, I think: the Middle America Centrist I can trust.

Why not CCTV? Having video footage to subpoena after a crime is committed, then analyze, seems less surveillance society than going straight to a real-time, individual tracking data store.

Somehow, Meta managed to overhire in low cost of living areas and will likely look at employee overhead when considering where to downsize.

  1. Note that this is a news aggregator for tech startups.  Tech startups in large cities tend to hire most of their experienced engineers from FAANG companies.  So, it's in a tech startup's interest to critique FAANGs.
  2. You could want to be a great startup founder or early engineer as an ambition.  Probabilistically, your most straightforward path to this goal is to go to a FAANG next.  Golden handcuffs, most people come in with this ambition then don't leave because there's so many pleasant aspects.  Think about point #1 again.
  3. If you are trying to get into a more respected tech community and are limited by visa issues, which companies tend to solve more often than individuals, it's probably in your interest to find a company [1] that will clear this hurtle for you and [2] that has a brand you can leverage.  FAANG is a subset of companies that would provide that option.

This seems like a pretty generic question, so I assume you're looking at it from a new grad standpoint. Distributed Systems is more of a technical/resource specialty. You will be optimizing data across multiple systems. You'll want to measure it, improve overall performance/size/cost through algorithm and heuristic optimizations. It can be a terminal career state, meaning that plenty of people have a great career ending with the title: Distributed Systems Engineer. The progression within this career is similar to other Software Engineering roles. You are taking on larger projects, more team coordination, more business critical or technical complex problems.

While I agree that multi-tenant urban housing is lacking in America, the real question seems to be why no other American city has made significant progress on catching up to the Northeast corridor. I don't think that Washington DC is the prime example of the problem. If anything, it's the only city in America to have a true European feel due to the height constraints. When I lived in NYC, the dense skyscrapers of Manhattan were very constricting compared to Brooklyn, where I ended up moving. Manhattan is great for office buildings but less as a relaxing abode outside the Village. Even Shanghai & San Paolo has more space between large buildings with room for light, trees, sky.

Research hypergamy. It's a pretty well-established phenomenon across generations.

That's essentially what GitHub is doing. You have your entire contribution history and they have a product to help managers analyze contributions across teams. I worked at a couple startups that used this to evaluate their employees in manager-only meeting.

Negative externalities play a large factor in the cognitive split. I'm more willing to tolerate a minuscule amount of people who hurt themselves more than a minuscule amount of people who hurt a random innocent.

I agree with your analysis. My frustration is in this reality, which I think could have faster iteration speed with the right framing & education.

Oregon has decriminalized all drugs and I have heard a number of people in the Bay Area wanting to make progress beyond this without definitive results: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta... . Personally, I tend more towards the liberal viewpoint but I also believe that the more granular we can make A/B Scientific Testing here, the more our country will reach a positive equilibrium faster.

Drug legalization highlights one of my frustrations at the practical American dialog about controversial topics:

1. Liberals get acknowledgement that weed isn't so bad and should maybe be legal. 2. Liberals: "Legalize all drugs!" 3. Conservatives: "No." 4. --- 20 years pass and another generation is born ---

I wish nuance made it to the front page more than diatribes expounding upon, essentially, hard yes and hard no.

https://www.yugabyte.com - Postgres fronted distributed OLTP database

I work there (300+ ppl). It's primarily open source. It makes money through support contracts and cloud hosting, but all core development is done in the open.

I find power in art through reflection more than immediate action. A lot of how we perceive the past and the lessons to be learned from it are reading a historical account. Seeing an accompanying art piece that makes the text come alive. In the Vietnam example, the Napalm Girl photograph speaks to the horrors of chemical warfare in a way that is immediately palpable. Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen gives an honest account of the nihilism of war veterans in a way that's otherwise hard to explain to teenagers. Without this media, the war would not have the same visceral nature to a millenial like myself, who had not lived through the experience.

I work at YugaByteDB as a software engineer, and I encounter people in your situation regularly. You are asking HN for product-market fit basics on something that is more like a tool or innovation than an end-to-end company. If you join a growing startup (Series C+) related to the product area you like, then you'll be able to understand how that market works from the default company culture. You'll also be able to pitch your own product ideas of similar scope - if the company isn't too established - after the first year or so when you understand their focus more deeply.

I think the point is that this negative pitfall happens to people and multiple people concur. It's easy to say "fight this with positivity", most people on HN started with this philosophy. In practice, it's hard to do that consistently after the first 10 years, especially when you don't notice the slide until you're in a pit.

If you were the only party to win in the spirit of the competition, you should be the first person to accept the prize money. Why would you let the unethical companies get even more prize money from a hijacked idea? Also, if you make an ethical stand too early, you lose the ability for the Hackathon to publicly list you as a winner and give you a platform for reform. That publicity will create a situation where other individuals reach out to you proactively and you can tell your perspective as a winner.

Coming from a Southern US state, I expected that the Bay Area would be more egalitarian given the language. Instead, I've found that it's more like an idea incubator setup by generational wealth that people need to leave if they can't become nouveau riche before they want to build a family. Even when you win the lottery, your reward is living the same type of life in CA that you could in 45 other US states without pushing yourself. 1849 Gold Rush. Same as it ever was.

renren.com

I was 27, living in the Southern USA with a MS from a State University, feeling very similar to you. I decided to push through my comfortable malaise and got offers at early Amazon AWS & Facebook back in 2009. It changed my life trajectory completely. I worked a little bit harder but got exponentially better payoff and interesting problems. Recommendations:

1. Getting into a more prestigious company is likely your next step. You only need to stay there 2-4 years but, since colleges are more corrupt, it's really the modern grad degree that proves your worth. FAANG or a reputable startup is your best option (LinkedIn Top 50 or Breakout List). The crazy hours you hear about are more self-imposed than you think, not mandatory.

2. If FAANG isn't calling you back, this means that you likely weren't even close on the interviews (Medium to Strong - No Hire). The interview algorithms are a heavily game-ified system and these companies expect you to study and game them so hard that answering the questions are second nature. I used to resent this, then I realized that it's actually a really good way to filter a large group of people with less class bias. If anyone can pass but they have to create their own 2-4 month gradual study plan to ace it, who is competent enough to pull that off? Often, in a larger org, you are encouraged to ignore your instincts and game-ify on arbitrary metrics to achieve larger-multistage company goals anyways. Adjusting my mindset this way helped me get the fortitude I needed to be better here.

3. Coding Competitions are another good way to get noticed by companies. The existing algo interviews started as NP-complete puzzles and Coding competitions and many people came to Facebook from that route (https://github.com/robertdimarco/puzzles/tree/master/faceboo...). Kaggle is the new equivalent for ML. It's a great time to get into ML via a non-traditional route and will likely turn into the existing algo interview frustration as it matures.

Without harassing frat boy culture, how else could they convince developers to work long hours for such little pay compared to the rest of the industry?

TCL is quasi-religious. You either appreciate the simplicity and elegance of the 12 clearly ordered rules, or you think the nutbag scruffie programmer is talking to a burning bush.

I learned TCL for adding an embedded scripting language to a company's command line in 2005. I originally cast derision, but have learned to appreciate its beauty after a wrote a couple API frameworks in it. I think it has a little less magic now that lambdas and other shorthand notations are commonplace.

I worked as a manager at a FAANG for 2 years and switched back to IC. It was fairly common practice at my company, even among directors. I actually preferred the management role, but felt like there were many downsides.

  1. I wanted more flexibility in hours and working remotely.  I have elderly parents in another state and want the flexibility to support them, as an only child.
  2. Level of support.  Most directors talked about taking all their vacation at once to relieve pressure to constantly check messages during vacation.  For me, it was a < 1 hr response, much like lawyers.  I was constantly pinged if I ever slacked on checking.
  3. I felt like line management was much less emotionally supported than ICs.  It was pretty common practice to give any positive praise to the IC and negative feedback to the manager, regardless of any sensical attribution.  This was fine for optics, but frustrated me that it extended to internal reviews.
  4. The power dynamics mean that any of your IC friends now have at least a minor level of suspicion towards you.  Other managers also have hostility because advancing feels more zero-sum unless the company is hypergrowth.

To give a different spin on your question: you are really asking if should you relocate to a high cost of living environment and geo-arbitrage. SF, NYC, Seattle, Boston. All of them pay high salaries for highly educated labor. They have to. To retain senior talent, you need to be able to give them enough money to afford transportation, lodging, entertainment, etc. Cost of basic necessities is capitalistic and rises when the average salary does. Like all other environments, most people like to save 10-20% per year for retirement and longer term investment. That 10-20% annual savings in a place with a $400K/yr average salary can go a lot farther in a European city where engineers with €65K/yr average salaries do the same strategy. Of course, when you come back 10+ years later, you'll have missed out on a lot of memories with friends. If friends are less important or you don't feel attached to your environment, then maybe the tradeoff is worth it. The FIRE movement arises from an extreme version of this, where people would rather live in a lifestyle city with little industry upon retirement.

Source: I moved from Alabama to Silicon Valley + NYC for a FANG. I loved it. I wasn't attached to Alabama, although I underestimated how much I missed seeing my college friends progress through life. That said, now I'm attached to avoiding winter and don't benefit as much from the geo-arbitrage. I work in system infrastructure, which has significantly better work:life balance options than product or ops.