I used to love getting to know the interviewer and doing things like that but IMO the market has shifted fundamentally on both ends for this to be effective anymore for most SaaS roles. This is anecdotal for US/Canada tech market over the past 10 years so YMMV.
Developers Side:
Since developers don't have job security anymore (at least for those who work on common languages like Go, Python, Java and Typescript) they are better off learning and keeping in touch with leetcode and system design questions, looking for new opportunities and interviewing in "batch mode" when looking for a job. The idea is to clear as many interviews as possible using the same concepts, get in and make money asap before you get laid off. No incentive for collaboration or for fulfilling but esoteric stuff like Haskell and Scala. Career security > Job security.
Companies Side:
On the other end software companies have less trust in developers staying long term so they want to make the interview process as quick and risk free as possible. In essence they are betting that by perusing 100s of resumes and hiring someone who seemingly knows CS concepts they can get some value out of them before they leave. Standardized tests/vetting > team fit.
TLDR; The art is gone from this job, its become akin to management consulting or investment banking. Quality and UX seems to be regressing across the board as a result.
I meant the “grind”, short term profit mentality of SWE market has become similar to professionals in those fields, not that any of these fields are similar.
All the while there are numerous issues with Firefox on M1. They simply ignore or close them as “works for me” [1] while I personally have encountered at least half of these issues as of last month.
IMO they should first focus on being a good cross platform browser that works well on desktop arm before doing anything else.
Thanks for this link. Firefox has been getting worse for me stability-wise on my Mac M1, even with tab discarding it consumes huge amounts of power, and at least two or three times a day it will just stop loading webpages and show errors in the network tab and need to be restarted. I spend a couple of hours every few weeks trying to track down the issues and Firefox and even in the bug tracker can't find answers.
I also have a bizarre problem where any Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Brave, Edge) are extremely slow to load any page since upgrading to Sonoma, where Firefox or Safari are near-instant - like taking 60 seconds to even start DNS lookup. After a couple of minutes it will eventually fully load a page. I've seen other people mention the same issue online, but no fixes. I have spent hours trying to debug and track down problems for that too.
It's discouraging how much it feels like every software tool I use on every device has gone to shit, especially things as fundamental as a web browser.
IMO for many people a laptop means highly portable, wire free 'desktop' computing experience that you can't get on a tablet. Therefore the comparison for mobility is with a tablet and not a powerful Windows laptop.
Plus many people working in tech have specific systems for specific tasks; I use a spec'ed up Windows laptop for heavy lifting and games, and an M1 Air as my main computer.
But at the same time, many people also asks for performance improvements, and sometimes extra few USB A ports too. Plenty people makes hyperbolic claims such as which Apple Mx CPUs has x times more computation than which NVIDIA GPUs, superficially focusing on raw CPU performances.
I know deep down that thinnest laptops with brightest displays sells the most in reality, marketing wise, but it just sounds a bit hypocritical to me.
For ultraportables I think people just want performance to be “good enough” while also not getting hot or spinning up a fan. The M1 Air struck this balance very well – it was no speed demon but wasn’t pokey either, and battery life didn’t suffer for it.
This was in stark contrast to contemporaries where any semblance of decent battery life required low power mode, which made them dog slow. Even today this is something that x86 laptops with current chips struggle with… there are a handful of x86 ultraportables that can get M1 MBA like battery life, but they have larger batteries than the MBA had and still need low power mode to pull it off reliably.
That’s where a lot of the hype around “M-series SoC is capable of X performance” is rooted. It’s not the performance in and of itself, but the perf per watt, which allows that performance without also turning the laptop into a furnace/jet or destroying battery life.
Thanks for highlighting that! I think in the new economic cycle we should judge companies in a holistic manner, including the CEO’s personality and character because such things often affect how they provide value or screw over customers.
I don’t see the advent of generative art any different than when we moved from paper to photoshop.
For those unaware the vast majority of graphic artists start their projects with assets and base images that they themselves don’t create. With generative ai you’re simply going one step further and have another new tool create a more polished version that you can edit to remove extra fingers, etc. It’s simply moving the baseline from 20% done to 60% done, which will result in artists producing even higher fidelity and more detailed art.
For example an artist could generate a bunch of scenes using Sora and create a collage of them for a larger piece of art, something that is prohibitively time consuming right now.
I went over the list and IMO the omission of any verification center at the airport creates a huge friction in your app's adoption.
Just looking at the locations, it's a 2-3hr cab ride in Mumbai/Kolkata between the airports and the transcorp centers during rush hours, and 1-2hr trip in Delhi. Also credit cards are widely accepted at most places except roadside stalls, etc.
This service would be beneficial to visitors and NRIs (like me) if cross-sold with SIM cards or in currency exchanges at airports, otherwise I fail to see a valid use case due to the sheer inconvenience of having to take such a long cab ride in traffic. Also a lot of international flights land at night so visitors would have to dedicate at least half of next day to go verify their identity.
I 100% agree with you and the ability to scale workforce up and down is a key factor in market competitiveness. But offer rescinding is equivalent of a first responder taking off your tourniquet and simply refusing to put another on, leaving you to bleed out. If you can't afford another tourniquet maybe don't take off the one that's holding things together.
IMO hiring be done with a more medium term (6-12 months) mentality based on available runway, and sending out an offer and then rescinding on it usually is a symptom of bad organization where department heads are hiring without CFO buy-in. Maybe just freeze hiring and do layoffs when runway goes below certain level?
This seems like short term reactive thinking but I'm sure every programmer worth their salt will research "<company x> layoffs/rescind/return to office" before accepting an offer. I recently went through the interview gauntlet and past layoffs and policy changes were a key deciding factor for me.
I could imagine that in a bull market candidates would ask for offer acceptance bonuses before quitting their current jobs as a form of assurance. And this issue is even more severe in countries where 2-3 month notice is the norm.
This is a general issue across all fields - blindly following other companies or people is never a good idea because you don't know all the internal and external variables that the person/organization was working with. In fact in business schools they often teach you to scrutinize established patterns and norms and apply various frameworks in conjunction with statistical analysis to draw conclusions.
What your employees and customers observe and perceive is the reality, not what Google, Martin Fowler or Bill Gates prescribe.
Having worked at smaller companies (~ 500 people) in different stages (series-A, unicorn and post IPO) I very much like the idea of a lean platform team that defines the interfaces that are used to control interaction between different modules, and with external services.
Yes it creates friction and reduces velocity at ticket level but it prevents misalignment errors in UAT and production. This can be solved somewhat by having dedicated product owners in each module but it's often not feasible for smaller companies and brings in too much non-technical chatter.
For example, if your product acts as a metadata repository as well as a task execution engine it is important that the execution engine modules access the metadata only using streamlined (and maintained) internal APIs and not hit the database or maintain duplicate metadata for different engines. This way you actually improve velocity at milestone/release level because you're free to make changes to the metadata codebase without breaking features in various downstream execution engines.
In my experience, with a well-scoped platform team, the integration phase of a release gets significantly smoother with fewer defects. YMMV based on product type and company size.
Developers Side: Since developers don't have job security anymore (at least for those who work on common languages like Go, Python, Java and Typescript) they are better off learning and keeping in touch with leetcode and system design questions, looking for new opportunities and interviewing in "batch mode" when looking for a job. The idea is to clear as many interviews as possible using the same concepts, get in and make money asap before you get laid off. No incentive for collaboration or for fulfilling but esoteric stuff like Haskell and Scala. Career security > Job security.
Companies Side: On the other end software companies have less trust in developers staying long term so they want to make the interview process as quick and risk free as possible. In essence they are betting that by perusing 100s of resumes and hiring someone who seemingly knows CS concepts they can get some value out of them before they leave. Standardized tests/vetting > team fit.
TLDR; The art is gone from this job, its become akin to management consulting or investment banking. Quality and UX seems to be regressing across the board as a result.
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