root-z

As an engineer I meet one of these people with the the just-feed-me mindset once in a while (luckily not too often). They are never very good at their job, because they lack perhaps the single most important ability for an engineer, to research on their own. An example is when an engineer could find the API doc with a 5 min search but choose to bother their co-workers for it repeatedly. They will also often complain about the lack of documentation but when they actually do projects the documentation are not more accessible either.

I also find people with this mindset hard to coach, just because it's a very passive attitude, and simple words of advice couldn't do much to change the passivity.

There is always a limit to guidance or documentation. Code changes every day in any decent software project and docs become stale quickly. Even if the docs are there, it's always a good idea to take a look at the code, do some research on your own and see if you find any discrepancies.

Parts that I enjoyed particularly:

> "It's too bad someone is building a resort hotel so close to your house," I said. "That's my new house," he said.

> I wanted to publicly thank more than a dozen people for help on this essay, but they all said "NO!"

considering my experience with their product, it's probably the best they could do in a realistic timeframe.

I worked at a big tech for many years and my team never managed to get Scrum working properly. Every year my team commits a delivering certain product/features at a very specific date (some sort of launch event), so we have to know very early in the year what's all the work required and report periodically whether project is on track. The deadlines are also always on the tighter end. The flexibility of Scrum becomes an issue in that case, because not everyone can deliver the same tasks at the same speed and without careful planning you can easily miss important deadlines.

You are right that it's just sales language, but people, tech folks in particular, don't have to like it and it's nothing wrong to voice their complaints. In fact it would be quite freshing today if some company start talking down to earth languages, like "hey we are giving you basically the same phone as last year with slightly better camera etc. It's useful though."

been there done that. deleted tiktok from my phone and reinstalled multiple times too

FB to me today is mostly a modern phonebook rather than real content platform.

TikTok's power lies in how much they encourage creators to develop new and fun contents. Every other social media I tried feels way too static and full of propaganda these days, built only for the famous and powerful. Instagram (not including reels) is nice but the picture format is restrictive and the interface feels less immersive. TikTok has a better interface imo since their videos occupy the entire screen.

I think the main challenge for TikTok would be to commercialize without degrading their content, but I doubt other companies could do it better at this point with the same medium. A TikTok challenger would probably need to have a substantial edge on technologies such as VR/AR to beat them.

I think the overall point of this article is that SE is a subject that is best learnt by doing, not that engineers do not need to work with end product in mind. So the title is slightly misleading.

one can argue that redundancies is part of a working system, in fact most large distributed systems are designed with redundancies.

I come from a JVM/Python background, so not familiar with JS ecosystem at all. How do people decide what to use when there are 5 most popular libraries/frameworks in each category. Not saying the diversity is a bad thing. Just wondering how people make these choices when starting a new project.

It's quite common in the cloud industry to trade hardware for shorter development cycle these days too. I think that's because there is still very high growth in the sector and companies all want to be the first offering feature X. As cloud services become more mature I expect people will be more cost sensitive. Though when that will happen I cannot say.

FANG employee here. Same.

Exactly. It can take decades and all the time you have to build the next Google or Tesla and that's in the case that it all works out. There are other things to pursue in life and with a smaller company you get a lot more control in both the company and your own lifestyle.

echoing the common opinion, this is a great article at both practical and theoretical levels. The discussion on cash flow is insightful but the summary about the flaws of first principle thinking is what makes it complete.

I'm a bit confused about this article because it first states that Xi personally halted the IPO and then says "It was unclear whether Xi or another government official was the first to suggest the IPO suspension".

The reality and its implications aside, I don't find this article very informative.