Hacker News: AmericanBlarney

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Apple turns monitor height adjustment into a $400 upsell"

AmericanBlarney — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 18:07:47 +0000

The chairs are probably more like $1000 after bulk discount for buying hundreds of them,and they'll last 20 years. Having worked in many corporate environments, including FAANGs that seemingly spare no expense, none of them have used these monitors. It's always a $300ish monitor for developers and I've seen some senior executives with $1000 wide screen curved monitors. Maybe a few designers somewhere get a fancy Apple one (although I've never seen it), but these are not intended for the masses.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "How to get the most out of your 1:1s"

AmericanBlarney — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 13:17:52 +0000

The fact that the 1:1s are monthly makes me question how much the author really knows about managing people.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Why not hire part-time developers?"

AmericanBlarney — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 00:50:26 +0000

The bigger issue I've seen is that there's a relatively fixed amount of time required for overhead activities (e.g. compliance training) and context sharing (meetings). Purely hypothetically, if those sorts of activities eat up 10 hours a week, then a full time developer gets 30 productive hours, whereas a half time developer only gets 10. You might think there's room to cut down on overhead, and you might be right, but when the majority of employees are full-time, it may not be the most pressing issue to change.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Chernobyl power plant captured by Russian forces"

AmericanBlarney — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 18:57:12 +0000

I don't think the second is realistic, as that might be considered an attack on NATO countries, which is likely not a scale of war Russia is looking for.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "“The president of MIT told me that tenure was not about research or merit.”"

AmericanBlarney — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 14:00:15 +0000

While I don't dispute the accuracy of your description, there are some conclusions that I wish we as a society would revisit. By your logic that the researchers only work for the university in a very technical sense (and often retain the commercial rights to their work), I honestly don't see how they're underpaid. If anything I question what value they bring to universities at all, and question how much of the inflation of college tuition is driven by this operating model (I know administration is a large part of the increase, but many administrative jobs are tied to the procurement and management of grants).

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers"

AmericanBlarney — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 03:49:37 +0000

I generally like to base my interview questions on the candidate's resume, asking questions of various levels of difficulty about the areas they claim to be skilled. I find it gives a better sense of their abilities than strictly asking about the tools/languages/algorithms being used on the hiring project. As such, each interview was already unique to an extent - and I might have noticed something like a person whiffing the easy questions but then getting an advanced one that didn't add up.

Also, the "architect" I inherited on the team seemed totally incompetent in a variety of ways, and insisted on using a fixed set of questions without deviation. To He kept flagging people through who seemed totally inept when I'd dive into their background, so they was also probably a tip off that they figured him out.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?"

AmericanBlarney — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:54:08 +0000

Friend of mine was an apprentice plumber - was working in a tight space, bumped something and dropped his torch. I'd rather not deal with third degree burns.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers"

AmericanBlarney — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 18:46:10 +0000

When I was interviewing developers from a very large offshoring firm, they covertly had an account manager listening in to take down the questions for future candidates. Each interview, I'd ask a slightly different variation and it became obvious what was going on when a candidate gave a textbook answer to the question I'd asked the previous candidate, including references to tables I hadn't mentioned and that had no purpose in the problem I presented them.

Also had an incident where I interviewed one person but am pretty sure someone different showed up and was completely clueless about the most basic tasks. Within a week I think they figured out that I was onto them and made some excuse to quit about taking a contract closer to home.

Honestly, at this point many American companies have an office of their own offshore, and it's generally considered more prestigious and better condensated to work for those companies directly, so I assume there's close to zero talent left in the large outsourcers.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?"

AmericanBlarney — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 21:46:56 +0000

Because we've been at or near full employment most of the time.

Also, the exact definition of full employment is fuzzy, whereas grocery bills rising is quite tangible.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Computer scientists prove why bigger neural networks do better"

AmericanBlarney — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 18:40:02 +0000

This conclusion feels like saying more CPU and memory are better. Seems obvious that more moves allows matching to have more nuance, but I guess cool that someone proved it.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Jeremy Grantham: The U.S. Market Is in a Super Bubble – Morningstar Podcast"

AmericanBlarney — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 01:20:26 +0000

You were so close to getting there - he is a rationalist and, purely my personal opinion, the markets have been behaving irrationally for several years (I would say even the Trump years of fiscal manipulation to pump the markets).

Where I think you're off base is that, while markets can stay irrational for extended periods of years (and have before), eventually people realize the emperor has no clothes and there's always a reckoning at some point.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Poll: Is the leetcode grind necessary to land a high paying remote job?"

AmericanBlarney — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 19:29:14 +0000

Irrelevant - a CIO's job isn't to be a hands-on coder, it's to set a strategy and manage an organization. Companies do a good but if due diligence on that, which is why it's really hard to break into the executive ranks - you have to find an opportunity that can grow into leading a large team because no one will hire you to do so if you haven't before.

Purely by chance, the last place I worked that had a CIO title, my LOB CIO probably would have had a good chance at passing a Leetcode interview, despite managing 10,000+ people.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Poll: Is the leetcode grind necessary to land a high paying remote job?"

AmericanBlarney — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 14:17:32 +0000

SWE manager here, at multiple well known companies, and this isn't how it's worked at any of them. Some of them I've had to do leetcode interviews while at others, it was important to know aubergine who could vouch for your work. Could just be me but I've never experienced the "I just have a good feeling about this guy" supply t if interview.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "CQL – A database query language using category theory"

AmericanBlarney — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 19:37:18 +0000

Unfortunately, the name is already taken - by Cassandra, which is widely used enough that it's probably worth avoiding a naming clash.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Ask HN: Besides a job or freelancing, how would you make money with coding?"

AmericanBlarney — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 13:27:41 +0000

As soon as you mentioned being ok with building bots, all desire to help you vanished.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "FedEx: equip aircraft with countermeasure against heat-seeking missiles [pdf]"

AmericanBlarney — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 20:18:45 +0000

You know the wings double as fuel tanks, right?

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt"

AmericanBlarney — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 17:48:01 +0000

This might take the cake for the dumbest comment I've ever read on HN. With absolutely zero data/evidence, you're trying to categorize the views of millions of people, along with their professional qualifications. This is probably why the mainstream denigrates your views.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022"

AmericanBlarney — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 13:50:40 +0000

Or what's legally allowed by the ToS...

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?"

AmericanBlarney — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 21:26:57 +0000

Author is looking for the wrong correlation - the price is only indirectly linked to the amount of silicon being diverted to crypto. Should be correlating to hash capacity.

New comment by AmericanBlarney in "How to Set Low Expectations at Your Two Remote Jobs"

AmericanBlarney — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 23:43:32 +0000

Incorrect on background checks - there are employment verification services that get quite a lot of data (many companies opt in to sending them payroll data).