Have sex, get an emotional attachment, fall in love. Obviously there are risks associated with all this.

I was insanely career obsessed. Found someone I adore. Helped me recalibrate my brain. They didn’t love me back the same, so I had other problems. But I grew a lot as a person.

Or there are other software secrets that we wouldn’t want state adversaries to see, like things that block your access under export control laws?

It’s not exactly the question you’re asking, but what I’m trying to say is, this is the natural outcome of our economic system. Tech organizations involvement in politics is a side effect.

Drink plenty of water.

Walk. You don’t have to do cardio exercise but try to walk every single day. At least 20-30 minutes. If you take a bus, get off earlier or later so you can walk.

Floss your teeth. If you get gum disease it’s permanent. It’s not that hard to get. Once your gums are diseased, they will recede slowly (or fast), and it will be painful to eat certain foods.

Seriously, please take care of your physical/fitness health and dental health.

No matter how much you love your work, the more you put in, the more others will take advantage of you if it suits them. Draw healthy boundaries. Don’t work every night or weekend. Use that time to read, go into nature, learn about the world, travel, and so on. Anyone who tells you money isn’t everything or “we don’t want people just in it for money” can fuck off. They’re there for MONEY. You don’t need to obsess with money, but your career is a means to financial freedom. Don’t kill yourself especially if your hard work is getting others promotions and making them rich while you merely just stay employed or get meager raises.

Also prioritize family and having a kid earlier than later. You won’t understand until you have a kid, but your children are your most valuable treasure. Once you have child, you’ll do anything for him or her. Bring that joy sooner than later.

hiring bar was dropped. expecting a mid level engineer to work with a byte buffer is considered “too complex” and non differentiated work.

the literal goal is to pump out features written up by mba/product team. none of these mbas use the product mind you. theyre chasing stupid features they think vice presidents want, because the thinking is it will drive promotions.

this is a cynical post and i will stop here. my org has problem of incentives. nothing else. you incentivize wrong things then this happens

It’s actually quite awful. It’s obvious the text is LLM generated because of the verbose, generic writing style. It communicates clearly but without substance. Not gonna lie, I secretly judge these people.

If I really want to focus and stay organized, nothing beats pen and paper. I’ve tried out note taking apps, writing on my iPad, using my husband’s remarkable tablet, and Obsidian. It’s fun and interesting at first but doesn’t scale. I will however type some notes up, when needed, in Obsidian just for the search functionality. I’m still pen and paper first.

Amazons core model is to try a million different things and see what sticks. That’s why they’re horrible at some things, and “ok” at others. They never really double down and deliver a truly amazing experience. The UI is so so. There are ads everywhere. Their electronic devices are pretty third rate toys to give to your 8 year old instead of a more expensive iPad. Even Prime Video mostly looks like shit compared to Netflix, though they do end up copying their interface.

I hope I am wrong, but the establishment politicians see this danger. Tik Tok is a clear example - the anti Israel narrative, which was never tolerated in the mainstream press, is gaining more and more momentum. Congressional leaders, their financial backers, and Presidential candidates are all advocating some kind of ban or suppression of Tik Tok. And this is merely one example among so many divisive politics in the US.

I don’t think the younger generations will just roll over if you offer them cheap TVs, iPhones, or cheaper Big Macs. Something drastic has to happen.

When I think of holding in memory state, to me it’s less about class or OOP vs something else and more about race conditions, thread safety, possibly idempotency, and proper abstraction design.

Abstraction design meaning, I’m not exposing the keys to the castle or leaking internal details where it might allow another good intentioned programmer to do bad things or introduce some subtle, difficult to reproduce bug.

  > Has anyone ever been promoted to an engineering manager and decided it wasn't for them?

So much personal stress and in some cases negative team or business impact could be prevented if we stop thinking of management as a promotion and more as a career shift.

If you’re unhappy, think about root causing what specifically it is you’re unhappy about. If you DO want to be a manager but not for this team, that’s a different challenge than if you do not want to manage people at all.

If it’s something you don’t want to do, have a heart to heart with your direct manager and tell him or her how you feel. This is less about quitting - if your manager is worth working for, they’ll give you the right encouragement to stay in the role and help remove obstacles and unnecessary challenges off your plate. Or they should help you transition and return to an IC role.

Supporting Palestinians is like drinking Tide pod? WOW, what an incredibly inhumane and racist take.

American politicians, deliberately or out of incompetence, use the crisis of the moment and conveniently forego this topic.

I’m convinced the next US administration HAS to do something about this. I don’t see a way that doesn’t involve both spending cuts and raising taxes.

I don’t like discussing politics on HN, but I think this should be deeply concerning for anyone interested in start ups, technology, or innovation. All of our innovation is enabled by having a somewhat functioning democracy, courts, cops, civic culture, where people have the opportunity to critically think about hard problems and innovate, because they’re not worried so much about near term survival.

In fact, we had military and private contractors commit war crimes, and even the ethical folks did things that contributed to millions getting displaced.

We redefined how we classify male civilians. If you’re a male and end up being in the wrong place, you’re just another casualty and classified as a militant.

Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush clan did some truly horrific things. Kidnapping people with any kind of trial. Dropping bombs in Western Pakistan on weddings because there’s some suspected leader of an organization we don’t like, even if they simply aren’t terrorists but don’t want America in the region.

Saying it “doesn’t work” is a stretch, no?

The large tech companies all give similar technical interviews for software engineers. Today, most people hired through this process are probably “good enough”.

And by what metric do I mean good enough? These companies are mostly demonstrating some acceptable level of growth. At the end of the day, that’s all their shareholders care about.

We won’t have meaningful change unless there’s an incentive. You think something is broken, but the key decision makers don’t agree.

Source: 10+ years in big tech

For what it’s worth, I learned to code in grade school.

I wasn’t terrible at my job, and left in that principal role.

Not sure how conclusive my anecdote is, but I 100% do not believe there’s a strong relationship with starting to code earlier in life and being a better coder, engineer, or general employee than someone who started in college or even much later in life.

I think it’s even simpler than this white/black belt metaphor.

Driving your career forward requires delegation, scaling yourself through others. Doing this effectively requires having strong opinions. The author is referring to these opinions as elitism, which is jarring to me. It could be elitism or simple pragmatism.

Quite a few posts here are referring to code quality. People often forget that programmers aren’t paid to write the prettiest code or have the most beautiful abstractions. VALUE is what we want to produce.

I once found myself insulting a monolithic code base only to later realize that mess of a code base has shipped in over 10 million devices and a product rated over 4.5 stars on Bestbuy, Amazon, and many more retailers. It’s entire ecosystem had directly and indirectly generated billions of dollars in sales.

Meanwhile, my own teams’ clean code with well thought abstractions hadn’t generated any revenue at all. In fact, this other “piece of shit” that came before paid for all our compensation.

Everything was directly meaningful to me, insofar as it provided someone value, gave me money for sustenance, and/or was something I was personally extremely interested in.

Meaningful is a relative concept, and I sincerely hope people in this thread don’t fall in a trap of comparing what they’re doing so what others are or are not doing.

American politicians will drag their heels at times to address issues impacting Americans, but criticizing Israel shows them immediately speak up.

I think that’s dangerous, and we have to overturn that. And the idea of any particular race being “Gods chosen people” is unacceptably racist. An Israeli person is no better than a person of any other nationality. They are not above criticism. And if your religion says it is, we need to work to completely remove any influence your religion has on our government. Racism is racism, period.

You didn’t answer the question. Was there a time you could develop and distribute on iOS without paying the license fee?

> If you are fine with a corporate abusing their control over their platform to exploit money from you, both as a developer and a consumer, then we don't really have anything else to discuss because of our differing economic / political belief on this subject.

This is a logical fallacy — begging the question — when you state a position as an absolute truth.

No one is “fine” with a corporation “abusing their control”. But your argument is based on the premise that charging for an SDK or charging a license fee to build and distribute on iOS or Mac is itself an abusive practice.

The counter argument is that it isn’t. Because anyone could develop and distribute software for Windows or Unix doesn’t mean that that is the only model and anything else is abuse, which you’re claiming as an absolute truth.