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So long, and thanks for all the bytes

chethaase.medium.com

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Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes

#151

Post by da39a3ee »

Mc91 wrote: post #45
hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

> Everyone hates him, but you have to begrudgingly admit that Elon successfully demonstrated you don't need massive dev teams to build and run software, even at Twitter's scale. (obviously it has other problems due to Elon's incompetence, but nothing more developers would solve.) Most companies could cut their dev team size by 50% and end up net-positive due to less overhead--the challenge is figuring out which 50% t…

GP said "demonstrated"; you even quote them. They didn't say "discovered".

Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes

#152

Post by [deleted] »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #150
dangus wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that I’d spend my own money doing similar stuff if I had the means, I just wouldn’t be humble bragging on a blog for my “engaged readers” (is that what they call stans these days?) and downplaying my wealth while doing so. Right there in the post the guy is trying to tell us how tough this endeavor is financially but we all logically know that isn’t true at all. > worst financial decision I ever hope to make.…

Well that's why he didn't mention anything about money in the blog outside of "I know comedy makes less money than tech". That wasn't the focus nor takeaway. And I don't really see how it's a humblebrag. Is recalling your career and accomplishments as you depart a company after 14 years a "humblebrag"? Would it be a humblebrag if he said he was retiring instead? Is having a blog in and of itself that talks about your…

[deleted]

Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes

#153

Post by angarg12 »

I wish OP all the best, but there is one bit I can't get out of my head

> I feel very strongly that everyone should try, to the extent that it makes some kind of sense if you squint hard enough, to do what they want in work and life.

This is much much easier to say after an entire career in tech. However I wouldn't give this advice lightly to people just starting over.

Here is a counterexample. I started my career following my passion and "doing what I love", so I became an academic and joined a university.

After 7 years I was burnt out, broke and hated what used to be my passion. And I had to essentially start over my professional career in the private sector.

These days I don't necessarily always love my day to day job, but I do enjoy more the lifestyle it afford me as a whole.

My takeaway is that earning money and growing your career capital early on has compounding effect over time, and more importantly, it increases your optionality in the future. Going into comedy writing is less scary when you don't need to worry about sustaining your family.

Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes

#154

Post by crossroadsguy »

Anyone wondering about taking up writing, acting, sketching etc and leaving your current paying, probably tech, job, because the passion was already tugging at you, remember this — this person is leaving after working for truckload-of-money years in FAANG and some more. You must remember that!

In fact that’s my take from his post. First earn lots of money and then “choose” what to do. Otherwise you won’t really be choosing.

Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes

#155

Post by jimmywetnips »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #6

Chet'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 was way too daft to understand the joke, here's the very unfunny but afaik accurate explanation from gpt

https://chat.openai.com/share/a5a62c3f-aaf7-4adb-a3e1-b13780...

Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes

#156

Post by motoxpro »

angarg12 wrote: post #153

I wish OP all the best, but there is one bit I can't get out of my head > I feel very strongly that everyone should try, to the extent that it makes some kind of sense if you squint hard enough, to do what they want in work and life. This is much much easier to say after an entire career in tech. However I wouldn't give this advice lightly to people just starting over. Here is a counterexample. I started my career fo…

I think there is a big difference between thinking you want to do your hobby/passion as a job and understanding you may only like one small part of it.

For example, you might have a passion for writing on the weekends, but to write as a job it takes writing every day, hitting deadlines, pitching books, getting rejected, making changes you don't want to, etc., etc.

The advice is sound, I think a lot of people just don't think through the reality of what a job in their field of passion looks like.

I've been a professional athlete for a long time and it's the thing people get wrong the most thinking they want to have their hobby as their job. That's why they love it, because its a hobby!

If you only want to do the "job" after you have financial stability, you don't want a job, you just want more time to do your hobby.

Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes

#158

Post by boredtofears »

chihuahua wrote: post #136
shermantanktop wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me, before Ruby: “languages are languages, I can usually pick up what I need to in order to contribute.” Me, after Ruby: “fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.”

exactly - last year I had to learn Go and Scala for a job, and it was a nice experience learning something new. 2 languages with advantages and disadvantages, and good support from VSCode and IntelliJ. This year, I had to learn Ruby, and found it to be a mess, with poor support from VSCode and RubyMine. Apparently you can't know what methods exist on a class until runtime, so the IDEs don't can't tell you much about…

> Apparently you can't know what methods exist on a class until runtime, so the IDEs don't can't tell you much about your code.

If you didn't know that going in you did zero research about the job you took.

Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes

#159

Post by chaboud »

ghaff wrote: post #72
chaboud wrote: post #60

Earlier 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.

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.

The real core of NT, the kernel team, could have been fed by two pizzas (if they could agree on the toppings). I didn’t work at Microsoft, but I had some occasions to meet with them (I was working on high performance media tools that squeezed a lot out of a little at the time). They kept a tight ship and designed systems that they genuinely had understanding of. Linux has had similar guidance, and my contact with the Fuchsia team in the early days showed signs of the core design tenets (e.g., object capability permissions model) having been well considered before broadening the effort and resourcing.

Different ecosystems have gone through phases of mass and focus, but times of concise clarity of vision from small groups (e.g., hardware rendering in Android 4.x, early days of CoreAudio, NTFS) move mountains that large teams never could.

Re: So long, and thanks for all the bytes

#160

Post by dmux »

chihuahua wrote: post #136
shermantanktop wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me, before Ruby: “languages are languages, I can usually pick up what I need to in order to contribute.” Me, after Ruby: “fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.”

exactly - last year I had to learn Go and Scala for a job, and it was a nice experience learning something new. 2 languages with advantages and disadvantages, and good support from VSCode and IntelliJ. This year, I had to learn Ruby, and found it to be a mess, with poor support from VSCode and RubyMine. Apparently you can't know what methods exist on a class until runtime, so the IDEs don't can't tell you much about…

I've just inherited a Rails project that's been in development for the last 10 years. I know one of Ruby's mantras is something along the lines of "Optimized for Programmer Happiness," but after working with it for a couple of months, I have to ask "who is the programmer there?," certainly not the maintenance programmer. If code is read X times more than its written, then aiding comprehension is of the utmost importance. I'm not a huge fan of Go, but I do have to say that its readability greatly improves the developer-experience.
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