111–120 of 139 posts
[flagged]
> And when corporate needs to lay off 30% they’ll think nothing of it. Having seen this literally play out this year: it was all of the C’s that were first to be cut shrug
Well Kent got fired from Facebook, so maybe he wasn’t such an A player in their eyes. ;)
So much of this is written with an air of superiority over the noob. Indicates a bit of an ego problem. Yes, the noobs are noobs, but the goal isn't to exercise your status over them. Or even to waste that much time trying to categorize between A, B, C. The goal should be to boost everybody's productivity instead of treating them like a game.
The seniors are superior to the noobs. Kind of by definition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah good luck with that attitude over time. Most people don’t hang around in an org long enough to see that assumption scale to renting hardware than costs $900k a node a year.
Most orgs never get to that scale
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related, but the best quality to have in a startup is knowing when and what corners to cut instead of going on these side quests.
I used to think this but you only know which were the right corners to cut after the fact. And most things are not obviously right or obviously wrong, instead it’s a slow zombie death by a thousand fuzzy signals. And the management tier of the startup will too easily color the signal by the flavor they want to see. My latest take on this matter is to separate speed as in fast from quick. Quick is the thing you want a…
Good engineering intuition, the ability to learn new code/systems quickly and the ability to quickly validate ideas is extremely valuable.
So much of this is written with an air of superiority over the noob. Indicates a bit of an ego problem. Yes, the noobs are noobs, but the goal isn't to exercise your status over them. Or even to waste that much time trying to categorize between A, B, C. The goal should be to boost everybody's productivity instead of treating them like a game.
I think the article is explicitly saying, "Ok, you're green, we know that. We're spending extra time with you to make you productive. You can help that process or hinder it, and if you're unteachable or uninspired, we'll probably end up letting you go. So here's some attitudes that get people singing your praises at this early stage." I'm not sure if this is the last gasp of this type of thinking as AI changes the la…
IME new grad hires are break even effort for me for the first 6-9 months. If it’s clear they will become positive after that I put more effort into helping them.
LLMs may alter that break even math.
[flagged]
I think the biggest problem is that they almost dont ask questions. It’s like one question in two days. In past I had to deal with juniors who would flood me with questions, and with them it was pretty clear how they are doing (yes we talked about it).
I’m a “junior” senior and I’ve got a junior whose faith I’ll need to decide in a few months. How do you know if they are gonna be good? And how do you give them all of the possible tools to actually be good? Not like I don’t have a clue, but I’ll appreciate some advice. I think the biggest problem is that they almost dont ask questions. It’s like one question in two days. In past I had to deal with juniors who would…
Nevertheless though, we're blessed with a codebase that is several orders of magnitude larger than what the human brain can fully internalize so if you're trying to do anything remotely interesting, you're going to have questions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Hardware is almost always cheaper than engineering time, until it isn't, and that's when you should spend the time on targeted optimizations.
Yeah good luck with that attitude over time. Most people don’t hang around in an org long enough to see that assumption scale to renting hardware than costs $900k a node a year.
Generally A players work for C players. B players tend to work for the government. The person who the article sounds like a complete moron, though.