• 327 Posts
  • 515 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • i interpreted the “trend” correctly, “devops” was bastardized away from its original meaning to now mean “sysadmin”, at least in most cases.

    I don’t think I agree. The role of a sysadmin involved a lot of hand-holding and wrangling low-level details required to keep servers running. DevOps are something completely different. They handle specific infrastructure such as pipelines and deployment scripts, and are in the business of not getting in the way of developers.



  • Every job lately seems to have been infected by Meta/google “data driven” leadership. Its so painful and wasteful sometimes.

    It’s cargo cult mentality. They look at FANGs and see them as success stories, and thus they try to be successful by mimicking visible aspects of FANG’s way of doing things, regardless of having the same context or even making sense.

    I once interviewed for a big name non-FANG web-scale service provider whose recruiter bragged about their 7-round interview process. When I asked why on earth they need 7 rounds of interviews, the recruiter said they optimized the process down from the 12 rounds of interviews they did in the past, and they do it because that’s what FANGs do. Except FANGs do typically 4, with the last being an on-site.

    But they did 7, because FANGs. Disregard “why”.


  • In the 2010s, the mindset at tech giants seemed to be that they had to hire the best developers and do everything they could to keep them.

    Not really. The mindset was actually to hire skilled developers just to dry up the market, so that their competitors would not have skilled labour to develop their own competing products and services.

    Then the economy started to take a turn for the worse, and these same companies noted that not only they could not afford blocking their competitors from hiring people but also neither did their competitors. Twice the reasons to shed headcount.

    It was not a coincidence that we saw all FANGs shed people at around the same time.





  • I develop professionally in C and C++. No they aren’t. At all. C and C++ are so loaded with footguns it’s a surprise people can get anything done in them without triggering UB.

    The way you parrot undefined behavior is a telltale sign you do not work with either C or C++. If you had any cursory first-hand professional experience with either one of those languages, you’d understand what UB is, why writing your code by laying unfounded expectations on UB is actually either a bug or design error on your behalf, you’d know that for a decade or so there are tooling that throws warnings and errors if you inadvertently use it, and above all UB only means frameworks are ultimately responsible to specify the behavior that is left purposely undefined.




  • A comment on the YouTube video makes a good point that we already have a better word for the concept of dealing with multiple things at once: multitasking.

    I don’t think that’s a good comment at all. In fact, it ignores fundamental traits that separate both concepts. For example, the concept of multitasking is tied to single-threaded task switching whereas concurrency has a much broader meaning, which covers multi threaded and multiprocess execution of many tasks that may or may not yield or be assigned to different cores, processors, or even nodes.

    Meaning, concurrency has a much broader meaning that goes well beyond “doing many things at once”. Such as parallelism and asynchronous programming.


  • Do we really need a video about this in 2024? Shouldn’t this be already a core part of our education as software engineers?

    I’m not sure what point you tried to make.

    Even if you believe some concept should be a core part of the education of every single software engineer who ever lived, I’m yet to meet a single engineer who had an encyclopedic knowledge of each and every single topic covered as a core part of their education. In fact, every single engineer I ever met only retained a small subset of their whole curriculum.

    So exactly what is your expectation?