alecbenzer (u/alecbenzer)

alecbenzer commented on If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees software.rajivprab.com/20... · Posted by u/whack

lkbm · 5 years ago

Main reason: it's more fun.

I could be a cog in a giant corporate machine, or I can have a measurable impact where I work.

I can stay in my lane and do my specific job tasks, or I can run around putting out fires and helping wherever help is needed.

I mindlessly build the specific design product handed me, or I can guide my own work in accordance to the needs of our customers and the business.

I can follow policy and fill out forms when making any decision, or I can just do what's right because who has time to write policies and look over approval forms?

tbf, tech is relatively good at a lot of these. As I understand it, Facebook gives a fair bit of latitude to engineers, and Google used to be famous for their 20% time. But the longer a company exists, and the bigger it gets, the more bureaucracy and controlling it'll get. Every big disaster means a new policy on how to prevent future disasters.

I think pg wrote an essay stating that the most valuable skill in an early startup employee is "helpfulness" (maybe not though -- cursory search didn't find it). You do what needs to be done.

This is roughly your "wear many hats" point, but more than just different technologies, and not just being new. If you just want to have a well-defined, steady, sane-every-day job, a startup is terrible. If you every want to say "that's my job", a start-up is terrible. If you're the sort of person people will come to for help with whatever comes up (and enjoy being that), start-ups can be great.

alecbenzer · 5 years ago

Been at 2 series A/B startups for the past ~3.5 years. It was a really fun 3-6 months followed by 3 very not fun years.

My N is low, they were both non-Bay (NYC) startups, maybe some startups are fun, maybe I'm really bad at picking startups, but I think a startup's culture is often as much or more of a crapshoot than the startup's business.

Was at Google before, and it was fun for only a bit as well, but definitely not as actively non-fun as my last 3 years has been.

alecbenzer commented on If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees software.rajivprab.com/20... · Posted by u/whack

brd529 · 5 years ago

Bravo bravo bravo! This piece neatly encapsulates all the problems with ISOs. The biggest one is mentioned at the beginning - information asymmetry. I don’t really understand why most companies, especially small ones less than 100 people, can’t be transparent about their cap table with employees.

I do think the culture around 90 day exercise Windows is changing. Here is a list of companies with extended windows [1]. At this point I would never join a company with 90 day windows.

[1] https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows

alecbenzer · 5 years ago

AFAIK the 90 day thing was more of a legal thing than something the companies themselves wanted to enforce?

alecbenzer commented on Kovarex's (creator of Factorio) struggle with burnout factorio.com/blog/post/ff... · Posted by u/alecbenzer

lostmsu · 5 years ago

I actually think what is described there is more of 80:20, than a burnout. The first 80% of a new product are usually quite interesting to work on, but the last 20% of necessary touches are tedious work, that still needs to be done though.

alecbenzer · 5 years ago

What makes you say this is 80:20? The thing that got him out of the funk was fixing a minor UI issue:

> Once he asked me "Father, what is this thing in the list of things I can order?" ... "This is atomic bomb" .. "Oh, I want to order it" .. "No, we don't even have it researched" .. "But, why is it in the list then, it doesn't make sense" ... "Hmm, you are right, it doesn't, I might actually fix that." So I opened Factorio source code after a long time, and made the change, that the filter and logistic request selections didn't contain things yet to be researched (unless you force-unlock it in the settings). I made a change to Factorio, and it felt good, and I started to want more, this is how I got from the lowest point.

He didn't get back into it because the problem was particularly meaty or interesting to work on. It was a small piece of work that nonetheless allowed him to feel like he had impact. Because he was connecting with someone who was actually engaging with and getting joy from what he was building (and it might have helped that the person was his son).

I guess it's possible that what initially put him into the burnout was working on tedious things that felt like they had no substantial impact (though nothing in the post really indicates that IMO). But, that doesn't mean that this isn't burnout. Burnout is exactly caused by a felt loss of control and/or impact.

alecbenzer commented on MariaDB Temporal Data Tables mariadb.com/kb/en/tempora... · Posted by u/alecbenzer

crazygringo · 5 years ago

This is fascinating. I've got two basic questions, however:

1) Is this always going to be performant with indices? It seems like "time" is kind of like another index here, and when designing queries which indices are used and in which order can be the difference between taking milliseconds and taking an hour. It's not obvious to me whether this will have hidden gotchas or query execution complexities, or if it's designed in a way that's so restricted and integrated into indices themselves that query performance will always remain within the same order of magnitude

2) What is the advantage of building this into the database, instead of adding your own timestamp columns e.g. 'created_timestamp' and 'expunged_timestamp'? Not only does that seem relatively simple, but it gives you the flexibility of creating indices across multiple columns (including them) for desired performance, the ability to work with tools like mysqldump, and it's just conceptually simpler to understand the database. And if the question is data security, is there a real difference between a "security layer" that is built around the database, versus one built into it? It would be fairly simple to write a command-line tool to change the MariaDB data files directly, no?

alecbenzer · 5 years ago

> Not only does that seem relatively simple

I haven't thought about this too deeply, but I think "simple" is overstating it. Being able to turn on versioning for any table by basically just pushing a button seems really powerful.

There's application-layer stuff like paper_trail for rails that can do this for you, but you're stuck if your language doesn't have a good one.

Building it into the db also means that any out-of-band direct edits to the DB also get tracked.

alecbenzer commented on MariaDB Temporal Data Tables mariadb.com/kb/en/tempora... · Posted by u/alecbenzer

alecbenzer · 5 years ago

Had no idea until recently that MariaDB supported this out of the box. Does anyone have experience using this? How does it compare to https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal ?

alecbenzer commented on Unit Testing Is Overrated tyrrrz.me/blog/unit-testi... · Posted by u/ingve

eithed · 5 years ago

You'd test those cases. This way, if you'll change your code to be

``` public setValue(value) { this.value = value + 5 } ```

then your tests will start to fail.

Treat tests as a contract.

alecbenzer · 5 years ago

Can't tell if serious...

alecbenzer commented on Unit Testing Is Overrated tyrrrz.me/blog/unit-testi... · Posted by u/ingve

tonyedgecombe · 5 years ago

in the name of expediency

or productivity.

alecbenzer · 5 years ago

but BeSt PrAcTiCeS