> There is just such a disconnect with reality here I am having a hard time thinking the author has done any actual technical recruiting.
There might be a disconnect, but I think it's probably not in the direction you expect.
The vast majority of high-performing engineering teams (good startups, big tech companies) don't hire standard SWEs for specific language/framework expertise. The truth absolutely is that languages are interoperable enough that someone who is smart and understand the underlying principles can get up to speed in a new ecosystem quickly.
It's truly baffling how they manage to consistently make the software worse every single release. I was a huge fan of 1Password many years ago (and have been happy to pay for it throughout), but each successive release is more confusing and less reliable.
The UI isn't all that intuitive, the 'ask to save'/'ask to update' prompts don't work that well, but I don't really blame them because they are injecting into the DOM which usually changes. As someone else mentioned, it's a bit slow to sync and load sometimes. I wish it was more obvious when I have an existing session with the desktop app which can send a token to the browser extension to keep it loaded.
You can tell i'm really reaching for bad things to say about it, haha
The promlem with using apple password management on macos is that I need vertical tabs. Only vivaldi and Firefox provide them now and they don't use the macos key chain
But simpler vertical tabs are on Vivaldi, OmniWeb which had them since the mid 1990s but unfortunately has not kept up with allowing other extensions, Opera used to have them when it was not Chrome. Chrome had them at one stage but reading the issues on that the developers really showed a complete lack of understanding.
Gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up. And yes, the indentation of tabs is actually a good idea.
Although, iOS has tab groups now. I rarely use them because the menu is out of sight so I forget. But on macOS they’re convenient for when I’m researching a topic.
It's a little of both. There's enough woke influence over corporate communication to drive all employees to want to avoid non-inclusive words in docs. At that point, this becomes useful even for employees who don't agree with it—I'd rather just have the word flagged now and fix it instead of going back and forth later.
However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.
You're at Google. You need to do some kind of project that can be called a success -- within one quarter. What do you do?
One possibility, the disastrous effects of which we've seen, is to build Yet Another Incompatible Chat App.
This is another possibility. A very safe one, in a way.
You constantly have to demonstrate that you are "useful, self-directed, and doing important things", in an environment where usefulness and importance are extremely hard to judge, and so become very socially-constructed. It can get pretty brutal -- even if, when you step back and take the long view, it all seems ridiculous.
So when you look at what comes out of these companies, it's useful to remember that. Imagine the horrible games in which their employees have found themselves trapped.
(Money's a hell of a thing. Shame you seem to need so much of it.)
>However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.
No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either. Is anyone worried about that word being "driven out of the language"? I don't think corporate speech is as influential in overall language use as you are implying.
Funny. I remember graduating over 20 years ago. My first job out of University was on a construction site as a supervisory engineer. My direct manager, a crusty old guy, took me aside one day and explained to me the importance and necessity of applying the word "fuck" as part of my role. This was not a joke on his part. He had observed that I was a soft university educated well spoken book type. Nobody who I was supervising was going to take me seriously ever. I never actually applied his advice to the full extent but I did learn to toughen up somewhat .
"Fuck" and "badass" are relatively common in job postings in Utah. I assume it's because people from out of state are worried they'll join a company with a bunch of stiff Mormons so we need a signal to let them know that's not the case. Benefit #1 on the list is beer on Fridays.
Anyway, that's what scares me about this, I like language naturally evolving like it is in the above example, to address a specific communication need. I'm really not a fan of some remarkably privileged people using an insanely powerful company to coerce my language in whatever direction they see fit.
When I Google it, the first result is... your post, and none of the other results include the word.
Adding quotes to "badass" turns up (on the first page) a mechanics job posted in January, four hits for the same CNA job from over a month ago, and one hit for an administrative job, posted this month.
That doesn't seem like a lot of postings, certainly not enough to be considered an outlier.
Of course to verify that I'd have to do fifty Google searches and chart the data, which I don't really want to do...
I think you should, though, so next time you make such a dubious claim, you have the data to back it up. :)
> No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either.
Swear words are specifically used to be provocative, so naturally they're not going to disappear. Words like "motherboard" or "whitelist" were historically neutral and primarily used in professional settings, so removal from corporate speech is correspondingly a much bigger factor.
To be clear, I'm not particularly worried or concerned about this. I don't consider it any great loss if we start saying "allowlist" and have happily changed my projects to match. It's not a big deal, and the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.
It's a perverted version of Pascal's wager, the "You lose nothing by pretend-believing" argument of theologians, but reinvented for an age where social mobs are the new wrathful God. If you stick your neck out and refuse the newspeak, you present a target for Them, you're essentially betting they're too weak to do anything to you, a bet you could either win or lose. But if you comply, then you're safe no matter what the actual influnce The Mob has. The Nash equilibrium is always choosing "COMPLY".
The classic mistake that Pascal and everyone using his argument to argue for their favorite God lies in the simplifying assumption :
- Compliance is cheap, low-risk and fixed-cost relative to taking a stand
Which gets less and less true as the Wrathful God (or His spokespeople) sees you're completely submitting and realizes they can continue making more and more increasingly humiliating demands. Soon enough, you discover you wish you had drawn the red line earlier.
Yeah, I generally either mock them or go into malicious compliance mode. Once they realise I really don't care about losing my job they stop pretending to care about this stuff
“Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech.”
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
> The number of complainants can often be quite small. For centuries, theorists have worried about the potential of unrestrained democracy to lead to a tyranny of the majority, in which majority groups ride roughshod over the rights of minorities. What we often see today is instead a kind of tyranny of the minority: a system in which a particularly extreme and motivated fraction of the populace can wield outsized power in the face of a majority which is either too indifferent or too scared to oppose it.
I don't think there's actually any substantial pushback on the word "motherboard" either. That's not a real thing people are mad about. It seems like Google's AI is just not very good at judging what is considered inclusive or not.
Whitelist/blacklist was a hilarious one since it derives from the light/dark day/night separation found in pretty much every culture on the planet.
It's like, of _course_ early peoples created concepts from "day, when it's light" and "night, when it's dark". It has nothing to do with skin colour or ethnicity at all.
That is just enabling some pretty bad actors in my opinion who don't even care about minorities. People that do care tend to be very flexible about language use.
Not being tolerant here is a pretty clear sign of close mindedness in reality or just a hint of lacking life experience.
If you don't use "fuck" in corporate communication, you're not doing it right. Use swears very sparingly (not in every email or presentation, for sure) and only deliberately for emphasis when you need a little shock. Especially effective when the leadup is really dry.
> there are actually legitimate issues with privacy there
~Every interview process I've gone through required an NDA at some point.
> I mean - I think it's fully legit for people to have a 'broad sense of the state of the company' - and companies should be prepared to speak to it in some way. But not exactly in the way people are asking.
A "sense of how the company is doing" is not anywhere near enough. The company can be doing extremely well and that still doesn't give me any indication what (for example) 10,000 shares are worth.
If a company won't provide at a minimum the percentage your equity grant represents and valuation at last funding round, you should rightfully value stock at $0.
You're talking about two different things, which gives credence to my point that 'interviewee doesn't know what they are asking'.
The 'health of the company' and the 'valuation of you shares' are completely different things.
On your last point: "a minimum the percentage your equity grant represents and valuation at last funding round" - yes, they should probably do that. Because otherwise, the value of that equity could be anything, it's impossible to know what 10 000 shares means.
But that doesn't tell you anything about the company. Private valuations are mostly fantasy.
You'll want to get a sense if the company is healthy, and even 'burn rate' isn't so much the right question, it's probably new customers.
If the company is growing in terms of revenues and customers, it's probably the most positive signal of all not only in terms of stability, but also the actual value of the equity in then i.e. 'if it will be worth something'.
Finally, NDA's are not a very good protection, everything is still 'need to know'.
> You're talking about two different things, which gives credence to my point that 'interviewee doesn't know what they are asking'.
Your position is inconsistent and conceited. If you have actual points, you wouldn't resort to denigrating others.
Especially since you're moving the goal posts, your contribution to this thread is useless. You've swiftly gone from saying employees should scrounge info on funding rounds from the web to admitting employees need to be told info about outstanding equity and valuations.
I hope you're never in a position of hiring for a startup. Anyone with an attitude like yours would chase away quality candidates and only leave clueless rubes behind.
> You'll want to get a sense if the company is healthy, and even 'burn rate' isn't so much the right question, it's probably new customers.
This shows how incredibly uninformed you are. It's easy to acquire many customers by selling $1 for $0.50. It doesn't mean the business is healthy.
I highlight the fact that you did that - which validated my position that 'interviewees won't know specifically what to ask'.
You jumped into the ad hominem.
I have 'hired for startups' in fact several of them, including two Unicorns, and I'm an adviser to others, and I've helped set up a VC fund.
But that's besides the point.
You don't seem to understand the material being presented, but maybe worse, lack the self awareness to recognize that, and possibly have thin skin, all of which are not good attributes for dynamic environments like startups.
You are being deliberately vague with your position and relying on ad hominems.
I'll help you. For each of these questions, do you think it's something employees should be told:
1. How many shares are outstanding and what preferences are included in the cap table?
2. What was the valuation at last raise and when did that round close?
3. What's the burn rate and remaining runway?
4. What are the 6/12/18 month plans for the company? What are the biggest risks and opportunities currently facing the company?
> You don't seem to understand the material being presented
This is a great signal of which companies value their employees or not.
In my experience, all the good startups are transparent in helping employees evaluate equity offers. Ex. all YC companies I interviewed at were happy to share info on outstanding share count, valuations, and even preferred stock.
Meanwhile other lesser startups (often run by finance types) thought I was insane to even ask.
The fixed odds do not guarantee that a certain payout will happen. You seem to have misunderstood how it works. The odds determine the likelihood on any individual roll, not some theoretical "payout per hour."
Slot machines are based on RNGs.
> If each outcome were truly independent, it would be possible for the machine to never pay out
It is possible for a machine to never pay out. That would probably trigger an audit to see if there's a bug, but there is no guarantee that th
This may be jurisdiction dependant, but in the UK, the small prize fruit machine style games you find in pubs are required by law to payout a fixed percentage of their income over time. I believe it's 70%, but I think there are variations and exceptions to the rule.
So if £1000 is paid in during the day, the machine by law must pay out at least £700 in prizes. This is not allowed to be fully random, the odds of each game are not independent because they must by law ensure the minimum payout.
It's semi-common knowledge that the way to win at these machines is to watch them until you have seen someone else have a long losing streak, then take your turn when they leave as the machine is now 'behind' and overdue a payout.
You're right, this actually does vary by jurisdiction. I looked into and was quite surprised that the UK allows something called "compensated game control" to adjust the odds dynamically so the observed payout matches the expected one. [0]
Nevada has the opposite rule: machines must only incorporate chance when paying out and the theoretical payout is what the gaming commission analyzes. They can't dynamically adjust odds to favor a preferred payout. [1]
It actually makes me feel incredibly optimistic. Nothing snaps me out of a depressive episode as effectively as contemplating the scale of the universe.
On a cosmic scale, all my problems are miniscule. Everything that we as a species worry about, from petty politics to global warming, is likewise insignificant.
My heart soars at the vast potential of our universe.
There might be a disconnect, but I think it's probably not in the direction you expect.
The vast majority of high-performing engineering teams (good startups, big tech companies) don't hire standard SWEs for specific language/framework expertise. The truth absolutely is that languages are interoperable enough that someone who is smart and understand the underlying principles can get up to speed in a new ecosystem quickly.