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Jim Roskind had a really nice talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uaaCiyJCFA] at AWS Reinvent 2022 which highlighted the fence post problem. Basically, AWS was targeting P50 and P90 latencies in many services, and sure enough there were big clumps of latencies right under those target fence posts as engineers were basically gaming the metrics and nerfing the >P90 latencies to make it happen.
That makes sense, and is a fine approach.
I'm of two minds about this. Facebook and Instagram keep me connected with friends, new and old. True, they're filled with algorithmic crap now, but when I tried ditching them for a while, it didn't improve my connections with people. If anything, I lost touch with people because that's where they were. I'm much better off knowing what my friends -- many who have scattered -- are up to, and giving casual updates myself.
On the other hand, yes, absolutely put the phone down at the dinner table and engage with those who are present. No questions there.
Finally, my kids are getting to the age where their friends have phones and use them to communicate. My kids don't yet have that and are reliant on me to text parents, which is a lot of friction for everyone involved. Their summer is very boring because they hardly get to see their friends. So, sure, fight boredom by entertaining yourself, but that's a lonely existence.
Semi-serious answer: No, the company only gave themselves the right to unilaterally amend the terms, not you.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/house-bill/3010
Sadly, this bill has been around since 2007, introduced by the very same Hank Johnson! I would love if Congress would put an end to the forced-arbitration bullshit that so obviously does an end-run around your 7th amendment rights and makes a farce of informed consent, but alas, they couldn't even get it through when Democrats held the presidency, the house, and 60 seats in the senate.
The big two, x86_64 and arm64, have 64-byte cache lines, so that's a reasonable assumption in practice. But I was surprised to discover that Apple's M-series laptops have 128-byte cache lines, and that's something a lot of people have and run, albeit not as a server.
Yup, this is how stuff ends up getting lost and delayed, even if the crews on either side are competent and efficient. Most people can't fill up an 18-wheeler, so some bin packing has to take place for the long haul.
I've done a couple of cross-country moves with a full house and had fairly good luck -- North American Van Lines if anyone is interested -- and by far the best experience was when my stuff was last into the truck making the long distance trip. It was delivered a few days later by the same truck and driver. Nothing was lost or broken. There was no chance to screw things up with intermediate transfers to depots.
I just want to point out that the answer is shift work. Here's an example of an SRE job at a national lab:
https://lbl.referrals.selectminds.com/jobs/site-reliability-...
"Work 5 shifts per week to monitor the NERSC HPC Facility, which includes 2 - 3 OWL (midnight - 8am) shifts. Some days may be onsite, some may be offsite. The schedule will be determined by staffing needs."
40 hours per week, full salary, full disclosure about the night shifts, but none of this 24x7 wake up in the middle of the night on top of your regular job bullshit that the tech industry insists on.
"This was the first leadership interview loop in the past 12 months (20+ companies) in which anyone had asked me to write code."
Interesting data point for the question: at what point in your career will you stop being asked to write code on a whiteboard to prove you aren't lying on your resume.
It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job.
That says more to me about the companies practicing this style of interview than it does your degree or the institution granting it.
You got 21 recruiter messages _with salary_?? Amazing.
I have had almost no luck getting that information from recruiters without hopping on a call. None have ever provided that information upfront.
I only managed to get that info from an Amazon recruiter after pushing the issue pretty hard. At first he bragged that Amazon had upped their bands, without mentioning any numbers. When I asked how much, he pointed to a reddit thread and levels.fyi, still not mentioning any numbers. I finally straight-up asked him to stop being coy and just name the range, after all it's law in California and I'm going to keep asking until I get an answer. It took him a couple of days to respond, then I never heard from him again.
And this is the only recruiter that has ever actually given me an answer. Ever.
(350-475k total for "L6" in California FWIW)
How can it simultaneously be the hottest job market in anyone's memory, and yet the process still looks like this? These don't look like companies struggling to hire; these look like companies being exceedingly picky and not suffering one bit for it.
Yeah, the expectation that _everyone_ excels in leadership and influence leads to some absurd situations, like everyone on a team being "tech lead" for some part of the project. Or the all-"senior" team. Presumably they're all leading each other? Same game goes for cross-functional impact.
The whole point of the separate individual ladder was to give an alternate career path to management. What a lie that's turned out to be.
Thank you for calling out on-call responsibilities in your job listing. Too many job listings today fail to mention that _very significant_ responsibility.
I enjoy working with distributed storage systems, but I don't think I will ever carry a pager for one again. I wish the industry could figure out how to separate designing and building such systems, from giving up your nights and weekends to operate them.
Also, Craig Silverstein, 1993 ICPC winner and Google employee number one?
Definitely not graphd. Maybe Livegraph? I forget what the project was called, but it was the first realtime query engine built for the Knowledge Graph and it used PathQuery as the query language.
Mainly after. Metaweb brought MQL with them, which ran on their own single server graphd, which was eventually shutdown.
Warren started working on PathQuery as a replacement for MQL. PathQuery was originally executed on Pregel and was far from a realtime query language.
A realtime query engine was later developed for PathQuery in the search stack so interesting search queries could be answered a la minute from the Knowledge Graph, rather than just pre-generating results for a limited class of queries.
This was all done in the 2012-2013 timeframe. Most of the people involved are long gone.
I disagree with you premise. People are spending time in jail for not showing up to court, not because of their debts. And even jail time is pretty rare for a bench warrant.
Of the situations you listed, the only valid reason for not showing up to court is because you weren't aware. But because the stakes are so high, judges in California require that parties have been personally served by a registered process server before they'll issue a bench warrant for not showing up to a debtor's examination. I assume other states are similar. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I actually think that the process that the courts have for enforcing judgements is much fairer than the tactics that debt collectors often resort to. There's a reason that laws like the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act exist.
Both this article and the ACLU report it's based upon are ridiculously misleading. You don't get arrested for owing a debt. You get a bench warrant issued for not showing up to court when you've been ordered to do so.
Debt collectors sue to get a court judgement against people who won't otherwise pay, so they can use the power of the state to garnish wages, levy bank accounts, etc. It's no surprise that they win in court. The debts are usually valid. It doesn't help debtors' cases when they don't show up. Then they get a default judgement.
Even with a judgement against you, you still won't get arrested for not paying. But if you don't, the creditor can then request a debtor's examination to which the court requires you to show up. At the examination, you'll be asked about your assets and income, so the creditor knows how to collect by force.
What happens if you don't show up to a debtor's examination? The creditor can ask the judge for a bench warrant against you. What happens next depends on the state and county. Sometimes the sheriff knocks on your door and gives you a piece of paper telling you to come to court, or else. Sometimes they do nothing until you get pulled over for some other reason and the warrant comes up.
In any case, what's happening to some people is that they're being sued over debts they owe, not showing up to court to defend themselves, getting default judgements against them, still not paying, getting summoned to court for a debtor's examination, not showing up for that, and then getting a bench warrant issued.
If you don't show up for jury duty, the judge can issue a bench warrant. They probably won't, but they can. If you get subpoenaed and don't show up, bench warrant.
All this is to say that far from the courts criminalizing debt or being manipulated by debt collectors, they are simply acting in their capacity to enforce civil judgements. You know, the seventh amendment? Suits at common law?
What will likely happen, at least in California, is that the clerk will schedule all of the Equifax cases for the same day and the judge will hear them all at once, like a little miniature class action.
In California small claims court, you can sue an out-of-state corporation in the county where you reside. It's one of the options on the form: where the plaintiff was injured. You don't have to go to Sacramento yourself, just serve the papers to their agent of service there. The clerk of court will even serve them by certified mail for you so you don't have to hire a process server.
The assignment of invention disclaimer is straight out of Washington state law [http://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140]. They're required to put it in their employee agreement, but basically anything done on your own time on your own equipment is yours, by law. You don't need permission to reserve those rights.
The moonlighting, on the other hand, where you make money on your side projects, is not protected by Washington state law (California is much more friendly to that). If what you're doing is not a conflict on interest, you'll still have to negotiate it. If it is a conflict of interest, forget it.
Finally, you're about to sign a contract for hundreds of thousands of dollars and a good chunk of your waking hours. Consulting an employment lawyer is relatively cheap by comparison. They'll be able to fill you in on your rights under the law, what's standard in the contract, what's not standard, what's just plain unenforceable, and what you'll have to negotiate to protect the side projects you care about.
Having looked at a lot of overpriced "fixer-uppers" lately, believe me, owners aren't taking care of their places either!
I'm afraid I don't follow your math. The cash to exercise the options goes immediately back into the company's bank account. It's as if they were handing out shares instead of options. The only expense should be the tax on the fair market value of the shares, which should be considerably less than 100% of their value, no?
There's a much simpler solution: early exercise. It's already possible and good companies offer it as an option. You exercise all of your options immediately upon joining. The difference between the fair market value and strike price is zero, so there's no tax due upon exercise. If you stay for at least a year, which is where the cliff is, you're now in long-term capital gains territory. And if you leave before all of your options have officially vested, the company is entitled to buy the shares back.
Now, let's address the problem in the article of employees not having enough cash to even exercise their options. If the company is truly concerned about this, then they can provide a signing bonus with which to exercise the options, plus a bit more to cover the taxes on that additional payment. Since the cash goes straight to purchase shares, which goes back into the company's bank account, it's a net zero on the books. The only expense here is the taxes.
Please, explain to me why this won't work. I'm genuinely curious.
Don't forget natural growth, i.e. birth.
According to census estimates, California had a natural population increase of 1,332,394 (births - deaths) from April 2010 -- August 2015. In that same period it had a net immigration of 568,884 people, consisting of +834,999 international and -266,115 domestic.
On the other hand, when you look at the San Francisco bay area metropolitan region, you'll see that there's no domestic exodus and a net immigration of 274,598 people over the last five years.
[http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/PEP/2015/PEPT...]
So, yeah, with a little over ~90,000 new people per year in the region, the picture looks very different than the one the article was trying to paint.
Interestingly, papers by US government employees are already in the public domain. Journals have no problem publishing those. I think one direction this could go is that public universities could insist that their researchers put their work in the public domain.
Journals don't need copyright to function. There's still value in editing, peer review, and distribution. They're just being greedy by insisting on it.
It would be really nice if they would go ahead and release the Google version of MapReduce now that they've learned their lesson. It's not too late for everyone to learn from the original, and it's no longer a competitive advantage now that anyone can run a Hadoop job on AWS on demand.
Bell Labs most certainly did not release Unix into the public domain: