throwinga10101 (u/throwinga10101)

throwinga10101 commented on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable? newsletter.goodtechthings... · Posted by u/forrestbrazeal

throwinga10101 · a year ago

It's like I can't win. If I behave too feminine as a man people give weird looks to me and mockingly refer to me as a woman. A significant portion of the society still does not think men should be very effeminate.

So I am like ok, sure, I don't care much about this gender ideology, but if society does not think I am a man, then I am a woman!

Then people are not happy again. They call me a man who just wants to become a woman.

throwinga10101 commented on Ask HN: What does engineering leadership typically do wrong? · Posted by u/AlwaysNewb23

throwinga10101 · 2 years ago

Not enough experience to say "typically", but things of my top of head:

1. Credentialism or "too narrow thinking" in hiring: we use AWS so your GCP experience does not count. That candidate is from Columbia so we should give this candidate a chance while the person from Rutgers gets passed on.

2. Not recognizing the importance of holistic system design. In backend or distributed systems you often need good design. It can often be good to stop the world for a week to fix the design.

3. Lacking a general sense of humility or having too much ego. Most people are not Alan Kay, nor are most leaders. As a leader, embrace some fallibility and limitations of being human.

throwinga10101 commented on How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system mihaileric.com/posts/how-... · Posted by u/nutellalover

throwinga10101 · 2 years ago

The infra part particularly resonated with me. Leadership caring about high level metrics deprioritize "in-the-weeds" dev experience. At <redacted applied ML place>, I was working on data infra, but pressure from above made it impossible to have time to focus and instead focused on short-term deliverables. It was hard to convince others to adjust their priorities for "the greater good".

The only way to make things better (in my mind) was to use my own time to improve the infra, and because the metrics don't track these infra improvements I don't get rewarded so I just became burned out.

Part of me think this is the reason why you want bloat in orgs, so that motivated people with enough redundancy will actually feel comfortable chasing longer term incentives.

u/throwinga10101

KarmaCake day6June 12, 2024View Original