winter-day

The current CTO of a publicly traded company had my entire engineering team rewrite an <anonymized internal tool>. Mind you, the current generation of the <anonymized internal tool> is completely fine, and in fact a massive improvement from our 1st and 2nd gen version. About a year into that completely useless project, the CTO lays off 2/3 of the team (including the original authors), reorgs another team into our team, and the latest gen <anonymized internal tool> is a complete pile of trash. I left the team a few months ago when I realized it wasn't worth the head ache of dealing with the terrible CTO, the literal human centipede which is the leadership chain, and the sales bro turned product manager.

if you don't think FAANGs (and most companies) participate in "exploitative business" you should find out how your iphone was made (hint: lots of exploited workers).

while I agree with the sentiment, as an Indian, I hope this doesn't happen in India. countries which typically do this mechanical turk-like work typically don't raise themselves out of poverty (esp. Philippines, Indonesia, etc.). If anyone wants a specific example, I lead an aspect of web crawling for a FAANG and then other public companies. Over the last 10 years we heavily used those offshore teams, aforementioned, to do sanity checks/labeling, etc. Now, we have initiatives with GPT APIs which perform just as well for pennies on the dollar we spent offshore - and the offshore team that's been loyal for years? They're getting cut.

Most things in america are paid ads in disguise: these posts, blogs by mckinsey/bcg/big 4 accounting firms, news is often a paid ad/agenda in disguise. You're honestly better off spending time with your family and developing a small hobby. ~ musings from a late 30s guy

I'm an extremely strong believer that the sun has consciousness. I think there exists quantum processes that causes consciousness and that suns, gravitons, etc. all have it. I likely won't be alive to ever find out, but if someone does discover it, I hope a historian finds this thread :)

As a parent, I'm equally ashamed. We're probably moving our family to europe/dubai in the next decade. The quality of my wife and my education abroad was substantially better than what we've experienced in "blue ribbon schools" in california.

The sankey diagrams here are interesting, and a trend I haven't experienced, but have seen mentioned on /r/cscareerquestions quite frequently. As a Cal grad, cold applications have always worked for me, but it seems OP and newer grads are having a tougher time. I'm curious if Cal/top university grads are getting the recycling bin from cold applications as well (I also have 15+ yoe now, but it's never been an issue).

Also for new grads, the best advice I can give you: join a fortune 500 company. Startups are extremely cut throat and volatile, esp. in this environment where everything is under scrutiny, interest rates are high, etc. If you can get into a FAANG, Pintrest, xyz and climb the ladder, it's likely better than being taken advantage of at a startup - which I've seen more often times than not.

fun fact for the older HN community: The CSU system has a distance learning system (esp. SJSU), if you're interested in learning something new for fun - it's a great resource. I've used it over the last couple of years and am contemplating getting a masters from here as well.

Are CSUs academic powerhouses? No. Are they still great for learning upper division physics, chemistry, and math at an affordable price? Absolutely.

I honestly cannot understand why crypto exists - and i'm repulsed by everyone I know in that field who works at companies like solano, etc.

Congrats! My career has also revolved around PDF generation (once for federal compliance at large companies, second for scrubbing data from PDFs for HIPAA compliance and then generating a new pdf based on the scrubbed data). I think I've seen your tool around, I ended up creating a workflow that generated LateX scripts then converted them to pdfs, and the second a python library. The most difficult aspect for our tools was formatting - the pdfs were generally 60-100 pages and tables could show up anywhere and break the page/formatting. Quite curious to see how your company will grow, good luck!

we should have Brian Johnson reporting back to us shortly

joined a friend's startup that went through TechStars NYC. We both lost a lot of respect for each other, and I'm happy I didn't commit to staying on longer. The product is vaporware, propped up because their parents have good connections in the venture capital space, and the founders are acting exactly as clueless as what rich kids with a $XX million funding round would behave.

I worked at twilio when they were a series B company and Jeff personally did the on boardings. I think it was the only company I've worked at where I felt that every engineer was a super star. I've followed their career since then, and they've gone on to do phenomenal work. My opinion is that they had very weak leadership below the C-suite. We brought on one of the founders of skype, and after having lunch with him all I could think is how good he is at talking and how little value he'll deliver. I felt the same about the core engineering managers, and they went on to screw over a lot of the early talent - that now thrives at top companies. Regardless, Jeff was amazing. He was the sweetest guy and use to throw bbqs at his home. How fast the years go by.