11–20 of 58 posts
I learned this lesson kind of by accident. I've told this story before but I think it's relevant. When I dropped out of college the first time around in January 2012, I assumed that my career options were extremely limited. I knew I needed a job, so I applied to pretty much every wage-labor job I could find: McDonalds, Lowes, Starbucks, Aldi, Publix, etc. Almost as a joke to myself, I sent exactly one application to…
I learned this lesson kind of by accident. I've told this story before but I think it's relevant. When I dropped out of college the first time around in January 2012, I assumed that my career options were extremely limited. I knew I needed a job, so I applied to pretty much every wage-labor job I could find: McDonalds, Lowes, Starbucks, Aldi, Publix, etc. Almost as a joke to myself, I sent exactly one application to…
[flagged]
I learned this lesson kind of by accident. I've told this story before but I think it's relevant. When I dropped out of college the first time around in January 2012, I assumed that my career options were extremely limited. I knew I needed a job, so I applied to pretty much every wage-labor job I could find: McDonalds, Lowes, Starbucks, Aldi, Publix, etc. Almost as a joke to myself, I sent exactly one application to…
[flagged]
https://youtu.be/-Evrm03Y5hI?si=CvadZlyzR-PfwFh5
[Bonuses: narrated by Werner Hertzog and starring Ed Ruche]
Their Quality was astronomical (with, of course, the rare exception).
It was the kind of thing that I was repeatedly told, by my peers in other companies, was impossible.
But my bosses wouldn't accept that. They could be real pains.
We did make top-shelf gear, but you won't really get rich, doing that (unless you're a SpaceX person, I guess).
I think the people that make a lot of money, do that by finding a "sweet spot," in improving the Quality of everyday stuff.
I started by looking at well written tickets (to-the-point descriptions, minimal reproduction examples), but that method got me no work: some expert on the project would have a pull request for that kind of ticket in just a few hours, whereas I would need at least a week to figure out the root cause and another few days to craft a fix and a test.
So I started looking at ignored tickets, i.e., tickets that had been sitting around for weeks or months with no activity. Those often turned out to be very poorly written tickets with either very little information, or a huge wall of text with much business domain-specific info. If those tickets contained repro examples at all, they were often complex and very long, using external libraries I never heard of, and devoid of table schemas and example data. Sometimes I could get the author to provide more information, sometimes the author would not respond. I might have to infer schemas and make up my own data, try different things based on a stack trace, install libraries I would have preferred to not install, etc. I would work on trying to reproduce the problem for a few days, and at least a few times I struck gold. Then I would work on a self-contained, minimal reproduction case, followed by a week of sussing out the root cause. It was pretty time-consuming, but I was able to get a few fixes merged using that method, such that I was no longer a total stranger on the project (which helped me get other things merged into the code base).