blue039

People have to eat. Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that.

Fact of the matter is Meta has problems almost no one else has. Acting like people will choose less pay and boring work over interesting work and more pay on a moral basis is a little naive. But I see you apparently have a political axe to grind. Meta is not a morally acceptable place to work I agree. However, if you were offered 350,000 USD to work on something hard like a compiler or a data pipeline designed to ingest petabytes of data I'm sure you'd at least think twice about it. For example, you could work at Meta and use the money they pay to fund organizations you support that run counter to Meta's mission. This all not even mentioning having Meta on your resume is basically a golden ticket to the industry for the rest of your career.

It's good to see that despite all of the astroturfed "Journalism" on the death of remote work the data appears to show otherwise. The engineer market dictates the terms of employment. It seems that, based on this, remote is here to stay. That's good news for myself and others that would otherwise have very little reason to stay in tech. For example, the area I've lived in for the last 25 years has a small tech community. Mostly curmudgeonly old companies with a "tech" wing that is chronically underpaid. Think $90k for a senior a position. Given how expensive my house has become in recent years there's no way that's even possible to choke down.

Rails being the most in-demand skill is relatively unsurprising. It's becoming the web's very own COBOL. Millions and millions of lines of RoR code from over a decade ago needs to be maintained and these people are in high demand. I've seen a lot of new shops spring up that use RoR too. The trend with these places seems to be foreign developers and juniors powering the company. RoR, while it has it's problems, is still the perfect tool to extract any real power a developer has. It's about as close to WYSIWYG as we can come without going to dreamweaver.

It is interesting Python didn't make it into the in-demand skill list. I suppose the language is relatively niche still. It just feels like an in-demand kill to me because I work in data engineering. It's similarly interesting Go scored so high in demanded skills. Even outside my field it's still very niche despite all the posts you see. It leaves me suspect of their data somewhat.

The problem is much deeper unfortunately.

If they banned IMSI catchers it just makes the job marginally harder. When I mean marginally I truly mean MARGINALLY. Right now a police officer can fire up some software, draw a selector box around a region, and pull everyone who was in that region inside some timeframe. They don't need an IMSI catcher for that. Cell phone data from advertisers is often enough. It's real minority report pre-crime level shit. This of course all ignoring the fact that IMSI leaking happens with EM emissions which can be argued are incidentally picked up anyway and therefore information that doesnt require a warrant. Like a license plate for your car.

We need much, much stronger privacy laws. But first we need to get people into congress that actually care.

I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical

Like most engineers I didn't start out that way so perhaps you are right and a few grains of salt would make it better. However, I do not think the average HNer represents a weird aberration of happiness on the scale. I think most companies that hire on this site likely chronically underpay people. Not their fault most likely. HN caters to early stage startups.

However, I think my overarching message is clear. Happiness is entirely relative. At any rate, you should never prioritize happiness over financial security because you should be well compensated, first and foremost, for the time in your life you will never get back. Your compensation should be even better for dealing with a bad company. You might argue that spending those hours of your life in a relative happy state is healthier. I'd agree. But to me, that eventuality comes about after establishing good pay. I don't plan on retiring extremely wealthy but I think I'll be okay looking back at the sacrifices I've made sitting on the veranda with fewer financial worries. Perhaps this is a uniquely American perspective. I don't know.

Certainly, trading $100k and a good job for $150k and a job that gets you yelled at all the time is not a very good trade. Analyze the opportunity cost. The big point here is two things I think and I think you'd agree:

1. Analysis of opportunity cost is important. That means, to me, quantifying "happiness" with some dollar value. Is happiness worth $10k to you? $30k? I guess it depends. I'd actually quite enjoy a research position, for example, but I cannot take the make-ends-meet-and-no-retirement pay that most academic positions give.

2. People are often afraid to leap into a new position. To me, this is because they fail to quantify happiness with some dollar value. People often use qualitative metrics. Those are useful but only in the context of the quantitative reality.

Signal isn't overloaded. It's use here is the same as it's use elsewhere. It just requires contextual information to know what it means. A Qt programmer might think of signals and slots, a UNIX programmer might think of UNIX signals, etc. Jargon sure. Overloaded? I don't think so. Only thing here that bothers me is how vague the title is.

Money aside, did you ever leave a job you were happy with to find one where you were even more happy? Did that work?

I understand you said money aside but money is genuinely all you should care about. You are trading decades of your waking life to the rat race. It should be your first, and in my opinion, most imperative concern. If you were truly a generous and austere person you'd be a volunteer.

Frequently. I've only recently maintained "tenure" in my later engineering years. Mostly because I don't want to fight with scrappy new grads for positions anymore. First piece of advice I can give you is ignore anything about "fun tech stack" or "culture". It's all bullshit. Of course, parrot the lines they want to hear about how these are the things you look for. Appear fun and excited to work in their "fun stack" in their "culture". Use this as cover for what you really want: money. At the end of the day money may not buy happiness but I have rarely met a happy person that can't afford to be comfortable. Beer coolers, pizza, ping pong, and "fun activities" don't buy you time with your family, friends, and neighbors. Money does.

Second piece of advice: never fall for the "find a job you love" trope. Remember this: if you do not own the company you will never love it. You may like it. Hell, you may enjoy it. But the specter of a layoff, getting fired due to a bad review, etc will always be just a few steps behind you. Always remember as a software engineer the pinheaded MBAs have you squarely under the "cost center" line in the balance sheet. And no, getting shares in a company does not imply ownership no matter how many times HR tells you so.

Fact of the matter is for the first two decades of your career you should honestly be looking to move on from any company in <= 5 years. So, a minimum of 4 companies in 20 years. You'll want to reduce that to a move-on-rate of every 3 or so years if you're in start up land. Loyalty is not awarded. Not here, and not anywhere else. That ship sailed 50 years ago.

The reason? More money and more responsibility. You have a chance to redefine yourself at every new job. These redefinitions can bring you more money and more power. More money and more power is very "sticky" and you'll find people who "fail up" execute this strategy brilliantly. You are more likely to see a significant raise via quitting than by staying around. This advice is universal. It applies equally to tech as it does to landscaping.

Of course, this is just a rule of thumb. Don't leave a company that values you and gives you good raises every so often. Evaluate carefully the opportunity cost. One example from my career: I had a job where I made $X where $X was a little below average. I liked the company and the people. I interviewed around after I got my second or third "money is tight" in a review (despite others seemingly getting rank and pay). I found a company that I could tolerate willing to pay me 1.3x $X. That is a slam dunk. Without question I put my two weeks in and GTFO. Especially when you are young this is very important. If your raise is 10% and a competitor offers you 15% you may want to weigh other facts. But when you're talking multiples of your potential raise...just leave. You are not married to the company and they are CERTAINLY not married to you. If you like your coworkers that much get their phone numbers and meet them at a bar. Despite the himming and hawing from your boss they're probably doing the same thing as you.

Their ESG score tells me otherwise. They can single handedly destroy a company or industry with this score. They control trillions in investment capital. They have seats in the largest governments.

You are either legitimately shilling for your employer or watch/read one of the several DOZEN news organizations they own. You need to wake up. The giant, along with it's daemon Aladdin, control the majority of money flow on the planet.

It's not misinformed at all. The US's involvement in the Ukraine war is strictly along party lines. The Biden's have been involved in Ukraine at nearly every level for decades now. There are several high profile politicians in the US with ties to Ukranian companies. We flew a Ukranian flag in our congress. That should tell you everything.

There is not a "war" except one caused by politicians. The price eggs and gasoline in the US are not a function of this war. I could not care less and I certainly do not want to send our boys to die for a politician's dirty laundry. Whatever happens over there is a problem of the EU, not mine, and not anyone I care about. Being a "good global citizen" is pointless agitprop from BlackRock ESG. My life is already too complicated. It would be wise of us to not go about pissing off nuclear powers especially when the US is as fundamentally weak both in the spirit of what it stands for and leadership as it is today. Eisenhower tried to warn us and none of us listened.

The main driver of RICO, however, wasn't to stop racketeering. It provided the provisions for the FBI to pursue mob bosses for hits they ordered. Prior to RICO it was very difficult to throw a mob boss in jail for such things.

All we need to do is extract that portion of the bill. However, I suspect the answer is like usual. Congress does not represent the people and their corporate owners would not be pleased. Larry Fink would probably have a millenia worth of consecutive life sentences alone. We might spur innovation in healthcare technology just making him serve the time he owes.

It is interesting that we can use RICO go to after mob bosses even when they have layers and layers of indirection to protect them.

But with CEOs it seems RICO doesn't apply.

These interviews are not gutchecks. They are shibboleth checks.

I can design you a nice document, do the research, put the pieces together, etc with the big picture. I may not know a ton about AWS or another cloud provider but I can put the document together that describes how it will be looking when it's done. That is architecture. Somewhere between UML and word documents.

What these interviews are checking, and the one you are describing, is whether or not I can parrot the correct code-words. Lambda, elastic cache, all this other nonsense. That's the purpose of the bloodsuckers I mentioned above. If you can train someone with little architecture experience to pass a senior level interview by just saying the right things and knowing the right hype tech then you're not hiring architects you're hiring grifters.

It's a problem that is endemic in this industry. You can't "gut check" 30 years of architectural experience unless you're legitimately asking the core questions of architecture. Every interview I've been in has had me studying stupid buzzwords from cloud technology and every interview I am asked how to use these technologies. As an example, I was once turned down because I didn't use Kafka. I knew what the underlying technology was and suggested using it but the fact I didn't say kafka eliminated me. The reason? I can only guess, but it's likely because the interviewer doesnt know much and was looking for a way to get into a debate over kafka vs protobuf vs whatever instead of discussing actual planning of a system. These debates are resolved after I take the problem back to my desk and think about it for a week. Not in an hour. In an hour the best I can give you is a block diagram with maybe some very rough fleshed out detail.

The humility check should be bi-directional. It has been my experience that interviewers tend to be the least humble people at a company. The power dynamic is obvious and it's not in the character at most startups where a "senior" engineer high on hopium can settle themselves into their rightful place.

Yeah, I don't think I want a job that asks such questions. I've done the webscale BS. I've done actual architecture that exists in reality. At this stage in my career there's nothing an interviewer can do but insult me.

You might say that this is hubris about my own skill but it has nothing to do with how good I am. My resume has a LOOONG track record of consistent work in the industry. Call my references, do some actual DD on me, then ask me real questions related to actual things.

If leetcode and all these other service went straight to hell tomorrow the world would be a better place. This entire "interview" industry is propped up by a bunch of leeches capitalizing on a recently extremely popular field. Then, injecting their BS to make the process harder thereby earning them dollars. The linked article is a perfect example. It's actually an advertisement if you look close enough designed by these exact leeches. This is just a reimagining of the bloodsuckers who run SAT/GRE/GMAT prep services and "ex-ivy-league recruiter consultant" bullshit. They are the same people and the only place they belong is all the way at the back of the breadline. That may be too generous for them anyway. There are better people that deserve the bread.

There's a good chance at my career phase I have more experience than the interviewer. They "level the playing field" by asking me these stupid things. That is why it is insulting. I almost want to leave the industry entirely than have to do the process one more time. I don't need a 7 phase 360 interview with everyone including the CEO's cousin to insure I am a "culture fit". It was never like this before. It needs to stop.

The ACM has a strict code of conduct. If an engineer commits an atrocious error their PE will be stripped. Violating the computing rights of literally the entire planet should be similarly egregious.

It is not twitter mobs. Its about holding people to a standard and not allowing them to corrupt the meaning of computing for financial, or tyrannical, gain. In recent history we have done almost nothing to hold anyone accountable for their actions. Academia being the most impervious to such punishments.

The ACM and ABET would make the decision. The same people who issue the certifications to the schools who award the degrees. Yes, these organizations are generally spineless cowards, but in a perfect world it would be them. Iron-fisted responses to tyrants is the only way you can insure the purity of a field and freedom from their destruction. I assume you will take this to it's natural conclusion and say any CS degree holder working for the NSA/Military/FBI/etc should also be similarly stripped of their title. To that I say, yes, if they are violating the computing rights of others willfully we as a society cannot allow such people to hold the credential. Otherwise a code of conduct is simply a list of suggestions. In which case it should not exist at all.

I meant that we should have stripped it away. Sorry that was not clear.

You might be able to handwave some things in politics. They're either too old, too lazy, etc. They're just politicians trying to find a nice box to put everything into because otherwise you can't make laws. It's the fundamental problem with legislators that take a salary and are not volunteers for a short period. When you need people to justify their pay they start finding heuristics, no matter how awful, to create more laws.

The problem is the precedent, globally, of killing encryption is well documented. There is no good solution that doesn't harm everyone. Here in the states, the Clipper Chip [0] was the textbook example of politicians trying to legislate mathematics. You wouldn't even be able to do something like "give us a copy of your private keys" because then you'd go down the path of playing wackamole with every distribution, every slightly recompiled GnuPG, etc. It's an intractable problem. We, in the US, would've gone a long way by stripping Dorothy Denning's CS PhD from her [1] after her outspoken support of such measures. Instead she has received many awards for her "work" in the field of rights erosion.

The US seems to have settled on making attempts at Clipper 2.0 every decade or so. In the meantime encryption is considered a weapon legally which is how the DAs get their fill. Germany appears to have flat out opposed it...but it's only a matter of time. The EU will force them to bend the knee because historically they always have. It's a fantastic effort. Unfortunately, done by one of the biggest pushovers in Europe.

There's no hope for the technical among us. The people with power who do understand, the technocrats, are behind these efforts. The people that don't understand are behind these efforts. It's only the intractability of the problem that makes legislating it dangerous. Once someone clever enough makes it tractable there won't be encryption anymore. Pre-crime is the way the world has worked since 9/11 and encryption is #0 on the list of things to legislate to death. In the US, there are likely hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars being spent to store every last bit of communication in Utah for this eventuality.The EU has a similar program. Those tax dollars have to be justified somehow. So when you ask "who would support this"... just follow the money.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_E._Denning

I am generally happy and successful. However, my childhood was filled to the gills with trauma. So much so I visited a therapist and they immediately identified it.

It emerges as rampant pessimism and distrust of anyone and everyone. It's highly beneficial in the corporate world but has irreparably damaged my ability to bond with people. Which leaves me at a impasse as to whether to solve it. Given my age it's not worth it as I am well beyond my years of socializing freely.

How is this any different than with a hotel?

Imagine you send an employee to a place where they have to stay in a hotel. Then, they trash it. REALLY trash it. Trash it so bad that it takes actual time to repair.

The hotel will likely use the credit card as the identifier. They'll also probably blacklist the company itself until someone really high up calls them and tells them sorry.

Of course, AirBnB is a little different and not being a company makes this harder. However, the practice isn't exactly unusual. If you're strongly associated with someone chances are that someone will tag along. Easier to ban both (or all) of you than one of you and hope the people left over are responsible enough (they usually aren't with enough guilt tripping). Especially in the case of a romantic partner the only option probably is to ban both you strictly because it's a near certainty your malicious partner will travel with you or have the ability to guilt you into letting them. Good luck telling your girlfriend/boyfriend to go stay at the Holiday Inn while you sleep in luxury in an AirBnB.

A lot of fluff in this post's comments. I will be brutally honest and simply say there is nothing better.

The "intellectual" argument falls flat. I do not consider myself "enlightened" in any respect yet I find the amount of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing here to rival reddit. If we are to compare HN to it's nearest grandparent, slashdot, at least people had a sense of humor there. There is no such thing here. If you don't toe the line cast by the technocratic neo-liberal agenda you will be downvoted. If you don't like XYZ framework, are critical of Rust/Haskell/Whatever you will get downvoted. If you are an inch right of center you will get downvoted. Sometimes you get downvoted for just existing. /r/shithnsays has a select of posts exemplifying many of the above traits. If someone told me they were an HNer I would more likely avoid them just like I tend to avoid redditors.

The SNR is atrocious. It's very obvious there are as many, if not more, astroturf accounts here than there are legitimate posters.

It's truly a forum for the silicon valley yuppie who believe they hold the single truth to all things. It's obnoxious, it's annoying, oftentimes it's outright terrible. Questionable moderation, obvious political bent, and pseudo-intellectualism abounds.

Yet, there's nothing better. Maybe someday. Until then, shitposting here is all I have since slashdot is dead, USENET is dead, and forums are mostly dead. The one upside of this place is the relatively simple format. It's far better than the thousand-dark-pattern-deep designs of other places.

For many of us, including myself, such a "luxury" is not practical:

1. I like the outdoors and they don't put bus lines 200 miles from the nearest gas station.

2. Work is often further than walking or biking distance.

3. I need to haul more than a few days worth of groceries. Or a larger item.

I think what people are getting upset at is you are conflating not driving with some higher form of intellect when in reality it's a privilege really only afforded to people who live in often high cost of living areas. This implies a socioeconomic status to yourself whether you like it or not and so people feel you are talking down to them. I interpreted it as you were talking down to me too. It's not about me being "done" with road rage, or whatever, it's about the fact that my town, my life, and the country in general won't let me be "done" with it. Nor will my hobbies. For many of us a car is not a privilege it's an absolutely basal level necessity. No amount of cheerleading for the anti-car crowd will change that. I suspect it won't change in my lifetime either.

I see that politics is your entire personality. Sorry for offending something so deeply meaningful to you. I used it as an example and your moronic pseudo-intellectual deep-read into the psychology of my post lead to your conclusion.

It's probably depressing and shameful to be related to close family members who are potentially unreasonable, ignorant, violent, and more.

First, get help. Liking a political candidate does not make you unhinged and violent.

Perhaps instead of judging based on limited information, you should first look at your own circumstances and mind your own.

It's a public forum, sorry I ruffled feathers identifying a problem child that somehow made it to adulthood. I mean, their parents must've done something right. Except for the part where they raised an ingrate that judges them entirely on their affinity to a particularly, extremely popular nationally, candidate.

Wise parents should aim to promote self-reliance, 360-degree honesty, considerateness, courage, BS-detecting critical thinking, and confidence as much as possible.

Indeed, the person's parent's failed in one aspect. They raised a person who is so high huffing their own, admittedly leftist, farts they cannot even drop the veil for a minute to enjoy the likely little time they have left with the people they've known their whole life. It's pathetic. I say that because there is no word in the English language with more power that I know. It's beyond pathetic. The "dangerous, violent" person is the poster. I am sure you could say the wrong thing to them at a bar (perhaps "trump did some good") and get yourself into a knife fight. I've ran into these people before. They're better off siloed in a room with padding on the walls than out on the street. Perhaps with a hit reel from 2008-2012 Obama speeches playing repeat. If unhinged leftists were capable of anything California wouldn't be having a mass exodus and the streets wouldn't smell like excrement. And yes, they do. I travel there weekly.

Mob programming is such an asinine concept to me. It's like all the people saying holotropic breathwork cures cancer. It's just developer mysticism. There is no amount of himing and hawing that would get me to believe treating one guy, capable of his own expression, as a code-input robot while developers around him bark commands at him is actually productive. Each line of code is so expensive and the probability of any one of the people barking the code remembering how something works is pretty low. There is significant evidence the action of typing/writing something produces better memory.

It works when you're helping a junior. It's insulting to anyone else. Part of our jobs as programmers is to be able to tease apart another developers mental model and learn the abstraction. If you cannot do this the codebase is either unsaveable or you are. The only codebases I have been unable to untangle in my long career have been either written by contractors or by a pseudo-intellectual moron developer that believes they are the second coming of Turing. Everyone else's code is usually able to be parsed with some patience and a debugger for more complicated tasks. I even gasp use pencil and paper to keep track of code flow often.

Reminding them he was an evil man and his wife was a wack-a-doo is.. fun.

Why do you feel the need to do this? Does it provide you some personal validation that lets you sleep better at night? That you "bested" your parents?

I think your issue is deeper than politics. Militant atheists get the same kicks "besting" Christians. It's not a healthy way to go about living.

This is just not true...

I know the space is active, but when I see the old bright yellow CLHS linked to from documentation sites, I just frown a bit.

This is how documentation has been FOREVER. The newer documentation is not necessarily better. In fact, I find the "forced by the compiler" type docs that come from Rust et al to be infuriating at times. PyDoc is no better. I much prefer the terse documentation when I need to know something for sure rather than just copy-pasting examples out of docs.

downright dismissive of modern techniques like containers and DevOps practices.

Citation needed? Lisp containerizes just fine. Unless you mean hand-holding-via-blog-post which yeah, I guess the community can be hostile. If you hang around the IRC people are often very helpful. The greybeards in the field are very experienced and very intelligent. To be crass, many of these "modern" developers you refer to need a LOT of handholding. CL doesn't provide this handholding. Honestly, it is no harder than getting actual work done in Haskell. You spend a lot of time in documentation and not a lot of people can help you. Of those people that can, your problem is not hard enough to interest them because they are VERY good. That being said I had no problem at all getting help from the community IRC and mailing lists.

As far as I can tell CL is fine for the 21st century. A more streamlined package system would be nice but quicklisp and ASDF aren't that complicated.

Frankly, I dont think you've spent any time working in CL at any real size. You could argue it doesnt scale well across large teams and that'd be fair. Your other criticisms though...don't make sense and don't align with my experience at all.

Probably people who are mute or deaf.

That being said, the ultra dense morons who think "oral" can't be extended in a special case to simply mean "without extra time to think" (which is what is is, mostly) are typically not experienced with these exams.

The parent teaches CS1 and is not likely to have been given a formal oral examination in their likely short career (these are usually reserved for PhD qualifying and special MScs).

This is not only untrue, but interacting with anyone who really believes it is incredibly dangerous.

This opinion literally only exists in a pseudo-intellectual echo chamber such as this one.

In fact, people and corporations that can maintain personal and corporate Integrity, in today's world, are generally badass MFs, and it's not likely to end well for those that mistake Integrity for weakness.

Cool opinion. None of it is true. You may think they are "generally badass MFers" but there are plenty of people, myself included, who will see "corporate integrity" as a weakness. In fact, if you interviewed the world's most powerful people I'd bet all the money I had none of them would tell you to be a "nice person" with "integrity". Warren Buffett, for example, uses this image (and you should abuse such an image), but historically is a cutthroat.

If you want integrity join a church. The people in power who have convinced you that they have integrity and that's how they got there are exploiting your naive sense of moral purpose in life. Wake up.

Yes, because royalty got to its position through being a self described "empathetic person".

No, power is awarded to those bold enough to do what needs to be done. You'd be wise to read _The Prince_, and instead of being revolted by it, take it as a lesson in how people such as US presidents, CEOs, dictators, etc all come to power.

I'm getting downvoted because people like you haven't studied history. Typical of the pseudo-intellectual I doubt you've read any books on the historical acquisition of power. If you did, you'd notice the common thread across all cultures, kingdoms, and royalty. There's a distinct difference between deliberate machiavellianism, and uncontrolled machiavellianism. The former is business, the latter is "psychopathy". I put it in quotes because you also do not have any idea what psychopathy actually is. I'm sure you go around the office calling people "nazis" and "fascists" too.

This is nonsense. There is no paradox. Some people don't do good with remote, some people do good with it. I was a junior engineer when open office work was the norm. I can tell you right now nothing was harder on my ability to learn to engineer than being interrupted by loud people having calls, or being interrupted by coworkers, or being interrupted by other distractions. Now that I am a staff level engineer WFH (and have been WFH for many years now) I have NEVER been more productive.

It's like all of these astroturfed posters and article writers have been trying to get us to have collective amnesia over just how bad pre-WFH tech offices were.

Even though this article takes a "bad people helping bad people" side to the story it's important to consider the reality of the situation. Even if you're the most honest person in the world it'll take one twitter post from one persistent rock-in-shoe tier person to destroy you and your career. In today's "everything is political" economy one minor misstep 10 years ago can fundamentally put you on the street and eating from soup kitchens. Worse, the accusation need not be truthful. It simply needs to be believable given your immutable characteristics and especially if those characteristics match what people allege is the "majority".

Reputation management should be something all of us should consider. Adopting these "dark triad" tactics is not only sufficient but absolutely necessary for survival when every single person you interact with may use you as a stepping stone to their own 15 minutes of fame. Honesty is simply a weakness. Use whatever means, underhanded or not, to shape consensus of you.