What an amazing article on "de-FAANGing" the perverse org/incentive structure of most startup/tech places. Would love to see more of this type of leadership in the real world.
I like how he says he doesn't need FAANG level people. Then his next paragraph describes working at FAANG.
"We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers. (In theory, anyway, we’re not perfect.) So we’re looking for people who have peer leadership skills, who are great at teamwork, who will take ownership and make decisions on their own."
Exactly right. People who have “leadership” skills are the ones that pay attention to their own leadership and are manage up more than anything else.
They usually repackage people’s work around them into their own, take ownership and defend loudly their territory (project ownership) and methodically build relationships with leadership. Having “leadership skills” and being good a team work are often orthogonal to each other.
> People who have “leadership” skills are the ones that pay attention to their own leadership and are manage up more than anything else.
No, it's actually people who can put together a technical plan and drive its execution with other engineers, or who can clarify complex problems esp. when there are conflicting opinions, or who can see problems before they become disasters and organize the right group of people to take care of it...
There are many examples of leadership, which have nothing to do with the sour view of managing-up or taking credit for others' work.
I mean, that's the sour way to put it. As someone kinda stuck in that sort of position now, I own a project and have been able to do very little of the work because I'm spending 90% of my time making sure leadership actually makes decisions so I can get the decisions my team needs in order to proceed. I'm spending hours in meetings with other teams to get them to prioritize our dependencies and data access needs.
If you're not lucky enough to have management that's exactly technically aligned to your project someone has to be managing up and paying attention to leadership or else expectations will be totally off from reality.
This is not a sour way to put it; extreme levels of information hoarding, cookie licking[1] and building and defending fiefdoms were the norm from what I saw at my time at a FAANG.
Worth remembering we write code to create human value. Somewhere, in some way, your elegant code actually ran and did a thing that led some number of humans to be enabled or understand or somehow be affected by it.
Me too. My dad would go to "the computer club" and bring back some diskettes.
Best part was, most of the games were hobbyist efforts so I'd get a true floppy (5 1/2") that held maybe 320kb? And each side would have like 10 or 15 games each.
There was a later period on PCs in the 386/486 era where you would buy a magazine and it'd come with a CD loaded with games - back when shareware was a perfect vessel for marketing games that were easily stolen - good enough to sate a broke kid but also led to many Xmas gift wishlist items. iD had so much street cred in my circle.
Hmm. I never really knew where my dad got this mountain of Amiga disks. A mix of legit and not. As kids we would always find something new to play digging through them.
My neighbor in the early 90s was a 747 pilot on a regular route to Hong Kong. We’d give him a list of requests and a couple bucks and he’d come back with disks of whatever we wanted.
Which, we should note, didn't happen 10 years ago before the accountants took over search at Google. Those good, lean, helpful pages still exist. Google incentives websites to have pages of slop on everything now because they track how long you spend on a site as a "metric of a good match". Forrest for the trees...
I shouldn’t have to read 2000 words to make a cheesecake. And I shouldn’t have to read it three times before starting to make sure I combine the ingredients in the right order.
Even the good ones are often subtly wrong. For example, never add baking powder or especially cinnamon to wet ingredients. Stir them into the dry ingredients first, then combine. Otherwise they clump. With cinnamon it makes it look bad. With chemically reactive ingredients it can lead to insufficient rise. Who taught you people to cook? Obviously not grandma or PBS.
I see a lot of people blame “stale” baking powder and while that is a thing, mixing it in wrong or subbing oil for butter or not chilling (eg cookie dough) is just as likely a culprit.
My friend made two sheets of cookies from the same batch and the second ones were terrible. She left the dough on the counter while the first batch was in the oven. Rookie mistake. And she has adult children.
Stack overflow launched 16 years ago, when for many years most of google results already were expertexchange type of sites with the obfuscated answers hidden pages deep in the link.
Alternative take - this might not actually be the worst thing for musicians, to have a low effort, steady paying gig creating music. I am reminded of the documentary "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" about the "Funk Brothers", which was an amorphous group of jazz musicians who did all of the backing tracks for most of the 100s of Motown hits.
Obviously, making ambient tracks is not quite the same as writing "Please Mr. Postman" and hearing your songs on the radio, but in the documentary the band talked about how they'd pump out songs during the day then go to a jazz club at night to make the music they REALLY wanted to make.
> Alternative take - this might not actually be the worst thing for musicians, to have a low effort, steady paying gig creating music.
I think this is a red herring to try to convince people that it's in their best interests to be force-fed content produced by major labels behind the brand {INSERT_ARTIST_NAME}.
Which incidentally it's the business model from major labels.
I mean, check any major labels artist. Each and every single hit song they release has countless writers and producers claiming a stake, not to mention the fact that some major labels artists don't even try to hide the fact they buy all their content from third-parties to slap their name over it.
Is this the state of affairs that's being defended?
Give me a procedurally-generated playlist that I can listen all day long, and skip the content I'm not interested in.
"I mean, check any major labels artist. Each and every single hit song they release has countless writers and producers claiming a stake, not to mention the fact that some major labels artists don't even try to hide the fact they buy all their content from third-parties to slap their name over it."
It's too bad that stardom still generally requires being promoted by one of a handful of corporations. It's not impossible to get there without them, but the result is that we still end up concentrating most of the wealth on a tiny number of artists, while a vast number of equal talents go under-used and under-compensated.
I used Copilot and dropped it when it stopped being free. But Cursor is a different beast - the autocomplete is far better and intuitive. The chat functions like a personal StackOverflow (or just paste an error message for debugging).
For me as a senior eng, Cursor is where AI turned the corner from "maybe helpful for fringe / basic things" to "actually amplifies my productivity". Took about 30 min to flip the switch for me, so I suggest you give it a try.
The trouble is that I heard all of this—personal stack overflow, error messages—already with Claude, and I'm skeptical that anything Cursor can do on top of that will be worth losing the productivity of the JetBrains IDEs.
I imagine it's easier to switch for someone who's already making do with VS Code, because at that point the main hurdle is just being willing to pay for an editor. I already pay for an editor (a bundle of them), but "VS Code with better AI integration" just... doesn't appeal, especially when the word-of-mouth recommendations say all the same things that I've already heard about other tools that didn't work for me.
Great comeback, except you completely ignore the point (its purpose is not meant to be a backdoor) and attack him for... being an American?
Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations. The world doesn't owe anyone anything. Claiming your desires are everyone else's problem is a deeply self-centered way to view the world.
H-1B is dual intent by definition, so it is not a backdoor. Any sane person who knows how green card application works understands that it is objectively hard, if not the hardest in the whole world.
> Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations.
Without such an expectation, who would pay tens of thousands a year to enroll in a random U.S. college, only to be told that there is absolutely no way they can work legally there?
"Not good enough" or not good enough to pass your leet code gauntlet that has nothing to do with the day-to-day role?
Because those aren't the same thing. Also don't discount interview stress - I read that psychologically the most difficult thing to do is be on stage in front of people and do complex math problems... which is basically what live coding tests are.
Math problems usually have one right/wrong answer. Many interview 'challenges' have multiple ways of doing something correctly. Without necessarily knowing any more about the context of a problem beyond a few sentences, you work with what you've been given. You can deliver a working solution but if it's not the way they were expecting... you're out of the running.
I hate leet code and it's ilk, and I don't want anyone to go through that useless stuff. But I believe a good engineer can suss out another good engineer in a conversation or two. At least that has been my experience with people I have hired and people those people have hired.
When you hire anyone, there is always some bar of "good enough". It is different for different orgs and even people, but it is there. Otherwise you'd end up hiring the first candidate you encounter, no?
I hate leet code gauntlets too but I don't see what it has to do with hiring immigrant workers. No matter your status you are equally vulnerable to failing a code gauntlet test.
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