ditonal

13 ms·

91.
by ditonal 6y ago
It may be a fact that the Google spokeperson said that, but parroting it without any context does seem to imply you have trust in Google. I don’t think that’s an unfair take on what you posted. Google has eroded a ton of trust over the year
92.
by ditonal 6y ago
I have no idea how Stripe became the low paying non prestigious startup job in this conversation. They are a big prestigious company that pays a ton and is soon to IPO. I actually consider Stripe to be FAANG as far as the original acronym w
93.
by ditonal 6y ago
I bought a house in San Francisco a year ago and it’s estimate has gone up 100k. I rarely see needles unless I get pho in the Tenderloin, which is the neighborhood that some people seem to think is the only one in the city. SF is the most b
94.
by ditonal 6y ago
Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.
95.
by ditonal 6y ago
Google’s minister of misinformation Laszlo Bock explained it at TGIF as 1) Google did nothing wrong because 2) Outbound recruiting has no effect 3) So execs just spent a ton of time working out a complicated arrangement to prevent outboun
96.
by ditonal 6y ago
Feels like every week someone here is touting the idea of ADHD meds being this solution, all these people are just undiagnosed, there’s an unfair stigma against, and I feel compelled to bring up that I bought into that thinking, got a legit
97.
by ditonal 6y ago
One reason for that is way more variability in developer compensation. A company hiring a senior SWE in SF might be paying 130k or 400k. But until recently there wasn’t much transparency. My buddy is a nurse in Bay Area with a CRNA, it’s pr
98.
by ditonal 6y ago
One of the reasons I find your story relevant is that advice-pieces like the OP kind of assume a ton of factors are in place that are actually often largely out of your control. It kind of paints this clear career trajectory path for engine
99.
by ditonal 6y ago
Totally agree, and let's also mention Stack Overflow and the plentiful learning resources on Youtube etc. In 2000, I was a teenager trying to learn C++ and the Win32 API, and when I got stuck I got really stuck. These days, the amount
100.
by ditonal 6y ago
That's fair, but before I spent a lot of time in industry, I thought most tech entrepreneurs were genius engineer/business types. I was shocked that a LOT of startup founders are well-connected rich kids who have no skills or abil
101.
by ditonal 6y ago
I could not agree more. In many technical interviews, they want to talk about "scalability", using fancy big data software for horizontal scalability etc But I also know from experience that many, many of these problems would be m
102.
by ditonal 6y ago
Respectfully this is awful advice, as someone who’s worked at FAANG and early stage startups. The idea that working for early stage startups will help you start your own is a myth propagated intentionally by founders/VCs to recruit SWE
103.
by ditonal 6y ago
To his point about finding undiscovered talent, VCs are obsessed with finding people they can underpay via selling them on their “vision” and “impact”. They claim they can’t compete with Google and Facebook on comp, but the truth is they do
104.
by ditonal 6y ago
Thank you so much for saying this. Bipolar disorder is badly misunderstood by the general population, but one of the most common misconceptions is that mania is the opposite of depression and therefore good. For me, mania was hell on earth.
105.
by ditonal 6y ago
It's very common for people on HN to tout the benefits of their ADHD diagnosis and I feel compelled to point out that getting on ADHD meds was one of the worst mistakes of my life. They triggered a manic episode. The psychiatrist solut
106.
by ditonal 6y ago
It's not an apt descriptor at all because there's no test for a normal range of a chemical that depressed people are outside of.
107.
by ditonal 6y ago
What’s frustrating to me is clearly you’ve spent 10+ years on the industry, worked at big cos like Google and startups, passed Google onsite twice, and still got rejected by all those companies. Which would be fine if industry execs weren’t
108.
by ditonal 6y ago
In 2020, free speech is most often attacked under three false premises: 1. "It's a private company, they can deplatform whoever they want!" This is obviously true to an extent, but as all communication is increasingly dominat
109.
by ditonal 6y ago
The difficulty of all that stuff on plain old Linux is overstated and the difficulty of doing that on K8s is understated. And I agree with grandfathers point that if you don’t understand how to do that on plain old Linux you will struggle o
110.
by ditonal 6y ago
Walkouts will achieve nothing, but the tragic part of the story is Silicon Valley engineers are sitting on a massive amount of power to affect real change IF they collectively organize, which they have various irrational hang ups about doin
111.
by ditonal 7y ago
Many people are upset I called antidepressant placebo. It’s obviously a huge discussion out of the scope of this thread. But keep in mind that companies make a ton of money selling SSRIs and _still_ have trouble differentiating results from
112.
by ditonal 7y ago
I largely agree with all the advice here. I dropped out of college due to depression, then I torched my tech career with a manic episode that led me straight from a FAANG SWE job to an involuntary psych ward patient for a month, which was f
113.
by ditonal 7y ago
I got interested in programming in 2000 and graduated with a CS degree in 2009. Throughout the 2000s (remember this was post-dot com) I got told software was a bad field to get into for two reasons: 1) The advent of advanced tooling would m
114.
by ditonal 7y ago
Startup ISOs are totally broken, and VCs and founders would rather write 30 page treatises on all their complexities (of course, glossing over the 99 ways to screw employees), than actually try to improve them. A small percentage of people
115.
by ditonal 7y ago
Why do people on HN constantly claim that companies are right to consider “a false negative is better than a false positive”, act like insane interview gauntlets are normal and desired, AND claim that people can easily change jobs? It’s not
116.
by ditonal 7y ago
First of all Google affects a lot more than just the USA and while HQed in the USA is in many ways an international company. Secondly, even if you take a US centric view of things, just because someone at the Pentagon claims something is th
117.
by ditonal 7y ago
Well, I admit I'm biased because I started taking ADHD meds and then had a manic/psychotic episode, that involved me getting involuntarily committed to a psych ward and burning all my career bridges, and also got diagnosed with he
118.
by ditonal 7y ago
The other favorite arguments are, "if we don't do <unethical> thing, someone else will, therefore it's ethical". I call it the "selling crack to teenagers" argument but it was the go-to by Google employee
119.
by ditonal 7y ago
Founders want employees to have the founder mentality without giving them founder equity. AngelList (which this author is shilling) salaries and equity grants are pathetically low. So they write fluff pieces about how you’ll learn so much d
120.
by ditonal 7y ago
I had a psychotic break and almost torched my career and I had a similar epiphany that emotional stability trumps everything. My only critique is if you frame emotional stability as a foundation to achieve all these other ambitions then to

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