SassyGrapefruit

My friend an I were struggling to orient a couch correctly during a move. We were struggling to fit it through a door. So we wrote an app called "Will it fit"

You took a picture of the piece of furniture side on. Then you could tap to draw a polygon over the image. The app would then rotate the polygon to find the orientation with the minimum width.

Most people just aren't cut out for it. To be a good manager you need to ....

1. Be willing to be wrong a lot and admit it

2. Show vulnerablility

3. Deal with constant setbacks and disappoinment

Most people get the reigns and are suprised to find out its actually a thing nobody wants. Like being a social worker.

He meant to say "Famously Tucker Carlson claimed that the NSA spied on him". Given that the man is a bastion of journalistic and personal credibility I can't see any reason not to believe him /s

I think my favorite part of this discussion is that most developers give this sort of process/code a mystical vibe. Like it's some sacred code built by a priesthood of the world's greatest and smartest programmers. Not accessible to mere mortals.

I encourage developers that work for me to just read the code and documentation. My advice to them is usually something along the lines of...

Think of how you would have done it as a sophomore in college completing an overdue assignment... chances are it works just like that

I don't know man. I am employed but I still get 64 recruiting emails a day. Seems like business as usual. FWIW I have never had luck with applications. The last time I was unemployed I sent out 10 or 15 and heard nothing. I reached out to a recruiter and was drowning in interviews within a week.

As for the other side, I do hiring on my team. We posted a Senior SRE on linkedin and got 30 applicants within a week. That was not our experience 2 months ago(more like 5). Maybe something has changed. I don't know I don't pay too much attention.

They are getting a bunch of negative press for rescinding job offers. This doesn't seem any better. Better would be just not hiring people you don't need and not chasing growth like an unmonitored heroin addict.

The issue is these businesses are hiring without strategy, consideration to risk, or proper forecasting. There should never be a situation within a fortune 100 business where the forecasting is so poor that offers are rescinded. I began making household budget accommodations for the macro economic situation in the first half of 2022. What was google doing at this point? How does a business spend $20-30K on the search process, send out an offer, then all the sudden realize they don't want to hire that person? What cascade of management failures is required for that to even be a possibility? How is it that these businesses don't consider the human cost of these decisions?

This sort of action is unprofessional, questionably moral, and unforgivable. I think the FANG companies were/are overrated. Why would you want to work for a business displaying this level of incompetence?

I don't know man. The attitude comes off as defeatist to me. I think most people with this outlook are engaging in self-sabotage. It's easier than putting themselves out there and risking failure.

They don't try then claim "even I did try what would it get me? making some richy richer, no thanks". Ok so what the alternative? I'm just not willing to sit around complaining. Right now I don't feel like I'm being grifted and if I did I would quit.

Corporate finance doesn't work that way. If someone sets something up that costs $500K a year and it can be done for $150K a year. $150K is the baseline thats how much it should have cost in the first place. Otherwise why wouldn't I set it up to cost $10million a year then retract to $150K then say "Oh gee I saved you millions of dollars you owe me!" We as employees have a responsibility to our organizations to ensure they are trim and healthy. It's how we grow and achieve bigger things.

I have been rewarded in the past and am confident I will rewarded in the future. The individuals that set it up kooky will be retrained to avoid that situation in the future. I feel bad for all the jaded folks they must live very depressing existences.

maybe, but I'll keep doing it anyway.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It can surprising why a business actually exists. It can be counterintuitive(i.e. the mcdonald's is actually a real estate company conundrum). Even the "Product Engineer" guy who can probably talk up a storm about the financials of what he is doing, but in a Fortune 500 business does he really understand how that rolls up to the company's strategy? Is it a side line, is the landscape in transition and this is a existential hail mary? At one point facebook made no money, then they made all their money from placement ads, last I checked they made it from video interstitials. Of their 50,000 employees how many really know the revenue breakdown and how it has changed over time

For me I hate bosses, performance reviews, meetings, etc. I'm cantankerous and angry but I have always had a knack for finding and solving major problems on my own.

From my experience if you have a track record of doing a good job working autonomously and you can demonstrate that you contribute directly to the business's financial interests people just leave you alone and if they don't there is a good chance the boss's of those people will tell them "just leave him alone". Be someone's golden goose and in most organizations you can do whatever you want.

I don't know how your company works but at mine we have a profit target associated with our annual bonus. By eliminating that waste I am helping to ensure we hit that target so I get paid. Imagine if I let it slip and we missed our target by $200,000 that would be dollars coming right out my pocket.

Maybe specifically for product engineers, but does that extend beyond the specific product that engineer is working on. Do you think a network engineer knee deep in a data center knows the margins on all the products? I don't work for a fortune 500 but our revenue scheme and capital structure are complex. I could not profess to understand it in its entirety. We receive revenue from our products, managed services and support, one-off revenue streams, channel/revenue sharing arrangements, consulting, and on and on. This is for a lowly $120 million a year business look at a F500 earning $6 billion and I think it becomes opaque pretty quickly.

I think the majority of employees in most business do not have much visibility into the financial machine that justifies their existence.

I travelled to Yellowstone National Park. I wandered into the back country office and spoke with the ranger. She was super friendly and informative. One interesting fact she shared is that Yellowstone is almost 4,000 sq. miles and receives 5 million visitors a year. 99.9% of those visitors never travel more than 50 feet from the main road. This means that most of those visitors experience less than 1/10th of 1% of the actual park.

Why do I bring this up? Because this is how most worker's experience their organization. Stay in your lane, get that promotion, best case you get your boss's job. But how did that job come to be? Who setup the training that you took? Most people can't even describe where the money in their business comes from.

It is a tremendous advantage to explore your organization fully. Visit its other offices and learn what your colleagues do and why they do it. Especially as an engineer. You can literally write your own ticket. Last year I was bored and I started to break down our cloud spend. This took me on a little detour. That detour involved a team that was following a process I could not understand. Turns out they didn't understand it either. I little reorganization yielded a $385,000/yr cost optimization. It took me just a couple days. Chances are you swim in a sea of complacency too.