Polar opposite of my experience. To achieve the technical equivalent of changing a lightbulb, spend the entire day wrangling a dozen tools which are broken in different ways, maintained by teams that no longer exist or have completely rolled over, only to arrive at the finish line and discover we don't use those lightbulbs anymore. Move things and break fast.
IMO there's a mix of a few really good, widely used, well-supported tools as well as a long tail of random tiny tools where the original team is gone that are cruftier.
Yeah 100%. I found it immensely frustrating to be using tools with no community (except internally), so-so documentation, and features that were clearly broken in a way that would be unacceptable for a regular consumer product. If you have a question or error not covered by an internal search or documentation, good luck, you'll need it. Literally part of the reason I left the company.
People probably think you’re exaggerating but it’s true. Sometimes when I would get blocked the suggestion was to “read the source code” or “submit a fix” on some far flung internal project. Huge fucking waste of time and effort, completely unserious.
That’s how open source already works by default. The difference is if an OSS tool is broken my boss doesn’t imply landing a fix is my responsibility on top of my regular job duties.
> being able to land a diff to fix the issue is awesome imo.
yes, if its a one off. but for my last project that would involve spinning up many "XFNs" (multi-team chat fests) to argue that actually they don't want to have that change because of reason x,y and z.
At which point you just give up and make a stupid fucking hack.
So much is not about engineering excellence, its about trying to get people to accept change.
Doesn't sound like your type of company tbh, the flipside is that a "serious" company will often have broken bs too except now nobody is going to look at your contribution/fix.
Yes lmao, the number of times I would start off on some nominally useful task only to find out 3 weeks later that there is actually already a solution to that created by team XYZ that nobody in my reporting chain has ever heard of…(3 weeks was optimistic case, I remember my team member getting like 2 months in to some new data pipeline before finding out some tables already existed that did what he needed…)
Welcome to meta! where everything is a murder mystery.
Except you're not really sure if there has been a murder, or sometimes you wonder if you're the murderer, because at every turn you're told that you've been a bad dev for trying x,y and z
Same as Google. Many internal tools have painful interfaces and poor or documentation because the hiring bar was high and it was acceptable to assume that the user's skill level is high enough to figure it out. That attitude becomes a bigger problem when trying to sell tools to the public (e.g. Google Cloud Platform).
As an outsider, I was always under the impression that Google had a tradition of engineering excellence (robust tools, clean and while tested code following strict guidelines), while Meta has more of a Hacker culture (move fast and break things).
Agreed. I often get my work done using open source build instructions and tools and then when everything works I port it to internal infra. Other people are the opposite though, which for open source based code bases has a nasty side effect of the work having no upstream able tests!
But you're both talking about different things. The tools are both often left in disuse, lacking documentation, etc. But they also have a really tight integration with each other that allows for unparalleled visibility and ability over enormous systems with many moving parts.
The point is that some arbitrary number of weeks of vacation isn't the business-destroying choice this founder makes it out to be. Use your PTO. You earned it.
It depends on how important you are. If you are the director of sales, software architect, or something like that, it can be business destroying; particularly if some unforeseen emergency happens. An example is a new big client is suddenly requiring something happen before signing a contract and everyone needs to be on deck for that to happen.
If you are one of 100 CSRs, then it wouldn't be business-destroying obviously.
Any serious business needs to have a continuity plan and can't depend on availability of a single person. What if the person you depend on will have a medical emergency or resign?
Business owners can take this risk but using "don't take more than 2 weeks of PTO" as a risk mitigation strategy is disingenuous and disrespectful to their employees.
Startups running lean, which is what you need to do in order to maximize runway, don't have the money or time for "continuity plans".
Haven't you ever joked about the "bus factor"? All the startups I've worked at would have likely failed if any one of the core people had to depart, for any reason.
I've yet to see a job where hiring a new employee is more efficient than letting one have off 3 weeks instead of 2. There is a really good chance that a new employee wouldn't be working yet before they've returned.
I gave a measured reply given what the poster provided.
"Unbelievable nonsense" is a pretty harsh response. If they are working for a 10-person business burning cash, that is very different than a profitable 1,000-person one.
The poster asked about etiquette. Personally, I'd be offended as a founder or employee at a 10-person company if someone asked for 3 weeks off at the last minute.
It's significantly weakening one of the US's greatest geopolitical enemies for a small fraction of the US defense budget.
Even if you don't care about the US's geopolitical aims and want to reduce the defense budget, eliminating Russia as a military threat is the best justification for reducing the defense budget and stabilizing European democracy.
Russia is not a military threat though. It has an economy the size of Italy. Three US states each have bigger economies than Russia. The US blew past it on every level militarily, technologically, and economically decades ago.
Can you or someone else explain what they liked about Microserfs? I read it after hearing a recommendation for it somewhere online, but it didn’t really connect for me.
I’m young enough that I don’t have any personal knowledge of the time period to compare it with, so maybe I’m missing a nostalgia angle.
I don’t doubt that it is a great book, it just didn’t grab me for whatever reason.
and this is exactly why its not. I think we can all agree that the hollywood idea of competent people behind the scenes in positions of power has been proven wrong again and again. Any 4d chess move is the accidental consequence of a move so dumb that it becomes unimaginable to us.
