I recently found out the creator of the show Suits was an investment banker previously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Korsh
It's great to see folks excel in multiple fields.
So long, and thanks for all the bytes
91–100 of 160 posts
Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Elon did recently demonstrate what has been known for a long time You mean because he fired a lot of people and the website is still up? Revenue has been falling precipitously. I'm not sure anything has been demonstrated yet.
Revenue hasn’t fallen because devs were fired, but because people responsible for selling ads were.
No, I don't think that's what happend.
If I remember correctly, he reduced the content moderation team, which led to an increase in hate speech, misinformation and CSAM. That's why big advertisers left and revenues crashed.
He then told those big advertisers to piss off and refocused his advertising business on smaller customers, which is why he doesn't need so many ad sales people any more.
Perhaps he should hire some developers and data scientists to better automate content moderation.
Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe? How many people worked on the core of Windows NT? On a number of the big Unixes? Various minicomputer OSs? What you probably do need is a chief architect--like Cutler in the NT case--to keep everyone lined up.
Depending on your definition of “core”, I think the cores of those were indeed implemented by a handful of people. Read “Showstopper” for the Windows NT story, for example, with a small gang of ex-DEC engineers putting the basic kernel abstractions in place. Of course, the full functionality of the system comes after lots more people build functionality on top of that core. Which is exactly why it’s important for tha…
I've read Showstopper. Also Soul of a New Machine. Don't really disagree. A lot depends on what you consider core and what you consider a system in the words of Fred Brooks.
Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes
#94Chet's book on the early days of Android is super interesting. Lots of crazy OS building stories. He must have interviewed 50 people who worked on the first couple releases of Android. I had him share parts of that story on the podcast and result is one of my favorite episodes. I always thought of Android as, of course it succeeded, it was a big google project. But the story is far more interesting. They were somewha…
I didn't work on Android until 2016. As someone who was very much not old guard, Chet's book helped fill in a lot of details and historical context for me. I enjoyed the read and recommend it. So long Chet, and thanks for all the fish.
Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes
#95Well, we need more Shazam like comedy to get us nerds through the day (Silicon Valley is good and the IT Crowd but Shazam is way
more into it with the inside baseball), so I hope for selfish reasons he mixes the two passions!
Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes
#96Because of the downturn, I wonder how many people have given up on their careers at Tech? How many more will respond to the call of a different professional life that pays less, but that will be more fulfilling? Even as recent as yesterday I heard a past-colleague tell me "maybe Tech isn't for me, after all. I'll try my hand at this other thing."
Tangential to the article since that was a voluntary departure, but this is absolutely happening, yes. My partner decided to get "into tech" in ~2018. Her reason more or less amounted to looking at me and determining "it's a cushy job that pays very well." For a while, I tried pointing her to various sources to start learning a bit about software development and programming; there's no barrier to installing PyCharm C…
> So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers.
This happened after the dot-com burst in 2000. At that time there were a lot of people in Tech who would have otherwise gone into marketing, accounting or whatever.
A lot of these moved out of tech into other fields. Or they moved into less technical roles like project manager or management.
Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revenue hasn’t fallen because devs were fired, but because people responsible for selling ads were.
No, I don't think that's what happend. If I remember correctly, he reduced the content moderation team, which led to an increase in hate speech, misinformation and CSAM. That's why big advertisers left and revenues crashed. He then told those big advertisers to piss off and refocused his advertising business on smaller customers, which is why he doesn't need so many ad sales people any more. Perhaps he should hire so…
He also did fire a lot of sales and account managers in those first weeks. There were advertising customers in the news who were no longer purchasing ads because they literally didn't know who to contact any longer.
Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I joined Android in April 2012. Looking back, at that time Android was incredibly lean for what it was accomplishing. The entire Frameworks team reported to one manager, and we would fit in a medium size conference room. That included all of UI toolkit and the bulk of the Java APIs an app would call into, including Binder. (Networking, phone, graphics, Bluetooth, etc were other teams, but we worked closely together.…
>"until I left in late 2016 to join Fuchsia, largely because I was impatient to develop in Rust" Shows how different people are. I only care what I am developing. I have my preferences but if generally language is the last thing I care about bar some pathological cases.
I used to think that way until I ran into one of the pathological cases (Ruby) and now I'll think very carefully about which job offers to accept based on the language(s) involved.
Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangential to the article since that was a voluntary departure, but this is absolutely happening, yes. My partner decided to get "into tech" in ~2018. Her reason more or less amounted to looking at me and determining "it's a cushy job that pays very well." For a while, I tried pointing her to various sources to start learning a bit about software development and programming; there's no barrier to installing PyCharm C…
> So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers. This happened after the dot-com burst in 2000. At that time there were a lot of people in Tech who would have otherwise gone into marketing, accounting or whatever. A lot of these moved out of tech into other fields. Or they moved int…
I think this is a good call out. There are many in tech who, if salaries fall, will go into other industries. Then there are those who will figure out how to do with less—because they couldn't imagine working in anything else.
Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
That must have been an amazing ride. Note: in my opinion, a small, lean, focused team is the right way to build an OS. I haven't seen the "throw an army at it" approach succeed for building the core of an OS or platform, as it becomes almost impossible to keep coherence in the system. And, yeah, that GMSCore joke is too real.
Small, lean, focused team is the correct way to build any massive undertaking in software. Maybe not in sending people to the moon, but in building consumer software.
Well, small, lean, and focused also implies that the time to deliver is still a bit longer. If you're willing to wait 5 years for something, then a small lean focused team is the way to go. The issue with hiring 10k devs to build the core of an os is that just by definition, you'll have people starting the user land at the same time as the core and now you have UI project managers dictating ABI interfaces at the same time as you're trying to make your core OS.
A large dev team for something that complex it the classic case of the mythical man month. Some things just need to happen in series, and some things just need to happen first.