Readit NewsAll anecdotes I see about this dude is: "we hired him and he did a fantastic job, but once we found out he had multiple employment we fired him".
... why? If the guy's doing well by all metrics and not leaking IP, literally, who cares?
Location: Denver, Colorado (CO)
Remote: Yes, or hybrid, or on-site.
Willing to relocate: Yes, within Colorado, east coast USA, or EU/UK
Technologies: C++, C, Python, (Java|Type)Script, assembly (ARM, MIPS, SHARC), Linux (userspace), Linux (kernel), embedded Linux (buildroot, Yocto, OpenWRT, uboot, grub), networking (802.11n,ac,ax,be,k,v,r,s, hostapd, wpa_supplicant, nl80211), FPGA (VHDL, Verilog, Xilinx, Intel), Windows (kernel, C runtime, MFC, WPF, C++, C#), Docker
Résumé/CV: https://tuckerpo.me/ or curl https://tuckerpo.me/short-resume | jq
Email: tuckerpolomik[@]gmail.com
Strong C++/C background, systems-level orientation. I’m at home in resource-constrained, real-time, or just-plain-hostile environments. Embedded Linux, networking stacks, wireless protocols, FPGAs, weird bootloaders—if it’s not glamorous and people usually avoid it, there’s a good chance I’ve done it. Currently getting into Rust and Zephyr in my free time. Also very very strong background in networking/Wi-Fi, with several talks, published papers, and patents.
Looking for roles where software is the product, not an afterthought. I’d prefer to avoid places where Jira boards are sacred texts, architecture is decided by slide deck, and everyone’s calendar is 95% “syncs” to discuss work nobody’s doing. If your team measures value in working code and shipped products, and not in "alignment", we’ll probably get along.
Spoken at conferences (NetworkX, prpl Summit, SCTE Expo), given demos to customers, and generally enjoy making things that actually work.
If you’ve got an interesting problem, and you aren’t staffed wall-to-wall with MBAs LARPing as engineers via spreadsheet, shoot me an email.
tuckerpo commented on Ask HN: How do you handle an employee who complies but never delivers? · Posted by u/tropicalfruit
I’ll admit, I’ve shown some of the same symptoms you’re describing. Not out of malice, but as the end-state of long-term burnout and disengagement, at an old job, many years ago.
In my case, it was a slow, creeping decline. I started out hungry: shipping quality work, stepping up for projects well beyond my role and pay grade, even leading teams through fire drills and heroic launches. And the reward? A generic "atta boy!" and more work. Never the raise, the title bump, or real recognition.
My attitude over the span of years regressed considerably, shifting from a bright-eyed aw-shucks happy-go-lucky get-it-done engineer, and asymptotically approached, "dude, please leave me the fuck alone" whenever I heard a Teams ping or an Outlook inbox notification.
Really just smells like symptoms of extreme burnout, the input of which can only be determined by talking to this person. Could be 10 years is far too long in one job and they just want to coast now, could be personal reasons like a divorce or death of a close relative, could just be mid-life crisis, could be "I've got 1.8mm in my 401k, what're you gonna do, fire me?"
I work at a place that's very much in the spirit of Bell Labs — CableLabs — a nonprofit R&D organization that serves the global cable industry. It’s been a pretty unique experience, especially coming from a background in product development, where everything revolves around ship dates, KPIs, roadmaps, and making your manager look good to his manager's manager :eyeroll:.
Here, there are no product managers, barely any formal management, and a remarkably flat structure. Most of the day-to-day work revolves around filing patents, writing papers, speaking at conferences, and building rapid prototypes that push the boundaries of what's technically possible, often years ahead of commercialization. In some ways, it feels like stepping into a time capsule of what R&D used to be: curiosity-driven, deeply technical, and untethered from the usual metrics, as opposed to today's modern R&D miasma aimed only at sand-bagging products/results to nab VC funding and then cash out.
But the catch: our funding rises and falls with the cable industry. When times are good, we explore bleeding-edge ideas in areas like low-latency transport, advanced Wi-Fi features like Wi-Fi sensing, quantum-key distribution over fiber, and next-gen access networks. When times are tight (like now), there’s a sharper focus on short-term, directly applicable work — sometimes even jumping in to help operators troubleshoot real-world deployment issues. It creates this strange duality where one week you're working on a speculative 10-year-out idea, and the next you're neck-deep in production firmware because a partner needs help _today_.
It's a fascinating place to work, but it does raise an interesting question: can long-term innovation really thrive when it's so tightly coupled to a volatile and risk-averse industry? Bell Labs had Ma Bell’s monopoly cash to float moonshots. We’ve got a much leaner model, and the priorities shift accordingly. Sure, we've got Comcast in our pockets, but our R&D charter states that no one member can dominate our funding or priorities: we're split among hundreds of members and vendors, and they all seem coupled to one another economically, so if the industry takes a dip, so do we. I’d be curious how others in applied R&D spaces manage that tension between visionary research and near-term deliverables.
The canonical life vectors people used to align themselves to, largely school -> university -> job -> marriage -> house in the suburbs, are long dead. They don’t work anymore. They don’t even exist for most people. And the worst part is that for a huge swath of the population, life outcomes are no longer a function of personal agency. Not entirely.
I grew up poor. Trailer park, unemployed father, chronically ill mother. I did the "right" things, got degrees, worked my ass off in tech, climbed the ladder. And now, at 30, with a high household income, I still can’t afford a single-family home near my job. The American Dream has been geographically priced out of existence. It's a tautology: you need to be near economic opportunity, but that proximity makes the spoils of that opportunity unattainable.
And let’s say I could buy a house without draining my savings and becoming house-poor, what would I be buying? New builds are laughably bad. Developers optimize for speed and cost-cutting, not longevity or quality. Even the “luxury” apartment I rent, which was built in 2018 in a fairly affluent area, is $3k/month for water leaks, a cracked foundation, bargain-bin appliances, and slanted floors. It’s a high-cost, low-trust ecosystem. Everywhere.
What’s replaced those dead pathways is a schizophrenically fragmented collective ethos. A thousand micro-cultures screaming past each other about what actually matters. For some, it’s hustle and the entrepreneurial grindset. For others, political purity. Or aesthetic curation. Or spiritual awakening. Or personal brand optimization. Some chase passive income, others clout, others raw dopamine. One group preaches family values and self-reliance; another insists that simply surviving is oppression unless all conditions are ideal.
There’s no coherent worldview to plug into anymore. Just a buffet of ideologies, all half-digested and shilled beyond recognition. Each individual has to construct their own belief system out of whatever cultural detritus they happen to trip over. And the result is a populace with no shared reference point, just competing, incompatible theories of meaning, each as brittle and anxious as the next. A non-stop race to the bottom.
And when nobody can agree on what matters, nobody bothers to care. A Boeing tech doesn’t torque the bolt on a 787 properly because, why would he? No one else seems to care. Drivers treat public roads like a demolition derby because enforcement is a joke. People skip car insurance entirely because the odds of meaningful consequences are laughably low. If you're in a fender bender, just drive away! Nothing will happen to you. Steal stuff from the supermarket, nothing will happen. Why pay taxes for your small business? You're never getting audited! See an old lady getting mugged in an alley? Meh, not my problem. Nothing compels people to act in the collective interest anymore... not law, not shame, not pride.
The U.S. increasingly feels less like a country and more like a clown-show economic zone designed not to nurture citizens, but to extract from them, manufacturing wealth from thin air for a rentier class while selling everyone else the illusion of mobility. Unless you were born into money, got absurdly lucky with crypto, or won a scam lawsuit, the system is rigged to keep you running in place, and spare me the cope about “the best time in history,” when modern medicine is a privatized racket pushing pills over care and our “peacetime” economy is bankrolled by an endless carousel of proxy wars and every tech "innovation" in the last 15 years is just a new medium to drill ads into people's lives.
As Jon Blow once said, we live in a profoundly unserious country. And the logical endpoint of that unseriousness is a culture of nihilism, malaise, and quiet surrender. How do you fix it, or is it simply too far gone?
Exponential back-off while zooming in is nice, but maybe reset if scrolling back out.
I have almost two decades of experience. I'm approaching 40 years old, I have a family. Sure, I might sound stubborn, but I don't have the time to study 3 months for the nuances of DFS algorithms, or grinding leetcode.
The interviewing process should evaluate my knowledge as required by the job description, and not to play a role in satisfying the ego of the interviewer(s).
So yes, while I did refresh my memory on Big-O notation, and ran through some common brain teasers, I'm not going to read books and invest 3 months of sleepless nights in order to get the opportunity to be a cog in FAANG.
Warning: unsolicited advice incoming. DFS, at least in the context of big-tech interviews, basically just means searching a 2D matrix, or a graph. It's not some esoteric 160 IQ PhD CS concept. You probably've implemented DFS in your day job without even realizing. I used to think algorithmic interviews were beneath me, too, but then I realized that attitude and insecurity was just getting in my own way.
I begrudgingly started treating LeetCode and CodeForces like a game, and it turned out to be more engaging than I expected. I'm also 30 with a family, so I get the time constraints, but just 30 minutes a day for a few months made a huge difference.
Put it this way: If someone told you, 'I'll give you $500k, top-tier career opportunities, and a resume that opens doors, but you have to spend 30 minutes a day for six months solving toy programming problems,' would your sincere reply be "no thanks"?
Location: Denver, Colorado (CO)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Only within Colorado, or to the one of the following: NY (upstate), VT, NH, ME, MA, RI, MT, ID
Technologies: C++, C, Python, (Java|Type)Script, assembly (ARM, MIPS, SHARC), Linux (userspace), Linux (kernel), embedded Linux (buildroot, Yocto, OpenWRT, uboot, grub), networking (802.11n,ac,ax,be,k,v,r,s, hostapd, wpa_supplicant, nl80211), FPGA (VHDL, Verilog, Xilinx, Intel), Windows (kernel, C runtime, MFC, WPF, C++, C#), Docker
Résumé/CV: https://tuckerpo.me/
Résumé Short (JSON): curl https://tuckerpo.me/short-resume | jq
Email: tuckerpolomik[@]gmail.com
I am a generalist with a very broad set of experience, with expertise in system's programming using strongly typed languages. I've done everything from bare-metal assembly code, to FPGA gateware, to Linux kernel modules, to Windows GUI work, to front-end web development. Very "T shaped".
I'm also a seasoned public speaker, having given talks at various conferences including NetworkX, prpl Summit, and SCTE Expo. Quite happy giving customer-facing demos, too.
My ideal role is where software is the product, and I can leverage my expertise in high-performance, resource-critical environments that value deep systems knowledge.
If you're looking for an industrious engineer who adapts quickly and delivers reliably, please reach out. :^)
Most corporations don't need nearly as many employees as they actually have, so if you can deliver exceptional results in 20 hours, why not dedicate the remaining 20 hours to another corp, and double your comp? Everyone wins.
HackerNews dudes claiming they do a true minimum 40 hours per week, every week, forever, of heads-down hard-work are deluding themselves. I really don't understand the overemployment hatred this forum has. There are plenty of folks who really do solid work at 2+ jobs, not half-assing and politicking.
Disclaimer: I am not OE.