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My Google job was tedious and pointless

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Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#331

Post by Balgair »

jondubois wrote: post #326
mnm1 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked at over a dozen places in my career, I've never encountered a code base that takes longer than three months to master let alone ramp up on. This includes shitty code, overly complex code, and well written code. I'd say the challenge is staying interested and challenged after three months.

The more you change projects, the faster you are able to ramp up to new code bases. It takes me 1 or 2 week to understand the code base well enough so that I can start contributing - This is pretty standard for many contractors like me. Adapting to unfamiliar code bases is a skill on its own. You don't need to master the whole code base in order to make high quality contributions but you need to be aware of what you…

> for many contractors like me

Ooooooh! Yeah, I should have caught that earlier. 6 months now makes a lot more sense.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#332

Post by Balgair »

khedoros1 wrote: post #304
mnm1 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked at over a dozen places in my career, I've never encountered a code base that takes longer than three months to master let alone ramp up on. This includes shitty code, overly complex code, and well written code. I'd say the challenge is staying interested and challenged after three months.

You've said shitty and complex code...how about voluminous code, or old code? The main product that I work on has about 2 million lines of C, C++, and Java code in the core of the system, then about 20 plugins ranging in size from a few thousand lines to a few hundred thousand lines. We basically hire for sections of the codebase. It's pretty common for developers to discover the existence of an area of code that the…

2 Million! Wow! Now that is a LOT of code. I can't imagine anyone being able to master all of that and then keep up with the changes. That would take a decade at least!

For reference, the Bible has ~30k verses in it. A verse isn't a line of code, but I'd say mastering the Bible is a good benchmark for equivalent complexity to coding. If anything the Bible is more straightforward than a 2 million line code base.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#333

Post by khedoros1 »

Balgair wrote: post #332
khedoros1 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've said shitty and complex code...how about voluminous code, or old code? The main product that I work on has about 2 million lines of C, C++, and Java code in the core of the system, then about 20 plugins ranging in size from a few thousand lines to a few hundred thousand lines. We basically hire for sections of the codebase. It's pretty common for developers to discover the existence of an area of code that the…

2 Million! Wow! Now that is a LOT of code. I can't imagine anyone being able to master all of that and then keep up with the changes. That would take a decade at least! For reference, the Bible has ~30k verses in it. A verse isn't a line of code, but I'd say mastering the Bible is a good benchmark for equivalent complexity to coding. If anything the Bible is more straightforward than a 2 million line code base.

> 2 Million! Wow! Now that is a LOT of code. I can't imagine anyone being able to master all of that and then keep up with the changes. That would take a decade at least!

The people who'd I'd say mastered the core codebase were the people that wrote it. Over the last couple years, they've been laid off one by one, but most of them have been around for 15-18 years already (the prototypes were built around 1998, and I think that the current code descends from stuff written in 1999). I've been around it for about 8 years now, in total. I wrote most of the current build system, a lot of the packaging code, the initial version of two or three of the plugins, and individual features in a few of the others.

The Bible has a distinctly different kind of complexity, though. Social complexity, rather than technical. A line of code has an unambiguous meaning, with other lines of code, the OS, and the underlying hardware providing an unambiguous context. A verse of scripture can have multiple simultaneous meanings, and the context is provided both by surrounding text and by the millennia-old cultures that the verses were written in. I'm not sure how I'd make the comparison.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#334

Post by fixermark »

logfromblammo wrote: post #294
fixermark wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would one decide what a fair distribution of resources and opportunities looks like, if not via bickering about politics?

A Pareto distribution with alpha >= 2 (and likely alpha = the cost of basic necessities for one person--including shelter, water, food, sanitation, medical care, education, and their share of upkeep for the transportation and communications networks. No one suffers from lack of vital resources. Yet it is still possible to get rich via a combination of luck, skill, and tenacity. Seems fair to me. Of course, this leads…

At the point where you said "and likely alpha This is a blind-spot I see in a lot of technically-minded folks: politics as an evil to be avoided via technological solutions, as opposed to politics as the natural side-effect of needing two or more people to come to consensus on combined action. You can definitely improve the space of possible solutions if you have technology at your disposal, but you can't remove the human from the equation if you're solving human problems.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#335

Post by khedoros1 »

datburg wrote: post #323
khedoros1 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little over 30, and the shortest I've stayed somewhere is a little over two years (and counting...) I can't imagine wanting to leave just 6 months after starting somewhere.

I am an MD graduate and from studies in top notch databases I am waiting for a systemic review to show that my fears are true. Healthcare staff from the president to the hard working orderly, they are doing nothing for nosocomial or hospital associated infections. The ER becomes the reason for an admission. An athlete with a concussion does not need to be left lucid because of the diverse nurses are on smoke break 12…

You may've posted this on the wrong thread.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#336

Post by dang »

jrs95 wrote: post #270
s73ver_ wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When that policy is based merely on one's religion, and not on anything that matters, then yes, it is immoral.

If it "didn't matter" then there wouldn't be such a massive difference in the opinions of Muslims and non-Muslims about secular topics. Islam in particular is also more like religious and political ideology intertwined, and the political aspect of it does not mix well with Western culture or values. I'm not just making this up either, there are a variety of polls from allegedly "moderate" Muslim countries as well as…

Please keep flamewar topics off HN, as the guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Religious flamewar is particularly unwelcome here.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#337

Post by gspetr »

pm90 wrote: post #272
gspetr wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depending on the feedback, he could have change the wording to be perhaps more appropriate, and engaged in an honest conversation with HR. This is terribly naive. HR is there to protect the company, and it's PR image, not to have discussions with you, you're not the one paying them money.

Instead of attacking my suggestion as naive, do you have any constructive alternatives? I am aware of HR's role in the company. Regardless of whos paying them money, there are usually people in HR genuinely interested in making the workplace better. And if not, still better to try that than to write a manifesto and post it for everyone in the company to see.

Alternatives? Are any of them necessary?

The way I see it, Damore wanted to be a martyr (realistically, what happened was the most likely outcome and he knew it) in the spirit of "The Life of David Gale" and he got it.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#338

Post by logfromblammo »

fixermark wrote: post #334
logfromblammo wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Pareto distribution with alpha >= 2 (and likely alpha = the cost of basic necessities for one person--including shelter, water, food, sanitation, medical care, education, and their share of upkeep for the transportation and communications networks. No one suffers from lack of vital resources. Yet it is still possible to get rich via a combination of luck, skill, and tenacity. Seems fair to me. Of course, this leads…

At the point where you said "and likely alpha This is a blind-spot I see in a lot of technically-minded folks: politics as an evil to be avoided via technological solutions, as opposed to politics as the natural side-effect of needing two or more people to come to consensus on combined action. You can definitely improve the space of possible solutions if you have technology at your disposal, but you can't remove the…

So merely saying "Communism" is sufficient to make it political? In terms of fairness, my opinion is that alpha less than 2 puts too much wealth in the hands of the rich, hurting the baseline quality of life, and alpha greater than 5 probably doesn't concentrate enough capital to support innovation, competition, moonshots, and luxuries.

I was defining an objectively measurable middle ground between two economic antipodes that have each had extensive political backing now or in the past. This contrasts with those who decry any movement in the direction of redistribution to be greasing the slippery slope to Abhorrently Evil Communism, and any movement in the direction of concentration to be greasing the slippery slope to Abhorrently Evil Capitalism.

When you define numeric values, it becomes harder to hijack the discussion by throwing around loaded words and charged phrases.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#339

Post by notyourwork »

jondubois wrote: post #325
kamaal wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a huge red flag. Job Hopping every six months translates to 'cant be trusted with any serious work'. In India its more or less a given, that your resume won't even make it past the screening stage.

But if the prospective employer saw the kinds of companies I worked for and heard their reviews, they'd be silly not to try to hire me (especially in the current market). Some companies might think it is a red flag but I wouldn't want to work for such a silly companies anyway - These often don't do very well because they prioritise things like employee discipline over raw performance. When you job hop a lot, you beco…

If you job hop a lot you cannot build anything of substance or scale. Launching a first version of something in 6 months is great, scaling it globally and iterating 2 or 3 times is the part you are completely missing and cannot do in 6 months. This is why I think you need to spend at least a year somewhere to learn much of anything aside from writing code. Learning software design doesn't happen without hands on experience iterating on a major project.

Being adaptable and delivering a few one off features is junior engineering which senior engineers can coach through. Coding conventions differ from team to team, package to package adapting to these also doesn't mean you are a robust engineer. It means you are competent. Solid engineer are expected to adapt. All big software projects that stand the test of time have nuances and even possibly anti-patterns because the initial design missed something.

I'm not sure what you mean by "saw the kinds of companies I worked for" but if you worked at Google for 6 months, Facebook for 6 months and Amazon for 6 months it still wouldn't mean much to me. All it means is you are smart enough to get your foot in the door but not successful enough to succeed.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#340

Post by miketery »

untog wrote: post #90
miketery wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, that's the point - people are overly emotional. All this waking up the next morning and the world is different is such a stretch. Nothing has changed.

I'm going to guess you aren't in the US on a visa. "Nothing has changed" is such an absurdly wrong way of looking at the issue. Say you're stood in the street alone. That's normal. Now there's a man stood in front of you with a knife, and he's looking at you threateningly. But he hasn't stabbed you! Nothing has changed. Your body is still unpunctured, so why are you worrying? Throughout his campaign, Trump made overt…

Actually I am in the US, on a visa - albeit I'm Canadian and have a good country to fall back on. Regardless of the president I feel vulnerable on a visa.

I empathize with those on DACA or other immigrant situations; however on average I would argue reporting of the issues, the emotions, and reactions are over the top.

The news cycle every two weeks is - "immigrants getting kicked out, DACA is over" - three days later "president goes back on his word w/ EO" or "congress not in sync with president; won't change legislation." (not literally, but you get the point).

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