Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
Meta kind of screwed everybody here. I am at one of the hyperscalers with some insight into SDE offers. Second half of 2021 things got extremely crazy with Meta offering ridiculous salaries even for junior positions. This caused a chain reaction. Other FAANG had to increase their offers outside the normal bands to fill positions, which caused experienced folks to leave where out of frustration that new hires one level down were making more money than them. Now it appears Meta overshot and are trying to clean up their own mess.
Comment · 4 years ago
> Misogyny?

What an extremely unkind thing to say. There was nothing in the GP to suggest this. In fact it’s entirely plausible that Apple decided to honor women’s day this way.

You must have known that accusing people of misogyny can have a impact on their livelihood in today’s hyper PC world. That makes your comment even more unkind. I think you should apologize.

Comment · 4 years ago
> started "idolising" past scientists [..] whose primary purpose on life had become, basically, how to best kill other people

We all should be careful to judge people in history with our current set of morals. The scientists in the photo all experienced the horrors of WWII. I don’t think it requires to much mental gymnastics to have the position that the deterrence of nuclear weapons would lead to a safer world, especially in the post WWII context. Note that this is not a blanket statement against judging people in history. I just don’t think this applies to the scientists here.

Comment · 4 years ago
> I know this is a cynic take,

It’s worse than that. This take is a trivial restatement of history, namely that whites and men had most of the power, while amplifying outrage with people already agreeing with you, not contributing to lessening the divide, and causing people like myself to self censor by replying using throwaway accounts.

Comment · 5 years ago
And maybe you should consider the power of religion, the sense of belonging and origin it gives you, and the good it is doing to this world today (despite many missteps as well), before being so judgemental. I am saying this as someone not religious but grown up with religion.

Some religions evolve faster than others. I would hope the different faiths can come up with iterative improvements to their standard operating procedures that still meets the requirements. I believe the Jewish religion even has a concept about creatively outsmarting the religious rules as being a virtuous thing (eg women wearing wigs).

Comment · 5 years ago
Starting services in parallel will reduce overall service start up time as well, even if services are dependent on each other, because services often do work before they connect to a dependent service. Without socket activation that is a race condition.
Comment · 5 years ago
True. And the pressure not to do that would be extreme. So it doesn’t help the ‘I prefer not to give estimate, like Apple’ argument at all.
Comment · 5 years ago
Good estimates are critical to plan dependent activities and setting customer expectations. If we don’t estimate then we are saying that software engineering is not an engineering discipline. You can have that view, but in my experience it does not lead to good outcomes.

If I can assume you’re an SDE for a moment, I actually agree with the part of you not providing estimates. Recently I’ve done the initial estimate for projects exclusively between SDM and PMT with no engineers involved. It has been a lot more reliable and it seems that SDEs are very happy to be absolved of this responsibility. This does require SDMs and PMTs with a good amount of experience.

Comment · 5 years ago
Taking that quote at face value, it is shallow and needlessly binary. It’s shallow because it is a truism (paraphrasing, you cannot write bug free software). It is needlessly binary because there is such a thing as the size of your trusted computing base.
Comment · 5 years ago
> But it's not actually booted until the service is up, so it's moot.

With per second billing, fast boot times save money and enable lower fixed capacity, further lowering cost.

Comment · 5 years ago
Starting a daemon on first connect is essential for fast boot times of a system with multiple dependent network services. This is mostly a desktop use case though. Not sure if it can be disabled for servers.
Comment · 5 years ago
Agreed that this line of questioning is not likely to be fruitful. The alternative of discussing the design would have my preference normally, but i am not sure that it works any better for this hyper polarized topic.
Comment · 5 years ago
Care to elaborate? Off the bat, your comment comes across as a cynical rant due to its high use of strong words (garbage, fuck) and lack of examples. And even if you have anecdotes, to be convincing, it would have compare something like bug density to the software projects that collectively replaces. As written, your statement is unlikely to convince anyone that isn’t yet already.
Comment · 5 years ago
If you think that systemd is an ‘enterprise framework of doom’ then you must not have worked in Java enterprise software development.

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