Viewing profile — Magmalgebra

The title only so matters to the extent the company is a known entity. The "staff engineer" at some random series B startup 4 years into their career nearly always gets hired in at…

> get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. But this isn't their job. Their job is to hire someone who passes the hiring bar. If they can do…

I think the press release is actually clear that they felt this was necessary to retain talent: > Engineers in particular have expressed their desire to focus their time on enginee…

By "dishonest" I'm saying they become measurements of time, which is what we were trying to avoid. Stepping back - my experience is that points are solving a problem good organizat…

> The process is quite easy to implement Having implemented it myself, I agree it is easy to implement. My argument is that it is overly difficult to maintain . My experience is th…

> is in points not days I hear this often, but I've never met someone for whom points didn't eventually turn into a measurement of time - even using the exact process you're descri…

> But in my experience, your manager is expecting you to do all of your assigned role (e.g. write code), but then also do a bunch of stuff on top -- e.g. leading and taking ownersh…

> that got along well with leadership in a fast growing company I may be reading too much into your post but I'll say that this sentiment is a common pattern I see in many competen…

> This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. It's a good deal if you deserve the promo . Giving someone the opportunity to take on projects at the …

> You run into other tools you have to cobble together as part of actual work, but you never have to memorize those particular tools The statement I like to use as an analogy to th…

> I hate leetcode and that keeps me away from most of the job opportunities Odds are that until you can get past this mindset, you will hit a similar wall in every career, it will …

Yeah. For all the excesses of the current AI craze there's a lot of real meat to it that will obviously survive the hype cycle. User education, for example, can be done in ways tha…

Standards come from a mixture of culture and attention. The reason SF pizza is so much worse than NY pizza is that SF does not have culture of high quality pizza (I say this as an …

Depends on what you're measuring. Quite a few of AWS's more mature customers (including my company) were aware within 15 minutes of the incident that Dynamo was failing and hypothe…

Most of your complaints are about things that are not React. Those are optional. I can still standup a vanilla React stack in an afternoon just as easily as I did 5 years ago and i…

While I get what you're saying I don't think this is what most people think of as "solved". The brass tacks are: 1. Estimates for the cost of obesity globally are somewhere around …

> Most standard software engineering jobs don’t require that kind of research activity (although it does require some; product development is a creative process) This seems to desc…

It feels bad as a consumer, but the alternative is usually worse. The "stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" is really efficient market segmentation . If you don't do tha…

I imagine most people have the same value prop I do 1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service 2) I really really value not having ads in my life So the price for ad-free y…

I wish the article talked more about why people use Redis as a rate limiter and why alternatives might be superior. Anecdotally I see the following play out repeatedly: 1) You prob…

This is so much better than a decade ago! No underhanded "we're a family" - the company says "you will work 60 hours a week and take a big risk" and employees can say yes or no.

> others you get an extra 1.5mm to sit at the computer for 2 hours a day and then take a nap A few of the most world class reserachers can do this, all of my other friends and coll…

I've read a lot of blog posts making this same argument for a year "Cloud makes 80% margins! You're fool for paying them!" and I think they show a lack of curiosity as to why so fe…

> Managing down isn't actually that hard to get the hang of if you have strong technical skills and reasonable communications skills. But managing down is very similar to being a g…

I have - it works. I can also assure you that despite the 100s of applicants hiring remains hard even with competitive market compensation. Filling a generalist senior eng headcoun…