Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you resist it?
It would be nice if the language was typed. Easier for overall maintenance, and refactoring for big projects.
You should look into type hinting and MyPy
Python at Netflix
131–140 of 250 posts
Re: Python at Netflix
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I beg to differ, I've seen it adopted in quite a few places by large companies. I've rarely seen it used in startups though. My evidence is anecdotal (so is yours though). I definitely agree that it's not seeing nearly as much adoption as let's say... TypeScript in the JavaScript ecosystem though. Facebook even wrote a package to generate types automatically for existing code https://github.com/Instagram/MonkeyType .
Re: startups, it's more useful in a large, mature code-base rather than smaller projects still in the design-churn phase.
FWIW, we use mypy in Cirq (https://github.com/quantumlib/Cirq) and we haven't reached version 1.0 yet.
Re: Python at Netflix
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only way to get hired at competitive companies is via referral - if you live in the Bay Area you probably know someone or know someone who knows someone at Netflix. Trying any other way is a lottery - and if you didn’t go to MIT/Stanford/CalTech/Harvard then your odds are pretty bad. The other way is already working at a famous company and having another famous company send you a recruitment email via linked in,…
> The other way is already working at a famous company and having another famous company send you a recruitment email via linked in, but that typically requires you to have done the referral way first. Just as a single data point, the last clause here isn't true in my experience. I worked at Google for a few years some years ago, and I get a regular flow of recruiter spam from all the big companies for Bay Area roles…
Yeah, but you had to work at google first.
I wasn’t clear, but I meant in order to already be working at a famous company you probably already had to figure out the referral piece at least once.
Re: Python at Netflix
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but I'm not ready to relocate to the US Even if you wanted to, it's nearly impossible to immigrate to the US as a skilled worker legally . I have a friend who is an really talented programmer (and a really diligent worker) who studied Computer Science at some of the best universities in Europe: École Centrale Paris and the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) in Switzerland. One of his biggest desires fo…
You forgot other loopholes: 1. Get F1-visa and do MS. 2. Marry a US citizen 3. use a J1 visa?
> 3. use a J1 visa?
I've addressed this in this sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19789172
> 1. Get F1-visa
People that study here also have to go through the H-1B lottery, like everyone else. Graduates with MS/PhD have a slightly higher probability of winning the H-1B lottery, but it's like 0.5 for US MS/PhD versus 0.3 for everyone else. You are still forced to go through a lottery. (One thing is you get to work in the US for a 1-3 years with an F-1 visa under a program called OPT.)
There are many graduates with Masters and PhD degrees from American universities (incl. highly-ranked ones), who have well-paying jobs (under F-1 OPT), who lose the H-1B lottery, and as a result, employers are forced to fire them, and they have to leave the country (under the threat of forcible deportation and being banned from the US). This is the reality of US immigration today, and it's been like this for a long time. For example, here's a Harvard Crimson article from back in 2007 arguing for increasing or eliminating the H-1B limit: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/9/raise-the-h-1b-c...
> 2. Marry a US citizen
Marrying someone for the purpose is immigration is considered "immigration fraud", and if they find out, you will be deported and permanently banned from the US. If you became a U.S. citizen through such a marriage, your citizenship can and will be revoked, and you could even be rendered stateless as a result. If the currently conservative U.S. Supreme Court overturns Zadvydas v. Davis[1], you could spend the rest of your life in prison.
Re: Python at Netflix
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Question: If they would be, don't you think Netflix would go that route? "Better" is contextually dependent. There's no silver bullet to anything we do in tech.
> don't you think Netflix would go that route? Not necessarily. Python has a few huge advantages that aren't (directly) related to the quality or utility of the language. For example, hiring and training people to use Python is going to be easier and cheaper than hiring and training people to use C++. Additionally, as mentioned in the article, Python has a massive and healthy ecosystem of high quality packages. And t…
Netflix are famous for paying the top salaries in the industry, you will take a paycut leaving them. Programmer cost is absolutely not a reason for anything done there.
https://www.salaryproject.com/salaries/company/netflix/senio...
Re: Python at Netflix
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has worked on fully remote game dev volunteer projects for nearly 10 years, it's unbelievable how much the cultural inertia of physical presence has prevented companies from making the rational move of eliminating all possible office space in favor of remote work and skype meetings. So much money wasted on rent, security, and upkeep and so much time (and even lives) lost to commuting when there isn't a…
Communication between team members is a huge issue in remote work. It works if everyone is on site. It also works if everyone is remote. But when some are at the office and some aren't, communication and information sharing becomes a lot harder. Mostly it's a process and tool issue, but still humans will rather just turn around and ask the team than spend a minute writing their issue on Slack/whatever.
But it's not actually hard, managers just aren't trained on how to deal with the split. Leadership can demonstrate how to manage both, and if there are still problems, you can just mix up the office seating.
Even in remote-heavy orgs, communication issues remain if the culture or process is shit. If you have 10 different Jira sites, 4 forms of communication, and documents in 15 different systems, it's going to suck no matter where people work.
Re: Python at Netflix
#137I fail to understand the use of python in a distributed environment while the language has such poor concurrency support (on top of the lack of a type system). You can make your application HA, but they are obviously not trying to squeeze out every CPU cycle.
Just because you don't see or understand doesn't mean their usage is null and void. Does distributed imply a need to "squeeze out every cycle" at the cost of productivity? If they find that they are CPU bound, or need more efficiency then it's likely they'll move to another platform. If not, why make the move, or lose productivity?
Personally, I've worked with some HPC apps in pharma. We found quite a mix of CPU and IO-bound challenges when we actually profiled and looked closely at what was slowing up the apps. Contrary to the original belief, rewriting and increasing improving the CPUs wouldn't have helped much.
Re: Python at Netflix
#138I fail to understand the use of python in a distributed environment while the language has such poor concurrency support (on top of the lack of a type system). You can make your application HA, but they are obviously not trying to squeeze out every CPU cycle.
Some parts of the process are obviously not ones where it makes sense to squeeze out every CPU cycle. Sometimes programmer time (both in development and maintenance) is your scarce resource (either because of total numbers, or people with specific knowledge), and so it is far better to optimize for that.
In most cases (Python, Ruby, etc...) is it even possible to find your hot-loops and replace them with C/C++/Rust/etc... code. So you can really focus on those small areas where that would make an actual difference.
Additionally, in some places where you need concurrency you can split up the task into parts that have little to do with each other, and there Python is a great glue language to manage calling other executable that do the actual work.
Re: Python at Netflix
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only way to get hired at competitive companies is via referral - if you live in the Bay Area you probably know someone or know someone who knows someone at Netflix. Trying any other way is a lottery - and if you didn’t go to MIT/Stanford/CalTech/Harvard then your odds are pretty bad. The other way is already working at a famous company and having another famous company send you a recruitment email via linked in,…
You're right of course. Unfortunately Netflix is newish to the content business and all my contacts are at more mature companies.
Yeah that’s tough, you might have better luck cold emailing their recruiters directly with questions about roles.
Re: Python at Netflix
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your country of citizenship or birth plays zero role in terms of getting an H-1B visa. It neither helps nor hurts. And it's certainly not "pretty easy" to get an H-1B in any sense. For example, right now, if you wanted to work in the U.S. the earliest date you could start working would be October 1, 2020 . (That's because this year's lottery is already over, you'll have to try your shot with the April 2020 lottery, a…
This is not how it works, if you have a master's degree and want to work for Google you will most likely get your H1-B visa. https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-masters-quota/ If you don't what they do is they ask you to work for them elsewhere for 1 year ( London / Switzerland ) then move you back to the US with an L1 visa.
> This is not how it works, if you have a master's degree and want to work for Google you will most likely get your H1-B visa.
> https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-masters-quota/
The Master's degree needs to be from an US university - which is pure genius, as this way a prospective immigrant needs to pay a lot of money (US degrees are not cheap) for the right to have a better chance of getting in - even if they already have a Msc, or could get one for free in their country of origin. America's basically found a way to profit on people wanting to move there. Of course, it's not new, with indentured servitude being common in previous centuries, but it's cool (in a creepy way) to see it still being alive.