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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Used to work there. Yes, he is. Absolutely. Without a second of doubt.
FYI, you appear to be shadowbanned. Your comment was showing up as dead to me.
Why does the article use the term "technologists" when Hastings' quotes are all specifically about software engineers ?
In the same vein, even I get confused what to call myself when talking to other people. There's like 5 or 6 different ways to identify my position: programmer, coder, developer, engineer, hacker..."technologist" isn't that big of a reach from them I guess.
Of course, in reality it's a rather fuzzy term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same vein, even I get confused what to call myself when talking to other people. There's like 5 or 6 different ways to identify my position: programmer, coder, developer, engineer, hacker..."technologist" isn't that big of a reach from them I guess.
Software Engineer seems a pretty safe choice.
Also, if they are Canadian they might get their goose feathers extra ruffled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineer#Canada
I have no opinion on Disney, as it's not available in my country, but generally for me Netflix's latency from the play button is much better than youtube's or HBO Go's. HBO's app / web page is full of bugs that would be probably easy to fix (it gets stuck even after I turn my new Samsung TV off and on again, I need to force quit the app). At the same time while youtube offline video watching always works for me on my…
What happens when the Rockstar programmer needs time off because of a death in the family? Is Hastings okay with that if it's in the middle of an important project that can't easily be taken on by others? If great programmers are limited by supply I suppose he has no choice but to keep them.
My manager was forced to go help his family in a foreign country for a month and they fired him before he returned. They did this almost routinely (and still do from those I speak to) to people who had to take time off. It’s a highly political and backstabby kind of place. It’s the only company in SV I’ve worked at (been at more than half of FAANG) where yelling matches were not uncommon in meetings. The culture slid…
Good developers are the ones that create code that resists the slide from a 10x code-base to a 0.1x code-base. Important skills towards this end are a good sense for code architecture and testing discipline. But also: good communication, organization, documentation, teamwork.
As an anecdote, one of my favorite developers to work with at my current workplace is a "high throughput" developer but who is personable, tests and documents the crud out of everything he does and makes it easy to extend and fix bugs in his code for other developers. One of my least favorite people to work with is also a "high throughput" developer who is a prolific creator of software, but everything created by this person is an un-maintainable, un-documented, un-tested, brittle block of procedural copy-pasta that ends up in the critical business path. And yes, this developer "snapped" about a year ago and it has been a 3 person project ever since to scramble to fix this stuff.
So, moral of the story, be very careful with pure productivity as a metric for developers. Maybe a 100x developer is really just a 5x developer who enables 20 teammates to also be 5x developers?
EDIT: I think I maybe didn't make my point super clear. My theory is that there are two (somewhat) orthogonal dimensions that you can judge a developer by:
1) Productivity, ability to get things done, this is what I assume (maybe mistakenly) that people are talking about when talking about an Nx developer because it is the dimension that maps better to a quantifiable value.
2) Quality, ability to create code that is easy to work with and extend. This doesn't map to a Nx scale at all.
One of these qualities contributes towards a goal by compounding linearly, independent of headcount. The other compounds exponentially and also with headcount and is clearly the superior thing to think about when considering developer skill.
> Eventually, Rick snapped. Once he departed the company, the team of supposedly “mediocre” engineers redid his work to make it more elegant and efficient: “We didn’t have any mad geniuses building everything from scratch. But our productivity was never higher.” A silly strawman. I'd firmly put someone like this in the bucket of "not that effective."
Early in my career I had someone that kept telling me "we don't write documentation because nobody will read it". I'll never put up with that again. You can take 30mins to write a confluence page describing the context, the solution, and comparison to other solutions and why this one was picked. It will save the company many hours later when someone else has to pick up your stuff.
Why does the article use the term "technologists" when Hastings' quotes are all specifically about software engineers ?
"Tecnology" in conventional parlance has regrettably come to equate to "information technology" much as "engineer" once referred principally to a locomotive operator.
I'll skip the "ssofftware engineer" debate, though note its existence.