It used to be the case that the only way for engineers to advance their career. But we've long moved since and now you can have a long career and get very high in a company without management responsibilities. The examples given in the blog post are exactly what I would expect ICs to do, not managers.

Do you want advice to get promoted? if your company has a formal career ladder, look into the process and optimize for it. Despite people grievances, this is still the fastest and easiest method to get a promotion (shocker!).

https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

When I moved to the US I could have dropped one or hyphenate them. I decided to keep it as-is, and use "Garcia Garcia" as my last name (space and all).

Besides confusing amongs americans and people always confusing one Garcia for middle name and one for last name, I had almost no problems. One time an airline messed up my plane ticket (again by dropping one of the Garcias) but that's it.

I appreciate other people have different experiences, I definitely met folks who have changed their names to conform to american customs and make things easier.

Since 4-5 years ago I started to notice these betting houses cropping up where my family and friends live. They are impossible to miss, with big pictures of different sports and no windows.

The most important thing to notice is where these place are and are not. They proliferate in working class and less well off neighborhoods, while they tend to be absent from more affluent ones.

These places get a lot of foot traffic, all the locals barely making ends meet, blowing a few tens of euros here and there, with the eventual payoff. It's not difficult to hear stories of people getting into the deep end and developing a real addiction with devastating consequences.

And it's not only the business itself, but what they attract. All sort of sketchy characters frequent these places, and tend to attract drugs, violence...

Legal or not these places make the communities they inhabit worse, not better. I personally would be very happy if family didn't have to live exposed to them.

This is a first-degree smart argument. It presents a seemingly non-obvious idea that makes sense in retrospect.

However I happen to work at the experimentation team of a hyperscaler so I have a different perspective.

First, we aren't always saturating all of the potential experiments we could be running. The reasons are different, but essentially it takes time and effort to build those experimental features. If that cost trended to 0, we could make sure to have a queue of experiments deep enough.

Also in our side we need to do development work to support new features and products. We have a backlog long enough to keep us perpetually busy. If dev cost trended to 0, we could always be ready to provide our customers what they need.

Speaking of new products, each one our company comes up with comes with extra effort to support in our side, and yet more effort to produce dozens of AB test to validate new functionality.

This is not talking about ongoing maintenance effort. Bugfixes, upgrades etc. take a non-trivial amount of effort to keep up.

And this is only inside our little experimentation team. What about security, reliability, scalability, efficiency... it makes me wonder if OP has experience running products at scale.

Instead I'd like to think that dropping the cost of development by orders of magnitude changes the equation of how we create products.

Definitely a very minor inconvenience. And, compared with frequent trips to the gas station vs charging at home overnight, a total net positive in time saved (if you want to measure it that way).

One thing to consider is how easy is to make minor mistakes that technically count as an infraction. When acting in good faith, the administration can acknowledge this and promptly fix it, as it happened to me during my immigration process.

Then there are random mistakes out of your control. For example, when I first moved to the US and tried to get insurance for my car, I received extremely high quotes from the insurer. When I inquired why, they replied that my file showed several traffic infractions years ago in a different state. Simply clarifying that they'd mistaken me for another person was enough to fix it. Imagine if instead they deported me to a prison in El Salvador without a chance to defend myself.

And this is not talking shadier practices, such as changing the rules so that certain things suddenly become offenses, or simply fabricating evidence against someone.

My experience is that our needs and wants change over time, and they are shaped by our actions. Overcommiting to a future that we think we want can end up quite badly in my experience.

Browsing Airbnb the cheapest options available in my area are tents and RVs for 200-300 USD a night, and prices go up for there. Think about that for a moment, spending 250 USD a night to rent a tent, probably in someone's backyard.

Beyond ridiculous prices, Airbnbs have just become a pain. They often come with long lists of rules. Here are some of the most ridiculous that I've seen: clean everything before you go (what is my cleaning fee for?), put on the laundry (very common lately), or bag up the trash and take it out to the nearest t

Cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there. I fail to see how that's hype.

One of my first moves was to ask the developers to write tests for their code. I got terrible pushback, specifically from one of them that said the dreaded "we don't have time to write tests".

This went back and forth a few times until it got escalated to the lead of the whole project, who sided with the developer: writing tests takes too much time and we don't have enough.

Two days. It took me two days of my own time to go through a completely unfamiliar codebase and get a reasonable code coverage with unit tests.

The benefits were immense and immediate. For starters, we caught a bunch of regressions before a new release that might have taken days of manual testing by QA. We were also able to ship faster and with more confidence.

As OP say, if you don't have time to test, you certainly don't have time not to test.

All advice is circumstantial, and this one seems particularly painted by OP circumstances.

When I got my first job, I was living paycheck to paycheck and partially supporting my family. I can't imagine how could I possibly quit my job to pursue side projects. A few years later I did work in a side project that went nowhere for 2-3 years in a manner similar to how OP describes.

Sometimes dedicating yourself 100% to your own venture is the right call, but this piece seems to assume this is a choice everyone can make easily.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

I used to struggled with weight most of my young years. No matter what I did I achieved incremental advances at best. At some point I decided to start "counting calories", something that I used to frown upon.

To my shock some foods that I ate that I considered "healthy" weren't so much so. This isn't even counting the fact that most experts can't even agree what is healthy or not, and opinions change over time.

Just like with coding, there are some black/white examples where the average person could make an easy distinction, but then there is a wide range of greys in the middle where people might not really know what's "good/bad".

Once we use tools to easily iterate on code (e.g. generate, compile, test, use outcome to refine prompt) we will turbocharge LLMs coding abilities.

Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told.

Once you open the lid of this new codebase you discover that this new product is a half baked spaghetti ball of mud that barely works as the demo that it was intended. With no documentation or tests, it takes you a while to even understand what's going on. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. It took Pete a mere 2 weeks to write this system, why it is taking you so long to add new features?

You try to explain to management the pickle you find yourself in, but to no avail. They fucking love Pete, and won't have anyone criticizing him. He has saved their asses in numerous occasions, and why is it always that others are the ones who can't keep up with him?

So you chug along, paying the price of the mess that Pete made while he keeps moving to even larger initiatives under leadership adoration. He also seems to have a knack to leave ship before his acts catch up with him, and when he decided to leave the job for a promotion and significant raise, management will miss him.

I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too specific to not be intentional. Let me know if you ever met someone like Pete and how you call such people.

At the end of the day work won't love you back. Managers will come and go. Projects will start and end. Colleagues will join and leave.

For most of us work is an important part of our lives, after all we spend a big chunk of our life there. But try to find meaning outside work.

But that's not how the market works.