This isn't really just a big company problem, lots of start-ups fail too. It plays out a bit differently at big companies, as those failures tend to be more public but also done in a way that lets the company shuffle people around to the next project. There were lots of start-up companies that tried to build social networks or ERP systems or map applications that most people don't hear about.
Readit Newsjkingsbery commented on Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy (2016) techcrunch.com/2016/01/18... · Posted by u/bobbiechen
With other engineers I mentor, I often give similar advice: break the promotion into two steps. The one everyone talks about is when the email goes out. The one that probably matters more is when your manager says: "I'm going to start treating you like <target promotion role>." A lot less attention goes into that step, particularly at bigger companies that have more formal promotion processes.
I'm curious how congestion pricing became a national issue. The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.
Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges.
Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe and Asia and is thus seen as foreign? Or because it's New York doing it, so it's branded as a tax, versus market-rate access or whatever we'd be calling it if this were done in Miami?
> The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.
Writing this from mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of strong feelings about congestion pricing. It was a common topic in the local media. The stronger voices tend to be those who drive and are affected by it. For Manhattan that is a relatively low percent of the population.
There are some people who are pro-congestion pricing, but as often has with these things the benefits are distributed whereas the costs are concentrated, leading to certain behavior.
jkingsbery commented on The Startup CTO's Handbook github.com/ZachGoldberg/S... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi
I read all the time about folks who become a VP/CTO and stop coding. Management skills are not coding skills. I know it. But I can't for the life of me figure out why folks hang up their keyboards and let their first super power go to waste. You can be a technical CTO from start to finish. Treat your team and the company like a service that needs active contribution, maintenance, and on-call support; and also, get your hands dirty building by yourself and with your team.
Mostly because of the Maker's Schedule vs. Manager's Schedule (https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html) issue. It's really hard to be in a role that deals with a lot of randomization and then sit and focus for 4 hours straight on something.
The Last Viking - a biography of explorer Roald Amundsen
The Wager- a book about a ship by the same name which wrecked in the Drake Passage.
Eccentric Orbits - about the Iridium constellation.
The Great Bridge by David McCullough - goes into a pretty good amount of detail in the engineering and sub-problems of construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
"No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded" finally makes sense. Yogi was presciently talking about X, being crowded by bots.
jkingsbery commented on Alexandre Grothendieck, The New Universal Church (1971) [pdf] publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/uni... · Posted by u/vinnyvichy
This would have been a lot better with a “steelman” version of the “scientism credo” rather than the exaggerated form presented. I found it pretty alienating to try to read this, even though I probably agree with the thesis on the whole.
Yes, the case would be stronger with specific examples. However, I did not find it alienating, as examples of these 6 myths readily come to mind. We see people appeal to expertise all the time, rather than using their expertise to explain. There are lots of examples of people trying to "solve" economics problems rather than, as Thomas Sowell puts it, realizing that there are no solutions but only trade-offs.
jkingsbery commented on Teaching Algorithm Design: A Literature Review arxiv.org/abs/2405.00832... · Posted by u/belter
The vast majority of this paper discusses the methodology.
The actual part that you would use in teaching is miniscule.
It's education research, of course there are no randomized trials... you could never believe them anyway.
Honestly, this preprint is not worth reading. If you want the takeaways, jump to section 5 on page 11. You will find things like "intentional problem selection" and "problems with a variety of solutions".
Possibly of note "introducing visualizations provides no statistically significant learning outcomes".
Papers are quoted but there is no digest version of the results (as far as I could see).
You would be better off just reading an evidence-based book on teaching, like "How People Learn" [1] or the related "How Students Learn" [2]. At least those books go somewhere and present results. Updated references would be welcome.
[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/9853/how-people-le... [2] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/11102/how-students...
I had a similar reaction. I plan on using this paper mostly for it's bibliography.
jkingsbery commented on Coding interviews are stupid (ish) darrenkopp.com/posts/2024... · Posted by u/darrenkopp
The modern FAANG Frankenstein interview is a mess. It was so/so at Google 15-20 years ago, it was so/so when initially FB but most everyone cargo-culted it 10-15 years ago. It’s become “grind leetcode” which is clearly a failure mode.
The trouble is it’s a hard problem, and it usually gives -some signal, so it’s sort of better than nothing? I guess? In cases where contract-to-hire make sense for both the company and candidate I generally regard that as ideal, but that’s not every situation.
Someone will solve this, and that person will be very well-loved.
I work at a FAANG (and obviously, I'm not a company spokesperson, just sharing my own experience). Those who are passionate about interviewing internally all seem to agree on not asking leetcode questions. I know leetcode questions get asked anyway, but there's pretty clear internal guidance and training for interviewers saying not to use them.
At least part of the problem is that leetcode questions are easy to ask, and most interviewers don't want to go through the hassle of coming up a question that scales well to the candidate's experience and knowledge.
Being so pedantic, and then saying "but I'm not going to use the technical term voice" is particularly off-putting. If this is an article about grammatical pedentry, let's go all the way. Otherwise, the author should focus on providing useful advice.