Leadership positions like that mean doing a whole other set of stuff that feels like "not-work" if work has always meant personally, directly moving a product forward. Those meetings you always hated because they killed your productivity? Now they are your productivity. Sitting at your desk and can't think of a single thing to do that anyone's likely to care about? Try not to look like you're relaxing, but relax. You did your thing. Doing more now would be doing worse at your job because you're probably going to be annoying and slowing down the people doing the work. Maybe shoot off an email to someone else to see if you can get a chain going, just to keep up visibility. I mean, you can just "lead" a meeting (to be clear, this is actually valuable when done well!) and come out of it feeling like you contributed nothing at all, but guess what? You just did your job. Shit, sometimes just telling two other people to go talk, without you, and tell you what they come up with, is your job!
IME the weirdest thing about those sorts of middle- to upper-management software positions is that almost all the actual work feels like slacking or time-filler you might do when too burnt out to do real work, until you get used to it. Write up some proposals for something, write some specs or go over some stories with someone. Get some face-time with a stakeholder to go over some feature, propose some new ones. Talk timeline with some manager. Coach sales on the product. It is actual work that someone wants to be done, but to me (and I suspect to OP) it feels like you're no longer doing any work at all, you're just, like, someone who hangs around the people doing the work and chats with folks.
Yet (in most orgs—perhaps not FAANG) you are better-respected (you can feel this in meetings, it's incredibly weird at first) and better-compensated than you would be as a developer.
And then the Google pedigree thing is obvious. Youngish startups with a little money just starting to build their team past "a co-founder and these two recent grads" are hungry to get FAANG alums into leadership. I don't know whether that's a good thing for them to care about—maybe it is—but they do seem to show a very strong preference for them.
The FAANG and similar interviews are designed—one hopes, anyway, because if they're trying to do something else they've screwed up—to select for some combination of decent-or-better IQ and having put in enough work to prep for their tests using, yes, online exercises and some books, with the set of things one needs to study being fairly large but also very well-known. There are lists all over the place, including one sort-of famous guide someone put on Github, outlining what you need to study, and where to study it.
Basically they want you to be at least semi-smart in a raw general intelligence sense, and to really want the job and have put in the work to get it. Whatever their reasons for this, it will almost certainly have the effect of making a successful candidate value the offer more and think more highly of their co-workers, for the same reason that e.g. initiation (hazing) rituals or costs tend to improve group cohesion. Perhaps this is why they do it.
I am not kidding: you are all set to be CTO or dev lead (mind: only if there’s actually a team so you don’t have to do much development) at some late-early stage funded startup, that wants a long-time Google alum on their staff, in leadership. Without even a change in your work ethic. Not even slightly a joke.
If they'd even make some sub-brand explicitly for "shit we're serious about and promise we'll continue to invest in for a really long time"—and then actually stick by that—it'd go a long way. I think it's having no reliable indicator of their level of seriousness or commitment to a given product or service that's the main source of irritation for people. It's all just "Google" and who knows what the hell that means, this time.
Don't forget that they value new ways of spying on users at a non-zero dollar amount, and probably intended to slap ads all over the interface (maybe—maybe—not the games themselves) to make up the difference, or at least were holding that possibility in reserve in case it was needed or they just wanted to kick returns up a notch later (I'd be shocked if it didn't come up in any "decks" used to sell the project internally).
I'm not sure how it is in other countries, but at least here in the US there's this cultural tendency to want to crush anyone who's made any kind of mistake, or even made the right decision but happened by chance to have had something go wrong in a way that could have been avoided with a different decision, if they can be blamed for it, but also to accept paper-thin excuses for why a person who might be held responsible can't, in fact, be blamed for it, and once blame has been so laundered enough times we just forget about the whole thing. It's completely weird, really expensive, and ethically gross. And it's present at every level of our society, just about everywhere.
That'd all go for about 80% of my exposure to same, can confirm. Doltishness and lack of self-awareness re: the same sorts of things the consult on for others were especially surprising to me.
> The other thing management consultants do is industrial espionage -- they go into a company to learn how it work, and then advise other companies on how "industry leaders" operate.
This one doesn't get mentioned enough, I think. They'll happily sell you an outline of what you need to do to be in line with "industry best practices", where those practices are all the things your competitors are doing better than you (and guess what they'll sell those companies if they spot anything you're doing better than they are? Where do you think they learned about those "best practices" in the first place?).
It's basically a kind of weird, expensive, inefficient, unofficial business process collaborative R&D program.
> Never ran into anything like this. Show me a package that doesn't work with yarn
Been too long, don't remember. Happened more than once. Options were "debug package under yarn, and assuming there's a way to fix it without modifying yarn itself, submit PR to package's repo" or "just use npm".
Naïve search for 'is:issue is:open "npm works"' over yarn's ~2,000 open issues reveals some packages that don't work with it, pretty quickly. I'm sure npm has bugs too but we consistently and reliably ran into yarn problems that could be fixed immediately by switching to npm, on several projects. A browse through their issues more generally reveal tons and tons of broken features and edge cases, still, looks like, which is how it was back when I was using it, too.
If it's working for folks that's fine, but I think it's still a bad idea to give (especially) newbies the impression yarn's clearly the best choice.
- Messing up certain cases of dependency resolution such that you'd get a different version than NPM would give you.
- Something involving not checking paths they should have been, that caused brokenness.
- Local package problems of several sorts—really any 1%-of-users-or-lower use case, and I'd guess "just fetch some packages from the NPM servers" is the sole use case over 1%, seemed fairly likely to have problems.
- All of the above and more sometimes causing a dependency that worked under npm to fail with misleading error messages due to bad interactions between that package and yarn.
There were more but I don't remember all of them. My impression was that they implemented half the features of npm, did way fewer correctness and safety checks, crowed about how fast they were, and everyone crowned it as a superior drop-in replacement for npm literally years before that would be justified.
Mind I have no love for npm and don't much care what the command I run is called or who made it, I just repeatedly saw projects start on yarn then hit a silly problem the simplest fix for which was "use npm", while people were running around shit-talking npm and acting like yarn was some kind of miracle.
[EDIT] our projects were node, React, and React Native. I'd definitely believe it's possible use Yarn and never hit this if you don't happen to use a package that's broken in it and has only been tested under npm, or happen to step on one of the landmines, and maybe it actually is totally fine now, I just know people were claiming it already was and sticking their fingers in their ears when you told them otherwise back when it absolutely was not a suitable npm replacement yet.
> `yarn` is a generally superior alternative to `npm`.
I’m about 18 months out from last using it, but people were saying this then and it was, in fact, full of bugs and missing features. The company I was at kept starting projects with it because it was trendy, then switching to NPM when we tried to use a feature yarn didn’t have or lost an hour debugging some problem that turned out to be yarn-induced breakage. This was the consistent experience of about a dozen developers across several projects, most of whom were very enthusiastic about yarn, at first.
Maybe it’s much better now but, again, people have been saying this since it first came out and if it’s true, it’s a recent development.
This looks more like an SUV alternative than a truck alternative, for either the legitimately eco-conscious (but not eco-conscious enough to buy used) or those looking for certain social signaling.
Yep, it's the high reliability & quality of the first party software (Safari, their office apps, notes, and so on), the excellent battery life (largely due to the software—run a browser other than Safari and watch that benefit take a huge hit), having a Unixy OS that's way less of a PITA on a laptop than Linux (ran it for years as my main OS, including on a Thinkpad, so yes, I'm familiar), and the touchpad that doesn't make me feel like I have to have a mouse to use the machine for more than five minutes, that keep me on board.
There were other things (good-enough port selection complementing the high battery life and good trackpad to mean I could just grab my laptop and go for nearly any situation, without taking anything else, being high among them) but they're gone now. It's basically the software and the trackpad keeping me around. I'd rather use a "worse" Macbook specs-wise than a Win10 or Linux laptop that's much better on paper, because the experience will still suck far less. Design, "thinness", trendiness, all that, don't give a shit. Give me a brick of a Thinkpad with an Apple trackpad, official macOS support, and a 20% lower price than a MBP at same specs, and I'll take that option in a heartbeat.
AFAIK those are dying. DLC's killing them. You buy (or rent) the disk, you only get like half the game. The rest can't be resold. Consequently, second-hand prices for disks seem to be dropping quite a bit, outside certain categories where that's less of an issue (Nintendo, kinda, and certain genres that still aren't that heavy on DLC like JRPGs). The dropping prices might but OK but with digital stores competing, and providing pretty good prices to anyone willing to wait for a sale, volume (both coming in, and being sold) is surely going down too, at least relative to total market size if not absolutely (and I suspect it's dropping absolutely, too).
Gamestop & friends seem to be muddling along through inertia, the larger-than-it-was but still-small retro gaming market (less Gamestop, they don't carry stuff that old), and selling non-game materials. And new games that come with DLC tickets and such. Not so much used sales or rentals (remember renting games from Blockbuster?)
It mostly makes me sad that I can't come up with any good ideas, and when I do I find it's already a thing and they're charging so little I can't figure out how to even cover costs at twice the price.
I mean at the point you're writing a symbol table and associating it with an object so you can figure out which method to call in its context, probably it occurs to you that you're entirely re-creating a feature the language already has (but slower and worse) rather than just mostly doing so, as they are now.
I bet there are quite a few of us watching each of these announcements waiting for exactly that to happen, ready to click that buy button.
The only thing I'd miss dropping to a watch + decent point-n-shoot instead of an iPhone is live photos, which are maybe the most important feature to me from the iOS ecosystem released in the last, oh, decade. Only reason I'd even hesitate to go watch-only.
> The positional order seems like it would be easy to work around if they allowed you to pass in a key. Not sure why that isn't available.
IIRC it's because they implemented their own method lookup table (!) to associate with the Component object (!) but as a FIFO queue, more or less. I assume either for ideological (that's how they wanted it to work) reasons or because they (probably correctly) reasoned that loading down React apps with more strings at such a basic level would risk performance/memory problems. Plus if they did that then it'd really look like a method lookup table and be more obviously Rube-Goldbergian than it already is.
IME the weirdest thing about those sorts of middle- to upper-management software positions is that almost all the actual work feels like slacking or time-filler you might do when too burnt out to do real work, until you get used to it. Write up some proposals for something, write some specs or go over some stories with someone. Get some face-time with a stakeholder to go over some feature, propose some new ones. Talk timeline with some manager. Coach sales on the product. It is actual work that someone wants to be done, but to me (and I suspect to OP) it feels like you're no longer doing any work at all, you're just, like, someone who hangs around the people doing the work and chats with folks.
Yet (in most orgs—perhaps not FAANG) you are better-respected (you can feel this in meetings, it's incredibly weird at first) and better-compensated than you would be as a developer.
And then the Google pedigree thing is obvious. Youngish startups with a little money just starting to build their team past "a co-founder and these two recent grads" are hungry to get FAANG alums into leadership. I don't know whether that's a good thing for them to care about—maybe it is—but they do seem to show a very strong preference for them.