ayberk

Yeah, you can't talk about the deterioration of Google without talking about the deterioration of the culture at Google.

I didn't like working at AWS for the most part, but I have never seen Google-level dysfunction there. There were a lot of times I disagreed with decision, but I could always understand the reasoning behind it. On the contrary, I can't explain most of the decision being made at Google. The enshittification from the very top has been amazing to watch, even for someone like me who joined only 3.5 years ago. Both senior and mid-level leadership lack a clear vision and the execution has obviously been horrible. Google needs a hard reset if they want to be successful again. I'm not buying the "too-big-to-fail" bullshit.

The best workaround (imho) is just using virtual cards. My Venture X allows me to create a virtual card on the spot restricted to that merchant where I can also enter an optional lock date. If I want to try something, I just create a new card and set the lock date to the next day. Even if I forget to cancel, good luck charging my card :)

As a Google engineer, it's really saddening to see the Welchism completely taking over Google. There are more than enough examples showing focusing on bottomline to increase shareholder value doesn't work in the long run, but it's obvious the current leadership doesn't care.

This books isn't about that at all. It's more about how our brains work and how we can use it to make our code better (read: easier to understand).

If anything, the book tells the exact opposite: you can write your code so that it's naturally easier to understand.

This was one of the best books I've ever read. I'll actually go ahead and say this is probably the only book I can confidently say that every professional programmer* should read.

You know how sometimes you can "smell" something doesn't seem right? Or seems a lot harder [to understand] than it should be? Yeah all those little intuitions we develop through experience is explained using "brain science" in this book.

*: More specifically anyone that writes code in a collaborative environment.

It indeed is hard, and a good code search platform makes life so much easier. If I ever leave Google, the internal code search is for sure going to be the thing I miss the most. It's so well integrated into how everything else works (blaze target finding, guice bindings etc), I can't imagine my life without it.

I remember to appreciate it even more every time I use Github's search. Not that it's bad, it's just inherently so much harder to build a generalized code search platform.

I'm torn about this. I've been in FAANG for a while now, and while I do think I'd be more successful/happier at a smaller company (and I actually was), I don't think "smaller" tech is necessarily going to be better, especially right now.

Maybe we should just accept that these are just jobs, and no glamour is necessary -- so maybe big tech jobs losing it is not the worst thing. Let the talent spread and create more "glamorous" jobs.

I hope they change the binary name since "jj" is a common <ESC> binding for vim users :)

I'm still reading this book, but so far it's been one of the few books I'd recommend to anyone. I try to be as stoic as possible, but contents of this book has managed to actually anger me. It makes it so clear that how much corruption and bad policies impact our lives.

Kudos for being so open -- after seeing numerous "incidents" at AWS and GCE I can say that two rules always hold with respect to observability:

- You don't have enough.

- You have too much.

Usually either something will be missing or some red herring will cost you valuable time. You're already doing much better than most people by taking it seriously :)

I'm not surprised a bit given how hostile Twitch has become to users. Completely irrelevant ads, ads playing at worst times (who the hell thought it'd be a good idea to show an ad before the actual stream??), apps abandoned(at least apple tv app). I literally stopped watching some streamers because of Twitch itself.

This is in-line with Amazon's departure from "customer obsession" overall. I can't wait for bigger tournaments to move to a better platform.

I don't know if it's the tool honestly. I've recently switched teams and I'm in the process of getting java readability. The whole experience so far has been much worse than getting my C++ readability. I even get "nit" comments on the code I haven't changed. I have had multiple comments where reviewer basically "preferred" one style over another. It's been still mostly helpful, but I've had my share of frustration.

C++ readability was a much, much better experience. All the comments were about actually making the code better, eg, "use THIS_MACRO() instead of THAT_MACRO(), because go/...".

I guess I think it's much more about the reviewer, and based on my anecdotal experience, the language :)

probably for developers' sanity :)

This^. OP is basically just filtering for people who have experience building hash tables.

Any alternatives you'd recommend? I'm not happy with Notion at all, but I haven't been able to find a good alternative for my own personal use:

- Sync across all devices

- Hierarchical notes

- Note-level sharing for collaboration

Apologies if it came as rude or hateful, that wasn't my intention.

Funny thing is I'm a C++ programmer myself right now as I mentioned :) Even if we decide to "deprecate" C++ today, Google alone would have large enough C++ codebase left to maintain for the next two generation of programmers.

So no, I don't think it means we should demote or fire all C++ programmers -- but at the same time I'd like to note that as a programmer no one should be married to a single language -- languages come and go.

It _looks_ easier because it lets you do anything you want. C++ makes you feel like you're going faster, but then you spend two weeks debugging a weird memory issue.

I come from functional programming background, so I'm all for taking a little bit longer to make my code compile if that means it'll work. I'd rather deal with compilation errors than waking up at 2am to debug a stupid segfault.

As someone who has been writing C++ at Google, this exactly. Despite all the tooling, guidelines and "internal magic", C++ is still an abomination. And no it has nothing to do with memory management, I actually do like C.

I love how Eric Raymond describes it as "anti-compact", because, well, it really is. C++ as a whole should be deprecated -- and no new projects should use C++ (unless for some very odd and specific reason).

Huh, citation? :) I'm not saying you're wrong, but as a GCP engineer I have never seen us (well, my org) implementing something because of "AWS or Azure has it".

UO kind of shaped my life. The first piece of code I ever wrote was creating a bow with my name on it. It felt like magic and it was so exciting that I never stopped coding since then.

After two degrees, moving to a whole another continent, and getting my “dream” job, I only can hope to find that kind of excitement again.

I still get chills whenever I hear game’s music. Incredible game indeed.

I do and I love it! (except it stopped working on Safari and Firefox for some reason)

This is a good place to remind that _never ever_ buy a Tesla. I was a huge fanboy and I do love my car, but their customer support and service centers are absolutely horrendous.

It's all great when nothing is wrong, but things eventually go wrong and you regret ever owning one. - Signed, a Tesla Owner who has been dealing with a very minor damage because some idiot couldn't take their eyes off of their phone in a 25mph zone.

This is Google sharpening its focus ;)

Not quite. If you pass the hiring committee, you have one year to find a team. So it's more like your interview result is good for a year. After you match with a team you get the actual offer and it has the usual deadlines.

Hiring processed has changed though, so I'm not sure if this is still true.

I have, but nothing stood out. I even tried Firefox Profiler (which is pretty good btw, kudos to the team), and it looks like DOM processing and renderer both spend a lot of CPU. But alas I'm not a frontend developer and have no incentive to dive deeper :)

I try to use Safari as much as possible, but I need something that works on Windows as well.

Thanks for the recommendations, but I have both and some more. I wish there were an easy way to drill down on what exactly is consuming power.

I am not sure what's wrong, but I've been underwhelmed with my 14" MBP's battery life.

I was super excited to get one for work solely because of all the buzz about battery life. But here I'm getting 5 hours or so. Firefox and Chrome are by far the biggest offenders, but I don't do anything special.

Just wanted to give another anecdote.

This definitely doesn't apply to developer tools in general (and sometimes also to infrastructure).

Anyone who had the "pleasure" of using Amazon's internal tools can talk about how "Make it work ASAP" attitude has worked out for their internal tooling :) LPT anyone?

I've recently read "Dopamine Nation" by Anna Lembke, and most of the stuff in the book resonated well with me. I really don't spend too much time on social media, but my addiction has been online gaming for awhile. The book does a great job of describing the chemical imbalance caused by immediate access to dopamine we all have with the internet.

The key takeaway from the book for me was that abstinence is necessary and withdrawal is part of getting better. I have tried all kinds of tools and tricks to avoid gaming before, but learning "why" it's happening has been the key to actually succeed.