I'm curious about this. How many years ago was this, and would you be willing to divulge the general vicinity of the neighbourhood you rented or lived in?
MkI was the absolute best tool to do that one thing. Respectfully, MkII compromises on manual control to an unacceptable degree for my usage and an investment in education for beginners along with dumbing down the UI with explicit text labels (the font is indeed nice, but why do things with clean and clear iconography need these additional labels?) is not what I'd consider part of "that one thing". Of course, these issues could be fixed in the future, at which point I'd gladly eat my words.
"Full manual control" is somewhat crippled in Mk II (it switches back to Auto every time I switch back cameras) as well as removing the ability to pin ISO down when making use of tap autoexposure (there is no option but to have both exposure length and ISO adjusted now). Manually adjusting exposure length also sometimes leads to it getting "stuck" on long values like 1/2 or 1/1 far longer than Mk I ever did. I get that they think their new Auto mode is better, but in general this was a bug-infested and unwelcome surprise update for my usage of the app (getting maximum quality raw images out of my phone mounted to a small tripod.) None of this would be an issue if I had any way of opting out of this generous "upgrade" I couldn't refuse. UI fit and finish has also degraded significantly from my subjective POV and the large potential scope of future feature updates make me pessimistically assume that the app will continue to fail to be particularly well tested. If the devs are still listening I'd gladly pay (again) just to have the MkI app back, if money is what they want.
Yes, but if this engineer's achievements are well known, competition between companies is what drives crazy comp because they are seen more like a strategic asset rather than another engineer. They wouldn't quite be a low-level employee, these unicorn ICs often report directly to middle management or above. I'm surprised how little industry experience some of these commenters seem to have given that it's HN.
Competitors are also multi-billion corporations. I do work for one of those big multi-billion corporations, it's my second, and I've also worked for others not so big. Only newbie engineers fresh out of college believe the myth of the genius engineer who gets grossly overcompensated because they're so smart. You can find 10s of thousands of brilliant engineers in any of these companies, that's the bottom line. Not a single one of them is, on their own, irreplaceable. Specially valuable individuals get awarded distinctions like "fellow" or "distinguished". They're valuable, more than anything else, because of their contacts and rapport within the industry. It's never technical competency; not that they're technically incompetent, but most of their underlings will likely be more technically competent than them (if they're smart, after all, they will do the technical work). If you haven't figure this out yet, don't worry, you'll get there.
You clearly don't work for one of the ones that grant 7 figure salaries. I'm not saying they're common or that any engineer can aspire to achieve one, I'm saying they exist, I've seen it first hand, and I don't understand why it's so hard for you to accept they exist. Nothing in your comment constitutes novel insight to me, and neither of us have a good measure as to which of us have more credibility than the other, but I suspect you're just judging based on your own narrow experience.
Edit, just for more context I'm speaking of FAANG level companies here and very rare individual unicorn engineers who have been specifically hired into these kinds of positions for past achievements that have impact across the whole industry. I would agree with your general skepticism in any other context.
As I said, I'm on my second FAANG. The "very rare individuals" you mention are hired L9 or above. That is, distinguished engineers+. You don't get to L9 with "a valuable technical contribution", you get there because people know who you are, you have strong network of connections within the industry, and you are in a position to make strategic decisions. It's very much not a technical position, it's borderline executive. Let's put it this way, the people with that kind of compensation, you know who they are. It's never an anonymous whizz kid who's very good at solving technical problems, it's the guy who hired them and/or knows how to direct their work.
As you said, you don't know me and I don't know you, so I don't have a reason to doubt your word. If you say you've met engineers who get that kind of compensation, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Everyone I've met or I've known to be in that level of compensation were the people I already knew were making that kind of money.
People who see it happen don't even have enough hard details to confirm it to themselves aside from the fact that they're witnessing it firsthand. The best I can do, for example, is to say that at FB I worked with someone who was very well known as a very highly ranked IC, and that the comp in the band he was known to be in is astronomical (1m+ annually). Another factor is that we don't want to dox ourselves by giving out biographical details that would otherwise have built a case. This particular engineer had built foundations of particular unprecedented things within industry with enormous current relevance, even to laymen, before acquiring their current rank. I can't get more specific than that, but $1m is absolute peanuts compared to the size of the market sectors these engineers have a hand in shaping.
For me it involves scrounging around for anything related as a jumping off point, and sniffing for important keywords and concepts to look up and branch out into learning. Usually it takes me a few days of exploration before I stumble upon a really good or authoritative resource of some sort, and I end up mapping out the internet locations of related communities and resources in the process.
Of course, it's much faster when having experienced friends or acquaintances to help you navigate.
I remember at some point on HN those sorts of comments were reasonably well-voted, and now they litter the bottom of any thread they appear in. I wonder when that changed.
Pardon the snark, but: it's no longer 2010. Javascript isn't an option anymore.
I don't like this either, and I personally run a javascript blocker (which makes the internet much more enjoyable, imho), but I absolutely recognize that this is not the optimal way to view the internet. I also use react on all of my frontends.
> A reader emailed to complain about how this and other HN discussions often become derailed by off-topic carping about blog design. I agree completely. Could there be a more classic form of bikeshedding? It would seem parodic if it weren't sadly real. This has become more of a thing on HN lately. It needs to become less of a thing.
> I don't mean to pick on you personally, or just on this one comment. (Your second sentence alone, by the way, would have been a helpful contribution.) The problem is the tedious stampedes such comments spawn.
Yet another example of the mods contributing to the downfall of HN. I strenuously disagree with dang here (as a cursory look at my own comment history will indicate).
The ongoing destruction of the Web is something which all of us, particularly the start-up community, should fight.
Application of calculus to the real world, in its most basic form, is basic physics. The whole point of people who aren't planning on building on calculus with further mathematics taking calculus is to better understand the world and how it works, not to be able to derive stuff, I think.
