This is so sad, loss of a good pilot. I only saw Dick fly once, a group of us had flown our LongEz’s and VariEz’s down to Mojave for his brother, Burt Rutan’s birthday.
Dick took out his LongEz, and I realized he had more piloting skills in his little finger than I’d ever have. That plane did things at 100 feet that I wouldn’t be comfortable doing at 5000 feet.
People know him as 1 of the two who flew voyager, and the article on touches on a tiny fraction of the adventures he had in his life. Seemed like a life well lived.
For some reason I have initial charge set to 40%, but even then there’s several chargers in range. At recharges are quick going to 60% which means if consumption is higher you could charge for a free more minutes and easily get to 80%.
It's not immediately clear to me from the article, but this is the city of New Brunswick, NJ, USA, domain makes more sense now. It's not New Brunswick a Canadian province which I first thought of.
Kyle was a fine CTO, and these are the qualities you listed.
CEO is a different role, and without any checks in pace he’s pushed the organization so hard it is where it is today. Even the incident aside, just look at the handling and drip drip of news since going from bad to worse.
> Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State
Which mashed a lot more sense since Waymo, Cruise and Zoox all have L4 autonomous cars on the road today in California operating with no human inside at all.
Left my job in March, after a series of terrible managers I was waking at night dreading coming back from vacation. Being FANG adjacent, it paid well and I have no rush to find new work and I'm half looking and half taking a sabbatical.
I also changed jobs during the .com crash, and this feels by far better. Recruiters are still reaching out and returning messages, companies are interviewing. There's a ton of laughably low ball spam. During .com is was pure crickets. That said, I'm also 20 years on in my career and have skills/experience that are in demand.
Taking a break has been the best thing ever. I get to spend time with my son, I'm learning rust and doing Advent of Code, and took a 1day/week contract with a former employer. They want me to review and better document systems I built for them years ago. This gives me the opportunity to see how they've aged, what we did well and what we should have done better, and I'm being paid to learn this. :)
Then: up at 3am worried about work
Now: sleeping well again
Thoughts on the industry: why does tech have terrible founder worship and terrible sr+ managers. Do we really need a director to be able to code, or should they be focused on the 150+ people?
Nah, this role has been open to long, survived recruiting cuts, and it appears even layoffs. I wonder if FB will get so desperate they even stop trying to downlevel.
Meta recruiter just reached out to me this week, so even parts of Facebook are hiring, and my relevant skill set. Of course I don’t care about VR goggles, but you just had large layoffs, why would I work for you? (Plus ok Zuck is ruining your core business, but that aside)
I’d have to guess, but fake internet points? The ability to say “I’m ranked 5th at blah blah chess website”. Maybe it’s not even to others but just to themselves.
I think there might be an alternate to leet code studying. I did Advent of Code (AoC) in 2019 to learn a new language. I then did some interviewing, and remember a few things on leet code problems "oh, this just like this AoC problem" and applying the same skill set.
So maybe doing AoC and solving funny Elf and Sleigh problems could be more fun? Maybe not as efficient though. ;)
Plus I suspect the conversation rate of being raised catholic is much much higher than later in life without a religious background. Or in other words making new little catholic children is good for the church.
What does Jr mean? :) For example it's expected that our L2s (new grad) won't stay L2s for long. It's meant to be a very quick set of promotions up to L3 then L4 (Sr I) where things get real. Why would I care? Because along with a promo come promo raises and movement to new salary bands. At the higher levels the salary bands expand a lot and then your manager has wiggle room to work on your total comp.
So the first question I'd ask is, how am I meeting the requirements for my level, and how do I get to the next level? Ask to see what a promo package looks like. Making sure you check all the requirements for your level, and are performing on some at the next level if your fastest way to get a real salary bump at my company. This can happen every 6 months.
Now, this is what's true at my company and how it works here. How does your company work? What knobs does your manage have that he can turn? If you want to stay there a few years, have this conversation with your manager and understand how the system work, what's possible and does this fit with your goals.
> The best and most effective way to negotiate a salary or promotion is to have a competing offer.
Yikes, who's got this much time? Sure when applying for a new roles, having a counter offer is great, but imagine applying for a series of job, doing a TPS, then 6 hour onsite or two to get 1 offer to take a salary review. All of this over a couple of months?
Leaving isn't always winning. Good jobs and tenure at them can be really good. If you're learning, growing, working with good engineers can be amazing. Just because somewhere else is willing to pay and extra few dollars doesn't always make it worth it.
You will get through this. I'm sorry you're not getting the support you need, this can create a lot of stress.
You're making a lot of assumptions about your performance, since your manager is out who's filling in for them? Express your concerns to them and get a frank evaluation on your performance from their point of view. Don't spring this on them, but tell them what you wrote here and ask for feedback.
A couple of thoughts:
1. Nothing you've said sounds PIPable. Everyone makes mistakes, as roles grow the effect of those mistakes grows. Accidentally pushing to prod....really should have safe guards...I flipped a switch a few weeks ago, on a Friday, before leaving the office, and well now we lot of lessons learned. We all make mistakes.
2. Once you leave school you will get involved in projects/work that no one has done before. These take longer, and probably need more support. I think it's hard for those who have been working for a long time to remember what it was like to be a new grad.
3. New grads aren't hired for your ability to produce vast quantities of code/fix problems. Those are L5s....three levels above a new grad, and probably 10+ years later.
Yes, was Lan Media times. :) I probably have more Ron stories since we worked in the office together every day.
Ron and I kept in touch. (since he replied to emails) I lived overseas for a while, and when I was in the bay area we'd meet up, I remember visits with him to get breakfast at Black Bear Dinner, or touring the computer history museum together, a talk at parc. I so loved his excitement, he was so excited to meet up with me...made me feel special. I loved how he'd just chat/teach and that curiosity and patience.
Ok a story. So on this SDSL project we need to simulate 10,000 feet of cable, so Dave and I got some big boxes of cable and put them under our desk. But as the project progressed we need fancier setups. Again Ron pitched in, shook his head at out huge spool of cable and disappeared into the lab. About 30 minutes later he came back with this little mass of resistors, caps all soldered together in a ball and said something like "here, this is a good enough model of 10kfeet of cable with a 1k foot tap..." I just remember this little ball of parts...and having no clue how he just came up with it out of thin air. I think he explained it, but woosh. Analog, complicated, not 1s and 0s.
Or when I left....I gave notice and Ron was really nice. But he kept suggesting I should give 3 weeks notice. Just stay on for another week, etc. I was young, and I never listened well anyways so was firm with my date. Too bad...if I'd listened stayed 2 more days I would have collected my rather sizable retention bonus....ah well.
David and Ron Crane hired me for my first job in California right around 2000. I had no clue who they both were we just met at a trade show and I said I was looking for a job, we had this crazy interview where we just talked about anything and everything, and voila I was working in silicon valley. I think we spent about 2 hours talking about how we could float a balloon beside an AM radio station and how light up a light bulb...
Anyways, who fresh out of school doesn't work for the inventor of ethernet/fast ethernet/a core founder of 3com, etc? I only spent 2 years working with them, and I've always been looking to work with similar talent/kindness/etc. How they put up with a fresh grad I will never know.
I remember David and I working on an SDSL project, and we were just having the worst time ever. We couldn't get it train and finish setting up the link, it did almost everything but then just failed at the end. It was meant to be easy....but we just couldn't figure it out. We spent a crazy amount of time on it, maybe a month. Finally Ron got fed up, and asked "have you tried reversing the pairs?" and it worked! Turns out we had plugged the cable in backwards, and trying to streamline/debug the code had removed the final bits of cleanup code that checked if the pair was reversed. Ah well.
They were amazing mentors and friends. David invited me over to his home for wine tastings, to meet his cats (Palo and Alto), etc. I unfortunately lost touch with him over the years as I moved, he moved, etc.
Thank you David, you welcomed me to California and you'll be missed.
I moved out to a farm in 2003, before YouTube, and grew about 90% of what we ate. We had goats for milk, rabbits, ducks, turkeys for meat, sheep for wool, etc.
We'd still go to the grocery store 1/mo to get toilet paper, etc. We still had commercial power, cars, full time tech jobs, a mortgate, some form of internet....not sure it qualifies as homesteading, but it was my time on a farm.
Yes it's a lot of work, I'd get up at 5:30 to milk the goats, and again at 6pm I'd have to be home to milk. Barns are constant work in the quiet time, and the "garden" uses up all other time in spring through fall. We didn't take a vacation for ~4 years, and then found someone who would help care for the farm and finally got a break.
All the while we worked tech job, me at a 6 person company. The experience was pretty amazing....so I don't regret that. The pay was horrible, even by standards back then. And my opportunities even worse, I was hours from Chicago so could not commute. And there was nothing else nearby, so I was hand cuffed to that job. When 2009 came by and the job ended as the economy tanked we sold the farm and moved to somewhere with a choice of jobs.
Why did we go to the farm? In our 20s we saw it was a chance to buy a house, land, and see how feed really grows. In this case we succeeded.
But the opportunity cost was huge, we could have taken jobs at the to-be FANGs back in the bay area we left. We could have paid that outrageous some of 500k or 600k for a house in Sunnyvale. We could have spent 6 years in our late 20s or 30s earning 3-4x the salary and having it grow, etc.
But hindsight is 20/20. Who would have expected the FANGs to be so successful after the .com bubble burst? Houses in the South Bay to appreciate so much? Well a lot of people by not me. ;)
Sure…it’s fun. But also feels disingenuous in a way. People are rocking the machines in an attempt to get a free soda are killed. This is compared against unprovoked shark attacks. Probably a fairer comparison if you only count unprovoked vending machine deaths too then.
Dick took out his LongEz, and I realized he had more piloting skills in his little finger than I’d ever have. That plane did things at 100 feet that I wouldn’t be comfortable doing at 5000 feet.
People know him as 1 of the two who flew voyager, and the article on touches on a tiny fraction of the adventures he had in his life. Seemed like a life well lived.