pjlegato

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361.
by pjlegato 10y ago
A company that bills themselves as a reliable, highly available disaster handling tool ought to know better than to have a single point of failure anywhere in its infrastructure. Specifically, they shouldn't have all of their DNS hoste
362.
by pjlegato 10y ago
"Challenges" is exactly the sort of Dilbertesque euphemism that you should never say in a situation like this. Calling it a "challenge" implies that there is some difficult, but possible, action that the customer could t
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by pjlegato 10y ago
They do, but way less than a human employee (or else they wouldn't use the machines.)
364.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Rather, you don't get a discount for using the self-checkout. The price you are paying has the cost of a human cashier built into it. If you use self-checkout, you're providing that service yourself for free, but the company still
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by pjlegato 10y ago
The part about costs was not in the article... the old, lower prices, were already well above our costs. Now they're even higher than our costs.
366.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Exactly. They have a huge VC war chest, and they deliberately set out to lose money on every sale for years, just to gain market share, in the hopes that their competitors will go out of business before they run out of money. Of course, the
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Why we raised our SaaS prices(medium.com)
47 points by pjlegato 10y ago|6 comments
368.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Great, I love that this worked out! What's the purpose of backfilling jobs from StackOverflow -- is it just to make the site look less like a ghost town? Aren't those not necessarily old-geek friendly jobs?
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by pjlegato 10y ago
The "state actor" is Ecuador: http://www.wsj.com/articles/wikileaks-says-state-party-disru...
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by pjlegato 10y ago
Er. Again? When was the media ever honest? At least they pretend to be so now. Traditionally, newspapers were not terribly concerned with that, and didn't even bother much to hide this fact. It's actually better than it's eve
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by pjlegato 10y ago
They are betting that there exist people who are capable of performing that work who cannot work at a hedge fund, for whatever reason. Perhaps they live in the wrong location -- it's hard/impossible to get a quant job if you don&#
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by pjlegato 10y ago
This is a false dilemma. Npm-level programming and being able to rewrite the whole operating system from scratch are not the only two options.
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by pjlegato 10y ago
Then the article should be mostly about how he built the music blog, rather than eliding over that in a sentence.
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by pjlegato 10y ago
There's a vast middle ground between stringing together npm and rewriting the TCP stack. Most jobs that exist today fall firmly in that middle ground. Trying to find the TCP stack engineer to build your app is like hiring a petrochemic
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by pjlegato 10y ago
And then, the world developed robust, well-maintained, open source libraries that do all of that for you. Now, in 99% of commercial software engineering, you don't actually need to know any of those details, in the same sense that you
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by pjlegato 10y ago
This well illustrates the problem with "CS Trivia" style interviewing. It's billed as "exploring your background and how you think, not quizzing you for specific answers," but almost always devolves into an adversar
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by pjlegato 10y ago
I'm not sure that capitalism as such has much to do with the problem you describe, as anyone who ever went to a Soviet emergency room will be happy to tell you.
378.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Partially. It's also about perceptions. People who are having a problem love to believe that there is a magic silver bullet solution out there somewhere -- one that will let them have to do a lot less work than the Old Way. It also mak
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by pjlegato 10y ago
The opposite of "not invented here syndrome" is "the new shiny." In this condition, organizations culturally select new tools over older ones simply because they are new, get a lot of buzz among a certain userbase, and
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by pjlegato 10y ago
Drat, I knew someone would say that. Thwarted again.
381.
by pjlegato 10y ago
I admit I have never interviewed at Google. I have interviewed at a number of companies that use the "CS trivia" style interview process. I got some of these jobs and didn't get others. In the cases where I didn't get
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by pjlegato 10y ago
I never told any company how they should conduct their interviews. Google is of course free to spend their money however they see fit. This was not written for the benefit of Google, but for the benefit of the many others who are considerin
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by pjlegato 10y ago
No, I don't work there. I didn't study CS in school (much less attend the elite CS schools they are selecting for) and I don't have months to study fulltime to cram for the CS trivia challenge that you need to do to get throu
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by pjlegato 10y ago
Sure, I'll provide you with a letter of introduction to that effect. I agree that philosophy degrees are mostly useless -- but they are occasionally quite useful for refuting a condescending troll at a party or on the Internet.
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by pjlegato 10y ago
His snotty attitude made me disinclined to engage further and answer directly, though I did provide a general reference to where to find the answer.
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by pjlegato 10y ago
Well said. If I ever did actually have to implement a red/black tree or a TCP stack for my job as a software engineer (which has somehow never come up yet), I wouldn't do it by standing at a whiteboard racking my brain for the det
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by pjlegato 10y ago
Not at all. I love abstract computer science. I find it very interesting. The point is that the job of "software engineer" is not the same as the job of "computer science professor." The required skill profiles are almos
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by pjlegato 10y ago
Yes, that is true. A tiny percentage of Google engineers build new languages. If you're hiring someone to write a compiler, say, then it is absolutely appropriate to ask interview questions about compiler design. The point is that that
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by pjlegato 10y ago
I've seen the reverse: many companies are adopting CS trivia style interviews just because Google does it. They figure Google is the best of the best in software, so you can't go wrong by adopting as many of their practices as p
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by pjlegato 10y ago
Their interview doesn't select for "ability to figure things out" at all. It selects for "ability to memorize and regurgitate academic CS curriculum on demand." I'm sure many people who can do that are also goo

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