Not usually one to complain about AI, but I felt that there was some superfluous content here - maybe the use of AI has made it longer but not stronger.
In a distributed system it may not be appropriate to rely on a timestamp like this without accounting for the possibility of clock skew (unless the system provides a guarantee that timestamps are monotonically increasing.)
SQL databases have had auto increment columns for ages, and they can be used to help with this problem.
For a “guide” I wish it would discuss some of the pitfalls of the presented approach along with alternatives.
A recent HN submission [1] highlighted that a surprising amount of detailed employment history is shared by employers with third parties.
When I pulled mine it said “SW Dev Eng 4”, curious to see if that’ll change to “Associate” after I quit… or if third parties track the entire title history, like they do track salary history.
The average California tech worker maybe not, but plenty of them are sitting on $500k+ in cash with yearly incomes in that same range. At that point what does $100k mean? $100k makes no difference in the person’s day to day life. If you like the house and you end up in a bidding war, the $100k is more than worth it.
> According to prosecutors, he used that information to seek unjust enrichment through a series of beneficial stock trades that generated $227,000 in profits and avoided $377,000 in potential losses.
This seems like a trivial amount of money for someone that high up to jeopardize their career or spend years of their life in prison for. I would maybe even understand the risk/reward if it was in the tens of millions but this sounds nowhere close.
I am genuinely curious to know if this happens regularly - what is the real motivation for committing a crime that barely pays relative to the penalties?
We can’t be afraid to change code. If your code change caused a production issue, what’s stopping someone else from causing a similar issue even if they aren’t refactoring?
I have worked on teams where people don’t know what the code does and the test coverage is spotty. It’s a minefield and only a matter of time before something breaks. It sounds like your refactoring work was a much needed step in the right direction.
There needs to be sufficient testing and monitoring in place to catch problems earlier than production, so that people are not afraid to change code.
Would you be willing to share more details about the specific problem you ran into?
> The obsession with status and notoriety and money to the complete exclusion of intellectual curiosity.
To me this resonates with the idea that FAANGs swallow up promising engineers and have them work on mundane problems to help generate revenue.
Certainly there are novel or interesting problems to be solved even in these mundane areas, but I wonder what we may be leaving on the table as a species - if many of these brilliant people were to focus their energies on other problems or research, what could we achieve?
Tangentially, are there positive (but not necessarily profitable) uses for the pile of cash that big tech is just sitting on?
The remote areas you refer to are a small fraction of the population compared to the GTA (greater Toronto area.) Should a highly visible revenue-oriented corporation really aim to improve connectivity out in the boonies?
You have clearly elucidated the major factors in your decision:
1. Career / salary
2. Moral hazards
Taking into account what other comments have touched on, I’d say that you should be sure to weigh your own personal interests. Honestly I find it hard to believe that every engineer at FB believes that every decision FB takes is right. As others suggest - being part of the machine, you will have a voice and you will be able to have some impact on the world, and at the same time you might be able to advance your career and income.
You haven’t discussed the alternative options - what else are you considering?
Disclosure: I have had a FB offer but decided not to take it.