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Fact of the matter is Meta has problems almost no one else has. Acting like people will choose less pay and boring work over interesting work and more pay on a moral basis is a little naive. But I see you apparently have a political axe to grind. Meta is not a morally acceptable place to work I agree. However, if you were offered 350,000 USD to work on something hard like a compiler or a data pipeline designed to ingest petabytes of data I'm sure you'd at least think twice about it. For example, you could work at Meta and use the money they pay to fund organizations you support that run counter to Meta's mission. This all not even mentioning having Meta on your resume is basically a golden ticket to the industry for the rest of your career.
If they banned IMSI catchers it just makes the job marginally harder. When I mean marginally I truly mean MARGINALLY. Right now a police officer can fire up some software, draw a selector box around a region, and pull everyone who was in that region inside some timeframe. They don't need an IMSI catcher for that. Cell phone data from advertisers is often enough. It's real minority report pre-crime level shit. This of course all ignoring the fact that IMSI leaking happens with EM emissions which can be argued are incidentally picked up anyway and therefore information that doesnt require a warrant. Like a license plate for your car.
We need much, much stronger privacy laws. But first we need to get people into congress that actually care.
Like most engineers I didn't start out that way so perhaps you are right and a few grains of salt would make it better. However, I do not think the average HNer represents a weird aberration of happiness on the scale. I think most companies that hire on this site likely chronically underpay people.
However, I think my overarching message is clear. Happiness is entirely relative. At any rate, you should never prioritize happiness over financial security because you should be well compensated, first and foremost, for the time in your life you will never get back. Your compensation should be even better for dealing with a bad company. You might argue that spending those hours of your life in a relative happy state is healthier. I'd agree. But to me, that eventuality comes about after establishing good pay.
Certainly, trading $100k and a good job for $150k and a job that gets you yelled at all the time is not a very good trade. Analyze the opportunity cost. The big point here is two things I think and I think you'd agree:
1. Analysis of opportunity cost is important. That means, to me, quantifying "happiness" with some dollar value. Is happiness worth $10k to you? $30k? I guess it depends.
2. People are often afraid to leap into a new position.
I understand you said money aside but money is genuinely all you should care about. You are trading decades of your waking life to the rat race. It should be your first, and in my opinion, most imperative concern. If you were truly a generous and austere person you'd be a volunteer.
Frequently. I've only recently maintained "tenure" in my later engineering years. Mostly because I don't want to fight with scrappy new grads for positions anymore. First piece of advice I can give you is ignore anything about "fun tech stack" or "culture". It's all bullshit. Of course, parrot the lines they want to hear about how these are the things you look for. Appear fun and excited to work in their "fun stack" in their "culture". Use this as cover for what you really want: money. At the end of the day money may not buy happiness but I have rarely met a happy person that can't afford to be comfortable. Beer coolers, pizza, ping pong, and "fun activities" don't buy you time with your family, friends, and neighbors. Money does.
Second piece of advice: never fall for the "find a job you love" trope. Remember this: if you do not own the company you will never love it. You may like it. Hell, you may enjoy it. But the specter of a layoff, getting fired due to a bad review, etc will always be just a few steps behind you. Always remember as a software engineer the pinheaded MBAs have you squarely under the "cost center" line in the balance sheet. And no, getting shares in a company does not imply ownership no matter how many times HR tells you so.
Fact of the matter is for the first two decades of your career you should honestly be looking to move on from any company in <= 5 years. So, a minimum of 4 companies in 20 years. You'll want to reduce that to a move-on-rate of every 3 or so years if you're in start up land. Loyalty is not awarded. Not here, and not anywhere else. That ship sailed 50 years ago.
The reason? More money and more responsibility. You have a chance to redefine yourself at every new job. These redefinitions can bring you more money and more power. More money and more power is very "sticky" and you'll find people who "fail up" execute this strategy brilliantly. You are more likely to see a significant raise via quitting than by staying around. This advice is universal. It applies equally to tech as it does to landscaping.
Of course, this is just a rule of thumb. Don't leave a company that values you and gives you good raises every so often. Evaluate carefully the opportunity cost. One example from my career: I had a job where I made $X where $X was a little below average. I liked the company and the people. I interviewed around after I got my second or third "money is tight" in a review (despite others seemingly getting rank and pay). I found a company that I could tolerate willing to pay me 1.3x $X. That is a slam dunk. Without question I put my two weeks in and GTFO. Especially when you are young this is very important. If your raise is 10% and a competitor offers you 15% you may want to weigh other facts. But when you're talking multiples of your potential raise...just leave. You are not married to the company and they are CERTAINLY not married to you. If you like your coworkers that much get their phone numbers and meet them at a bar. Despite the himming and hawing from your boss they're probably doing the same thing as you.
You are either legitimately shilling for your employer or watch/read one of the several DOZEN news organizations they own. You need to wake up. The giant, along with it's daemon Aladdin, control the majority of money flow on the planet.
If BlackRock owns 70% stake in a company that buys houses they DE FACTO own the company that buys houses. Just like the link you posted your very own post is simply smoke and mirrors. I would not doubt there are posters like yourself that are bought and paid for.
> The difficulties for first-time buyers have been escalating for years. During the pandemic boom, they were frequently squeezed out as they competed against people with cash and investors who frequently target starter homes. The typical household income for first-time buyers soared to as much as $90,000 in 2022 from about $70,000 in 2019.
Weird they're not naming the actual villain - BlackRock. It always seems to fall back on these "investors" and "people with cash". In some places, corporate ownership via BlackRock shell corporations rose up over 40%. Entire neighborhoods are owned by these people in order to drive up rent, home values, and then dump the houses back on the market.
The US will do nothing. BlackRock executives are at nearly every level of the government. The majority of US wealth is tied up either directly or through clients with BlackRock. They know that if anyone was to do anything they'd dump all their assets and bring on a housing crisis of biblical proportions.
Enjoy the ride. We're in the terminal phase of crony capitalism.
There is not a "war" except one caused by politicians. The price eggs and gasoline in the US are not a function of this war. I could not care less and I certainly do not want to send our boys to die for a politician's dirty laundry. Whatever happens over there is a problem of the EU, not mine, and not anyone I care about. Being a "good global citizen" is pointless agitprop from BlackRock ESG. My life is already too complicated. It would be wise of us to not go about pissing off nuclear powers especially when the US is as fundamentally weak both in the spirit of what it stands for and leadership as it is today. Eisenhower tried to warn us and none of us listened.
First, the war has had very little appreciable effect on the stock market. This is personal politics injection. Your average westerner would probably go on living their life with a steady 7% return if the news media didn't constantly shove the war going on down our throats.
The problem is free capital. Follow the money. Billions and billions in corporate welfare was handed out to nearly every company. Some companies got literal corporate welfare. Companies like Walmart, Amazon, and many SaaS companies got second-order corporate welfare. Second-order? Yes, the people who got pandemic assistance by-and-large spent it on frivolous extras since moratoriums on rent, etc were in effect. Despite what the studies say the balance sheets for Amazon, Walmart, et al. 2020-2021 tell the truth. This MASSIVE injection of wealth into the companies provided them the capital do this. Now, add to that the gobs of near-ZIRP helicopter money getting thrown around by big VCs...you see where I am going.
This wasn't a misinterpretation of the cash flow statement. This was deliberate. These companies knew this golden goose would stop laying eggs. Everyone hired in any at-risk position in 2020-2021 was basically on the chopping block from day 1. This faux-cession is not a real tech worker recession. It's just the term they're using to defer blame from the companies blowing trillions in FCF on what amounts to temporary workers.
> If companies want to continuously grow and have long term career employees, they need to make sure that there are enough senior roles and positions available. It feels odd that we have a very limited number of high-level career positions, and yet everybody is forced to think about advancing towards those, or not seen as a person who is eager enough to be in this market. I want to build excellent products for our end users, I don’t feel like I should spend a huge amount of my time competing with my peers for those few senior positions.
The author cannot possibly be this dense. Either that, or they are more junior than they let on. These senior positions are wildly expensive. Even in today's depressed wage faux-cession market. Juniors and mids are getting hit the hardest and among my network I've noticed a distinct increase in foreign contractor workers getting brought in.
There's really only two outcomes here. Either FAANG realizes their dream of driving down wages by hiring back a glut of code campers at 3/4 their previous wages or foreign contractors take a deeper cut going forward. If you don't believe me look at what happened to the car companies post 2008. The vast majority of labor jobs (and yes, programmers are labor) are now in Mexico. They aren't returning. In every labor recession (or faux-cession) in this case jobs leave and never come back. Tech is not immune to this and I believe it's about to get it's car manufacturer reckoning.
All we need to do is extract that portion of the bill. However, I suspect the answer is like usual. Congress does not represent the people and their corporate owners would not be pleased. Larry Fink would probably have a millenia worth of consecutive life sentences alone. We might spur innovation in healthcare technology just making him serve the time he owes.
But with CEOs it seems RICO doesn't apply.
I can design you a nice document, do the research, put the pieces together, etc with the big picture. I may not know a ton about AWS or another cloud provider but I can put the document together that describes how it will be looking when it's done. That is architecture. Somewhere between UML and word documents.
What these interviews are checking, and the one you are describing, is whether or not I can parrot the correct code-words. Lambda, elastic cache, all this other nonsense. That's the purpose of the bloodsuckers I mentioned above. If you can train someone with little architecture experience to pass a senior level interview by just saying the right things and knowing the right hype tech then you're not hiring architects you're hiring grifters.
It's a problem that is endemic in this industry. You can't "gut check" 30 years of architectural experience unless you're legitimately asking the core questions of architecture. Every interview I've been in has had me studying stupid buzzwords from cloud technology and every interview I am asked how to use these technologies. As an example, I was once turned down because I didn't use Kafka. I knew what the underlying technology was and suggested using it but the fact I didn't say kafka eliminated me. The reason? I can only guess, but it's likely because the interviewer doesnt know much and was looking for a way to get into a debate over kafka vs protobuf vs whatever instead of discussing actual planning of a system. These debates are resolved after I take the problem back to my desk and think about it for a week. Not in an hour. In an hour the best I can give you is a block diagram with maybe some very rough fleshed out detail.
The humility check should be bi-directional. It has been my experience that interviewers tend to be the least humble people at a company. The power dynamic is obvious and it's not in the character at most startups where a "senior" engineer high on hopium can settle themselves into their rightful place.
You might say that this is hubris about my own skill but it has nothing to do with how good I am. My resume has a LOOONG track record of consistent work in the industry. Call my references, do some actual DD on me, then ask me real questions related to actual things.
If leetcode and all these other service went straight to hell tomorrow the world would be a better place. This entire "interview" industry is propped up by a bunch of leeches capitalizing on a recently extremely popular field. Then, injecting their BS to make the process harder thereby earning them dollars. The linked article is a perfect example. It's actually an advertisement if you look close enough designed by these exact leeches. This is just a reimagining of the bloodsuckers who run SAT/GRE/GMAT prep services and "ex-ivy-league recruiter consultant" bullshit. They are the same people and the only place they belong is all the way at the back of the breadline. That may be too generous for them anyway. There are better people that deserve the bread.
There's a good chance at my career phase I have more experience than the interviewer. They "level the playing field" by asking me these stupid things. That is why it is insulting. I almost want to leave the industry entirely than have to do the process one more time. I don't need a 7 phase 360 interview with everyone including the CEO's cousin to insure I am a "culture fit". It was never like this before. It needs to stop.
It is not twitter mobs. Its about holding people to a standard and not allowing them to corrupt the meaning of computing for financial, or tyrannical, gain. In recent history we have done almost nothing to hold anyone accountable for their actions. Academia being the most impervious to such punishments.
The ACM and ABET would make the decision. The same people who issue the certifications to the schools who award the degrees. Yes, these organizations are generally spineless cowards, but in a perfect world it would be them. Iron-fisted responses to tyrants is the only way you can insure the purity of a field and freedom from their destruction. I assume you will take this to it's natural conclusion and say any CS degree holder working for the NSA/Military/FBI/etc should also be similarly stripped of their title. To that I say, yes, if they are violating the computing rights of others willfully we as a society cannot allow such people to hold the credential. Otherwise a code of conduct is simply a list of suggestions. In which case it should not exist at all.
The problem is the precedent, globally, of killing encryption is well documented. There is no good solution that doesn't harm everyone. Here in the states, the Clipper Chip [0] was the textbook example of politicians trying to legislate mathematics. You wouldn't even be able to do something like "give us a copy of your private keys" because then you'd go down the path of playing wackamole with every distribution, every slightly recompiled GnuPG, etc. It's an intractable problem. We, in the US, would've gone a long way by stripping Dorothy Denning's CS PhD from her [1] after her outspoken support of such measures. Instead she has received many awards for her "work" in the field of rights erosion.
The US seems to have settled on making attempts at Clipper 2.0 every decade or so. In the meantime encryption is considered a weapon legally which is how the DAs get their fill. Germany appears to have flat out opposed it...but it's only a matter of time. The EU will force them to bend the knee because historically they always have. It's a fantastic effort. Unfortunately, done by one of the biggest pushovers in Europe.
There's no hope for the technical among us. The people with power who do understand, the technocrats, are behind these efforts. The people that don't understand are behind these efforts. It's only the intractability of the problem that makes legislating it dangerous. Once someone clever enough makes it tractable there won't be encryption anymore. Pre-crime is the way the world has worked since 9/11 and encryption is #0 on the list of things to legislate to death. In the US, there are likely hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars being spent to store every last bit of communication in Utah for this eventuality.The EU has a similar program. Those tax dollars have to be justified somehow. So when you ask "who would support this"... just follow the money.
It emerges as rampant pessimism and distrust of anyone and everyone. It's highly beneficial in the corporate world but has irreparably damaged my ability to bond with people. Which leaves me at a impasse as to whether to solve it. Given my age it's not worth it as I am well beyond my years of socializing freely.
Imagine you send an employee to a place where they have to stay in a hotel. Then, they trash it. REALLY trash it. Trash it so bad that it takes actual time to repair.
The hotel will likely use the credit card as the identifier. They'll also probably blacklist the company itself until someone really high up calls them and tells them sorry.
Of course, AirBnB is a little different and not being a company makes this harder. However, the practice isn't exactly unusual. If you're strongly associated with someone chances are that someone will tag along. Easier to ban both (or all) of you than one of you and hope the people left over are responsible enough (they usually aren't with enough guilt tripping). Especially in the case of a romantic partner the only option probably is to ban both you strictly because it's a near certainty your malicious partner will travel with you or have the ability to guilt you into letting them. Good luck telling your girlfriend/boyfriend to go stay at the Holiday Inn while you sleep in luxury in an AirBnB.
The "intellectual" argument falls flat. I do not consider myself "enlightened" in any respect yet I find the amount of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing here to rival reddit. If we are to compare HN to it's nearest grandparent, slashdot, at least people had a sense of humor there. There is no such thing here. If you don't toe the line cast by the technocratic neo-liberal agenda you will be downvoted. If you don't like XYZ framework, are critical of Rust/Haskell/Whatever you will get downvoted. If you are an inch right of center you will get downvoted. Sometimes you get downvoted for just existing. /r/shithnsays has a select of posts exemplifying many of the above traits. If someone told me they were an HNer I would more likely avoid them just like I tend to avoid redditors.
The SNR is atrocious. It's very obvious there are as many, if not more, astroturf accounts here than there are legitimate posters.
It's truly a forum for the silicon valley yuppie who believe they hold the single truth to all things. It's obnoxious, it's annoying, oftentimes it's outright terrible. Questionable moderation, obvious political bent, and pseudo-intellectualism abounds.
Yet, there's nothing better. Maybe someday. Until then, shitposting here is all I have since slashdot is dead, USENET is dead, and forums are mostly dead. The one upside of this place is the relatively simple format. It's far better than the thousand-dark-pattern-deep designs of other places.
1. I like the outdoors and they don't put bus lines 200 miles from the nearest gas station.
2. Work is often further than walking or biking distance.
3. I need to haul more than a few days worth of groceries. Or a larger item.
I think what people are getting upset at is you are conflating not driving with some higher form of intellect when in reality it's a privilege really only afforded to people who live in often high cost of living areas. This implies a socioeconomic status to yourself whether you like it or not and so people feel you are talking down to them. I interpreted it as you were talking down to me too. It's not about me being "done" with road rage, or whatever, it's about the fact that my town, my life, and the country in general won't let me be "done" with it. Nor will my hobbies. For many of us a car is not a privilege it's an absolutely basal level necessity. No amount of cheerleading for the anti-car crowd will change that. I suspect it won't change in my lifetime either.
First, get help. Liking a political candidate does not make you unhinged and violent.
> Perhaps instead of judging based on limited information, you should first look at your own circumstances and mind your own.
It's a public forum, sorry I ruffled feathers identifying a problem child that somehow made it to adulthood. I mean, their parents must've done something right. Except for the part where they raised an ingrate that judges them entirely on their affinity to a particularly, extremely popular nationally, candidate.
> Wise parents should aim to promote self-reliance, 360-degree honesty, considerateness, courage, BS-detecting critical thinking, and confidence as much as possible.
Indeed, the person's parent's failed in one aspect. They raised a person who is so high huffing their own, admittedly leftist, farts they cannot even drop the veil for a minute to enjoy the likely little time they have left with the people they've known their whole life. It's pathetic. I say that because there is no word in the English language with more power that I know. It's beyond pathetic. The "dangerous, violent" person is the poster. I am sure you could say the wrong thing to them at a bar (perhaps "trump did some good") and get yourself into a knife fight. I've ran into these people before. They're better off siloed in a room with padding on the walls than out on the street. Perhaps with a hit reel from 2008-2012 Obama speeches playing repeat. If unhinged leftists were capable of anything California wouldn't be having a mass exodus and the streets wouldn't smell like excrement. And yes, they do. I travel there weekly.
It works when you're helping a junior. It's insulting to anyone else. Part of our jobs as programmers is to be able to tease apart another developers mental model and learn the abstraction. If you cannot do this the codebase is either unsaveable or you are. The only codebases I have been unable to untangle in my long career have been either written by contractors or by a pseudo-intellectual moron developer that believes they are the second coming of Turing. Everyone else's code is usually able to be parsed with some patience and a debugger for more complicated tasks. I even gasp use pencil and paper to keep track of code flow often.
Why do you feel the need to do this? Does it provide you some personal validation that lets you sleep better at night? That you "bested" your parents?
I think your issue is deeper than politics. Militant atheists get the same kicks "besting" Christians. It's not a healthy way to go about living.
> I know the space is active, but when I see the old bright yellow CLHS linked to from documentation sites, I just frown a bit.
This is how documentation has been FOREVER. The newer documentation is not necessarily better. In fact, I find the "forced by the compiler" type docs that come from Rust et al to be infuriating at times. PyDoc is no better. I much prefer the terse documentation when I need to know something for sure rather than just copy-pasting examples out of docs.
> downright dismissive of modern techniques like containers and DevOps practices.
Citation needed? Lisp containerizes just fine. Unless you mean hand-holding-via-blog-post which yeah, I guess the community can be hostile. If you hang around the IRC people are often very helpful. The greybeards in the field are very experienced and very intelligent. To be crass, many of these "modern" developers you refer to need a LOT of handholding. CL doesn't provide this handholding. Honestly, it is no harder than getting actual work done in Haskell. You spend a lot of time in documentation and not a lot of people can help you. Of those people that can, your problem is not hard enough to interest them because they are VERY good. That being said I had no problem at all getting help from the community IRC and mailing lists.
As far as I can tell CL is fine for the 21st century. A more streamlined package system would be nice but quicklisp and ASDF aren't that complicated.
Frankly, I dont think you've spent any time working in CL at any real size. You could argue it doesnt scale well across large teams and that'd be fair. Your other criticisms though...don't make sense and don't align with my experience at all.
That being said, the ultra dense morons who think "oral" can't be extended in a special case to simply mean "without extra time to think" (which is what is is, mostly) are typically not experienced with these exams.
The parent teaches CS1 and is not likely to have been given a formal oral examination in their likely short career (these are usually reserved for PhD qualifying and special MScs).
This opinion literally only exists in a pseudo-intellectual echo chamber such as this one.
Cool opinion. None of it is true. You may think they are "generally badass MFers" but there are plenty of people, myself included, who will see "corporate integrity" as a weakness. In fact, if you interviewed the world's most powerful people I'd bet all the money I had none of them would tell you to be a "nice person" with "integrity". Warren Buffett, for example, uses this image (and you should abuse such an image), but historically is a cutthroat.
If you want integrity join a church. The people in power who have convinced you that they have integrity and that's how they got there are exploiting your naive sense of moral purpose in life. Wake up.
No, power is awarded to those bold enough to do what needs to be done. You'd be wise to read _The Prince_, and instead of being revolted by it, take it as a lesson in how people such as US presidents, CEOs, dictators, etc all come to power.
I'm getting downvoted because people like you haven't studied history. Typical of the pseudo-intellectual I doubt you've read any books on the historical acquisition of power. If you did, you'd notice the common thread across all cultures, kingdoms, and royalty. There's a distinct difference between deliberate machiavellianism, and uncontrolled machiavellianism. The former is business, the latter is "psychopathy". I put it in quotes because you also do not have any idea what psychopathy actually is. I'm sure you go around the office calling people "nazis" and "fascists" too.