throwawayosiu1

Yep, I was put on PIP with impossible success criteria (no issues raised in PRs by senior engineers and no issues in code deployed to production - even if it was reviewed by senior engineers & QA) and fired (for failing that criteria) in 2 weeks.

I worked there for ~8 months in total.

I'll add my story here for posterity:

My first job out of university, I was working for a content marketing startup who's tech stack involved PHP and PerconaDB (MySQL). I was relatively inexperienced with PHP but had the false confidence of a new grad (didn't get a job for 6 months after graduating - so I was desperate to impress).

I was tasked with updating some feature flags that would turn on a new feature for all clients, except for those that explicitly wanted it off. These flags were stored in the database as integers (specifically values 4 and 5) in an array (as a string).

I decided to use the PHP function (array_reverse)[https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.array-reverse.php] to achieve the necessary goal. However, what I didn't know (and didn't read up on the documentation) is that, without the 2nd argument, it only reversed the values not the keys. This corrupted the database with the exact opposite of what was needed (somehow this went through QA just fine).

I found out about this hours later (used to commute ~3 hrs each way) and by that time, the senior leadership was involved (small startup). It was an easy fix - just a reverse script - but it highlighted many issues (QA, DB Backups not working etc.)

I distinctly remember (and appreciate) that the lead architect came up to me the next day and told me that it was rite of passage of working with PHP - a mistake that he too had made early in his career.

I ended up being fired (grew as an engineer and was better off for it) but in that moment and weeks after it, it definitely demoralized me.

I'm at the marriage age right now and I see tons of my friends getting married.

A friend got proposed a couple of months ago and her ring is ~40k USD. In my opinion, that's crazy since they're spending ~30k CAD on their wedding.

My partner also mentioned that she'd like a wedding ring of the same calibre since according to her - diamond ring is how much love / value / worth I hold for her. Furthermore, a significant group of middle/upper-middle class want naturally occurring diamonds (because they're "real") over lab produced ones (not because of the quality, but because of the tag associated with and the societal group pressure). Furthermore, the same group also hate moissanite because it's not diamond.

It's irrational, marketing and conditioning all they way down.

Hopefully, stuff like this forces lab grown diamonds to the mainstream culture so that we can finally get rid of that mentality.

Weird, While I currently see none, I do see them logged out though.

Thanks for the heads-up. Looks like I might not be seeing the full picture logged in.

ah, maybe it's time we deplatform Twitter no?

maybe it's tongue in cheek but in all honesty, I find it extremely hypocritical that the Ayatollah of Iran, dis-information news organizations (esp those based in China) and now CP are fine on Twitter but god forbid some people on the right wing use the "#notmypresident" or "#learntocode" hashtags - both of which were extensively used by the left in 2016 without any repercussions what so ever.

I don't mind Twitter having it's policies (Infact I support it)- but selective enforcement of said policies is the issue.

Honestly, I've had way more success with Bumble when it comes to getting matches, continuing conversations and meeting IRL.

That said, IMO the market for Tinder vs Bumble is quite different even though they are in the same space.

Anecdotally, my friends use Tinder for FWB / Hookups etc. while Bumble is more-so for casual or serious relationships.

I also find the risks interesting. Not a ton of people are paying for dating (which is opposite to the advice given on Reddit for example).

I guess that's because the world is not black and white. You see corrupt cops hurt you while the nice mob helps your family.

It's one of the reasons why successful criminals always have a good community outreach program. Once you have the people on your side, it's very hard for the police to do much.

When gangs selling drugs in Colombia originally started, while they were quite violent, they did take care and look after the local community they were based in. And in return, they local community took care of them by alerting them when the military was closing in as an example.

If you're a young kid growing up in that environment, it's easy to see how you'd consider the military as the bad guys since all you see them do is come in and create chaos / hurt people etc. while the local drug dealer on your street is ensuring that you have food to eat.

On a side-note, I hate how Facebook sticks to their real name policy and does not allow for the creation of multiple accounts (I'd want one for my startup / work etc. and another for my personal use case for my friends / family etc.).

That said, all the mainstream social media apps - Facebook and Twitter had a hand and if Parler was de-platformed with that reason, then they should be as well.

I mean, if a 700B and a 50B company can't solve this issue, than how can we expect a much much smaller company like Parler to tackle it?

But it's obvious that these companies don't give a damn about the insurrection - This was entirely to pacify the dems by giving them a "Win" considering they have the House, Senate and Presidency.

It's funny because the company I'm currently consulting for a company that has a ~1B/yr account with Amazon and we've decided to slow our cloud migration projects. We run a major media site and if AWS decides to capitulate to the pressure from essentially people on social media or the wrath of the US Govt, what's stopping them from doing the exact same from Govts of other countries?

Didn't they freeze Trump only after the entire backlash? and last I checked, Trump was not on Parler was he? Infact, that was the big issue - Trump not moving to Parler or Gab while calling out Twitter.

It's funny because if he did do the move earlier, he'd have hurt twitter where it counts - their stock price. But I guess the attention on Twitter was just too much to ignore.

The idea behind repealing 230 is not essentially about tackling censorship.

It's more so the idea, that the right wing believes that Social Media is unfairly applying their moderation rules targeting the right side of the political spectrum. They want these these rules (even if it's more censorship) applied evenly to both right and left speech.

While what we have right now is not "free" speech, even moderated speech has a bias and both sides point to the other when it comes to these rules being applied unfairly. Repealing 230 is a way to hurt who they see as responsible - the companies running the services as they are the one who apply these moderation rules unfairly.

This is a good thing!

Google, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are pretty heavy handed when it comes to "censoring" content. This is annoying because somehow "rightwing / wrongthink" content is censored while "leftwing" content is fine as it is.

If they are not platforms and are publishers - they need to be treated as such.

I feel this needs to be extended all the way down - Why stop at social media? Let's go ahead and hit where this counts - Domain Registrars, DNS Hosts, Payment Processors and Web hosts.

The sad part is - if they do, the internet as we know won't exist anymore. But in all honesty, we are heading to it anyways - with all the internet companies consolidating - I don't think I'll loose a lot of sleep if Twitter if fined - They had it coming for a while anyways.

EDIT: If this comment does not follow the rules, I'm happy to delete it as it's inherently political imo. Also I'm happy to provide examples of the above claims as well.

Thanks for being willing to have a discussion about this. 1. > The difference is of course that the burger only kills the person ingesting it where a gun kills someone other than the owner.

Guns in general (both in the US and CA) have more self harm / accidental deaths to the owner than to others - If we wanted to reduce deaths by firearms, this is the number to watch out for. Which is why I brought it up. Far more people die due to drunk driving than firearm related deaths.

What I’m saying is that this issue has an significant amount of focus for an insignificant amount of return in Canada. (Again I’m referring to legal firearms).

2. I brought up PAL because just like we need a license to drive a car safely and the consequences of not having one and driving a car are serious, the same applies to guns as well.

3. > Indeed more should be done to keep weapons on the US side, however I don't think there's any reason we can't do both things at the same time.

I agree that we can do both at the same time - I don’t see anything being done about it though. I pointed (and feel) that this is why it makes this entire bill pointless.

I live in Toronto and have family in Scarborough - both places where firearm related deaths and crimes have kept going up YoY. (One of the people who died in the Nova Scotia’s shooting was a part of my interns family - a family that does have firearms btw - and yet they are against the bill). That said, I’ve yet to hear of crimes committed by PAL holders. This law has done nothing to keep us safe (or even relatively safer) while taking away a lot more.

Further, as a taxpayer - the buyback is going to cost quite a bit while our deficit is through the roof due to COVID. And I’d rather we not spend money for show when it is much needed elsewhere.

I’m a Canadian and I find that absolutely the opposite.

1. > I don't need perfect to be the enemy of good. There's no reason to possess these weapons any more than there's a reason to possess nuclear warheads

Slipper slope don’t you say? Quite a lot of guns on that list were not even available in Canada or would be available. Furthermore, we have some of the strictest gun laws around.

What you said above to me sounds like we also need to just ban McDonalds and others from Canada too - considering obesity kills more Canadians than gun deaths no?

2. > The next bill can ban more, fix the bugs, etc, but the flag has been planted: there's no room for those weapons in Canada.

Have you by chance gone throw the process of getting a PAL? Our issue is not responsible gun owners - it’s the access to illegal guns coming from south of the border and this bill did absolutely nothing to stop it. It was political theater at the end of which a minority of citizens were affected (and they probably didn’t even vote in for the Libs anyways)

it also makes them horrifying enough that we're not going to sit back and pray the crime away

By not dealing with the influx of guns from the south - we are literally doing JUST that further more at the cost of law abiding gun owners too.

We are paying salary as a perk. Legally we don't have to.

With that in mind, why should those 16 months count to experience?

Work was not done by said engineer, and experience was not gained.

The other engineer worked, gained experience that's valuable to the company -> hence the raise + promotion.

Most companies have a particular pay scale for a role - based on experience, position etc. (let's say a formula exists)

I'm arguing about this with the above mentioned model

This makes sense to me. Thanks for providing another view point.

My answer would be the exact same which is why I asked the question.

I'm a startup founder and I'd like to understand this:

Let's say we have a pay scale that pays you ~15% raise yoy + years of experience.

We have 2 people for this example - one male and one female.

Both join in at 5 yrs of experience and make 100k (example numbers) as intermediate engineers.

A year later both are making 115k.

Now the female engineer goes on maternity leave for 16 months - she get paid at the rate of 115k/yr for that period.

The male on the other hand - makes a little over 130k. On top of that he's at 7 years of experience so he's now a senior engineer - that promotion beings his salary to 150k.

The female engineer is at 115k with 6 yrs of real experience while her colleague is making 150k.

On the face this looks super unfair, but is it really?

She's getting paid based on years of working experience and those 16 months can't count towards it of course

Is my train of thought wrong?

So I had posted this earlier but I'll post again with another update. I'm based out of Toronto.

    2012 - small business owner                             - 60k AED / yr (no taxes) - built Wordpress websites in my spare time
    2013 - technical cloud marketing intern                 - 60k / yr CAD            - FAANGish company
    2013 - contractor                                       - 30k / yr CAD            - Engineering consultancy
    2014 - Software Dev Fullstack                           - 22k / yr CAD            - early stage startup
    2015 - Lead Software Dev Fullstack / Architect + DevOps - 55k / yr CAD            - very early stage startup
    2015 - Lead Software Dev Fullstack / Architect + DevOps - 60k / yr CAD            - very early stage startup
    2016 - Software Dev                                     - 60k / yr CAD            - medium stage startup
    2016 - Techincal Consultant                             - 90k / yr CAD            - small public company
    2017 - Software Engineer + DevOps                       - 99k / yr CAD            - medium public company
    2018 - Senior Software Engineer + DevOps + SRE          - 120k / yr CAD           - medium public company
    2019 - Senior Software Engineer + DevOps + SRE          - 135k / yr CAD           - medium public company

FB blocks those numbers, I've tried those in the past. Almost all major services that use phone verification ignore those numbers out right or act like they accept it but either:

1. don't bother sending texts

2. shadowban you

I used VPNs. But FB keeps a track of a lot of public VPN & Cloud providers and then throws a ton more "captchas" your way - asking for your picture, govt id, phone number verification etc.

As for searches - I've searched a lot of random stuff totally unrelated to my personal account JUST to throw FB off while acting like a real user (liking, reading, scrolling etc.).

While the user might have issues (like cookies and other features) - I can guarantee you Facebook does all kinds of creepy stuff to identify who you are. Worse yet, once they think they've successfully identified you - they share your details with who they think you are. Personal example:

Recently I wanted to have a look at a few ex coworker profiles (who are not my friends on FB). I didn't want to use my personal account because then it suggests me to them (something I wanted to avoid, as I'd not been in touch with them for almost a decade).

1. I created a VM (Ubuntu 18.04 + Firefox + uBlock -> enabled everything in uBlock).

2. Tried to create an Fb account -> asks for phone number. I didn't want to be identified so I could not continue.

3. Tried another way to create a new account -> success.

4. Fb obviously tried to figure out who I am -> was unable to do so at that point -> Forced me to post a picture of myself (and suspended my account until I did and they verified it).

5. Posted a made up picture and got past the first hurdle

6. Fb asked me for a phone number -> Logged out and used another means to log in.

7. Fb locked my account and asked for another picture (did similar in Step 5 once again)

8. Looked up my ex co-workers.

9. Until now, I've not been identified, I looked up a friend's profile (this friend is also my personal friend on Fb). FB immediately identified me and showed up my entire friends list as suggested friends).

10. I immediately tried to delete that profile (took 30+ days and they asked for Govt ID).

I've had multiple fake FB accounts, and FB's fingerprinting and data sharing is insanely crazy - I recently logged out of one my fake accounts on iOS via Safari Incognito (no FB app, Safari is always used as incognito) - it showed my personal phone number in the log in field.

I'm currently based in Toronto

    2012 - small business owner                             - 60k AED / yr (no taxes) - built Wordpress websites in my spare time
    2013 - technical cloud marketing intern                 - 60k / yr CAD            - FAANGish company
    2013 - contractor                                       - 30k / yr CAD            - Engineering consultancy
    2014 - Software Dev Fullstack                           - 22k / yr CAD            - early stage startup
    2015 - Lead Software Dev Fullstack / Architect + DevOps - 55k / yr CAD            - very early stage startup
    2015 - Lead Software Dev Fullstack / Architect + DevOps - 60k / yr CAD            - very early stage startup
    2016 - Software Dev                                     - 60k / yr CAD            - medium stage startup
    2016 - Techincal Consultant                             - 90k / yr CAD            - small public company
    2017 - Software Engineer + DevOps                       - 99k / yr CAD            - medium public company
    2018 - Senior Software Engineer + DevOps + SRE          - 120k / yr CAD           - medium public company

Just as a note, the author is from CleanTechnica. They are known to be extremely pro-tesla.

Best case scenario - most of their articles quietly ignore the downside and prop up the upside. Worst case - they lie or embellish the truth.

Disclosure: I've followed both bulls & bears for almost 6 months - and I've got quite a lot riding in short positions.

This actually scares me.

I want to bootstrap an SaaS company focused on enterprise / b2b soon and being bootstraped I can't afford to hire an sales rep/ account manager (or be one myself while working on the product) for what looks like a long process.

This is definitely a scary thought in my opinion.

Fingers crossed, I hope that's a good problem to have.

another quick question: in general, would it be considered ok to find recruters (and maybe employees from the same team that's hiring) on LinkedIn and contact them?

I've tried getting interviews at Google and the only time their recruters have contacted me back were from internal referrals (none of those worked out in the end as they wanted me to move to SF, and I wanted to work from Canada).

How would one go about getting your foot in the door at such companies (I've had similar experiences with both Microsoft & Facebook as well) ?

Throwaway as usual:

Just last weekend (Friday), I thought I had reached my breaking point. I could not handle my job, my friends, my parents and my side idea to the point I convinced myself that the only solution to my problems was suicide. I went on to 4chan to ask for help on the quickest solution.

The only reason I'm alive today is because Amazon does not have a quick shipping policy (what I ordered would have taken me over a week to receive). Now I'm taking one day at a time in the hope that I don't reach that situation again.

I truly feel sad for both the Engineer and his family!

I would really like to know what is unethical (or even illegal) about this (just so I can understand this correctly).

Uber

* created multiple fake accounts on lyft to know about it's drivers

* figured out that it's drivers were assigned numerical ids

* used said ids, to track lyft drivers.

imho, this is just figuring out your competition (say by signing up to the service) and then using this knowledge to improve your service (by incising drivers on both platforms to ditch one).

This is one of those "do things that don't scale" mean (or my interpretation of it). I say this because, one multi-billion $ "startup" is doing this to another multi-billion $ "startup".

Also, I'm sure this would never be an issue if Uber was not in the press for other crappy stuff they did.

First off, very few very early stage startups expect you to work for free until you get funded. Exceptions being that you're a co-founder or an unpaid intern that never touches code.

Obviously this is not something I have a lot of statistically accurate data for but, me and my friends are recent graduates and collectively have applied to quite a lot of very early stage startups in Toronto and out of those, we all have experienced the bait and switch of unpaid work till funding at least 50% of the time.

Secondly, while the startups in Toronto are probably less well funded than the ones in the US, not all require you to work for 12+ hours a day while paying you for 8 hours. It looks really shady to set these expectations especially since we have clear laws around overtime pay in Canada (describing such a work situation to friends will raise eyebrows -- definitely not the standard practice, whatever industry you work at).

I didn't say all startups are like what I've mentioned. The one I'm currently working at is awesome! That said, it's more often the case that startups use their short runaway as an excuse to make you work long hours (and just to be clear - the 12hr / day was not an estimation - I was literally asked my thoughts about it during an interview - that company is still recruiting on HN Who's hiring for more employees and a quick google search shows they have increased headcount to 35 people this year and is profitable).

Lastly, I'd say that any place worth working at (big or small) will be insanely picky about who they hire. Current employer included.

I have 0 problems with employers being picky. I worked closely with the CEO of a previous startup and I totally understand that. What I don't understand is the point of claiming you need to hire a developer (with a start date of immediately) and then leaving the position open for months altogether, or having crappy working conditions.

BTW I've interviewed at Nulogy (if that's where you are currently working) - Since this is a throwaway I can't give too much details, While I was still disappointed for the reason I was rejected it was one of the good interviews I've had (interviewer was knowledgeable, I learnt about the company and product, the tech stack, the problems they were facing, what was expected of me, and just some personal chit-chat during the coffee walk).