eecsninja

few who had interest in computers rather than viewing programming as a path to easy money.

FTFY

25 years since I started learning C++ as a kid, 14 years in industry and feeling like a disappointed old man despite still having the youthful looks to pass for a student!

This is exactly it. There's a lot of apex fallacy going on in the discussion of tech.

Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry. Many of the rank and file workers would actually prefer to live someplace cheaper like Seattle, but it's the leadership of the tech industry (VCs, execs, etc) that have been slow to geographically diversify the industry.

There's too much blaming of all techies for the actions of the people at the top of the tech hierarchy.

"Tech bro" describes a few people at the top (think Adam Neumann or Travis Kalanick) known for their bad behavior but unfortunately is used by the media to paint the rest of the men in tech with the same negative light.

The irony is that these people don't have a strong technical role -- they are mostly founders and executives. It's the people working under them with less influence who are doing all the hands-on tech work.

The problem is that large organizations like government agencies and corporations don't want alternate opinions, except in the rare cases where they specifically have a devil's advocate position to test the validity of ideas.

Better performance isn't an argument that sways these organizations that care more about preserving the status quo than about success in their stated goals.

This is significant because it is a company that pays very well. Not because of where it stands relative to the US average.

I'd like to know what this person actually did for work. The media tends to ambiguously use terms like "tech worker" without specifying whether they are technical or non-tech employees at tech companies.

Googler not on Cloud team, but using Google Cloud Platform for an internal project. I've encountered my share of bugs and other flaws while using this platform. I think all these platforms are just too damn complex and brittle. It's easy for even a smart SWE or SRE to overlook one little thing that will bring down a bigger part of system.

Don't you mean fen? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fen_(currency)

1/6 of a penny is 0.0016 USD, or 0.01 CNY: https://www.google.com/search?q=0.0016+usd+to+cny

The problem with your example of Office 2003 is not that they added sharing in later versions.

It's that they replaced the old toolbar with the awful ribbon interface, instantly breaking years if user familiarity.

Good article but why does the HN title include"silicon valley"?

The article doesn't include SV in its actual title, and mentions SV only twice.

Not to mention that the old SV model is mostly dead, and the new SV is highly corporate and rewards conformity.

How do you find these fixit jobs? Are you brought in as a contractor/consultant?

Maybe many people you see are Asian foreigners (Chinese, Korean, Filipinos, etc) and you just don't realize it. I hear Chinese spoken on the streets all the time.

I had a travel plug adapter (for conversion between US/UK/EU-style) that had a bright blue LED on it to indicate power.

I don't know who thought the choice of blue was a good idea, because as a travel adapter, it would be plugged into the hotel room where the user would be sleeping. /facepalm

I ended up taping a piece of paper over the LED.

If I had the option to reduce my working hours by 25%, I would actually prefer to accrue the extra time as vacation, so that I can take several weeks off at once.

I've been in OP's boat, mentoring people (normal hires, not from boot camps) who couldn't be bothered to put in the effort. It was a colossal time and energy sink.

My attitude today is that you have to put in the initial effort to demonstrate that whatever I invest in training you will be paid off by your future work using that training over and over again. Otherwise it's a wasted investment.

And that attitude is basically that of the old kung fu master: First prove that you are a worthy student, then I will spend time to teach you. Yet in a modern software dev environment, it somehow becomes snobby and elitist?

Edit: I've gotten the same criticism from elsewhere, so the the parent comment (which has since been flagged) is not unique.

The data you linked is for the entire Tokyo metropolitan area. The trend is that people are moving out of rural areas and into the urban core. It would be more appropriate to look at the central part of Tokyo, the 23 wards (former city of Tokyo): http://www.newgeography.com/content/002923-the-evolving-urba...

From 1990 to 2010 (latest year in data), the population grew 9.6%.

In the same time period, SF's population grew 11.3%: http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/ca/san-francisc...

Not a big difference if you ask me. Yet SF prices have skyrocketed.

Tokyo may require citizenship to buy, but that doesn't mean foreigners can't rent. Rent prices in central Tokyo often start at around $1500/month, which is a lot less than that of SF bay area suburbs.

If only the naysayers of development as a solution bothered to do research on how Asian cities (esp Tokyo) develop to get ideas to apply to cities in the west.

And parking minimum laws make it worse. Just look at all the new 2-bedroom apartments in North San Jose, that are inhabited by single people.

Are 4 years of living in dorm rooms stressful?

Keep in mind that this is a survey of people of each age living during the 2010s. Not a graph of how each generation's happiness has changed as they aged.

Ironically I use it as a Chromium/Chrome developer to check whether certain documents are visible to users outside of Google, as a way to determine what information is internal-only.

Maybe if we got them started earlier than college CS, it would be easier.

I learned how to use the MSDOS prompt growing up as a teenager. Most of my programming was done in an IDE, though -- including the first few years of my career. I had also worked a little bit with Linux command line, so I wasn't completely unfamiliar.

At age 26, I joined FAANG and was forced to adapt to developing in Linux 100% of the time. The transition wasn't difficult. I felt comfortable with the Linux command line after a few months, with some help from coworkers and Stack Overflow searches when necessary.

Remember when Tokyo was expensive?

https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...

Ding ding ding, we have a winner!

This is something that most people who in the "only luxury housing will be built" camp miss.

If the newly rich (either acquired wealth or moving in) can't buy luxury housing because none is being built, they will just do create their own luxury housing. That's one less housing unit for normal folks.

Exhibit A: https://sf.curbed.com/2015/10/8/9913302/victorian-disembowel...

This reads almost like a satire. I urge anyone to read this over and consider that this disgrace of a CEO not only took someone else's place in Stanford, and later took funding that could have gone to other uses, refuses to own up to her mistakes, and still has fans greeting her on the streets of SF.

I've met my share of Googlers who are lazy, don't know how to solve problems (as opposed to write code itself), or still need help with basic tasks after several years on the job.

You just can't test for some qualities like focused, persistent problem solving and the desire to find ways to speed up your work.

A good rule of thumb to follow when writing C++, esp C++11 or later:

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

No, but they certainly have no use for SWEs thinking outside the box in ways beyond engineering work. Such as recognizing that interviews don't work well to predict ability and success. We engineers are supposed to shut up and conduct interviews and build interview tools, not wonder if the whole thing is a case of the emperor has no clothes.

It's easy to talk about training people.

I spent a lot of time training people in my previous job only for them to come back to me with basic questions about what I taught them over a year later.

What was missing was technical leadership from above: the managers didn't realize (or value) the need for the team to get familiar with the systems that they were working on, so they didn't make sure that the team learned these things well, or brought in a few more people who could guide them in addition to just me.

The bad news is that you can't do any of that on modern computer systems anymore.

I started out learning how to program in Windows 95 to make games. I learned to use inline assembly to set the video mode, and then directly write to video memory at 0xA0000000.

You can't do that anymore on modern Windows even if you knew how. Today if you wanted to start game programming, you'd probably read a bunch of articles recommending Unity, which doesn't even easily support C++ FFS.