141–150 of 648 posts
Let me explain. I was browsing Facebook on my phone at Philz one day and saw Mark Zuckerberg come in wearing a suit (it was a Friday). I asked him "are coding interviews good?". "No", he said, "they're very bad". I would have asked him to explain, but he seemed to be engrossed in the last level of some sort of Mario Bros game. I went back to my phone and clicked on an ad. Only I never click on ads: it was all a dream…
Is this GPT-3 output?
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> be glad you're not cleaning toilets for 20% of your pay Be advised: If you are programming computers in 2020 and making only 5x what a toilet cleaner makes, you are approximately 100% underpaid.
Depending where you're based this isn't true. At my country in Europe I could earn 1000€ / month cleaning offices and common Programmer salaries' are 1200 - 1500€ / month
That is really the crux of the matter - "good work" can have many definitions, so I'd first make sure that any FAANG you work for matches your personal values. Do the coders at truly believe in its mission? Do you? If so, putting up with the corporate world is easier. But if your values don't match the company's direction, then you are just in it for the money. And with enough money, that can be OK.
Finding a job that pays amazingly well while also working smoothly and matching your values.... that is tricky to find. So you need to start thinking of which of those levers you are OK with changing. Does more money make it OK to be less efficient? Or would you prefer less money for a smaller company that doesn't have the same scaling problems internally?
So to answer whether all of FAANG is like this, both yes and no will be true answers. Every company has its own unique dysfunctions - but they do all have them. It is up to you to figure out which corporate dysfunctions are acceptable.
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This really goes a long way towards explaining the current state of macOS.
MacOS is less than 10% of their sales, so makes sense.
This doesn't directly answer your question and you didn't ask it, but I feel it relates directly to the source of your frustration potentially: you may never find a job that is fully satisfactory in terms of what you hope to find. I used to be in a similar boat striving to work towards and find some magical job that would make me feel fulfilled and purposeful. They all ended up having things I didn't like and would q…
>So at least what I did is stop trying to put so much of an expectation on my job to fulfill me. I took responsibility to find and do things at and especially outside of my day job that did fulfill me. I'm not debating you but I just want to point out that your advice depends on the personality. It may even work for most workers but for some us, we cannot mentally "compartmentalize" the day job as the isolated 9-to-5…
Unfortunately, while I have had some successes working for myself, I tend to find down periods come along where I need to work again and I convince myself it will be different this time. It usually never is, the only difference being the length of time I can stomach being employed and even then it's a difference of a few weeks at most.
Is this actually a defect that needs some kind of therapy to correct? Or is it an acceptable way to be? Who knows but I thought I'd let you know that it's not just you.
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Yours maybe
Are you telling me that if you had the financial freedom to work on any project you wanted, you’d choose what you’re doing right now?
I work for a small company. The company does foreign language training. Most of the business is one-on-one classes between real teachers and students. My job is basically R&D to figure out ways we might use software to improve the teaching/leaning process. My primary focus is on virtual reality, but I'm also exploring a lot in teleconferencing.
For about a year, I was the only software developer on staff. Our company website and our student portal are all developed by a consulting firm. I got to hire another developer about a month ago. We will never be responsible for the website. We strictly work on these R&D projects.
It's been the best job I've ever had. Most money I've ever made. It helps that the company culture is strongly tilted towards "employee empowerment", and not just as a platitude. Nobody brow beats me over anything. Nobody asks me to justify any hardware purchases (though I still do, because I think it's an important part of developing and documenting the projects). When I say something will take X long, they believe me and that's that.
If you like your work, if you like to build things, try finding a small company that isn't a software company. Definitely avoid consulting companies. I spent 15 years in consulting across a variety of company sizes and it was universally soul sucking (though the smaller orgs were definitely less so, up to the best time I had as a consultant was as a freelancer. It still wasn't as good as my current job, though).
Edit: somehow my phone auto corrected 15 years to 25. I'm not quite that old.
I think being part of a big company will always be like that. The 10x performers will get paid 1.3x and the .5 performers will get paid .8x, so if you're smart and not particularly passionate about your work it makes much more sense to be a .5x performer. Also, usually the codebases tend to be quite complex with little to no documentation since that kind of work is not rewarded. This means the hundreds of engineers w…
> This is why I'm convinced places that use proprietary tech are going to fail in the future since the natural forces of competition will cause the internal technology to stagnate This was Bezos' reasoning for making as much of their internal software available to the public via AWS, a) now it's required to be documented, b) it's now subject to competition, you know it's not the best if no one's using it.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
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You spend around half of your wakeful hours at your job, if it's unfulfilling you're trading misery in addition to time for money.
That's why they pay you money for it. If it was fun, people would do it for free (see the FOSS world and its endless discussions on how to monetize).
Everyone exchanges their time for money, if you work a job that's entirely unfulfilling you're trading happiness too. It's an exchange that no one wins.
I think being part of a big company will always be like that. The 10x performers will get paid 1.3x and the .5 performers will get paid .8x, so if you're smart and not particularly passionate about your work it makes much more sense to be a .5x performer. Also, usually the codebases tend to be quite complex with little to no documentation since that kind of work is not rewarded. This means the hundreds of engineers w…
> This is why I'm convinced places that use proprietary tech are going to fail in the future since the natural forces of competition will cause the internal technology to stagnate. I doubt proprietary tech is going to fade completely, but it's true that maybe there are forces that are pushing for big companies to make more and more projects open source. If you think about it it makes sense: the employees are happier…
This idea will never become a reality for the vast majority of companies, for the exact same reason that companies fear piracy. If I open source my product then anyone who uses that open source code is a lost sale. A lost sale means I make less money, less money means the board is mad, on and on and on...
The bottom line is money, and open sourcing their code means (to them) a loss in potential revenue.