alzaeem

I interviewed with Uber in 2016 with the "crystal ball" team. Reading about R-crusher, I am glad that offer never came through!

But then Eddie Howe moved to Newcastle and is on track to get them into the coveted Champions League spots... Is that a risk you wish to take?

I am also looking for this information. I largely switched away from lastpass over the last 12 months, and only a few low-value credentials remain in it. But if this is an old backup, then it is more concerning for me.

They showed the WASM image is 5mb vs 30mb for the alpine Docker image. So that’s 25mb of overhead due to the alpine distro?

How is it possible that the image size is so much smaller with the WASM image compared to the Docker image? They need to ship the entire php runtime compiled to WASM, so I don’t see how it can be smaller

I agree that product managers should set the product direction. But my personal anecdote is that they have too much say in what engineers do and when, to the extent that the default answer of engineering teams to everything becomes “talk to pm and they decide when this can go in”.

I think the dynamic that creates this is that the product org becomes responsible for delivering features/products to business stakeholders, and product blames any delays on Eng not being able to deliver on time. So then Eng decides to let product plan everything to a t, such that Eng cannot be blamed if they meet said plan. Which is what motivates my use of the term “code monkeys”…

I feel like engineering should have the freedom and responsibility to entirely own the product delivery. Product managers/owners would still decide what product should be built, and then Eng would take it from there. But I don’t think I have seen this anywhere, and not sure if it would work.

> The past two years created a new type of hype: PMs. Until the Tech Giants (eg: Google, Meta, etc) made PMs the ‘new normal’ of how to get any product functionally built and delivered, down to the tiniest button, startups used to do just fine with no PMs. Chances are very high you could do with less (no?) PMs. Also an excellent forcing device to kill some of your internal bureaucracy.

I think the PM fad has been around much longer, to the point one almost forgets how to build products without PMs. But from my experience, I find that the prevalence and empowerment of PMs is largely turning Devs into highly-paid code monkeys, as opposed to the highly-paid and empowered value builders that they should be. Much of the busy work that many PMs are doing can be replaced with a bit of Agile/Scrum training of a few devs per team.

At the same time, I would say that having a product owner who develops a deep understanding of the domain, actively talks to customers, and steers the vision and direction is immensely valuable. But I hardly see any of my PMs doing it.

Anyway, I am seeing a lot of negative sentiment towards the prevalence of PMs these days, which I mostly share. Would love to hear any counter-thoughts or corroborations of this. Are PMs necessary? How should they be utilized?

Love it. But one suggestion, which I’ve been looking for, is to fill the knockouts bracket based on the current group standings. That’s a great way to build up the excitement

Best of luck to OP, and there are some solid suggestions in this thread!

Just wanted to add that the wholesale adoption and normalization of WFH and remote culture in tech is worrying and will only make this type of issue worse and more common. Personally, I had consistently been able to make good friendships at work across several positions at different companies/cities/countries. That's until WFH and remote work hit, where now I rarely see coworkers in person (if at all), and often people are not in the same city. We feel more like automatons these days.

Tech work seems no longer a reliable vector for creating meaningful friendships or a social life outside of work. Like OP, many of us will have to learn to meet people outside of work.

I work in ML engineering, and I’ve seen people work on a problem for the better part of a year with little to show for it. The non-progress gets on leadership’s radar, so even more resources get directed to crack what should be a solvable but non-trivial problem.

An engineer who could have solved this problem without a fuss within a month or two is easily a 10x engineer. Not because they work 10x faster, but through better ideas and thought process, efficiency with their tools, and exercising leverage. This is even without considering their additional impact on the work of others.

I think this could be applicable in any software or tech field, as long as the best solution to a problem isn’t trivial or immediately obvious.

The Apache Arrow project is led by the creator of Pandas, which is one of the most important packages in the Python ecosystem. I agree Apache has some half-baked projects, but I think Arrow has the track record and backing to achieve its goals

I share the frustration with how many A/B testing driven development processes end up. Leads to a very iterative process with lots of small changes, rather than big bets. Also, trying to get statistical significance from iterative changes when you don’t have a ton of data is problematic.

DDG is the default search engine I use on the desktop and in iOS Safari for more than a year. I'm glad to see them growing and hope their privacy centric approach becomes dominant across the web, but the reality is that their search results can be quite poor except for simple queries. I used to use bing in the past and I don't recall having as many frustrations. I hope DDG are able to invest more in this area as they grow, because for most consumers the compromise in search quality may not be worth the privacy gains