Jormundir

  Location: Portland, OR
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: AWS, Go, Typescript, React, Node, SQL, NoSQL
  Résumé/CV: Available on request
  Email: [email protected]

This already exists and is starting to gain popularity for new builds. It’s also not that expensive to retrofit, but is most effective when a home is sealed well.

All the products made around ergonomics are total BS, full stop. Your body is not built to sit at a desk all day, and you can't fix that with an overpriced keyboard. Take breaks from time to time and go walk around a bit.

Get yourself setup so there's no pressure on your arms and legs and call it good. Don't waste your money on ergo BS.

My situation is probably drastically determined by some stranger 200 years ago who decided hopping in a pile of potatoes on barge headed for the US was a good idea. Thank you distant relative, that was a genius idea!

The point isn't to act like people aren't responsible for their own actions, of course they are. The point is to be realistic about how much of our situations are attributable to our personal decision making. People don't exist in small vacuums where they control everything.

The better pursuit is for schools to work on constantly realigning their curriculum towards what is necessary for modern life and employment. Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in.

Saying the market is turning to the buyer in real estate, implies it's a good time to buy a house, and renting is comparatively expensive to a mortgage.

1. Someone sets out to change the world and make a lot of money by building a business around a new technology.

2. In order to grow the business, they build barriers around their technology / market. This takes the form of closed platforms, patents, safety regulations, etc. (This is a neutral point, I'm not trying to call anyone evil for doing this).

3. Once the entrepreneurs are prosperous, with good intentions, they lobby for the public to pay for essentially remaking their businesses in a more open way. There's the obvious irony in this stage, as they have to fight the very barriers they erected, and I think some people get mad here, because those barriers end up costing the public more.

I actually think this is a healthy cycle. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who are satisfied with 1 and 2, and never put the effort into 3. I think applauding the people who have the strength and drive to get to 3 is going to help the world become better, faster. I don't think there's a reason to hold malice against entrepreneurs for building those barriers, if we did, we will just have less people lobbying for the good things in the world.

I think there's a strong argument to make that university programs are too focused on theory, when the vast majority of their students are going to go out and get practical engineering jobs. I don't want the pendulum to swing too far to the practical side, though, because then you lose the long-term benefits of getting a CS degree. Although, schools can certainly buff up their practical material.

Anecdotally; when I participate in hiring, I tend to discount the bootcamp grads. Maybe it's unfair, but my experience hiring them has been that they know how to interview well, and know their tools well, but when you compare them a year in, they're pretty far behind their university counterparts. I see a plateau, where it's hard for a lot of bootcamp grads to move from doing generic web development to designing more challenging systems. Obviously it depends on the individual, but this seems to be a categorical struggle for bootcamp grads with little technical background. A lot of companies really just need more people doing web development, so being open to the bootcamp pool is essential, and ruling out bootcamp grads is silly.

The first sentence is not far off from what their process is. My interviews with them were composed of one helpful database problem, after which they explained how they designed their production database, followed by a bunch of frivolous algorithms problems.

I did not receive an offer from them, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Asana seemed like a company that has some great engineers, and runs well in general. I would, however, like to provide some constructive criticism for their interview process.

1. Their engineers can use some training on how to interview. Several of them came into the room noticeably anxious. Hearing what the problems were was easy, but communication was very difficult when it came to figuring out what kind of answer they were actually looking for.

2. The questions they use are very academic, which to me means they are mental exercises lacking practical grounding. As an interviewer, it's very uninspiring to have to solve academic problems without getting a peak into the business' real problems.

3. The whole process wasted way too much time. Obviously I wouldn't have cared as much if they had given an offer, but I think it's important to be conscious of this nonetheless. My suggestion would be to pick topics for interviewers to cover, and cut out the repetition of the problems. Plan a process that will lead to a decision with one shorter visit, be respectful of peoples' time.

I hope that helps. I received more offers I'm excited about, and I hope to see the company succeed from the outside.

Do -> analyze strengths and weaknesses -> try to do better.

That middle part is way more successful with the help of a good coach. Really quick learners ("talent") can fill in that middle step on their own, but would ultimately benefit from a coach.

When your work cycle is:

do -> do again -> do again -> do again

you'll improve a bit, but pretty quickly plateau.

Your "shoulds" sound like arbitrary rules to make some people comfortable at other peoples' expense.

I wonder, though, how apprentices would fair in competition with people having general education and degree focus. Fields require skills to change over time, and quite quickly now. I wonder if an apprentice would be stronger in the short-term and outpaced in the long-term.

Also, where does the wage subsidy you talk about come from? Would people be paying for their own apprenticeships? The government paying for some like public institutions?

I don't like the college system we have now, but switching to the extreme of apprenticeship is definitely not a good answer. Right now I'm an engineer, but with my rounded education, if I don't like it, I can go and switch to a myriad of other fields that I'm educated enough for.

The world already had apprenticeship systems, and it's not some magical system we forgot about. Apprenticeships lead to weird power dynamics that aren't very good for the individual, such as being indentured to your employer for providing the training.

The main problem I see with our education system is that it's inefficient, and growing too large and slow to keep up with modern needs. This doesn't mean a well-rounded education is a problem though.

Laws are tools paid for and created by large entities to cement their positions. Ignoring laws means giving ridiculously powerful legal tools to big companies and governments to prosecute the smaller groups who can't defend themselves.

Bringing those dependencies in under one roof doesn't eliminate their risk. Though it does increase the chance that an error in one of these small dependencies brings down the whole system.

With microservices if one of the services runs into trouble, you can ignore it and still serve the other 90-99% of your site without it. You can also deploy updates to services without having to deploy your entire site.

I don't think I see how this would not hurt the employees. Seems like a classic startup management move that screws over the employees who are already taking pay cuts and huge life risks to make the startup successful.