laboratorymice (u/laboratorymice)

laboratorymice commented on Stop trying to promote my best engineers idiallo.com/blog/stop-try... · Posted by u/foxfired

Arainach · a month ago

I largely disagree with this premise.

We should be encouraging people to grow, and we should be rewarding them based on something as close to product/customer impact as possible.

If someone is an incredible Senior dev who doesn't want the cross-team responsibilities of a Staff dev or people management responsibilities, then yes, they should be OK to stay as a Senior dev without pressure that they HAVE to do something else. This doesn't mean that you should pay them as much as a Staff, because a Staff has more impact and that's why you're paying them more.

In particular, you want well-defined pay bands for job titles, because otherwise things get unfair quickly. Best case people find out that people are getting paid rapidly different amounts for the same job, get angry, and leave. Worst case there's a pattern where you're paying all of demographic X less than everyone else and you get sued.

laboratorymice · a month ago

> Best case people find out that people are getting paid rapidly different amounts for the same job, get angry, and leave.

This is only a problem if the disparity does not match the difference in contribution. I'm sure most of us have been in situations where ourselves and two other people have the same job and are earning roughly the same, and we perceive the situation as massively unfair because one of them should be earning half as much, and the other twice as much. I've been in teams where I would have been perfectly ok with specific people earning twice as much as myself. It's ok to admire someone's skill, be motivated to reach it, and accept that they should earn more in the meantime.

In practice ego makes truly merit-based compensation impossible to implement. We just often think too highly of ourselves. The other obstacle is that the difference in contribution from a low-performer to a high-performer varies widely with profession, with software development being (in my opinion) one of the widest.

laboratorymice commented on Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year' cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-... · Posted by u/drchiu

brink · a year ago

Being stuck carrying coworkers that don't perform sucks. Firing under-performers is what healthy businesses do.

laboratorymice · a year ago

This is true in theory. In practice, most managers either do not understand what "performing well" for an engineer means, or willfully go against what they know to be true due to internal incentive structures. For example, favoring those whose contributions are more visible in the short-term, even if net negative over time. Through such a lens, someone who is competent at executing a longer term vision, or refuses to do only those tasks that are visible, is a low performer.

I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.

laboratorymice commented on Why Scrum is stressing you out rethinkingsoftware.substa... · Posted by u/aard

everdrive · a year ago

Without a lot of the project reports, the manager would honestly just have no idea what's going on. I recently moved into management, and one of the challenges I'm trying to balance is how to be aware of my team's progress without wasting their time or being a bottleneck for them. It's a legitimate problem which is often tackled poorly.

laboratorymice · a year ago

regardless of "process", work items should be tracked (in the problem solving record for our future selves sense, not time keeping sense), so you can follow those. If you're a non-technical manager, then either a) the implementation goes super smoothly and the estimate the dev team initially gave you is all the progress update you need, or b) it doesn't go super-smoothly and you should be involved in any discussions that arise. If you find yourself asking "when is it ready?" you've likely gone astray.

laboratorymice commented on CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops old.reddit.com/r/crowdstr... · Posted by u/BLKNSLVR

luizcdc · a year ago

Fines are not enough because a large enough fine will kill a company, destroying lots of jobs and supply chains.

Why not dilute the shareholder pool by a serious amount? There's no need for a statization to formally happen, the government can sell the shares back over time without actually exercising control.

Also fire execs and ban them from holding office on publicly traded companies for the foreseeable future.

Seizing shares doesn't impact the cash flow of the company directly, thus shouldn't cause job losses, but shareholders (who should put pressure on executives and the board to act with prudence to avoid these kinds of disasters) are adequately punished.

laboratorymice · a year ago

This actually sounds like a workable idea, but the implementation would be extremely thorny (impact on covenants, governance, voting rights, non-listed companies, etc) and take forever to get done. It would also punish everyone equally, even though they clearly do not share equal blame.

You probably want, in addition to your proposal, executive stock-based compensation to be awarded in a different share class, used to finance penalties in such cases where the impact is deemed to be the result of gross negligence at the management level.

laboratorymice commented on Finance worker pays out $25M after video call call with deepfake CFO edition.cnn.com/2024/02/0... · Posted by u/bsdz

logicchains · 2 years ago

Corporate email clients usually have a way of marking non-internal emails, surprised this wasn't used.

laboratorymice · 2 years ago

Don't know the details here, but email is still very much broken, and a number of large companies, including in the financial sector, are spoofable even after checking the usual boxes.[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438478

laboratorymice commented on FAQ on Leaving Google social.clawhammer.net/blo... · Posted by u/mrled

sethops1 · 2 years ago

Two talks given by Ben Collins-Sussman absolutely changed my career path from being a hot headed programmer to thinking like a professional engineer.

The Myth of the Genius Programmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ

The Art of Organizational Manipulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCuYzAw31Y

I rewatch these every few years, or before an interview. Puts me back in the right headspace.

If you're reading this Ben, thank you.

laboratorymice · 2 years ago

Just watched the second video and I am confused.

It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime.

edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.

laboratorymice commented on Asking your customers what they want doesn't work techbooks.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/AntonZ234

jillesvangurp · 2 years ago

Classic mistakes in product management:

1) assuming the user understands what they want/need - this is rarely the case. Figuring out what they really need is your job.

2) assuming that what you are building is something the user wants - until people use it, you have no proof for this. Lots of startups fall into the trap of building stuff that nobody wants or needs.

3) assuming what users ask for is actually what they need - always figure out why they are asking for this, whether they are actually going to use it if you build it (I've had cases where we built stuff that was never used), and what it is worth to them.

4) assuming that what your sales people say the customer wants is actually what they want or need. This one is tricky. I've had sales people go "unless you build X, I can't close the deal" and then you build X and it doesn't make a difference. Reason: the sales person's analysis was wrong.

Especially with new products, figuring out if it is something users want is tricky. Do users actually like the new thing? They won't be asking for it because it is a new thing. You have to pitch and explain the thing to them and even then they still might not get it. Only when you show them the thing and they like it will you get some confirmation that this might be something they want/need.

The classic example is selling cars when they were invented is that all customers ever asked for was faster horses.

laboratorymice · 2 years ago

> 2) assuming that what you are building is something the user wants - until people use it, you have no proof for this. Lots of startups fall into the trap of building stuff that nobody wants or needs.

> You have to pitch and explain the thing to them and even then they still might not get it. Only when you show them the thing and they like it will you get some confirmation that this might be something they want/need.

If you have to build first in order to pitch and show it, then necessarily you've had to assume that what you were building is something they want. Maybe your point was to get new features quickly into the hands of users to test the assumption early, but that has its own significant downsides.

I like the way you phrased it though, in terms of "don't assume foo" instead of "do bar", because it implies that there's really no replacing good old-fashioned _thinking_ with blindly following a 5-step plan to success.

laboratorymice commented on Crush Your Interviews with the Power of Storytelling scarletink.com/p/crush-yo... · Posted by u/jseliger

DeathArrow · 2 years ago

It's exactly what I do. I always try to bring the interviewer on a territory I am comfortable with and paint myself in a good light.

If you seem hesitant, if you seem unsure about what you did and why, it's not good. Why should an employer trust you with the job if even you don't trust yourself that much.

From two people, one with lower technical skills but with good people skills, projecting trust and confidence, the other with better technical skills, the former will almost always win the job. Employers want wheels that work well with other wheels and turn fast.

laboratorymice · 2 years ago

I can accept that this is effective with most companies, and I don't blame you for doing what you can to increase your chances, but in an ideal world each side is their genuine self.

I understand that some people see an interview as a sales meeting, but in the end, if it works out, what results is both sides having to interact with each other on a daily basis ideally for a long time.

An employment relationship is in the end a relationship between people. Embellishing in an interview just makes that relationship uncomfortable.

laboratorymice commented on U.S. Deficit, Pegged at $1.7T, Effectively Doubled in 2023 nytimes.com/2023/10/20/bu... · Posted by u/dilawar

flexie · 2 years ago

It's a unique form of American subsidies: You don't have to directly pay your businesses to get a competitive edge. You just don't require companies and individuals to pay any way near enough tax to keep basic government functions like education and healthcare going. Then you solve it by printing more money.

When a less powerful country does that, it bears most or all of the cost itself. When the US does it, much of the inflationary cost is borne by all other countries that use the dollar as a reserve currency. Other countries don't have a reserve currency like the dollar.

laboratorymice · 2 years ago

Fully agree, and it's probably intentional. It's not entirely fair, but I suppose most countries would do the same given the chance. Clearly it's not how you want to get ahead as a country, since all it takes is for the world collectively to decide it no longer wants to bear that cost, and then you can only keep it through force. Inflation becoming a well-understood phenomenon with the general population also threatens it.

If China plays its cards right, the US is going to start having a bad time still this decade. The US should be aggressively trying to reach a more balanced economy. The distribution of not just wealth, but of the ability to generate wealth, leaves the US on very shaky ground.

laboratorymice commented on U.S. Deficit, Pegged at $1.7T, Effectively Doubled in 2023 nytimes.com/2023/10/20/bu... · Posted by u/dilawar

chii · 2 years ago

> Then you solve it by printing more money.

the money isn't printed. It's debt, which is different. The debt is expected to be repaid, with interest.

If you actually printed money, which does not have interest to be repaid, then the amount of circulating money would've increased permanently. Therefore, the expectation is that each printed dollar is worth less. By borrowing instead of printing, you don't have this permanent increase in money supply. Of course, there are other ways to increase the money supply, which is to control how much debt actually makes it into the system - but this can be regulated as required by the economy.

> Other countries don't have a reserve currency like the dollar.

the dollar being reserve is not really "forced" upon other countries - it's a choice they made to use USD as their reserve. They do it because other parties trust it. They could use the japanese Yen, or even the chinese yuan. And yet, majority of entities choose to use the USD.

They do it because it's a relatively stable currency. They do it because other people accept it, and they do it because there's some trust that the US won't print money like Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

laboratorymice · 2 years ago

> If you actually printed money, which does not have interest to be repaid, then the amount of circulating money would've increased permanently.

You have to get your head around the fact that this is an open-ended system, the music never has to stop so long as the sun rises and we stay on this monetary system. The same way people still get "wealthier" from stock market appreciation, even though there is a buyer for each seller, so too does more debt indeed mean a permanent increase in money supply[1].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S