> You know what I haven’t seen? not once in 15 years?
> A company going under.
What a wild assertion: The OP hasn’t personally seen a company fail, and therefore software quality doesn’t matter? Bugs and slow delivery are fine?
It’s trivially easy to find counterexamples of companies failing because their software products were inferior to newcomers who delivered good results, fast development, and more stable experience. Startups fail all the time because their software isn’t good enough or isn’t delivered before the runway expires. The author is deliberately choosing to ignore this hard reality.
I think the author may have been swept up in big, slow companies that have so much money that they can afford to have terrible software development practices and massive internal bloat. Stay in this environment long enough and even the worst software development practices start to feel “normal” because you look around and nothing bad has happened yet.
As a counterpoint, my YouTube feed is great these days. When I open it up, I get more of what I want to watch. The hardest part is choosing which video to watch in my limited time.
I think the key is that I subscribe to channels I want to watch and I use the like button on videos I want to see more of.
> I've noticed over the past few years though, that no matter how much I try to tweak the algorithm, I'm just getting mindless junk. And shorts are the worst of it! They're deliberately designed to hook you in, so they're very hard to ignore.
If you're actually clicking the shorts ("very hard to ignore") then you're going to get more of them, period. I get an occasional shorts line in my feed but I scroll right past it.
> I have never in my career had to do anything like designing a large scale system.
Giving large scale system design interview questions for a role where someone never has to work with large scale systems would be a weird cargo cult choice.
However, when a job involves working with large scale systems, it's important to understand the bigger picture even if you're never going to be the one designing the entire thing from scratch. Knowing why decisions were made and the context within which you're operating is important for being able to make good decisions.
> I've worked with the Linux kernel, I've written device drivers, I've programed in everything from Fortran to Go, and that's what I want to keep doing. Why put me through this?
If you were applying to a job for Linux kernel development, device driver development, and Fortran then I wouldn't expect your interviewers to ask about large scale distributed web development either. However, if you're applying to a job that involves doing large scale web development, then your experience writing Linux kernel code and device drivers obviously isn't a substitute for understanding these large scale system design questions.
8K is four times the pixels and therefore four times the bandwidth as a 4K monitor.
It took us a long time to go from 1080p to 4K. It has taken even longer for 4K at 120-144Hz to be practical.
It’s more likely that you’ll end up with intermediate steps to 5K, 6K, than getting 8K 120Hz.
The other limitation is lack of demand. You need a gigantic monitor for 8K to be worth it, and you need a powerful video card to drive it. The number of people who would buy such a monitor is very, very small.
> I do not know how many developers use VS code, but all of them are using electron and it seems to be fast enough for them.
At this point, I think the debate about slow apps is more ideological than reality.
I also think a lot of people are mistaking backend/network latency for front-end slowness. Slack isn’t going to load your scroll back history any faster if the backend is spending all of that time searching the database. People are too quick to blame the front end.
Either that, or some of these posters are running 10-year old hardware and wonder why it’s slow
> Of course this is just a toy example. But suppose you had a different task that is I/O bound, like processing terabytes of jsonlines files.
If this task was the bottleneck in a large scale system then it would definitely get hand optimized after a proper analysis.
But if this is an occasionally run task or something otherwise not business critical that doesn’t bottleneck anything, spending orders of magnitude more time hyper-optimizing it would be a waste of time and money.
Match the solution to the job. Optimizing everything is one of the age-old mistakes in computer science.
My best managers have been umbrellas, but with transparency. If something was happening in the company we would be informed, but could rest assured that our manager would do their best to work the issue for us while keeping us informed.
The worst managers I’ve had were umbrellas, but to such an extreme that they kept us in an isolated island separate from the rest of the company. We didn’t know what was going on in the company and had no chance to integrate that content into our work. It felt good at first, but over time I realized that the umbrella manager was trying to keep us in the dark so they could keep exclusive control over our work and neutralize any possibility of us competing with them among management. The last manager I had like this went so far they they would praise us for our work and give nothing but positive feedback, right up until he cut people for low performance. It felt like everything he did was for equal parts performance (looking like the ideal, happy, positive manager) and control (keeping us isolated from the rest of the company so he was always in full control).
Ironically, that manager now posts frequent leadership thoughts on LinkedIn and has a newsletter.
> I tripled my salary in two years by starting off woefully underpaid,
Unfortunately, this is how most "I tripled my salary in X years" stories look when you dig into the details.
I've spent a lot of time coaching people on interviewing and negotiating. With some people, half the battle is detaching them from their original compensation anchor point and re-centering on real market data.
On the other hand, I've also had to gently convince a lot of eager students that they can't expect $300K full-remote FAANG offers right out of college, despite whatever they heard on Reddit and Blind.
Because the value of accounts that browse extreme numbers of posts per day is near zero to advertisers.
Someone who has seen thousands of ads per day for years on end is basically immune to ads (or has blocked them, or is a bot)
One of the hard things to grok as an engineer or power user is that we are not the target audience for ad-supported services most of the time. How many people in this thread have aggressively blocked ads everywhere and are confused about why ad-supported services aren’t catering to people like themselves?
> Because legally, that's as meaningful as saying "they are quooquaquams".
I don’t see how this is at all equivalent, given that “psychedelics” is a well-known term that can be found throughout decades of literature and that gibberish word you just made up has no attached meaning.
If you’re equating random gibberish words to well-known words in literature then why does anything have any meaning? Why would a new word have meaning?
Regardless, the laws generally don’t refer to “psychedelics”, they refer to specific chemicals by their name. There are numerous compounds that would be considered psychedelics that are, nevertheless, not illegal because they’re not covered by any laws (including analog acts)
> But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water.
I’ve done a lot of mentoring, including through some formal programs.
One of my biggest challenges has been students/mentees who find a very convincing blog post or video from a confident, polished writer, then mistake that person’s confidence for absolute authority on a subject.
The worst example I can think of is the world of JavaScript training influencers. These people produce courses and training material for sale, then heavily use social media to promote their material as the canonical source of truth in the field.
These influencers can be very persuasive, confident, and relentless in their advertising. They have an incentive to present their material as flawlessly correct and exaggerate or invent problems with other ways of doing things.
The result is juniors who have taken some overpriced online JavaScript course who are utterly convinced their knowledge is superior to that of the 10-plus years of experience of people around them. They’re off on some tangent trying to rewrite part of the codebase in some new framework/tool/language that their influencers said was the “best”. They won’t accept that there are multiple ways to solve problems or that some times the correct engineering solution is to use a simpler framework even if it’s not trending on Twitter.
It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources and assume that what they read is superior to the real-world experience of the engineers they work with.
Rear view cameras are a safety feature. You’re not sticking it to anyone by refusing to look at it.
I understand that you’re upset about data collection, but refusing to use a basic safety feature is a pointless protest. The only people who might be harmed are those around you.
> AVX-512 is still not present in the chips with E-cores.
Why would they put a dig at Intel’s consumer chips in a slide deck for their server parts? The Intel Xeons don’t have E-cores. This doesn’t make any sense unless I’m missing something.
Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without AVX-512, right?
Tim Ferriss is very good at downplaying the effort and costs that go into businesses. Good for inspiring people to try, bad for actually being transparent.
In this example, the (claimed) $200 production cost and $2.10 DVD cost are probably nothing relative to this large marketing cost:
> piece through trade magazines
The marketing costs and effort are conveniently omitted.
Fitness influencers and podcasters took the Vitamin D story and ran with it to extremes. The number of people who think more is better with vitamin D or assume that their levels are severely low without checking is scary.
Taking a nominal amount of Vitamin D is probably a good idea for those of us who spend a lot of time indoors. Taking 10s of thousands of IUs every day for years is probably a bad idea for anyone who isn’t regularly checking their Vitamin D levels.
> A company going under.
What a wild assertion: The OP hasn’t personally seen a company fail, and therefore software quality doesn’t matter? Bugs and slow delivery are fine?
It’s trivially easy to find counterexamples of companies failing because their software products were inferior to newcomers who delivered good results, fast development, and more stable experience. Startups fail all the time because their software isn’t good enough or isn’t delivered before the runway expires. The author is deliberately choosing to ignore this hard reality.
I think the author may have been swept up in big, slow companies that have so much money that they can afford to have terrible software development practices and massive internal bloat. Stay in this environment long enough and even the worst software development practices start to feel “normal” because you look around and nothing bad has happened yet.