WDCDev
After 5 years I was done with that type of work. Way too frustrating to try and get buy-in from development teams, leadership, IT etc. to make changes necessary to support the business at the enterprise level.
I do think SaaS has relieved form pain for organizations. Hopefully legacy Peoplesoft and Lawson systems are being replaced by things like Workday etc. It does open up a new set of problems (and expenses) but these seem way more manageable than the problems and challenges with working with on-prem ERPs.
Every financial crisis or recession from the last 30 years or so has had a string of failures leading up a crash.
Late 1980s S&L Crash - You had a string of larger S&Ls failing (and a ton of smaller ones). This was a contributing factor in the 1990 recession. Note that S&Ls started failing in the mid 1980s.
2000 Crash - Long Term Capital Management blew up in 1998 and had to be rescued due to fears of contagion. Note the market hit all time highs after this fund failed.
2008 Crash - In early 2007 - New Century blows up ... starting a cascading series of failures. The S&P hits new highs throughout 2007 after New Century, until it finally starts to crash in late 2007 leading into the 2008 recession.
And now we have Archegos, which failed earlier this year and new highs in the stock market this week.
I am watching for more failures. One of the major contributing factors to Archegos' failure was WAY too much leverage. There is a ton of money sloshing around the system right now, and margin debt has hitting all time highs.
Crypto is also going blow up and take a lot of retail with it. If you get a stock crash and folks get margin called you could see a lot of crypto selling to cover that margin.
Recently left a company with an ex-Amazon Director who was VP of Engineering. He was an absolute snake who had only really worked at Amazon for his entire career. He did his expected round of firings/PIPs at the 2 year mark, then quit himself. Many experienced engineers left around the same time since we all were tired of the shitty Amazon culture he was breeding.
The point is that now you have to watch out for who the Directory/VPs are at your current organization. If they bring in someone from Amazon expect the company culture to go downhill fast.
I just hope it's a weird early-21st century "intellectual" movement that eventually dies out.
I feel that this is due to the weird place victimization occupies in our culture combined with how anti-social social media is.
It's extremely easy to issue accusations and threats and have them be read by literally millions of people. You would never dare vocalize these same threats and and accusations publically - and even if you did, in the pre-internet days, it would reach far far fewer people.
At some point we to start thinking about strengthening our libel laws to act as a deterrent to this type of online behaviors. It's depressing to consider MORE litigation as the solution here, but I don't think we can depend on the good nature of people and rationality to ultimately prevail.
I get that VCs will fund stupid things like that to grow entrepreneurs and build a portfolio of companies that maybe grow enough to get acquired and produce some profit. But funds/corps dumping $250 million+ annually into self-driving seems crazy. The opportunity costs of that alone are outrageous especially when there are ample and ripe opportunities to disrupt "traditional" businesses and business models across all kinds of market verticals.
> I do think it's different from 5 years ago. Yes, some researchers were throwing cold water on the idea then but they were seen as contrarians. And, on boards like this one, you'd have no shortage of people going but Waymo is going to have a taxi service next year! Today, it's closer to being accepted wisdom.
Yes, and this has always been perplexing. I work at an AI startup which actually uses it to accomplish rather straightforward tasks - and it's really hard to perfect with the minimal tolerances for error that we have to adhere to. When you start to scale the problem up to self driving it becomes evident quickly that it will take a looong time to get the level 5; yet people in this business were still insisting it was around the corner.
Articles like this have been written for 5 years now, but the money keeps flowing into these projects. Argo, Aurora and Aptiv etc. are all still burning mountains of cash.
I am shocked the industry didn't take Uber/Lyft selling off their self-driving divisions as the signal to stop funding these efforts.
Since Oct. of last year, the base price of our model has gone up $215,000 and every lot in this phase (phase 1) has now sold. I suspect at least half of that increase is materials, and the rest is due to market demand.
The market is just crazy and in talking to my builder he has said supply shortages could last through EOY and into next.
They love consultancies. It's a total roll of the dice if their projects are successful or not. I've seen it go both ways.
It's also talent that is hard to recognize and can be valued very differently from one organization to the next. I've been in the room with developers and management looking cross-eyed at me as I walk them through a top down business/problem decomposition and system design questioning the value of the entire exercise. Not surprising, these are organizations which have extremely brittle systems full of overlapping and "hard to reason about" abstractions.
Yep .. so if you want a rich responsive user experience, DON'T use any web technologies. GMail (AND Gsuite) is a perfect example of how a relatively simple concept like email can be turned into a slow, unresponsive piece of garbage.
I also don't believe self-driving will be anything more than tech stuck in R&D for the next 10 years. If I were an investor have preferred Uber sell ATG before this IPO.
However, I firmly believe the autonomous driving bubble will pop eventually, and you will have layoffs across that entire segment of the tech industry.
But ... if you read some of the feedback from interviewers at "those companies" that rely on these interviews, they say the reason they failed someone is exactly because they "didn't leetcode hard enough". It is manifested as:
"Well other candidates got the same solution as you, they just did it 10 minutes faster"
or
"You missed an edge case, even though your core algorithm was correct".
This is a huge issue with these interviews. It's all too easy for interviewers to evaluate candidates based on how fast, correct, neat or "complete" you answer was. It's easy and takes no time.
BTW ... this is a true story. One of my career's shining moments.
Did I mention the power line run to this trailer couldn't handle the load we were putting on it, and the circuits would break every 15 minutes or so?
So yeah .. I am sweating, literally, and our field test is about to begin. This was an anti-IED system, using passive biometric collection capabilities. I had written a big piece of the software to integrate everything.
Then ... 10 minutes before we begin, we get a nasty bug. General Such and Such is arriving, followed by Cnl. Whomever. Then the AC cuts out. I am in this trailer, and have to code up a fix in 10 minutes, literally, in 105 degree heat, dripping in sweat, with PMs and more important ppl staring over my shoulder.
I did it ... while dripping sweat all over the keyboard. Hooray for me! I saved the day!
Craziest ... most intense coding I have ever done.
Still fail white board interviews though. =/
When you combine risk management with certain corporate cultures and market verticals, you get a combination of the following:
Risk aversion
Lack of technical knowledge in the management layer
Technology viewed as overhead vs. a value provider
These three things are deadly to an ambitious corporate IT project. Unskilled management can't appreciate requirements, manage scope nor understand trade-offs very well. The business wants guarantees on budget and timelines. Budgets are fixed, and management rarely wants to ask for more since ROI may be hard, if not impossible to quantify.
So what do you end up with? The standard "over-promised and under-delivered technology" solution that are endemic across so many enterprises.
[edit - formatting and spelling]
I am curious how Airbus is going to handle external vendors, customers and organizations sending them complex Excel Spreadsheets and Word Documents.
Bring the candidate on site for a 4 hour coding session. Provide a standard list of questions the scale in difficulty. Think:
1) Fizzbuzz
2) Reverse a string
3) Write a calculator class/script
...
100) Write an algorithm that can search compressed text without decompressing it
So you see how far and correct they can get with an IDE ... and maybe no internet connection.
Noon - Hiring Manager lunch Afternoon - 1 or 2 design interviews on the white board.
So you have done a few things here that I want to outline.
A) You got rid of the stupid whiteboard
B) You have one process that scales for experience levels!
C) You can tailor the problem set at a certain of difficulty to specific languages
This interview style ensures the developer/engineer knows how to code, and can be weighted appropriately to certain skill levels.
One thing did jump out at me in this article.
Mike Cassidy, who stepped down from Loon, ran the team “like a fire drill,” a former employee said.
I read this as, "Leadership likes to change its mind about direction and focus ... constantly". That's a recipe for disaster. Focus is key. You need to find the right direction as quick as possible, then execute.
I don't know about you, but I have a constant backlog of features with tons of interesting problems to solve. There are places where I could build a DSL, but I am not going to because I would inevitably build something hacky and brittle that is impossible to understand and maintain (like JDSL).
I can't build new features, and increase the value of the system if my DSL is constantly breaking the system.
So don't do it. There is plenty of functionality on the .NET and Ruby platforms for me to model the concepts and objects in the domain without the need for a DSL.