mtlguitarist

Yup, they moved back when Somerville Theater did the most recent renovations I think. I kind of miss going to the bathroom down there and seeing the strange art while wandering.

This is an unfair framing of it. Addiction is a mental illness and these companies are preying on the mentally ill to make money. They rely on them ruining their own lives and others' to make a profit.

This is totally fair and I agree with that. What I was trying to say and didn't express particularly eloquently is that you need to consider both "abstract" measures of code quality (performance, test coverage, complexity, rate of regressions/defects, etc.) and specific product metrics. You can deliver "high quality code" that checks off all the abstract metrics, but if it doesn't actually solve your business problem then you've basically just succumbed to Goodhart's Law.

Yes, but presumably we all work at businesses that are trying to make money. Code quality and product quality are inextricably linked in the business world.

I just realized that I always use my ring finger for underscores. I wonder if that changed how I feel about snake case.

Except coffee is associated with lower all cause mortality (likely due to the amount of fiber extracted in coffee drinks) [0]. Do you have any evidence of decreased all cause mortality associated with any nicotine product?

https://youtu.be/IBB_8vR7wpU?si=0Cmq26oBQ-9dwUNN

Okay but the difference is that being a mediocre athlete or musician means that you're unemployed, whereas you can be a totally mediocre programmer and make well into the 6 figures. My friends who are professional musicians know far more about their craft than even the most motivated engineers I've worked with, and they make less money than the worst paid engineers I've met. I've casually played guitar for almost 20 years and been programming less than half that time ane I can't even think about going pro without a massive dedicated effort.

I think there's a bif citation needed on whether social media influences anxiety and depression in younger people. It's a nice scapegoat, but the world is harder and more competitive than it's ever been. I can't work in a textile mill and become a union president and support a family. The job doesn't exist anymore, and even if it did it wouldn't pay enough to achieve those coveted milestones of a "quiet life."

Okay but is this a failure of the user or an unintuitive UX? We can't just expect to pass cognitive burden onto users in a million places. UI affordances and conventions exist for a reason.

> And how do you get those tickets into the issue tracker in the first place?

I mean depends on the team but approximately:

1. Discuss high level initiative

2. Write tickets with coarse descriptions

3. Have team refine tickets (define scope + estimate)

4. Prioritize work and assign tasks

> How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group?

Do you have an example where you think that a complex problem can't be broken into tasks and solved this way? I can understand with ongoing incidents maybe you need to solve them as a group in a time-sensitive manner, but those are rare events and the world's large companies have been solving them in distributed ways anyway so I don't think this is a remote vs. in-person problem.

> How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it?

Honest question here: have you really had this problem at work? I think this is a pretty toxic situation to be in if you need to build social capital to solve conflicts. I really don't want to work in an environment where people are fighting hard enough to warrant needing social capital to get them through the discussions.

> Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.

It approximately is honestly. There are some small differences I'm sure, but it seems somewhat narrow-minded to focus on the relatively small differences when the vast majority of problems are universal (coaching/mentorship, working with stubborn/difficult personalities, removing single points of failure, giving people opportunities to advance their careers, etc.).

I really do not understand what could possibly be hard about it for the manager here. People have tickets in some issue tracker, they move them into whatever status they're in, and the manager just sends out some messages to check in on the status if there haven't been new updates in a few days. Yeah, you also have 1-1s, status meetings, performance reviews, etc but these are all things you'd have anyway. My managers have done basically nothing different for me while I was remote and everything seemed to be fine.

In what way is pedestrian safety political? I have no political interests in this topic other than not wanting to be run over while walking around my city. I literally cannot trust drivers to follow the laws and plan my walks accordingly because I know drivers will ignore stop signs, red lights, etc.

If you wanted to handle this scenario with the serverless AWS stack, my recommendation would be to push records to Dynamo with TTLs and then when they pop have a Lambda push them onto the queue. Would cost almost nothing to do this. If you had 10 million requests a month your Lambda cost would be ~$150 to run this (depending on duration, but just pushing to a queue should be quick). Dynamo would be another ~$50 to run, depending how big your tasks are.

Granted now you need 3 services instead of 1. I personally don't find the maintenance cost particularly high for this architecture, but it does depend on what your team is comfortable with.

The young people I know hate going into the office, it's all the older folks that want to go in. I've been almost entirely remote since I've graduated and haven't missed being in person at all. I've developed my skills more being left alone and having time to read and learn on my own than I ever have being forced to sit in an office and struggle to be productive. I'm absolutely not established, but I've had no issues convincing others of work of my impact. You simply need to take writing seriously and learn how to communicate your work.

Companies are just learning they have terrible onboarding processes and documentation. Turns out those things are important and being in-person is an expensive and poor quality bandaid.

I find personally that my math ability is set to approximately 2-3 levels "below" the highest level math I completed, and I've seen hold for others. I have an applied math bachelors so I've taken analysis, dynamical systems, and other high level math classes, but I find that the stuff that I actually remember at a level to pass undergrad exams is up to linear algebra or maybe a little more advanced. Of course if I were to relearn it'd be much faster, but years of being a software engineer have caused me to forget all that stuff.

I wish I could agree. Every aspect of pytest that I like (fixtures, plugins, etc.) is marred by a boneheaded move to make them autoloaded by default. Loading should be explicit/opt-in. It's dumv that if you pip install something that adds a new pytest plugin it'll automatically modify your runtime behavior. Some of the plugins are great (shoutout to pytest-socket), but it has the same issue flake8 has with the plugin ecosystem where the quality varies wildly.

I might be in the minority but I also find python's mock implementation awful. Mockito in Java is way better where you explicitly state which calls you expect and if you get an unexpected call it errors out.

Is this really a positive thing? It creates in-groups and decreases diversity. Sure, it makes hiring easier but this is exactly how you end up with old boys clubs.

One funny incident I had on this topic was when I was TAing calculus one student proudly proclaimed that there's no gravity on Mars while doing velocity problems.

This didn't stop them from using the gravitational constant provided in the assignment or from getting the correct answer even, but it was funny regardless.

Regarding your last two points, you're absolutely spot on. I don't have much in terms of data, but I want to at least offer my story so that people understand how fundamentally broken the system is and how it discourages you from doing anything other than leaving.

I internally transferred at Amazon and had many internal offers to choose from - so I went with a team that had great tech survey results and where the manager seemed like an honest guy that I could trust. In < 2 years I had 6 different managers at Amazon, so I felt like I could read managers pretty well and knew what I was looking for. I joined the team and was ecstatic, up until the manager announced he was leaving 2 weeks later. I had to report to his manager who I had interviewed with and could tell I didn't work with. He had newly been hired by Amazon just a few months earlier, and he was exactly the type of micromanaging bureaucrat that Amazon gives too much power. He also clearly didn't want to manage ICs and they weren't clear to him during the interview process that he was going to manage ICs rather than managers.

Things went about as poorly as you can expect. The new manager had no technical knowledge, poor leadership, and blatantly favored the people he was managing before he inherited my team. But I'm not sure if I can convey how bad he was. He would have engineers manually updating excel spreadsheets for his monthly business reviews as part of their oncall work (which was literally his job). He would gaslight engineers into telling them they'd be promoted, and then hand them a PIP. He would lie at status meetings and has numerous documented performance issues and complaints in his connections and directly to his manager and director. His performance was so dismal that our Senior Manager made his team meet together and write down ideas (anonymously) for the manager to stop being so bad. He would blatantly not pay attention in meetings and ask us to repeat whatever we went over in the previous day's meetings (which he attended himself) in standup. He would never back up his engineers on any push back, even when we would get paged to do things outside of our SLA windows and completely let our stakeholders run us over with requests and expectations.

No list about all of his horrible practices could be complete, but I want to emphasize that he was so disliked that he caused 9 people to leave his team in 10 months. I don't want to say I was the best engineer, but I got positive feedback from all of the senior and principal engineers I worked with and I thought I was on a steady path to being promoted. But it turns out this manager realized he could weaponize performance ratings, and gave me and the other L4s that he inherited the lowest performance rating possible while giving his original reports promos and the highest rating possible. This wasn't an absolute shock to me and I already intended to leave Amazon because I couldn't stand him any longer, but this set my team's senior engineer off. He was absolutely livid and escalated the issue to the senior manager that this was a disaster and completely ridiculous. The senior manager met with me personally, told me it was a problem and that he'd make it right. He and the director decided to have my team report to a new (remote) manager, but for me it was too late and I decided to leave amazon.

But what happened to the manager? Well, I wish I could say HR stepped in and fired him for weaponizing ratings, or his bosses PIPed him for being awful, but actually none of those things happened! He caused ~60-70% attrition, had documented performance issues, and abused tools in a documented way and still manages at Amazon! A few months ago he internally transfered and as far as I know his new team doesn't have him on a PIP yet.

What is the takeaway for anyone reading? Just remember that just because you interview with a manager doesn't mean they'll be your manager forever, or even really at all. And it's okay if you underperform at Amazon, as long as your title is SDM. The last thing I wanna say is that I really liked the Senior Manager as a person, but he was too nice to the shitty manager. PIPing is inherently a bad system, but if it can't even catch someone who is so blatantly underperforming for a year straight then it doesn't even do what it says on the box.

Also no matter what don't join Amazon Go Boston. Just as a heads up.