HN user

curiousDog

1,496 karma
Posts5
Comments491
View on HN

All of this seems like deliberate destruction of America from the inside out by an ayn-rand worshipping, billionaire afrikaaner cabal (David Sacks, Elon Musk, roelof botha etc). Thoughtless and mindless cuts

Describing engineers as "fat and happy" is really derogatory. Their spend on tech employees is a tiny fraction of total content spend. Also, an even tinier fraction of what they spend on services like AWS. If they want to cut costs, there's a ton more low hanging fruit than letting people go. In fact, revenue per employee is the highest compared to other FAANG

After seeing great folks laid off from FANG, i would also question if you should care so much about these things. IMO, us SWEs tend to care so much about writing idiomatic code for corporate overlords when in reality the effects of mildly sloppy code won’t be realized for a decade, it’s okay to leave it to the next poor soul that has to deal with it 10yrs down the lane and just enjoy your weekend :-)

Very true. Though less “prestigious”, the most fun I ever had was actually working as an SDET in the beginning of my career at Microsoft in Azure. I would spend hours dreaming up corner cases on how to break dev code in a distributed systems setting and came up with (for that time) quite a few unique frameworks that helped catch bugs that would’ve otherwise slipped through the usual unit, functional and smoke test archetypes. Unfortunately, I believe this job function has been removed entirely within MS

Very well said.

To the OP: if you really are a good programmer, then mastering LC is just a matter of time and effort and really, the problems aren't that hard. You're also hired at most companies to solve problems; not just be a code monkey. It's a matter of interest and motivation not whether you're good at LC or not.

LC is the best proxy we have for aptitude and general problem solving ability at this time. So best to suck it up and grind.