WDCDev

Yeah this matches up with my experience when I was working as a consultant and trying to get large organizations to buy into managed and structured changes to their enterprise IT environment. It is not an easy job and it is very necessary for enterprises to coordinate their systems development. I've seen the messes first hand, the frustration from "the business" at how "long" everything takes. I've seen tech teams struggling to communicate the complexity of certain requirements in a way leadership can understand too.

After 5 years I was done with that type of work. Way too frustrating to try and get buy-in from development teams, leadership, IT etc. to make changes necessary to support the business at the enterprise level.

I do think SaaS has relieved form pain for organizations. Hopefully legacy Peoplesoft and Lawson systems are being replaced by things like Workday etc. It does open up a new set of problems (and expenses) but these seem way more manageable than the problems and challenges with working with on-prem ERPs.

It's when a major fund(s), bank(s) or lender(s) blows up and is followed up a successive string of failures until the "big one".

Every financial crisis or recession from the last 30 years or so has had a string of failures leading up a crash.

Late 1980s S&L Crash - You had a string of larger S&Ls failing (and a ton of smaller ones). This was a contributing factor in the 1990 recession. Note that S&Ls started failing in the mid 1980s.

2000 Crash - Long Term Capital Management blew up in 1998 and had to be rescued due to fears of contagion. Note the market hit all time highs after this fund failed.

2008 Crash - In early 2007 - New Century blows up ... starting a cascading series of failures. The S&P hits new highs throughout 2007 after New Century, until it finally starts to crash in late 2007 leading into the 2008 recession.

And now we have Archegos, which failed earlier this year and new highs in the stock market this week.

I am watching for more failures. One of the major contributing factors to Archegos' failure was WAY too much leverage. There is a ton of money sloshing around the system right now, and margin debt has hitting all time highs.

Crypto is also going blow up and take a lot of retail with it. If you get a stock crash and folks get margin called you could see a lot of crypto selling to cover that margin.

Yep - I've ignored the many many Amazon recruiting emails I have received over the years. I have absolutely no desire to deal with their shitty employment practices and idc if it is "team dependent". I am not taking that risk.

Recently left a company with an ex-Amazon Director who was VP of Engineering. He was an absolute snake who had only really worked at Amazon for his entire career. He did his expected round of firings/PIPs at the 2 year mark, then quit himself. Many experienced engineers left around the same time since we all were tired of the shitty Amazon culture he was breeding.

The point is that now you have to watch out for who the Directory/VPs are at your current organization. If they bring in someone from Amazon expect the company culture to go downhill fast.

Whistleblowers have plenty of protections and can be exempted. Libel can be stated such that they only apply to private matters between individuals, where accusations that do not reach the felony level - which is exactly what is going on here. I have no doubt we could protect all interests, while limiting the power of the wealthy and powerful.

Yes - and it's driving people further into tribes where the only way they feel "safe" is in and around their own "kind". This isn't civilization, but a regression and if it goes on for a few more generations it could be very damaging to our social fabric.

I just hope it's a weird early-21st century "intellectual" movement that eventually dies out.

I was stunned at how someone with zero evidence and an obvious axe to grind could rally such disdain for someone else with little more than a few unsubstantiated social media posts.

I feel that this is due to the weird place victimization occupies in our culture combined with how anti-social social media is.

It's extremely easy to issue accusations and threats and have them be read by literally millions of people. You would never dare vocalize these same threats and and accusations publically - and even if you did, in the pre-internet days, it would reach far far fewer people.

At some point we to start thinking about strengthening our libel laws to act as a deterrent to this type of online behaviors. It's depressing to consider MORE litigation as the solution here, but I don't think we can depend on the good nature of people and rationality to ultimately prevail.

Ha! I kinda stopped paying attention to most consumer-oriented startups a few years back when some kooky poetry delivery service got a few million in funding. (I am trying to find a link to it). Then there was that "pizza robot" company ...

I get that VCs will fund stupid things like that to grow entrepreneurs and build a portfolio of companies that maybe grow enough to get acquired and produce some profit. But funds/corps dumping $250 million+ annually into self-driving seems crazy. The opportunity costs of that alone are outrageous especially when there are ample and ripe opportunities to disrupt "traditional" businesses and business models across all kinds of market verticals.

I do think it's different from 5 years ago. Yes, some researchers were throwing cold water on the idea then but they were seen as contrarians. And, on boards like this one, you'd have no shortage of people going but Waymo is going to have a taxi service next year! Today, it's closer to being accepted wisdom.

Yes, and this has always been perplexing. I work at an AI startup which actually uses it to accomplish rather straightforward tasks - and it's really hard to perfect with the minimal tolerances for error that we have to adhere to. When you start to scale the problem up to self driving it becomes evident quickly that it will take a looong time to get the level 5; yet people in this business were still insisting it was around the corner.

Yes? That's what the whole article is about.

Articles like this have been written for 5 years now, but the money keeps flowing into these projects. Argo, Aurora and Aptiv etc. are all still burning mountains of cash.

I am shocked the industry didn't take Uber/Lyft selling off their self-driving divisions as the signal to stop funding these efforts.

Has there? I can't imagine investors/corporations dumping billions, annually, into an project which won't produce a return for 40-50 years.

My family moved into our newly built home in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh in Oct. of last year. We were part of the first group of buyers in a relatively new plan of higher-end homes.

Since Oct. of last year, the base price of our model has gone up $215,000 and every lot in this phase (phase 1) has now sold. I suspect at least half of that increase is materials, and the rest is due to market demand.

The market is just crazy and in talking to my builder he has said supply shortages could last through EOY and into next.

It is for a lot of executives, especially ones which are clueless about technology or who do not have a technology background but were promoted and told to "fix the TPS submission and reporting system!". These characters are typically corporate politicians who are great at talking but couldn't manage a team of 3 to boil a pot of water.

They love consultancies. It's a total roll of the dice if their projects are successful or not. I've seen it go both ways.

Everybody considers themselves a designer, but it is baseless optimism that is supported by little data or precedent. Good designers are unique. Design ability is a 'talent'. Being able to conceive a complex system that maintains "conceptual integrity" is not an ability that everyone has, nor is it show (yet) that is even teachable!

It's also talent that is hard to recognize and can be valued very differently from one organization to the next. I've been in the room with developers and management looking cross-eyed at me as I walk them through a top down business/problem decomposition and system design questioning the value of the entire exercise. Not surprising, these are organizations which have extremely brittle systems full of overlapping and "hard to reason about" abstractions.

Use the right technology for what you're trying to build.

Yep .. so if you want a rich responsive user experience, DON'T use any web technologies. GMail (AND Gsuite) is a perfect example of how a relatively simple concept like email can be turned into a slow, unresponsive piece of garbage.

I am not buying stock, but a business model that could work is renting out a percentage of their capacity to companies/startups that need to deliver goods or services to customers' homes.

I also don't believe self-driving will be anything more than tech stuck in R&D for the next 10 years. If I were an investor have preferred Uber sell ATG before this IPO.

Layoffs happen all the time so I am not reading too much into this re. macro economics.

However, I firmly believe the autonomous driving bubble will pop eventually, and you will have layoffs across that entire segment of the tech industry.

They think it's about gotcha questions and they think they fail because they didn't leetcode hard enough.

But ... if you read some of the feedback from interviewers at "those companies" that rely on these interviews, they say the reason they failed someone is exactly because they "didn't leetcode hard enough". It is manifested as:

"Well other candidates got the same solution as you, they just did it 10 minutes faster"

or

"You missed an edge case, even though your core algorithm was correct".

This is a huge issue with these interviews. It's all too easy for interviewers to evaluate candidates based on how fast, correct, neat or "complete" you answer was. It's easy and takes no time.

Contractor ... Biometrics firm. I loved this company and would still be there today had they not lost so many ppl with the draw downs in Iraq and Afgh.

BTW ... this is a true story. One of my career's shining moments.

In the field at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, next to old WWI style bunkers that were prob. full of mustard gas or chlorine gas 100 or so years ago, in a tiny trailer filled with server equipment ... with a failing AC unit, in the August heat of Maryland.

Did I mention the power line run to this trailer couldn't handle the load we were putting on it, and the circuits would break every 15 minutes or so?

So yeah .. I am sweating, literally, and our field test is about to begin. This was an anti-IED system, using passive biometric collection capabilities. I had written a big piece of the software to integrate everything.

Then ... 10 minutes before we begin, we get a nasty bug. General Such and Such is arriving, followed by Cnl. Whomever. Then the AC cuts out. I am in this trailer, and have to code up a fix in 10 minutes, literally, in 105 degree heat, dripping in sweat, with PMs and more important ppl staring over my shoulder.

I did it ... while dripping sweat all over the keyboard. Hooray for me! I saved the day!

Craziest ... most intense coding I have ever done.

Still fail white board interviews though. =/

There is no one answer to this questions, and efficiency isn't always in the best interests of a "big company". Efficiency always must be tempered with risk. In startups, risk is embraced and therefore they can be very "efficient", but in many large corporations (and the federal govt. especially) risk must be quantified, controlled and eventually managed.

When you combine risk management with certain corporate cultures and market verticals, you get a combination of the following:

Risk aversion

Lack of technical knowledge in the management layer

Technology viewed as overhead vs. a value provider

These three things are deadly to an ambitious corporate IT project. Unskilled management can't appreciate requirements, manage scope nor understand trade-offs very well. The business wants guarantees on budget and timelines. Budgets are fixed, and management rarely wants to ask for more since ROI may be hard, if not impossible to quantify.

So what do you end up with? The standard "over-promised and under-delivered technology" solution that are endemic across so many enterprises.

[edit - formatting and spelling]

I thought I was the only one that noticed. It's certainly makes it clear why this type of situation persists.

I agree. I have been using it for over 20 years now, and use it almost daily in many different capacities. Excel along with the entire MS Office suite of applications is ubiquitous across almost every enterprise.

I am curious how Airbus is going to handle external vendors, customers and organizations sending them complex Excel Spreadsheets and Word Documents.

Interview Style. Are you going to whiteboard me or do something else?

I'll bite on your suggestion of a different process.

Bring the candidate on site for a 4 hour coding session. Provide a standard list of questions the scale in difficulty. Think:

1) Fizzbuzz

2) Reverse a string

3) Write a calculator class/script

...

100) Write an algorithm that can search compressed text without decompressing it

So you see how far and correct they can get with an IDE ... and maybe no internet connection.

Noon - Hiring Manager lunch Afternoon - 1 or 2 design interviews on the white board.

So you have done a few things here that I want to outline.

A) You got rid of the stupid whiteboard

B) You have one process that scales for experience levels!

C) You can tailor the problem set at a certain of difficulty to specific languages

This interview style ensures the developer/engineer knows how to code, and can be weighted appropriately to certain skill levels.

They also have a lot to lose by leaving the position unfilled for months on end. If you aren't Googlefaceapplezon, then false negatives could be as costly as false positives given time is money.

Data is a commodity.

This depends on the goal of the projects. If it's pure R&D that doesn't have a requirement to transition to commercial use, then you are absolutely correct. I don't think that's the case here. Some percentage of projects has to transition it's technology or research into commercial use, otherwise what is the point? Google is a publicly traded company, I wouldn't be a happy stockholder if I knew they were blowing $1 billion a year and with very little to show for it.

One thing did jump out at me in this article.

Mike Cassidy, who stepped down from Loon, ran the team “like a fire drill,” a former employee said.

I read this as, "Leadership likes to change its mind about direction and focus ... constantly". That's a recipe for disaster. Focus is key. You need to find the right direction as quick as possible, then execute.

The good news is that global populations will begin to decline over the next 100 years!

Don't build a DSL for a production system, period. Production quality DSLs are for academics and/or staff engineers that have enough time and resources to build and maintain them.

I don't know about you, but I have a constant backlog of features with tons of interesting problems to solve. There are places where I could build a DSL, but I am not going to because I would inevitably build something hacky and brittle that is impossible to understand and maintain (like JDSL).

I can't build new features, and increase the value of the system if my DSL is constantly breaking the system.

So don't do it. There is plenty of functionality on the .NET and Ruby platforms for me to model the concepts and objects in the domain without the need for a DSL.

Run for the hills any time anyone says, "It's our in-house developed DSL!". It's a virtual guarantee that whatever was cooked up is some sort of insanity like JDSL.

I would withhold judgement on Lockheed. It wouldn't surprise me if someone there raised the lack of a backup strategy as an problem with the govt. ... only to be ignored or told there wasn't enough budget for it.