bethly

9 ms·

31.
by bethly 9y ago
This has interesting implications for organizational dynamics: the more you can allow people across the organization to innovate, rather than relying on promotion and formal recognition to pre-pick winners, the more likely the company will
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by bethly 9y ago
This is why Sarah Mei's idea of Livable Code is so exciting to me: it talks about context-dependent quality code, and lets us talk about developing the context needed to move our definition of "quality code" to a more effecti
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by bethly 9y ago
I think we tend to forget this because we so often muddy management and technical work, but management's job is to tell you what to build. You are the professional and it is your job to know how best to build it.
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by bethly 9y ago
It's not even lying: the cycle is red-green-refactor, not red-green-done. Knowing when to extract functionality (and when to inline functionality) is part of our job, not a management concern.
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by bethly 9y ago
Anyone can pitch a tent: building a house is harder. Given that we need a lot of housing and we don't have many home builders, there are a lot of tents floating around this industry.
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by bethly 9y ago
I worked on code that had been in active development for sixteen years, but it only got to be sixteen-year-old code because it was reasonably well-written and maintained. Code quality and developer skill is what lets software become older
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by bethly 9y ago
Any team striving for a perfect architecture rather than building something that works and then seeing where the bottlenecks are isn't focused on "code quality": they are ignoring best practice in favor of intellectual satisf
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by bethly 9y ago
I've had business people tell me I should stop writing tests so I could go faster, even when I'm producing significantly more features than the developers around me who don't write tests. Once you get good at testing, writin
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by bethly 9y ago
Hey, author here! I'd been thinking about how all the advice, discussions and books that have sprung up around white board algorithm interviews makes them seem more inevitable than they actually are. Discussing different kinds of inter
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Tips to Ace a Coding Exercise(blog.ltse.com)
17 points by bethly 9y ago|1 comments
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Silicon Valley meets 'Flash Boys' on new corporate listings program(reuters.com)
2 points by bethly 9y ago|0 comments
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by bethly 9y ago
Even if you don't trust the previous author, you can still use your "go to definition" shortcut and see the real thing: who is it who is coding one file at a time? You shouldn't be considering the implementation details
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by bethly 9y ago
In that they don't think women should have to deal with sexism: damn skippy. Existing in an environment where some people think women should have to deal with sexism sucks. You don't get to be inclusive of both sexists and me, b
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by bethly 9y ago
You can tell my strategies are possibly effective because of all the sexist men in these comments who are apparently deeply concerned that I will never work for them, or perhaps that they might accidentally end up in an organization that is
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by bethly 9y ago
Men of color don't get a pass on sexism, but that particular screening tool isn't effective because of the racism many of them face. The cost to them of publicly supporting marginalized people is higher, whereas it doesn't h
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by bethly 9y ago
I suspect part of the disconnect is that not all the ex-mil folks I've worked with were coming from support units: overall the military still has a lower percentage of women than software development does, and it was even lower when so
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by bethly 9y ago
This comment is an excellent example of why screening for racism is helpful in avoiding working for sexists like this.
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by bethly 9y ago
As David Morrison said, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. "How to signal you are on the side of non-sexists instead of the sexists" is probably a different thread, though: the original poster wanted to know w
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by bethly 9y ago
All of life is tradeoffs. It doesn't matter if people "value" diversity in some abstract sense; it matters how they will value it when it comes into conflict with something else they value. If they can't think of anythi
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by bethly 9y ago
Relatedly, the strategies I've used also change over time. At this point in my career, I rely more on preemptive screening by employers. I list my talks about Cyborg Feminism and Feminist Software Development on my resume, along with
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by bethly 9y ago
That was not my experience working at a defense contractor, and it was obviously not because I do drugs. I haven't found military service a relevant signal for levels of sexism, either positive or negative.
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by bethly 9y ago
Oh, the other thing is that what you are looking for will change over the course of your career. Early on, you need to work with people who can effectively mentor you. Your direct boss and the technical leaders on your team will matter, b
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by bethly 9y ago
Being willing to fire people for "just" sexism is a great sign, and one many Big Name companies fail to manage.
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by bethly 9y ago
I look for existing diversity, and of underrepresented minorities not just gender diversity (IME this is often a better signal.) Especially in upper levels: the % of Software Engineer 1s matters a lot less than the % of architects and tech
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by bethly 9y ago
It's the total, and reflects all shares whether or not they are likely to have vested by then; vesting schedules vary widely, and hopefully are something people will be told about when getting their offer.
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by bethly 9y ago
This tool reflects that profit by assuming a current strike price based on average valuation changes between rounds. Instead of saying that you get the full value of the stock you buy, the calculation takes into account that you also have
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by bethly 9y ago
You can also choose not to exercise and just walk away, in which case the value is still 0. Though I imagine a lot of people would have trouble doing that even if they didn't think the company was doing great.
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by bethly 9y ago
It assumes that the total amount of money raised over all rounds will be $41 million, rather than that the seed round valuation is $40 million. All the investors, whether they came in before or after the employee joined, will still get the
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by bethly 9y ago
Yep! That's part of what changes with the round: we assume a relatively-average dilution of 35% per round.
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by bethly 9y ago
In the worst case, an option is going to be worth 0 and in the best case it's going to be worth > 0, so the value of an option is always positive until the company actually dies. Lottery tickets, unlike options, cost money up front.

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