pcsanwald

+1. I'm a musician who has released albums and I'd never use something like this, because who wants to manage distribution for every platform?

DistroKid/CDBaby are a much better way to do this.

Being a "tech luminary" is a pretty high bar, no? Who would self-identify as this anyways?

I graduated from NC State in 2000 and I've had a really awesome, rewarding career filled with interesting problems and fun. As an engineering manager I've had many, many colleagues who have advanced degrees from fancy schools that I never could have gotten into (or afforded). I use stuff that I learned at NCSU in my job every day, and am extremely thankful to have gotten such a high quality education at such a bargain basement price (in-state tuition was very cheap, I used to put it on my credit card). I've never felt like my degree or lack of a fancy school has hindered me.

As a hiring manager, unless the person is coming directly out of school, I don't even look at their education. There's a great many people that I've hired where I had no idea if they had a degree at all, much less CS.

I would upvote this by 1000 if I could. I lived in the bay area for 2 years, and one way streets + right on red is a recipe for disaster for pedestrians because drivers will never look to their right.

Interestingly, people in SF rarely jaywalk, and I wonder if it's related to this.

my .02 from having been CTO at a SaaS analytics company for a long time: "we want to see how your algorithms made their decisions."

that's great product feedback. and a problem you need to solve. You shouldn't solve it by handing out your source code.

I agree, although if the company asking is not engaging with an aforementioned auditing company (Mitre is the one I've dealt with the most), then that would be a red flag to me.

in my experience, a couple reasons:

1. It's far easier to raise money from VCs if you are located in SV/SF vs anywhere else in the country.

2. Once you raise that money, the only thing you are going to spend it on is employees. Infrastructure costs, real estate costs, etc, are comparatively cheap.

3. People starting companies rarely look around and decide where they should strategically be located based on costs. A few do, including my last company which was located in baltimore, but not many. Most people want to start their companies where they already live, and have a network for hiring, etc.

These 3 things, and probably others, lead to a significant amount of new companies getting started in SF/SV.

You could make the same argument about most programming languages. I hate to sound like I'm parroting Spolsky, but, he's right that the reason that the reason every developer ever wants to re-write the code they inherit is because it's easier to write code than it is to read it.

It's obviously an exaggeration, but not by much.

When I worked at a large investment bank we spent a ton of time and effort on a system that allowed equity analysts to use excel and sync their data back and forth to the firm's centralized system. it was a great approach because it kept the analysts happy, who were all masterful excel users and thus very efficient and happy with it.

Joel Spolsky's essay "Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy" comes to mind.

package management is a harder problem than most people seem to want to admit. I've run into tons of issues with every package management system you can think of: rpm does some extremely dodgy caching stuff at times, navigating maven dependency trees to identify the offending version of slf4j that is harshing the vibe, etc.

I can't think of a single package management system that works well and people seem to love.

In the poorer areas of NYC there are few, if any, healthy options. Access to fresh, healthy food is a big socioeconomic problem.

yeah, I guess my point is that maintaining internet and general office stuff is not "free", in that it's costing you your time or money. I don't spend much time on office stuff, but if the office is just software engineers, it's actually pretty expensive for anyone to spend any time on office stuff.

I am not saying it's more expensive than wework, but it is damn sure more expensive than just looking at rent + monthly bills.

sure, I've subleased a bunch. my experience with that is that two kinds of companies generally sublease: places that are growing and will eventually want the space you're occupying for themselves, or places that aren't doing well and will eventually fold. I've subleased from both :).

it's for sure a good option if you want a very short term thing, but it's a tough spot when you probably want > 1 year but 5 is a stretch.

exactly. Finding less than a 5 year lease in Manhattan is extremely challenging in my experience.

instead of non-relational, think of it as denormalized. I also can't think of any cases where you wouldn't want some relationships. I can absolutely rattle off tons of cases where applications benefit greatly from some kind of denormalization.

In years past, people called these "data warehouses" and essentially took snapshots of their production DBs and denormalized the hell out of them so that aggregations wouldn't crash the server.