shoefly

Every day is a new horror.

Take a close look at the teams. A friend of mine had several offers from teams at Google. The first team she choose sucked and she was ready to leave a month after she joined. After a chat with HR, she was transferred to her second choice and has been there for years.

Let the companies know you have multiple offers and that you wish to have one more additional meeting with your potential workmates.

I doubt this will be good for the little guys. Personal experience in the games industry here. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe.

The small midwestern town from which I hail is rotting. The residents could never afford the luxuries flowing here in the valley. They are angry. They are huge Trump supporters. They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes. They are stuck.

Sums up my interpretation of his writing, which I was forced to digest at uni.

I don't plan on leaving but there are a few fears that make me think about it. These are: Not being taken as seriously as my male colleagues (by men and women). Worrying about being hired for the wrong reasons. Getting boring grunt work that deadens my brain. Not being asked by the team to join them at beer events. And I like beer.

A lot of these things I mention actually happened to me at a few software corporations where I worked early in my career.

My solution was to code my own products on the side. The products became very popular, made much more than I did at the corporations I worked for, so I started my own business.

In those early days before I left, I was starting to drink the coolaid that I deserved grunt work because I sucked, but that turned out not to be the case in the end.

I feel the same. I will stop coding when they nail shut my coffin.

This happened to me once. I ended up coding my own personal projects at the "host" company to pass the time. Otherwise, I would have gone nuts.

Some interesting blurbs from the manifesto:

"This document is mostly written from the perspective of Google’s Mountain View campus, I can’t speak about other offices or countries."

"Change is good (unstable)" vs "Change is dangerous (stable)"

"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things" thus "This leads to women generally having a harder time ... leading."

"some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change)"

"Thankfully, climate scientists and evolutionary biologists generally aren’t on the right."

"the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ[8] and sex differences)."

"Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social scientists learn left (about 95%)"

"Ironically, IQ tests were initially championed by the Left when meritocracy meant helping the victims of the aristocracy."

"males are biologically disposable and because women are generally more cooperative and areeable than men."

"Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness"

"empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases."

"Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employees sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power."

I hope they go easy on him. He's done some bad, but recently some good.

Whatever we do, it's important that we learn how to control the "ingredients" of our atmosphere. There are so many things that could go wrong with our atmosphere and result in mass extinction. Global warming, ice ages, massive volcanic eruptions, etc. If we can find a way to quickly filter out the crap and rebuild our atmosphere... well, this technology could be used for protecting our Earth and future pursuits in space.

I'm 99.9% certain these vehicles would be forced to fly over existing roads. And it's likely the final product would be autonomous to ensure no one could do a random fly over of your house.

Evolution is a beautiful thing.

I once worked for a monolith who decided to invent a new way of programming. They built something massive and ready to scale even larger. And then they discovered no one wanted the product.

I've worked on distributed teams where kids pop into conference calls to say hi. It actually does some good when everyone is getting pissed about some shitstorm or another. If a kid (or kitten) pops on the screen, everyone calms down and the shitstorm magically evaporates.

I don't know how they do it unless their partner is doing all of the parenting. I used to work crazy hours until our kid arrived. Now, I work 10 hours or less per day. My kid doesn't sleep, so this compounds the problem. He never goes to sleep until 10:30 pm, and always wakes up before the rest of us. He is young, though, and every year gets a little easier. I'm more productive this year than I was last year.

In our case, we sold TWO houses that we owned outright in another state, and this was our down payment for our house in silicon valley.

Love this idea. I needed the company machine years ago.

Work smart not hard. Automate everything you can automate. I do this and I routinely finish projects 30% faster than my peers. Another plus is that automation results in less human error.

Most of them went into the workforce when the Great recession hit.

The ability to write off a student loan as a bankruptcy was removed in 2005. While part of this law has been thrown out, many people are still stuck as indentured servants to the loan sharks.

Housing is insane... around here in the bay area, but from the older people I've chatted with, it was always a tough market. Now, if you moved to my hometown, you could get a beautiful home for $200k.

A great article. There is one thing the author got wrong. Pot IS addictive. My brother can't go more than 3 hours w/o smoking it. If he does, he starts to sweat like crazy. He once went an entire weekend without it and he had a very rough time.

I read the entire article and this is my take: this writer worked with an extreme bulley. The bulley was a ringleader. And potentially psycho.

This isn't about sexism, racism, etc. This is about a ringleader selecting a victim to prey upon for the sole purpose of causing pain.

IQ means little if you do not have the ambition, drive, and courage to be more.

I have known many people with superior IQs working in brainless jobs. They would not leave or consider another way of life. Actually, one did. I was her best friend. She loved kids. I planted little hints that she would make a great teacher. She watched me go through college. Once she saw me do it, she decided she could do it to. She went for two years, took on a double load, and graduated at the top of her class. She is now a middle school teacher. Not making great money, but she loves her job.

This made me think of IOI in Ready Player One.

Looks like any other brittle FSM. It's missing an important layer of logic. And yeah, I'm bias because I'm finishing up an FSM that crushes that brittleness.

We should rephrase the question as "why don't computer scientists learn traditional math symbols?"

Try writing traditional equations with your keyboard. Try posting your answer online. Modern computer science breaks down these symbols into plain english.

If you've ever done a job search in tech, there are always 10x more software engineering jobs than PM jobs. There is that.

A thought... I have worked at monoliths, a mid-sized corp, a hatchery, and my own. At a monolith, your job is very narrow. I was bored out of my mind and left. At a smaller company, the role of a PM is much more interesting.

I was a PM but I had a coder's heart. I took the route you are thinking about. I would never go back to being a PM.

Two words: software architect

The best software engineers at my company are self-taught.

Places like school make it easy to connect with people you like. Same if you work in a large social environment. Leave this space and everything changes. As soon as I left college and got a job in tech, I was surrounded by few people of my age and gender.

Defeat ignorance with cleverness. Create a solution that is far superior to what coal and oil have to offer. Make it so affordable that you cut the coal industry off at the knees without relying on politicians to get the job done.

This site is full of very smart people. Get this shit done!

I use this process and it works great. We give potential hires a 1-4 hour project to do at home, they bring it into our office to defend. We don't pay them to create the project. We don't look at education. Some of our top coders are self-taught.