Sustainable growth is far better than boom and bust cycles. I guess if you're shutting down entire product verticals you can reduce the blast radius. Doing partial cuts across the board can cause top talent to look elsewhere.

Mismanaged startups can have a lot of technical debt as a result of pivots, shifting priorities, weak engineering and an emphasis on being feature factories. As a result you can get to a point where even a relatively simple feature takes months because of massive technical debt.

Shipping early and often while giving engineers the space to tackle debt is important. Good hiring pipeline for competent product focused engineers can help mitigate building castles in the sky. That and/or having a good CTO.

Anecdotally my experience with nix community has been unpleasant. They're very resistant to suggestions and offer little in terms of guidance or documentation.

People can commend it as much as they want, but the steep learning curve is largely self inflicted because of their resistance to writing clean, comprehensive, up to date docs

It has also led to the community being filled with a lot of arrogance and pretentiousness

I wouldn't run nix in production because of the lack of accessibility and toxic community. There are other ways to get reproducibility, etc without using an arcane and poorly documented toolkit

Giving a candidate a problem they haven't seen before and observing their problem solving skills and mentality doesn't sound so bad on paper. However the process has been gamified and as a result the expectations for what a candidate should know and accomplish have increased. This ends up favoring younger candidates and/or fresh grads, since on average they can expend greater time and energy into studying for these types of interviews and their algorithms & data structure courses are still fresh in their minds. A more senior candidate or a person with more responsibilities outside of work (taking care of children, parents, etc) won't be able to invest as much time into studying these types of problems. The original purpose of the interview is also obfuscated - did the candidate genuinely show good problem solving skills or did they see the question before and merely memorized the solution? As a hiring manager I've seen multiple instances of the latter.

I think the utility of spending time on these problems varies from person to person. I personally find it more useful to delve into distributed systems, cryptopgraphy, networking, or operating systems. These topics have made me a much better engineer and improved my problem solving skills, more so than programming riddles which gave me diminishing returns over time.

And are there any ways to mitigate the amount of data they obtain when using Edge (e.g. Ublock)?

This level of insidious marketing is a pain, but more than that I'm struggling to understand why Microsoft wants me to use their browser so badly.

What's the motivation?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24384673

Points: 4

# Comments: 12

I have upcoming interviews with companies I'm interested in that largely use Java. I feel very conflicted about this because when I first interviewed for companies and tried whiteboarding in Java, I failed miserably because I was so slow and the syntax was so verbose. I later switched to Python but I'm still worried about the day-to-day life as a Java programmer. Though Java has a vast ecosystem, I don't particularly enjoy working with that language. I feel like Java inhibited my ability to think holistically in terms of software architecture and design, and I'm worried my design and architecture skills may suffer if I use Java regularly for work.

In addition, I have strong interests in contributing to open source software in my spare time, and many of the projects I'm interested in are written in Go, C++, or Python. I'm worried about the cognitive effort it would take to balance this work when my day job is in a completely different language.

Looking for advice on how to deal with applying/working for a company that has great benefits but unappealing programming language that conflicts with personal projects and dealing with fear of skills worsening

tl;dr

- Learned Java in college, used Ruby and Go for work

- Dislike Java because of verbosity, syntax, overuse of OOP, and perception that it obfuscates and complicates software architecture & design

- Have a strong interest in contributing to open source projects written in Go, C++, and Python. Worried that Java day job will make this balancing act of programming languages much more difficult

- Conflicted on following through with companies that use Java given language, personal interests, and fear of skills declining

Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897242

Points: 2

# Comments: 5

In the end I landed on OneNote, but I find it to be slow for larger notebooks, and it doesn't have an intuititive method of linking different notes from different sections for easy reference. However I like the handwriting recognition far better than Apple variants, and I felt like with apps like Notion I spent more time customizing and grokking the app than actually taking notes.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. We didn't ask the problem with the expectation of a perfect solution, it was more to gauge his problem solving skills. However as we were running out of time we asked him to implement a naive solution, which was met with a very negative response. Maybe I'm not explaining it properly but it gave the impression of a serious ego problem. Actually part of the criteria for our interview is to see how well a candidate can take feedback and make changes accordingly. They did poorly on that front.

Agree that architecture leadership is critical, especially when dealing with business teams that acquiesce to every single client demand with impunity.

Working on anything related to design and architecture with them was a disaster. They preferred waterfall over agile, didn't take feedback very well, was obsequious towards leadership but toxic towards the team they led, and would terminate collaboration with someone if there was disagreement.

The soft skills for an architect are essential, and I think that includes excellent communication skills, documentation, and ability to take feedback and constructive criticism. Needless to say, the coworker I describe fit none of those criteria. It's been pure bliss not having to work with someone like that, and helped me better understand what to avoid in the path to becoming a legitimate software architect.

For someone who espouses an expertise in mathematics his perspective on religion is quite reductive if not completely wrong in some cases. I guess in addition to math the author is fond of strawman arguments.

I deleted (not deactivated) a Facebook account that I had from high school to sophomore year of college.

A year or two later I made a new one and didn't fill out anything except my name and didn't add any friends (yet). Almost immediately facebook started suggesting friends, groups, etc that existed on my deleted account.

tl;dr nothing is every really "deleted," just hidden