fsociety (u/fsociety)

fsociety commented on H-1B Visa Changes Approved by White House newsweek.com/h-1b-visas-c... · Posted by u/ivewonyoung

goostavos · 13 days ago

I don't think you can capture the complexity of the world with a single variable. I'm at Amazon. We all make about the same. Some more than me. Some less. However, while I don't have to worry about changing jobs, or _not_ having a job (for awhile), they do. They're working with an entirely different set of pressures and constraints.

For me, I can hop ship, decide I don't like it, boomerang back or take some time off no worse for the wear. That level of autonomy doesn't exist when you've got 60 days to land a job or uproot the life you've been building. Salary is a minor part of the picture. If changing jobs is a gamble that might end in "leave the country," the employer gets a certain kind of "loyalty" that salary cannot buy.

fsociety · 12 days ago

It’s pretty easy to change jobs on an H-1B if you are high skill. I love hearing folks, who aren’t on an H-1B, tell me things like this. Or that I’m paid less when I’m paid more.

I know these abuses happen, no system is perfect. But I feel the bias in the US against H-1Bs from random citizens not from employers. And the government today has quite strong bias against immigrants.

fsociety commented on Writing a good design document grantslatton.com/how-to-d... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

kingkongjaffa · 22 days ago

> Think of a design document like a proof in mathematics. The goal of a proof is to convince the reader that the theorem is true. The goal of a design document is to convince the reader the design is optimal given the situation.

We don't need to veneer technical writing in faux rigour for it to be worthwhile. That's the silly stuff that belongs on LinkedIn.

This kind of psuedo-rigor feels good to nod along to, but it's nonsense.

'We're not writing code, we're programming', 'we're not just programming, we're doing software engineering', and now 'we're not doing software engineering we're doing rigorous proof based mathematics' all of a sudden.

IDK how you write 'Think of a design document like a proof in mathematics.' without feeling at least a little bit silly.

> The goal of a design document is to convince the reader the design is optimal given the situation.

A proposed design may be optimal, or it may not, but the purpose of a design document is not to prove that the proposed design is optimal by any definition.

In a software development setting you're virtually NEVER formally proving anything, nevermind optimality.

You're writing technical fiction based in reality, nothing more. It's not a 'proof' of anything.

You're convincing stakeholders that your proposal can be feasibly built, is viable to run in the ecosystem of the rest of your codebases and infrastructure, and satisfies whatever business requirements that led to someone asking you to create a new $thing the design doc is aiming to propose the technical solution for.

Nothing more IMHO.

If your doc isn't doing those things then it's not effective, if it's giving the illusion of trying to do more than those things then it's just theatre.

The rest of the article is standard good writing advice, but can we not put design docs and PRFAQs on an altar as anything more than technical business fiction to communicate ideas and proposals for scrutiny to stakeholders.

fsociety · 21 days ago

This is my problem with design documents. If your stakeholders already have enough trust that they ask you to go build it without writing a doc, then what value does writing a design doc have.

Many will answer that it helps them think. But why do we need a formal process to think? Thinking is a valuable skill that should be practiced all the time.

fsociety commented on The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain theguardian.com/society/2... · Posted by u/NaOH

xvector · 4 months ago

I genuinely think death will be conquered, for all practical purposes, within this century. In our vast 300 thousand year history, we are likely in the last century of mortal humans, and in the last millennium of biological ones.

Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier.

Why isn't the longevity problem our #1 tax expense? Because the culture believes the problem is insurmountable, inevitable, and not worth solving. Our parents try to hide their grief and dread at the inevitability, telling us it's okay, but the tears at a funeral disagree.

As an aside, I would pay vast sums of money (millions of dollars) to live my final days at an old folks' home that was capable of monitoring my health on a frequent basis, catching things early, and integrated SOTA cryonics facilities to maximize my chance of revival in case LEV doesn't become a possibility in my lifetime.

fsociety · 4 months ago

Mortality is not meant to be cured. Quality of life on the other hand..

fsociety commented on The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer 0x1.pt/2025/04/06/the-ins... · Posted by u/vmsp

trchek · 5 months ago

I gotta say I worked as a farmhand, waiter, fast food manager, line cook, grounds crew (by far my favorite job, it was at a university and I got to do everything), plumber, electrician, day laborer, delivery driver for many things and I did a couple stints in factories all before I ever owned a computer (didn’t come from a background where you had one, I got my first one and it clicked, within a year, I was working at an ISP configuring Qmail and Bind, everyone just assuming I had been living with a computer since I was born).

I’ve had a wildly successful career in tech where I’ve gotten to do, what to me are crazy impressive things (I don’t want to brag about here but you may have benefited from some of it, certainly all of you have done more impressive things than me, and thank you for that) and I don’t regret it a day, but as someone that’s worked in those " normal jobs", other than factory work I found the jobs themselves WILDLY more satisfying than anything I’m doing today.

Tech work did used to be a lot better and I still love learning new things but if I could make a few hundred grand a year and never do another OKR and garden I would take that so quickly you can’t even imagine (actually I’d take it for a 100 grand year).

Now I’m old and I have people that depend on me, so I do the OKR shuffle and play all the politics, and even lead on new tech that I think is being misapplied in the org but hell if I can get anyone to believe me and just use SQLite. But if I was single and had no kids, I’d gladly give up the 6 figure lifestyle to get my hands in the dirt again or even get through a hard rush in the kitchen with the team, there was so much more worthwhile about the jobs I had before, it was just the benefits sucked and couldn’t support a family in the USA without a lot of luck and sacrifice.

I think maybe it is possible that most of you that think these other jobs are so hard just didn’t come from a family where they were normal, but for me they were, and I don’t see anything wrong with them other than the pay and the benefits. They’re honest work.

That said I’d be ok if technology companies just let us do our jobs without all the bizarre AMA, self help talk and bizarre behavior from management.

fsociety · 5 months ago

Upvotes for you. I have also worked a ton of odd jobs out of necessity. Many doing things that would frankly disgust most people, or people would say is a worker’s right violation, or is a safety violation. I enjoyed these jobs more despite the conditions.

Financially it is great, no doubt about that. Take away the money and it’s a terrible job - despite loving programming, design, and engineering. And I mean, I love design, programming, ambiguity, and the constant learning required.

My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.

Modern tech companies and culture suck, even the best ones that I praise. I can’t even blame anyone at this point because it is hard and I have not started a company that tries to be better. I'm not even sure I would do better, to be honest.

fsociety commented on Meta puts stop on promotion of tell-all book by former employee theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/j_maffe

fsociety · 5 months ago

I worked at Facebook and the amount of ex-FBers, especially OGs, speaking out against them on LinkedIn is staggering. I’ve debated doing a livestream of reading this book from start to finish, perhaps even in one sitting, because of what is happening here.

fsociety commented on Elon Musk, Video Game King? Well, Maybe Not nytimes.com/2025/01/26/te... · Posted by u/hughmandeville

meiraleal · 7 months ago

it’s kinda obvious. The people that already like him would defend it and justify the act and the people that dislike him would do the opposite. I guess he might have lost a small % of people liking him here but I would not bet it to be much

fsociety · 7 months ago

The effect on society and the human psyche when political discussions are stripped away from forums is chilling. Internet forums and IRC channels, in their peak, welcomed discussions like these. If you didn’t like it then you don’t click on the clearly political topics. This is hurt even more by forums being turned into feeds that pander into a single category and into businesses where profit, and agreeableness, must come at all cost.

fsociety commented on Moving on from React, a year later kellysutton.com/2025/01/1... · Posted by u/yakshaving_jgt

overstay8930 · 7 months ago

Given I was able to see the errors directly in the js console, yes. You used to be able to break everyone's state by putting an emoji in a URL.

fsociety · 7 months ago

I was hoping for stronger rationale than this. This is not a React-specific problem.

fsociety commented on Hitting OKRs vs. Doing Your Job jessitron.com/2025/01/05/... · Posted by u/zdw

TheBigSalad · 8 months ago

At FB would the 'boots on the ground' devs be required to do OKRs? Or were they done at the team or manager level?

fsociety · 8 months ago

I did not do any OKRs on an infrastructure team. Qualitative results were just as valued, and we had the quantitative knobs to dial when needed thanks to excellent internal tooling and service maturity.

I found it to be the ironic part of working at one of the most data-driven companies. We didn’t do OKRs in my org despite using data to drive decisions. I much prefer this to OKR hell.

fsociety commented on NixOS is a good server OS, except when it isn't sidhion.com/blog/posts/ni... · Posted by u/IrisBMeredith

jen20 · a year ago

Pulumi is a great example of declarative APIs built with imperative programming languages. SwiftUI is another.

Personally I have nothing against the Nix language, and use it without issue, but it's untrue to suggest that the language itself requires uncommon support for this kind of thing.

fsociety · a year ago

Some people don't want to hear this, but it is 100% true.

fsociety commented on Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta engineering.fb.com/2024/0... · Posted by u/Maro

landedgentry · a year ago

Well, you're supposed to read the code and figure it out. And if you can't, you're not good enough an engineer. According to people at Meta.

fsociety · a year ago

Or you know, go chat with the tool maintainers because they want people using them for impact.