I was working there that fall as one of my co-op work terms!
I recall the onboarding tour around the testing rooms which were essentially giant Faraday cages. There was a print-out on the door exhorting employees to CLOSE THE DOOR! when you come or go. Apparently it was a semi-monthly occurrence where someone would accidentally leave the door propped open and the nightly tests on upcoming devices would make real 911 calls to the local dispatchers as the E2E tests on physical hardware were running.
I'm guessing that using some clip-on aero bars would make a big difference. Then you're not using your hands to support any weight so the typing would be a little easier.
And if you're doing hours of Z2 training, you likely want to be getting more time in a position closer to what you'd be doing in the drops.
I used to work at a company in the chip-design software space that built Linux-only software for $100k/user/year, so there's definitely money to be made for Linux (even if it happens to be niche software).
I had a professor in college who was building self-driving tractors and would come in every other week complaining about John Deere this, or Case that, trying to steal his business with more expensive solutions. It turns out you can use GPS for a rough location and a fancy $200 gyroscope for millimeter precision. Then just plant the seeds on an exact grid and you know that anything not on the grid is a weed.
And actually, his suggestion was to use high-pressure water jets to cut the weeds instead of lasers. It would/could be less energy-intensive.
This was the key line that stood out to me as well. I've seen both situations where individuals are jealous of successful people in resource-limited environments and where employees appreciate working with and helping high performers when resources are plentiful for everyone.
It would be great if this list would include Buck or Bazel and their associated HTTP caches. For us we lowered our clean CI build times from 22 minutes to 4.5 minutes (1 million lines of Swift)
I went to school at the University of Regina, and did an engineering co-op 5 years ago. It was amazing to see how gradual it makes moving out from home if you go to school in the same city where you grew up.
My work terms were Regina (home) -> Saskatoon (3 hrs away) -> Waterloo (28 hrs away) -> India (really far) and definitely was able to grow in experience each time.
I'd say it was invaluable for learning what was important and what wasn't with respect to the class materials.
Now I'm at Twitter and often look back to the wide experience I gained at companies where I could leave after 4 months and have no negative repercussions.
However, saying "bullshit" with his disclaimer at the bottom, I'm also the original author of "High Performance MySQL" published by O'Reilly Media certainly lends more credibility to his statements than many other people (Bob Warfield for example).
I recall the onboarding tour around the testing rooms which were essentially giant Faraday cages. There was a print-out on the door exhorting employees to CLOSE THE DOOR! when you come or go. Apparently it was a semi-monthly occurrence where someone would accidentally leave the door propped open and the nightly tests on upcoming devices would make real 911 calls to the local dispatchers as the E2E tests on physical hardware were running.