chaosphere2112

I was only there in 2022, but at that point there were in fact three or more monorepos (forked roughly based on toolchain - go and scala in one, primarily Ruby in the one detailed here, and there was one for the client stripe api libs that was JS only. There may have been more.

I just killed Reddit off my home screen after a decade of usage because of a totally different bullshit growth hacking thing - they have started injecting their “recommended” subreddits into my swipe stream.

I have thumbs downed every single recommendation they’ve ever put in my scrolling feed, and now am being forced to consume absolutely random subreddits that their models have decided I’m super interested in because at some point in the last ten years I clicked through an r/bestof link.

Sigh. Now I need to actually figure out Mastodon.

Yeah; my product team will get wildly different priorities over the course of a month as execs spin plates, PMs and managers scramble around, and we nail down what our next round of experimentation will involve. On top of that, relying on A/B testing for all decision making means you’re liable to discover at any point that there’s a totally different piece of software that you should have built instead.

It’s all chaotic, but I enjoy the scrum.

This is very on point. We have platform and product in entirely different reporting structures that meet just below Sundar; this leads to hysterically different cultures. My team is trying to straddle the product/platform divide right now and it’s a constant learning experience.

A recent example: someone asked me for my team’s planning schedule, specifically when we figure out what we will be doing for the next six months.

My only response is “we don’t do that here”; my team has to constantly juggle projects to load balance downtime on projects (most of our work is very sinusoidal in how much time it demands in a week), and we pick up new ones that are important enough to add to the load from time to time.

The platform folks set out in December last year with a mission for all of 2021; the design is flexible, but they know exactly what the goals for their year are.

When one team has projects that take an arbitrary amount of time to “get right”, and the other has more reliably predicted cycles that just depend on coding output, things get a little hairy. Mostly just takes a lot of empathy for the folks on the other side, though.

My old gig was at Lawerence Livermore (home of Edward teller); there’s a photo of the sedan test with a few lab engineers posed next to it in the building that they interview new comp sci hires in. One of the senior engineers I was on an interview panel with told me all about Plowshare; weird to hear it from someone who wasn’t on the project.

Timezones. It’s hard enough scheduling meetings across multiple timezones (and boy are there a lot of meetings in FAANG), but going more than +/- 6 is a huge pain (I meet with east asia and europe on a fairly regular basis).

It’s L4 as of like a year ago; also going up to L5 no longer has promo committee per-se, but instead is a PA meeting between leads who hash it out, and the manager is much more involved.

Yeah, but one of the main roles of pretty much every government is regulating what is sold in their markets.

(Were this a less autocratic regime,I would have said "governments are just people", but I take your point on the government of SA being largely disjoint from the citizens)

It's actually a reference to the USB-C ecosystem for the laptop line; Marco and his cohosts on the Accidental Tech Podcast have burned a lot of time griping about the state of connecting things to a laptop. Not so much time on the head phone jack, which was mostly a no-op for them (since it was paired with the airpods).

The front-end interviews at Google are about half algorithms and half details about how web front-ends should work, be structured, web technology problems, browser performance, etc. It's an entirely different interview track from General SWE.

Almost definitely not the case at Google presently. 80-90% of the fridge space is dedicated to non-soda beverages (flavored seltzers, cold brew coffee, iced teas), and the chips + candy are hidden out of sight in the snack areas.

When ordering at a restaurant, yes.

As an owner of a car with ACC and lane keeping, I frequently get to experience the always fun sensation of my car accelerating full bore at a turn. My understanding is that Tesla actually made the two systems talk to each other, which is definitely not the case in my Honda. Calling it "just" ACC and lane keeping is disingenuous.

As an additional piece of anecdata, I was also thoroughly underwhelmed by my offer (software engineer) at Tesla; they either maliciously or incompetently tried to get me to take an offer at new grad rates, and when I laughed the first offer away (a 30% pay cut to move into the heart of silicon valley), the return offer was just strictly worse than all the other offers I got. Negotiation led to a promised increase to match, but then the actual letter was lower than the negotiated amount. Was thoroughly underwhelmed at the entire process.