First of all, 30 is a very arbitrary deadline. I heard rumors that there is life even after age 30 :) ([cough]I am in my mid-40s[cough]).
Also, you are absolutely right; it's up to you to carve your own path. That being said, the path doesn't have to be glorious by somebody else's standard heck... it doesn't even have to be glorious by yours. However, as long as you are fine with it, who cares?
One thought, though. "I don't see any reason to take someone's best guess over mine.".
I think using black-and-white logic is detrimental. Even if people use "best guesses," the quality of these guesses (including yours) could be very different.
It's up to you to decide whether you want to climb the corporate ladder, build a business, or become a Tibetan monk. That being said, there are a lot of people who did it before you. Their advice will be imperfect, but the quality/probability of their advice will be better than that of a person who has never done it before.
Ugh... This touched a nerve. Surely, if you have a semi-unlimited amount of money (way-way more than will ever be asked from you), it's easy just to loan and forget.
I think it's a much harder game for the rest of us.
Also, it has a built-in assumption that people will self-limit what they are asking. I learned the unpleasant way that people don't. At some point in my life, I had a friend who was constantly asking for smallish amounts and conveniently forgetting to return them. Each ask for definitely in the category that I didn't care whether it was returned or not, but if you accumulate all of them, it was an amount big enough to care. After numerous unpleasant interactions with the money subject, I just decided to stop this practice.
That being said, I feel like it's critical to not become too thick-skinned. Sometimes people do need help and they are truly in a bad place and dismissing their ask just based on some other problematic person is not good.
Yeah certainly a lot of privileged/tone-deaf attitudes in here. I feel like I'm at a conference for Effective Altruism or something.
They're insecure about being successful when others are less fortunate. Rather than admit they got where they are due to a combination of skill _and_ luck, it's decided that it was all skill and that it is the duty of the skilled elites to take care of the rest of us.
Unfortunately, these days you don't even need skill, just a splash of narcissism and good self-marketing.
Our company (https://aembit.io/) solves auth problems (specifically identity and authentication between workloads).
I have been doing security and auth for the last 20 years in different shape and form. It's a minefield. Grabbing and using some SDK for auth is simple. Making sure that you account for the whole lifecycle (identity, authentication, authorization, secrets management, secrets rotation, addressing vulnerabilities as they pop up) is incredibly complex.
- As people pointed out, it's advanced FizzBuzz (really advanced)
- I can easily see a lot of people being unable to solve it, not because they can't do it, but because of a "performance anxiety". The bar here is quite high, and the result is binary (does it work or not).
- I like that it is quite close to real life (that people have to read code, figure it out, write code). On another hand, again, what is not real, that you are parachuted into a unknown (quite big) codebase and expect to add a small feature in 3 hours.
The result is not binary - you can have it fully working, or forget binary protocol, or syntax accepted but multiplication not happening; or correct code changes done, but code does not build...
That is one of advantages of longer questions (compared to 5 minute one): even if task is not fully done, there are plenty of other signals.
Given that they're specifically hiring for high-performance database work in C++, I think it's a appropriate to have a pretty dang high bar. For less-intense work, I would definitely want to formulate a less intense version of this style of problem.
I am torn. On one hand, this is great idea (exactly for such cases). I feel unbelievably bad for users.
On another hand. Lifetime support of technology (say 50 years) is damn expensive. Let say you need a dozen of engineers (hardware + software) + doctors to keep it going. It's 12 people * 200k salary (if you don't like this number, pick your own) * 50 years = $120M.
I think you can potentially argue that you don't need a dozen people to support this. However, I think it's a fair number to support aging hardware + software.
Unfortunately, such things work only with a scale. You need 10 people to support 100 customers, 20 people to support 1000 customers and 40 people to support 10000.
If they got to 10000 customers, I could see them getting enough money to fund such trust. Having just 300 customers won't be enough.
Perhaps this could be accomplished by making them front or insure the cost of the expected liability — being at least the cost of removing unsupported devices.
On one hand, yeah, may be nuanced message doesn't work at scale. However, when saying literally two things (vs one) became nuanced. I wound understand if it was a speech talking about a dozen of different things and their interplay... These were literally two things - create a solid product and let's move forward fast. That's it.
Also, why the hell whole hierarchy of middle management exist in such case? The only reason for it to exist is exactly ability to execute at scale (when things which are coming from the top are propagated properly).
But if those two things (velocity and reliability) are at opposing ends of an engineering spectrum, then different teams will make different decisions about how best to trade one off for the other, and then the org as a whole is unfocused.
The problem is the thinking that there is some fixed bucket of speed and a fixed bucket of robustness ingredients and a fixed bucket of product output. That the only way to get any reliability is to displace some speed, or that if you want to move ahead at all you have to throw reliability out entirely.
When in fact these things, and 100 other goals and considerations like being green or hiring fairly or paying interns better etc... merely influence each other a little and don't preclude each other except at absurd hyperbolic extremes.
The different goals DO influence each other. But the output product can in fact have a whole bunch of both speed and reliability, probably at the expense of yet another dimension like cost, but actually the same applies there too, you can possibly have all 3, at least to some degree, if the leadership is insightful enough to figure out a way like employing underutilized people or geography, or gamification or crowdsourcing or alternative incentives, whatever.
Pay more or sacrifice in one dimension to get more in another is merely the obvious and easy way, not the only way dictated by some zero sum law of conservation.
I switched about half a year ago from a MacBook Pro with an Intel processor to MacBook Pro with an M1 processor. My overall impression was "when the hell will it run out of power"? I spent the whole working day (without a charger) and it was still at 60%, while I was constantly stressed before when I had to do something without a charger for more than 3-4 hours.
I don't care what any test, but tripling battery life with no visible performance degradation is a huge win in my book.
It ran circles around the old machine despite being the lowest spec. Battery is light years ahead. And it doesn’t even have a fan. So it’s dead silent. Never gets hot unlike the old Intel. There isn’t any mechanical component to fail except the hinge and the keyboard.
I was worried I might regret not waiting for the higher spec M1s. Now that just seems totally unnecessary for me.
PS: Work later gave me a high spec 2019 Intel MBP. It’s slower, louder, and much hotter than my Air. And at least 2.5x the price. Amazing.
I had a 2019 Intel MBP. I hated that machine with a vengeance. It was always hot, and because of that always throttled. I live in a hot place (Israel) and during the summer of 2021 the heat caused a massive expansion of the battery which destroyed the laptop.
I went for an M1 in late 2021 after using a Windows machine for a few months and hating every moment of it.
The M1 is simply incomparable. Fast. Silent. It feels futuristic.
Part of it might be new battery effect too. I just popped a new battery in my 2012 and just doing light dev work I could stretch it to 8 hours or so. This thing was doing like 3 hours on a good day before.
Certainly that plays a part. But my M1 Air is now over a year old and I can still easily edit 4K video in iMovie for a few hours and see the battery only drop from 100% to 70%.
Pretty huge! Don't expect miracles long term though. Batteries are still batteries M1 or not and if you do 4k video editing every day, you will notice wear over time. What sucks about the new macs is you need to take it in to replace a battery, where as you used to be able to do it yourself in like 2 mins or less.
Yeah, both Chrome and Firefox will easily reduce the battery life of my M1 Pro mac by ~30% compared to Safari. I've "solved" this by sticking to Safari when battery life matters (ex, when I'm not at home) and using FF when I'm docked or close enough to one. With Safari, even my 14" gets ridiculous battery life: I spent almost two continuous days with ~6-8h of SoT each day without charging it once throughout.
I got an 8GB Mac mini. I was broke at the time but needed a replacement in a hurry, and even though my two previous machines had 16GB, 8GB should be fine for web dev work, right?
Yeah, I regret it. I like to have YouTube videos on in the background, and usually it's fine, but for some reason live streams in particular just gobble up RAM until there's sometimes skipping audio and noticeable waits when switching apps.
Interestingly hiding the chat seems to help; I wonder if the YouTube "app" isn't flushing those DOM nodes corresponding to chat messages off the page after a certain amount of time or something. When worse comes to worse, Streamlink comes to the rescue: https://streamlink.github.io
Oh well. Making do for now. And as others have said, the performance (when not RAM-constrained) and noise (or lack thereof) have been blissful.
I don't have a MacBook (but have been considering getting one), but I can't imagine that you need more that 16 GB of RAM to run a browser, no matter how memory-hungry Chrome might be.
Is this really an issue? Maybe you're trolling?
I don't understand how adding more memory is going to fix your performance. It's not like you're spinning up a HDD to swap.
The system really starts to bog down with 15 ~ 20 tabs open for things like jira, roam, email, etc. CPU usage will be very low but when swapping is in effect system slowdown is really noticeable. I don't see the same issue with Safari but of course Safari does not have the extensions I rely on.
I love the Air but excited for my 64gb macbook pro arriving in a month.
On my macbook M1 Pro I was able to work for ~11 hours without charging and on Thinkpad P14S GEN 2 AMD (5850U CPU) with a 4K display I can work for ~ 7 hours. So the difference is not that big TBH.
If we are talking about AI singularity then to achieve a superintelligence, it should at first achieve human-level intelligence (and just to be very specific, it should achieve human-level intelligence for a wide variety of unstructured situations).
I think two tell-tale things will be:
- AI passing Turing test
- AI started to improve itself (after passing Turing test)
- I really didn't like that seniority equates to creating value in this article. I knew junior engineers who could have code circles around way more senior.
- Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Bootcamp is usually much shorter and very narrow. CS is longer and much broader. Software engineering became complicated enough to require some breadth (even junior engineers need to have some understand of SDLC, source control, language, main framework and couple of other things).
- On another hand, I agree, everybody wants senior people, because senior (+good) engineers create way more value than junior (and unproven).
- I think for junior engineers who don't come from the top schools it would be hard to get into a pipeline of hotshot companies. However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity? The first company where I worked had 5 people and a dog and a tiny salary. It didn't stop me from finding the next company and gradually getting to a decent place.
- If I was in junior engineer shoes, I would try to find absolutely non-glamour company (big old consulting company, something small and local, government, etc, and apply there). Get a couple of years of experience and after, expand the search to include better companies.
Also, I would challenge the core premise of this article, looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900.
> I knew junior engineers who could have code circles around way more senior
That's a good point, there's a lot of nuance to that, but when I hire junior devs I still think of them as an investment, where for the first X months I'll spend more time training them than I would spend doing all tasks that they take
> However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity?
I don't think I made this article FAANG-specific, in fact I've spent majority of my career in small companies and I always tell entry-level candidates to reach out directly to small companies because they might be open to hiring even if they don't advertise it
> looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900
Yeah, I tried a few searches like that too, and I was wondering why people find it so hard to land interviews if there's so many junior positions. So I started looking into that, I checked the first 100 or so results and a lot of them required 1-2y of professional experience, meaning the number of entry-level roles is smaller.
> Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Yeah, that's a generalization on my side, of course CS grads will have much easier time finding their first job, but unless they come from a top school they still might have problems getting interviews these days. And with the higher demand for developers in general, I would imagine that the number of entry-level opportunities should be much higher, and it should be easy for both CS-grads and other people to land interviews, but it's not happening.
Also, you are absolutely right; it's up to you to carve your own path. That being said, the path doesn't have to be glorious by somebody else's standard heck... it doesn't even have to be glorious by yours. However, as long as you are fine with it, who cares?
One thought, though. "I don't see any reason to take someone's best guess over mine.".
I think using black-and-white logic is detrimental. Even if people use "best guesses," the quality of these guesses (including yours) could be very different.
It's up to you to decide whether you want to climb the corporate ladder, build a business, or become a Tibetan monk. That being said, there are a lot of people who did it before you. Their advice will be imperfect, but the quality/probability of their advice will be better than that of a person who has never done it before.