SirNuke

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (14 children)

Yeah, they kinda suck and they are brutal to go into cold. Having to grind a bunch of leetcode problems is a burden, particularly if you currently have a job and god forbid a family.

I would still take them over the puzzle questions that used to be popular, or the personality test nonsense that dominates most fields. At least Leetcode problems are reasonably reflective of programming skill. I'll also take them over vague open ended questions - ain't nothing more fun than trying to ramble my way into whatever answer the interviewer is secretly looking for.

Personally, when the day comes when I'm In Charge, I plan on experimenting with more day to day type evaluations. I think there's potential for things like performing a mock code review or having someone plan out a sprint based on a very detailed design document. "Here's an icky piece of code, tell me what it does and what you would do to improve it" seems to have fallen out of style, though it's not clear to me why.

That said, like it or not it's how the game is played and not changing anytime soon. Get on the Grind75 train, or don't and keep failing tech screens.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If he's someone that's normally good at being funny - that is good at finding humorous observations and wording things that get people to laugh - then I'd say he's messing with you.

I would mess with him right back by acting like I'm very seriously trying to understanding the joke and ask increasingly dumb questions until he realizes that yes, I knew exactly what he was doing. Or a knowing smirk if that's too much.

(Yes this comment is very revealing about my childhood)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

This might not be what your friend is going for, but I smirked slightly and this is how I interpret it:

I particularly like jokes that take something absurd and launder it through the structure of things that do make sense. Everything in your friend's joke is factually true. It's structured as a logically consistent argument.

And yet it is completely nonsensical. No one has ever thought that windows make something move. It invoked a slightly confused response in me, which is why I found it funny.

It's not a great joke, but I might tell it to feel out someone's sense of humor plus whether they pick up on that I'm doing so. I think the analogy to Windows makes it a weaker joke, but I would give that as an explanation just to mess with someone a little.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm going to assert a few things up front:

  • A company that is struggling to keep its head above water should not be paying 2.5 billion to shareholders. The mechanism - dividends or buybacks - is not the problem.
  • There's a hidden assumption in your first statement. Just because dividends have always existed does not mean they necessary or optimal. I actually don't have an answer to that, only that it is an assumption worth challenging.
  • I'm typing this on an M2 Macbook Air. It is an incredible technical achievement, and creating it provides real tangible value to society in its own small way that wouldn't have existed without Apple. Apple is not struggling.
  • However, Apple has 164,000 Apple Store employees. Apple Stores are part of Apple's successful business strategy, and the retail employees are by extension part of Apple's success. How many of them are paid enough to make their jobs a career? That 14 billion comes out to ~$85k per Apple Store employee.
  • 401(k)s are a terrible way to do retirement, and I say this as someone who has a shot at retiring. Crumbs being chucked at me doesn't change my stance. The stories of people who ran out from nursing home stints or medical bills or whatever are just starting to trickle out.

Since you are reading a lot into my comment I'm going to read a lot into yours. Why are things different now? The rules of the (United States) game changed, and checks against this behavior have been nullified. Value creation is a means to an end: acquire as much power as possible, and flex that to siphon value off for your shareholders.

That's what Unity is doing. They are flexing their power to extract value from its customers. If you use Unity, what are you going to do? Unreal is a different beast with a different target audience. Godot is untested, and I don't blame anyone that hesitates hitching themselves to a noncommercial open source project. Porting a game to a different engine may not even be realistic anyway.

So everyone will stomp their feet and complain and mostly keep on using Unity. Some day they'll push too hard and that'll be the end of them, but what do the shareholders care? They got paid. Onto the next one.

The 11 million is irritating given how it's more than most will make in a lifetime being paid to someone who is incompetent. The 2.5 billion is why Unity is forced to resort to destructive behaviors to stay afloat. The incentives for companies to act this, and lack of checks against it, are why the economy is broken.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (6 children)

From a quick search, John Riccitiello received about 11 million in total compensation in 2022. In comparison:

During the fourth quarter of 2022, we bought 42.7 million shares back at an average price of $35.10 per share. With this buyback, we returned $1.5 billion to shareholders as part of our $2.5 billion share buyback program.

We need to call buybacks what they are: a method of siphoning value from where it was created and is useful and into the hands of the already wealthy.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

More topical references would help if there was a strong commentary aspect to Futurama, but it's never been that kind of show.

The simplest explanation is jokes are the bread and butter of a comedy and they just aren't that great in Hulurama. Having rewatched it recently, Foxurama also leaned heavily on the plot of individual episodes, but so far the plots feel like retreads or just not particularly interesting.

Which now that I think about it, all of this can be said about The Simpsons.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

I'm extremely open to tech stacks and specific industries, though I would die happy if I never had to touch another line of TCL. Go to hell TCL, and take your upvar nonsense with you.

I'm currently between jobs and planning a career shift into a software engineer manager role, so I have been thinking about this quite a bit. A job I would leave - which is really leaving a manager/team, not a company - would rate poorly on these, which I'm polishing into a new "what type of position are you looking for?" answer:

  • A team that works cooperatively, as we accomplish more together than in competition. Everyone should strive to be world class at their roles, as being around that is critical for learning from each other.
  • An environment where clear and open communication is encouraged, including whatever anyone is struggling with.
  • Work that takes on difficult problems and strives to work through them with the highest standards.
  • A position that enables me to grow down my desired career path, which as of this writing means reporting to a software manager who is willing to delegate project management tasks and eventually people management as well.

Something I wouldn't reveal during an interview, though critically important, is a work environment that I can arrange such that it best enables me, and not be boxed in by someone else's conceived ideas of how software engineers should act or work. I've felt like a square peg in a round hole my entire life. Turns out it's a concrete objective fact (ADHD). I am so goddamn tired of feeling bad or apologizing for things that are actually just the scaffolding that I need to survive.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If you are interested in this, also check out Robert Reich's course Wealth & Poverty, which until his recent retirement he taught at Berkley. He's probably best known for being Clinton's secretary of labor, so not just someone who's only taught at universities.

His course goes more into the incentives built into the economy do not merely encourage but effectively require this sort of behavior, among other topics. A key takeaway that resonated with me is the observation that there have always been greedy, bad actors in the economy armed with too much power. It is wrong to simply blame individual companies, or their boards - though don't let them off the hook either.

If at nothing else, it's one of the few investigations of the intersection between economics and power that I've found, and an important subject that otherwise doesn't fit into any particular silo.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

It's easy* to setup Hashicorp Vault with your own CA and do automated cert generation and rotation, if you are willing to integrate everything into Vault and install your root CA everywhere. (*not really harder than any other Vault setup, but yaknow). I may go down this route eventually since I don't think a device I don't control has ever accessed anything I selfhost, or ever will.

I have a wildcard subdomain pointing to my public IP, and forward port 80 to an LXC container with certbot. Port 80 appears closed outside the brief window when certbot is renewing certs. Inside my network I have my PiHole configured to return the local IP for each service.

Nothing exposed to the internet at all. There is a record of my hostnames on Let's Encrypt but not concerned if someone will, say, deduce apollo-idrac is the iDRAC service for a Dell rackmount server called apollo and the other Greek/Roman gods are VMs on it. Seemed like a house of cards that would never work reliably, but three odd years later I only have issues if a DNS resolver insists on bypassing my PiHole. And that DNS resolver is SystemD-ResolveD which should crawl back into whatever hellhole it came out of.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They could hijack your site at any time, but with a copy of your live private certs they (or more likely whatever third party that will invariably breach your domain provider) can decrypt your otherwise secure traffic.

I don't think there's significant real tangible risk since who cares about your private selfhosted services and I'd be more worried about the domain being hijacked, and really any sort of network breach is probably interested in finding delicious credit card numbers and passwords and crypto private keys to munch on. If someone got into my network, spying on my Jellyfin streaming isn't what I'm going to be worried about.

But it is why CSRs are used.

[–] [email protected] 127 points 2 years ago

Friction between Snap and AppArmor is to be expected. The corporate sponsor of Snap, Canonical, is well known for their icy relationship with the corporate sponsor of AppArmor, Canonical.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Not really, but it's consistent with my beliefs in life before and during work as well.

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