zebraflask

Indeed.

I'd only add (or rephrase other comments to the same effect) that slow growth is not only about staying within your capacity, it's also about learning what you're doing so well that you can systematize your processes for maximum results with as little speculation and risk as possible.

You could call that "being efficient," I guess, but I think I mean it in the macro sense, not looking for nickel and dime efficiencies.

+1 to the comments pointing out that these types of questions can easily veer into highly intrusive, if not overtly discriminatory, territory.

This reminds me of LinkedIn pablum more than anything else.

Aha, I've often vaguely suspected as much with certain well-known food columns. I wrote it off to incompetent cooks, but it makes more sense that they were just making it up as they went along.

One that sticks in my mind was a recipe that called for a dozen whole cloves, where really you'd just use one or two. If any.

A dozen whole cloves, used in the way the recipe called for, would make pretty much any dish painfully inedible.

That's a good point.

Counterpoint: what idea can be had from rushed / time-constrained / deliberately careless work examples?

Any junior can copy / paste some functional yet poorly done code. Or make ChatGPT come up with something, I suppose, now that that's a thing.

Experiences vary, but every job I've taken and liked - no coding tests of any kind. More of a discussion about an example piece of code, for that part of the interview, but no requirement to come up with new code.

+1 on that.

The handful of times I've dumped a bunch of time and effort into an at-home screening assignment, it took far longer to do well than whatever the allotted time was made out to be. Emphasis on the "do well" part.

My (unscientific) sense is that these things are really just screening for people willing to jump through unreasonable hoops.

The grass is always greener, etc.

It might be better to spend some free time cultivating a side project or two where you can exercise your dev skills without endangering your income. Who knows, it might take off and turn into your own company down the road.

Once you give up salary and seniority, though, those are gone with the odds stacked against getting them back.

And there is the cynical (but non-zero) chance that many people will assume you were demoted for poor performance / behavioral issues / insert your own negative perception, instead of a voluntary move.

Tread cautiously, I'd say, don't do aything to endanger your current position and income.

A tale as old as (Internet) time - I've seen this cycle happen, too.

Tangentially, I have to wonder to what extent misapplication of Agile, and similar, project management processes is to blame.

You'd think for most relatively simple sites, like we're talking about here, it ought to be planned once and built once, but something about the mindset that the goal posts can be moved during planning and development seems to drag everything out at length.

It might help with credibility and adoption rates to make it explicit on the site that your editors aren't going to work on material that looks like it's being used, or could be used, for plagiarism or related "no outside help" rules.

For non-STEM writing - your typical business and humanities-oriented material - you'd be surprised how frequently this issue comes up with instructors, teaching assistants, etc.

Just a thought, not a ding on the idea. What kind of controls are there or will there be re: plagiarism scenarios?

For example, a user sends in an academic draft, represents it as their own, and does so with the intent (explicitly voiced or not) of using the service to get past automated plagiarism software / filters?

If you're familiar with academic writing, it's a pretty plausible thing that could happen.

Or is that type of abuse-prone material automatically turned down? Couldn't tell from the site.

The $10,000 number is a little too high.

I'd say it's easy to start spending and keep spending the bucks if you're aiming to duplicate a conventional print run from a large press, with no expense spared, but it isn't necessary.

Sites like Canva will take care of cover art, and print on demand presses like Blurb let you start with a very reasonably priced short run and will hook you up with a variety of distribution networks.

You can quite literally publish a professionally packaged book for a few hundred dollars or less.

There's also Amazon, but I've never tried it so can't comment on it.

That is a recipe for a variety of nagging injuries, at best, that will almost certainly get exacerbated.

Exercising only highly-restricted movements by themselves looks nice on a training log, but isn't really effective.

Cogent point. I've worked with outsourced and offshore teams quite a bit.

The attempt to arbitrage lower wages based on geography for highly skilled roles has almost invariably, over any meaningful length of time, run up against increased organizational costs and managerial overhead for all kinds of reasons. You name it.

My general impression is that it tends to work out as a "Rob Peter to pay Paul" kind of scenario - a wash or a net negative.

There are always stories where, when everything went really well for everyone involved, it worked out as an advantage, but those - in my view - are the exception to the rule.

Echoes of Microsoft's Tay, the little bot that could (offend everyone).

Maybe my prompts were boring - I got some profanity back, but nothing too outrageous - but it does highlight, I suppose, how easily these platforms can be abused.

The word I'm seeing repeated here is "boring," but that also brings up a point about where Twitter works well: niche audiences.

Especially ones that aren't necessarily interested in photos or short videos you look at once then forget. Or in the amount of work it takes to make said photos and videos as an entry fee to be visible on a platform.

Journalism comes to mind, and with it, politics (of any persuasion).

The writer's side of Twitter is also very active, maybe like you'd expect - writers, of course, gravitate to the written word.

Twitter does have its audiences that other platforms don't cater to very effectively.

Doesn't speak well of their longterm planning ability to yank six open positions over a tweet - but I would guess there are other undisclosed reasons, and saying "because of the economy" is just a convenient thing to say.

A variety of protests, I'm sure, would look askance at much of this comment.

The sovereign citizen material, though, really does leave the impression that there must be something underlying the absurdity.

Mental illness? It generally comes across as the type of homegrown rant material you'd find stapled to a telephone pole.

Some are smarter than others, but I think, in terms of animal behavior or ecology, cats are basically carnivorous rabbits.

That's not to say anyone who has had a trainable cat doesn't like them - mine have their moments - but I think it's worthwhile to consider that.

This all somehow seems unsurprising. If anyone has tried to use Heroku in easily the last year, the number of times you get failed builds over really trivial things is noticeable.

Replika.ai was founded on a similar idea. The earliest version was reputedly based on text messages between the founder and one of her (deceased) friends.

Love it! Very clever.

It might beg the question, but if the OP has a stated lack of interest in the subject matter that makes "tech" companies tick - I'd suggest reevaluating the motivation.

None of the roles listed in the edit can be done well, or at all, by people who don't have even a basic grasp of the industry they're working in.

I've had the same experience. Suboptimal code isn't refactored because of the test code overhead, or, much worse, the tests on that same subpar code somehow morph into a perceived "gold standard" for how that code should work.

I avoid tests (aside from hands-on end user testing) as much as possible, actually, since they rarely seem to tell you anything you'd didn't already know.

Why is this not surprising?

I have to wonder how long this kind of thing will last in these types of org structures before there's a collective realization that coordinating groups always has a challenging element to it, even in person in a single office location.

With distributed groups, even more "overhead," which Zoom / video calls, I think, have been proven over the last 2+ years to ameliorate to some extent.

These kinds of stories come across as almost validating the critique I've seen going around on various discussion forums - that critique would be that the return to office push when the job doesn't inherently require it is more an artifact of an organizational failure to adapt and/or an attempt to put expensive office spaces to some kind of readily visible use, rather than rational or productive management planning.

Funny you mention that. From my earlier comment, I run a lit zine, and we get tons of that stuff.

Our journal explicitly rejects 99% of those submissions, just to stand out from the pack.

I think a large part of it has to do with the print aspect - printing costs have been going up from supply chain issues over paper, binding material, etc. And if the outlet needs to pay staff and pay writers, that adds another layer of pressure. If it's subject to budgetary and other administrative issues because it's tied to a university, even more pressure.

What this article glossed over far too quickly, in my view, is how there are thousands - literally, thousands - of online or primarily online journals and magazines that are doing just fine or better than fine.

I can vouch to that because I started one last year. Granted, our editors are all volunteers and we don't pay writers, but we've had no problem pulling in all kinds of accomplished writers (and, no, they aren't "quirky" like the article somewhat dismissively referenced, whatever that means).

Our largest operating costs come from submission platform fees and trade organization memberships. Grand total, around $500 per year. For everything else, free resources like Netlify hosting for the site.

These types of articles could be a little more nuanced. Conventional publishing has serious issues, but it's just one piece of the literary landscape.

At the risk of going off-topic, I'm a little taken aback by how we're all still in the middle of a global pandemic. Vaccines don't provide bulletproof immunity and aren't intended to be a license to gather in groups, etc., without precautions.

From that description, your neighbors don't sound particularly appealing. What's there to be envious of re: that?

It's an interesting idea.

I guess it depends on the audience. For example, I run a literary magazine and something that has been noted in publishing forums is that when you charge a reading fee to consider a submission, it can cut down on the number of people shotgunning completely inapposite submissions to any magazine or journal with a free open call.

But that's a targeted audience, people who like contemporary literature.

If they're thinking "Twitter but you have to pay per post" ... I could unfortunately see a race to the bottom where most paid posts are ads or thinly-veiled ads.

I think these kinds of complaints are interesting compared to other HN posts about - take your pick - startups trying to keep the lights on, startups closing their doors, bootcamp attendees looking for their first job, etc.

Whether intentional or not, the tenor of this blog comes across as fairly sheltered and not particularly sympathetic.

This doesn't pass the sniff test.

For a basic non-engineering example, think about B2B sales. How much of a typical B2B sales cycle involves phone calls and emails and video meetings versus how much involves in-person meetings? Hasn't the first part of that more or less been "remote" since well before the virus?

To an extent, I think a large part of this view, as other comments have noted, might involve things like expensive office leases, etc., and to a certain mindset - realizing that a company doesn't necessarily need much of a physical presence highlights many varieties of poor longterm decision-making.

Agree. It can be a tiny project, too, just make sure there's something new or unique or conversation-worthy about it. The point is to have something you can talk about that shows you can walk through the basics of a dev project.

When I've reviewed applicants for junior roles, some demonstration that they can code in a relevant domain made a big difference.

Too many people can talk themselves up and/or repeat nice-sounding things from their classes better than they can do basic coding.