Based on this and your last couple of posts, I can sense you are struggling. Please don't rely on the advice of strangers (mine included).
Some things I would suggest
1. Find someone in real life that you would like to emulate. See if you can talk to them about being mentored or coached regularly.
2. Consult a qualified medical mental-health professional. This is easier said than done. But if you can find the right person it's completely worth the few weeks of effort it would take
3. Consider that your value system might not necessarily be the same as the value systems of the authors of the projects that get on HN front page, or get commented up.
4. We live in increasingly a winner-take-all society. That's not a judgment, it's a matter of fact. The stuff that gets upvoted here gets upvoted more. That means you may be seeing something that's not reflective of the general population
I know this is cliched but be kind to yourself.
PS: If you're LARPing, you have a flair for writing.
Why are there so few Shazam alternatives? Does it have something to do with licensing perhaps? The algorithm itself is fascinating but I don't get why this space seems to have just one player - i.e. Shazam
Maybe I’m missing the point - all these issues are because of various governments’ policies. how could startups possibly address immigration policy problems? I can’t think of any way a startup could e.g. help someone waiting months for a visa appointment.
I have great respect for John Carmack but this feels like a very unnuanced take.
Lead time isn't about "startups", it's about code complexity, side effects and blast radius.
The time it takes to push code when you have 10 use-cases and 1,000 users, is very different from the time it takes to push code when you have 1,000 use-cases but 10,000,000 users. At that scale, it takes A LOT of effort to keep fix times small. It isn't going to occur naturally.
Some times the effort to keep that fix time small may not be worth it, some times it might.
> Unless everyone in the org works the same three days a week in-office
Amazon had a culture of small teams (≤15 people) being somewhat independent. I would imagine that you don't need _the whole org_ there, you just need the whole team there.
My 2c - Prompts are the input that you send to LLMs to get them to give you output. In general LLMs are large black boxes, and the output you get is not always great. The output can often be significantly improved by changing the input. Changing the input usually involves adding a ton of context - preambles, examples, etc.
A lot of the work of prompt rewriting is like boilerplate generation. It is very reusable so it makes sense to write code to generate prompts. Prompt Engine is basically a way of making that prompt rewriting work reusable.
Code Engine seems to be a way of rewriting prompts for LLMs that generate code in response to text prompts
Chat Engine is the same for LLMs that generate chat/conversational responses.
> If you've worked on a large Python or JS codebase, what was it like to work in?
Rife with footguns.
Things broke all the time until we eventually re-added some form of static type checking.
> How did you make small refactors for example?
We'd write tests first to validate that _wrapped_ large chunks of functionality, commit those, then refactor. The key was to write these tests even if the existing code already had "unit tests" because we often found issues this way.
Wayfair is a major player in e-commerce and a very "tech heavy" place. They offer work and salaries that are highly competitive outside of the FAANG bubble. Chewy is another similar company that people often disregard.
E-commerce players in specific verticals (furniture and pet supplies, respectively) are large. We just don't see them because of the absolute fucking behemoth that's Amazon.
I'm genuinely curious if there's a wall this was written on. Does anyone have links to articles/websites that predicted the size and timing of the layoffs?
I can only speak for CS academia and industry. It is very different in the industry.
In my industry jobs, there is a lot of structure. New grads are often given very close direction and very specific tasks to complete for at least 3-6 months. Then over the next 1-2 years what's expected from you becomes less and less clear, gradually, until you can function somewhat independently. A new grad complaining to a skip that they were not given clear tasks was a Major Fail for their manager/TL. Your manager/TL is required to do this for a new grad, or they were dinged.
In my academic life, you had about as much structure as your advisor provided. About half the advisors did have a plan and genuinely cared. The other half just expected their students to figure it out. It's the students of the former that "succeeded" - i.e. went on to do novel meaningful research. The rest either muddled through till something clicked, or quit. A new student couldn't complain to anyone. There was no structure beyond your advisor. Your entire future is basically in the hands of one person.
I think its a distinction between the type of person that says "I want to build a business, I think building product X sounds like a good way to do so" and the type that thinks "I want to build product X, I think building a business sounds like a good way to do so"
My goals from 1-1s are asking for regular feedback and preventing surprises.
I keep a running list of things that I need to talk to my manager about. I pull top 2-3 things off this list for each 1-1. And once a month I talk about career progress. Basically closing "gaps" especially if you're in a BigCo there's often a list of expectations that might be surprising (e.g. must do N interviews) and i'd like to see what I can do to close them.
Things on my list might include
- Things I did that went well, and didn't go well.
- Venting
- Ideas I'd like to bounce off him.
- Things that frustrated me (but dont block me yet) and seeing if he can help.
- Ideas for new things me or my team could do.
- Questions on who I should talk to for X thing.
My golden rule is never, ever use a 1-1 for project status updates. I'll provide one if asked but otherwise this is time for me.
About 15 years ago I was trying to debug a pesky timing issue and couldn't reproduce it.
I wrote a script to capture and replay network traces from Wireshark (then called Ethereal) that included keeping the timings intact. Caught the bug reliably every time.
Based on this and your last couple of posts, I can sense you are struggling. Please don't rely on the advice of strangers (mine included).
Some things I would suggest
1. Find someone in real life that you would like to emulate. See if you can talk to them about being mentored or coached regularly.
2. Consult a qualified medical mental-health professional. This is easier said than done. But if you can find the right person it's completely worth the few weeks of effort it would take
3. Consider that your value system might not necessarily be the same as the value systems of the authors of the projects that get on HN front page, or get commented up.
4. We live in increasingly a winner-take-all society. That's not a judgment, it's a matter of fact. The stuff that gets upvoted here gets upvoted more. That means you may be seeing something that's not reflective of the general population
I know this is cliched but be kind to yourself.
PS: If you're LARPing, you have a flair for writing.