tomcat27 (u/tomcat27)

tomcat27 commented on Ask HN: I just hate working in teams · Posted by u/tomcat27

bradwood · 3 years ago

As a CTO at a startup I use a flavour of this.

http://www.engineeringladders.com/

There is a difference between leading, managing and mentoring or coaching juniors.

Maybe using a flavour of the above in your conversation with your boss will help?

tomcat27 · 3 years ago

This sounds like useful advice. Thank you.

tomcat27 commented on Ask HN: I just hate working in teams · Posted by u/tomcat27

perilunar · 3 years ago

> most people like working alone

I don't agree. Extroverts love working with other people, and love having meetings and 'catching up'. I suspect most engineers, scientists, and programmers lean towards introversion, so we like working alone, but it's not true of most people.

tomcat27 · 3 years ago

I just can't think well on interesting problems while someone's talking to someone behind, someone at my face at the cubicle trying to hit a conversation. Hence, WFH.

Don't like team because finding good team 10xs everything but bad team 1/10xs everything.

It's way more likely the team is a misfit in real world unless of course there are no hiring constraints due to elitism.

tomcat27 commented on Ask HN: I just hate working in teams · Posted by u/tomcat27

fbrncci · 3 years ago

Go into contracting. At some point in my career I decided that I did not like meetings either. While still in a job, I started advertising my skills online, and offering them as a freelancer/contractor. When some of my content caught on, and generated interests with potential employers/clients, I was able to pick and choose on both terms and compensation. It moved me from being a senior with 20-30hrs of meetings per week, to 2-4 hrs of meetings per week.

tomcat27 · 3 years ago

Don't like to be a contractor.

tomcat27 commented on Ask HN: I just hate working in teams · Posted by u/tomcat27

superchroma · 3 years ago

Well, you should clearly communicate your career desires to your manager, for starters. If you don't want a leadership position and you're being groomed for it, say so. As for meetings, they're for your manager's benefit, so they have visibility on what you're working on and can identify blockages in a timely fashion. More broadly, I would suggest finding a smaller company or start-up that doesn't have a lot of formalized processes and will allow you to run with something.

That said, I've got bad news for you: most people like working alone. Everyone wants to "own" the thing they're working on and not depend on others. It's not special, and it's really a baseline expectation of a programmer. What companies want is team players who are often fun, light and friendly, actively work to build trust with a team through socialization, promote good practices and patterns and don't begrudge the fact that a portion of their day is to be spent in meetings, reviewing others' code and generally communicating. These behaviors increase in value in a larger organization with heavy processes in place to compensate for scale and variable talent.

tomcat27 · 3 years ago

> What companies want is team players who are often fun, light and friendly, actively work to build trust with a team through socialization, promote good practices and patterns and don't begrudge the fact that a portion of their day is to be spent in meetings, reviewing others' code and generally communicating.

It seems ok for a company to seek these from their engineers. I think, I want these too. I just don't like forced standups and sync up meetings. If someone did something cool and want to pull me aside to show? I'm all in. If someone wants help on something, I'll be there..

but it's just that the way things are managed is just dull.

let's do a standup meeting for 15mins where people explain - what they did yesterday - what they will do today - what are impediments

I propose an idea and the TL arbitrarily pulls off a blog post reference to shut down by saying "there's no business value".

umm. effing nonsense.

tomcat27 commented on Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient bigtechnology.substack.co... · Posted by u/minimaxir

tomcat27 · 3 years ago

Firing over this very un-googly

tomcat27 commented on Ask HN: Anyone ever consider bringing a coding exercise for the interviewers · Posted by u/ciwchris

tomcat27 · 3 years ago

I think it's fair to expect interviewee to solve 2 LC mediums in 45 mins given by the candidate. That's the current FAANG expectation. If a bad candidate is too costly for a company, so are a bad company too costly for a candidate.

tomcat27 commented on Twitter Notes twitter.com/TwitterWrite/... · Posted by u/yellow_lead

dend · 4 years ago

My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for those that write.

Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content.

I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside the "walled gardens" is not super complicated even for non-power users. Ghost has existed for years and is a very user-friendly experience. Want to be a bit more technical - go the static site route.

It might be a lost battle to convince the majority of the social media audience of this (after all, can't beat the convenience and the cost of $0), but I really do not see this as beneficial to those that deeply care about their long-form writing accessibility and sustainability.

Twitter already has login walls to just read tweets, so I'd imagine the same is likely to apply to long-form content as well.

tomcat27 · 3 years ago

People on internet seek engagement else why eve write a blog. Twitter is indisputably better for engagement.

tomcat27 commented on Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance twitter.com/cz_binance/st... · Posted by u/tosh

dragontamer · 4 years ago

It actually is.

Smaller banks are vulnerable to bank runs. So a lot of banks during crisis (before FDIC / Centralized Banking in the USA) would close up to stop bank runs.

Closing up shop during a bank run only made people angrier, and exacerbated the problem. What was invoked as a solution, was for every bank in the nation to be FDIC insured by the central bank.

The smaller and more decentralized banks are, the more frequently the bank-runs are, forcing the small banks to close to protect themselves.

tomcat27 · 4 years ago

They are not banks. They are forex traders.