sudeepj

Productivity compared to which time in the past? If we compare productivity today compared to say 1960/1950 then we have definitely improved. We can manufacture at speed & scale. We can communicate with people across the continents like never before. We can work-from-home to a large extent than ever before. We can destroy each other at much grander scale like never before.

But like any system, any improvement in efficiency results in shifting the bottlenecks. It never truly goes away. The nature of the bottleneck may be different but its there. The things like "forms, compliance, process" are the new bottlenecks.

Technology is a means to an end. It cannot be the end itself (at a macro level). Tech is by humans, for humans and of humans. Humans will always be the centerpiece for time to come (unless AI becomes so good as they potray in sci-fi films/tv-series).

> patent offices will generate adversarial AI review examiners

What if someone patents these examiners first? :)

Oreo is actually an imitation (a successful one) . The original product was called Hydrox [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrox

(Hydrox is really a not a good name for a snack)

My bad. I based on the tweet from the author himself [1]

May be he meant to use "invert binary tree" as a representative example of questions that typically asked.

[1] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

The key question imo is:

Was he still subjected to same interview process where he has to prove his coding skills inspite of being prominent open-source contributor?

As for L5 level based on anecdotal stories anything beyond L6 is hard in Google.

Search for "Crossing that barrier to L6 is getting more and more difficult with time" in [1]

[1] https://debarghyadas.com/writes/why-i-left-google/

The article is from 2019 and its not that old.

Actually there both cases happen:

1. Team matching before hiring commitee [1]

2. Hiring committee approved but rejected because no team matched [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/o6gs9m/g...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-failed-at-the-team-mat...

There are two modes of hiring:

1. General purpose: Typical FANG like where hire first and then do team matching later

2. Targeted hiring: Companies want specific people and they try to recruit them

A sizable number of top open-source contributors get recruited are in #2. Eg. 1) Top contributors in Rust lang hired by AWS. 2) FANG companies targeting top AI researchers from academia.

One's open-source presence needs to be really prolific and the project has to make an large impact to be in #2 category.

For #1 category folks, your public profile does not matter that much (atleast for FANG companies)

Other way to think is #1 are treated as cattle, #2 are treated as pets.

The famous incident where author of homebrew was rejected by a top company because he could not invert a binary tree got in the wrong channel (#1) to begin with where he was treated as a cattle.

Note: Recruiter from FANG calling you still goes in #1 category for most people

The rate of consumption is way greater than rate at which new/creative/interesting content can be created.

With improvement in tech (e.g internet speeds) and new accessibility nodes (like streaming services) the rate of consumption has increased even more.

After few years the same thing will happen to TV-series as well (e.g. [1])

[1] Game Of Thrones explored and doubled down on grey characters. Now, a lot of others will do it and it will become a trope.

I think the rate of change in tech & culture (and therefore the attitudes) in last 50-70 years is way more than our societies can cope-up with.

It almost feels like things are in so much great flux today in every aspect of our life than anytime in the past.

> That North Korea would be the prime suspect in a case of cyber-crime might to some be a surprise.

Really? This is actually well-known (atleast amongst security agencies) [1][2]

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/cbb28ab8-8ce9-11e9-a24d-b42f641ec...

[2] https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/cybe...

> Don’t start a company

Next tweet: "Today is the best time ever to start a company. You might fail, you might succeed, it’s a crazy ride either way, and you’ll learn and grow more than at any job."

I do not fully understand but my interpretation: Try it anyway even if you are not cut out for it.

Any other interpretations?

One thing which has helped me is to listen to a podcast or any audio of your favorite topic while lying down. Initially your mind will try to remain attentive but after 20 min or so it becomes harder. After a while you will feel so sleepy that you would want to stop the audio.

One factor I think is span of control. If the director you mentioned starts getting project statuses from 15+ teams then the director might not scale. The director will not be able to scale for things like appraisals, burning issues, hiring.

Anecdote (which serves as a reverse example i.e. senior asking a question):

We were having a regular status call and since the meeting finished early there was a general chit-chat happening.

That is when we started talking about "iphone" and our boss innocently asked "what is iphone" (it had been on the market for a year since its first launch)

We started looking at each other in disbelief. But we knew this about her. She used to openly ask in a meeting without shame on things she did not know. But once she understood something she use to process that info very well.

The team really adored her because she was so good in other managerial things (like defending team, good rapport with individuals, planning, etc).

Back story was that all her time was spent with her 2-3 kids leaving no time for other things.

> I don't feel like the guy who does a plan which must be blindly followed by others

When I became PE, my boss said that if you have to successful then you need to get teams listen to you by influencing instead of an authority.

At that moment, I had no idea how to go about this. But I realized one thing: "Knowledge is power". If you know the tech-stack, product & domain then you are well equipped for this role.

zstandard continues to amazes me. Compared to zlib (level=4 I think) it seems to have best of both worlds (good speed & comparable compression ratio).

BonziBuddy ... oh boy! you took me to early 2000s. I remember it installing out of a CD shipped with a IT magazine.

From an employee p.o.v it should not.

But the reality is that lot of companies open offices in certain countries because they can afford to pay less than US and while extracting the similar work. I am not talking about outsourcing companies and instead I am referring to product based companies opening their offices in Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, etc (or may be east European countries)

US (Nashville), Software Engineer III => $121,005

India (Bangalore), Software Engineer III => $121,005

Am I reading this right? Does cost of living in Bangalore same as Nashville?

(I am not aware of the formula here but I assumed cost of living must be a factor in it)

I think WFH choice is a spectrum. At one end its "I will work remote only" and the other end its "I want to be physically present in office". And then there are in between like 80% wfh but 20% for important meetups/discussions.

All this is fine but what happens when in a team of 5, 1 person prefers WFH all the time and 2 want in office and others in-between. Its really awkward to have meetings where majority team is in a room white-boarding and one guy/gal joining in remote. Also the person working from home will miss a lot of ad-hoc conversations/corridor talk.

Offcourse all of the above does not matter if one's nature of job is not dependent on others to large extent and then that person can definitely wfh much more effectively.

This reminds me of "How To Legally Own Another Person" [1] by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[1] https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person...

In last 50 years or so, the rate of change in tech > the rate the human civilization can cope. This is more pronounced after early 90s.

With the inventions like printing-press, electricity, electric motor, humans still had about more than a century to adapt around it and culminating into commoditized products like fridge, car, fans etc. This impacted how the average family stores food, transport, comfort. This in turn gave rise to processed foods which could be stored for a longer time. With transportation upgrades words like "commuting" to office became part of daily lives.

However, what the way things have changed (esp in last 10-15 years) has a much fundamental impact. Example, our law is not able to keep-up with the advancements and the complexities it brings.

Another example: remote work. Never in history, humans from all over the globe can collaborate at a scale. If sizable population shifts to this mode, it will have cascading effect on things like: the way cities are planned, transportation, physical entertainment (malls, disney-land, etc), labour laws, etc.

I am guessing you are a point D/D' in the diagram [1] Although the diagram is for the Rust overall, I think something similar is true for async Rust.

All I would say is hang in there. It gets better (from my experience).

Rust is not something you can code along as you think. There is a bit a of upfront thinking what the data-structures & data-flow look like.

At present, I can know in advance without writing code whether implementation I am thinking in Rust will work or not (work => satisfy Rust compiler)

[1] https://imgur.com/kNkV7jm

> Web development without garbage collector sounds like a bad idea.

Before rust, all the mainstream non-gc'ed languages (i.e C/C++) were not recommended mainly due to potential security issues.

The only options left were gc'ed languages (e.g Python, Java, Go).

Now Rust enters which addresses a lot C/C++ issues but the ergonomics, lack of tooling & learning curve is too much for lot of basic web services.

For large scale web services, investing in Rust makes sense to make it more performant & resource efficient, especially a lot of $$ is riding on it.

Agreed. This also demonstrates: Does one-thing and does it well.

But golang's CGO does not link with msvc compiler right?

Are they planning to change this?