I imagine most groups compete on exactly what they can get away with. The more money you can build for clients the more you can earn. If your competitor is getting away with more illegal shit than you then your clients will go to them.

In the HFT space you save some wire space if you can commit to a consistent exponent for some {slice} up front (think instrument/tick-size/asset-class/exchange/feed/server/whatever/...) such that you only need to send the mantissa and your clients can have a hard coded exponent. However, in similar spaces it's often worth the extra uint32 to send a on-the-wire exponent such that things _can_ change and you aren't hamstrung later by earlier "we only need cents now!" design choices when, e.g., you suddenly need to support bitcoin/... prices to full precision. (your users will thank you when they don't have to coordinate a breaking change when you want to adjust your fixed exponent)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48686155

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Any recommendations on how to comparison shop recruiters w/o a rec/referral from a trusted peer?

An example (I have intimate experience with) is the finance/hft space in NYC -- if you're employed at a competitive player in this space in trading/quant/engineering you will almost certainly be given a phone interview w/o question at every other competitor when you reach out.

If you don't trust the 'contact us' forms on their website it's dead simple to search e.g. LinkedIn to find their own in-house recruiters and reach out directly.

Again, if you're a new grad? Definitely higher chance of your contact going right into the trash. But the target hires are still getting called back within a day.

Same reason these same head hunters will usually strip any direct-contact details out of your resume before sending on to companies -- they don't want those companies running around them and contacting the candidate directly.

IMO, these people are all grifters and uses-car-salesman. Their goal is to get as many people as possible to use them to change jobs so they get bonuses. They provide little-to-no value add in the actual process and will actively try to shovel you toward shitty companies and dead-end roles, despite how well they dress them up.

You are ~20-50%~ cheaper (typical is 30% IIRC) in the first year of your employment if you are a direct hire instead of going through a recruiter, from a hiring manager's perspective. If you switch jobs often this compounds to make your offer chances lower as well if you're going through a head hunter (I've been part of these discussions from hiring side).

Sure, if your team is extremely lopsided or unfocused, and e.x. has one person from every discipline, you don't want to cross train everyone into everything else. This is a sign to reorg. Youre not asking your department heads to cross-train to other departments, your PMs/devs to cross train/...

But when you have a 1-to-2-pizza engineering team of e.g. C++ engineers and a tech lead, the lead should absolutely be encouraging this "everyone is a leader" mentality. Anything else means that your tech lead is irreplaceable and if they e.g. get hit by a bus or resign tomorrow you are SCREWED. You essentially are promoting learned helplessness as soon as the subject matter leaves your narrow areas of expertise and the "leaders" are not available to offload decisions to. The best thing a tech lead can do is encourage his workers to make him redundant -- no regular process/decision/... should ideally be blocked by their absence.

As an IC, your manager dreams of you approaching him not like "I have a problem, solve it for me", but instead "I have a problem, here is my recommended fix, how does that sound?". This would be AMAZING. You can then sync on goals/reasoning/approach/... and catch out fundamental misunderstandings on both ends. If one truly is at a fork and someone NEEDS to make a decision (really only if there is conflict as to the preferred approach) then the buck stops at the designated leader. However in most situations your engineers should be empowered to make decisions when they are confident, with review/reflection helping improve/align these decision making skills with their leads/peers over time.

Defaulting to "youre the lead, I cannot-or-willnot walk down the path unless you proceed me" is shit. Sure, when starting off it's great to have an example to follow, but eventually you gotta learn to walk the path yourself (or get off my team).

I want to be promoted one day, and the only way that's going to happen is if I can ensure I have a team of reports who prove they can survive without me (and one of whom hopefully is able to step up and fill the hole).