Hacker News: throwinga10101

New comment by throwinga10101 in "Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?"

throwinga10101 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 04:36:37 +0000

It's like I can't win. If I behave too feminine as a man people give weird looks to me and mockingly refer to me as a woman. A significant portion of the society still does not think men should be very effeminate.

So I am like ok, sure, I don't care much about this gender ideology, but if society does not think I am a man, then I am a woman!

Then people are not happy again. They call me a man who just wants to become a woman.

New comment by throwinga10101 in "Ask HN: What does engineering leadership typically do wrong?"

throwinga10101 — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 20:23:47 +0000

Not enough experience to say "typically", but things of my top of head:

1. Credentialism or "too narrow thinking" in hiring: we use AWS so your GCP experience does not count. That candidate is from Columbia so we should give this candidate a chance while the person from Rutgers gets passed on.

2. Not recognizing the importance of holistic system design. In backend or distributed systems you often need good design. It can often be good to stop the world for a week to fix the design.

3. Lacking a general sense of humility or having too much ego. Most people are not Alan Kay, nor are most leaders. As a leader, embrace some fallibility and limitations of being human.

New comment by throwinga10101 in "How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system"

throwinga10101 — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 16:40:43 +0000

The infra part particularly resonated with me. Leadership caring about high level metrics deprioritize "in-the-weeds" dev experience. At , I was working on data infra, but pressure from above made it impossible to have time to focus and instead focused on short-term deliverables. It was hard to convince others to adjust their priorities for "the greater good".

The only way to make things better (in my mind) was to use my own time to improve the infra, and because the metrics don't track these infra improvements I don't get rewarded so I just became burned out.

Part of me think this is the reason why you want bloat in orgs, so that motivated people with enough redundancy will actually feel comfortable chasing longer term incentives.