Very relatable. I still recall when our team at Microsoft, about 20 years ago, had a dedicated "build engineer" who would be given the task to create a new branch for the product. He would disappear for a few days and re-emerge with the announcement that a new branch had been officially created and was ready to be used. Hard to imagine that in git world.
When I went back to Perforce I was reminded of why that was a thing. You're making a full copy of everything. They recently introduced a virtual copy stream, but I remember people advising against using it, for reasons I can no longer remember. It seemed like a potentially sensible approach.
Couldn't agree more. I wonder why the company stalled as much as it did. To be fair they've been around for three decades, maybe it's just hard to keep momentum for that long, especially if you're in a dominant position with no competition coming after you.
Thank you! It was a bit of culture shock for me when I first experienced it, coming from the world of business software, and I figured others would find it equally fascinating to learn more about.
We had to use Perforce (Helix Core Cloud) at my last game studio, and it is the de facto industry standard that most of your creative staff is already familiar with. The programmers don't love it, but they don't rule the roost in games. It's also the safe, verified default for working with Unreal Engine 5.
It does show its years though. We were one of the first users of the Perforce cloud offering, as we were small and didn't want to self-host ourselves, but it was a bit of a rickety experience. You had to register an Azure account in order to be able to access the service, and you had to ask support to modify things like triggers. Coming from the world of GitHub and other SaaS products, you could tell it was an attempt to retrofit an older model into a new skin.
The Git LFS path has some unofficial support as well, but you are on your own when things go poorly. Epic doesn't provide much help there.
Competition in this space is welcome, especially if they're planning to make it fully officially supported by the Engine.
Looking forward to reading this. Still have a signed copy of The Lean Startup from an event in Seattle from 15 years ago. The book had a big part in pushing me towards doing my own lean startup just a year later, so, thank you.
I own two Glove80s, but for me the ultimate split keyboard with a thumb cluster was the Dygma Defy, of which I now own a pair as well. Couldn't recommend it enough. https://dygma.com/pages/defy
> Another reason is that on the supply side, nobody wants to sign up to do a bunch of free work just to be rejected. If you just put up work, the candidates incur all the risk, meaning they walk away with nothing if you don’t hire them.
It's true, but prepping for a typical senior+ onsite loop in big tech still requires weeks of grinding leetcode, re-learning the latest system interview questions and the system interview answer framework, refreshing and rehearsing STAR stories, studying the company and its unique quirks that you're expected to know to pass the culture filter, remembering how to do all of this speedrun-style since you only get 40ish minutes per session, etc.
While that knowledge is more reusable across onsites, it's likely even more work than doing real or pretend-work for the company for a couple of days.
> When candidates get to walk away with something of lasting value that they can keep forever
I'm curious why them getting rejected from the position, even with the work sample they can carry away with them, wouldn't be still interpreted as a negative from future employers. "The other co passed on them, am I the fool for thinking they're good?" type of herd mentality which is often unavoidable.
Won't that "work sample guest book" be treated as the list of all companies that rejected you, a net negative for your personal brand you're projecting?
> (Me paraphrasing what Steve was implying) Take-homes are impacted by AI one-shotting them for candidates
I've been pleasantly surprised by how much you can glean from having the candidate upload their conversation log with the coding agent for whatever take-home you give them.
Author here. A collection of personal experiences of working with business co-founders and CEOs as an early stage CTO in the Bay Area VC-backed world. Hope it's useful to others in the role who want to maximize their chance of success in this critical partnership.
This is great stuff, walking the reader through your thought process was helpful for me as a developer to grok why yolobox was designed this way. I ended up landing in the "just make a local copy, don't get fancy" world myself after many iterations of workflows. Separate agents, separate containers, separate ports, that all resonates.
You mention this approach gobbling up a bunch of extra disk space as a consequence of the tradeoffs. Have you considered using APFS cloning on macOS to reduce some of that burden, or is that too tiny of an optimization to be worth it at this point?
So hard to say in abstract without knowing more. I always wonder if this is something you can fix through process and habits, or if this is something you just need to feel intensely first, and only then will the right behaviors will emerge.
For example, if you're feeling comfortable and handsomely compensated at your current job, and you have the sense of security that you'll keep being hired forever, why would you burn the midnight oil and go the extra mile? Is your lifestyle going to change at all if you get to that next level? You might work longer hours, experience more anxiety and stress, and get barely any upside in return.
My hunch is that the human brain is efficient. It won't make you work any harder than you need to if you have obtained the thing you already want.
Maybe the real question here is whether you truly desire to be this aspirational high-performer, or if that's an idea you're romanticizing, something you feel you should aspire to, but you don't genuinely crave it. You end up fighting between the idealized you and the practical you. Which may explain why you're burning out and losing steam eventually, you can only force yourself to do something you don't feel like doing for so long before the body rebels.
The paragraph was supposed to be descriptive of what one sees in the field, not prescriptive of what managers should do. I can see that it doesn't obviously read that way. Will edit, thank you for the feedback.
Hey Tikhon! The Haskell thing was such a great way to filter for interesting frontier people back in the day, as we both experienced. That was a contrarian bet at the time, but it paid off handsomely for at least a few of us. The number of people we'd get to interview was only a fraction of the broader population, but it felt like 30-50% of the people we would talk to were awesome fits.
I've often heard the idea that you can always teach someone how to code, but you can't teach them to want to be great at it.
At the same time, I think there's a limit to how great someone can get even with a lot of experience. We see that with sports, there's probably a similar limit to cognitive activities too.
You can probably get the average, already smart person, to be a pretty good 8/10 on just about anything, be that music, math, writing, coding. But there are levels beyond that may require natural wiring that most of us just aren't born with. An extreme example of course, but there's no amount of experience I can acquire to get to a von Neumann level of genius, but fortunately we don't need that to build business web apps.
It's perhaps a little reminiscent of stock picking. Everybody wants the best deal they can get away with, everybody wants to get lucky, occasionally you find alpha with "one weird trick", but it turns out you just got lucky, and you regress to the mean eventually.
And of course the evergreen Housing Theory of Everything https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...