I’ve mentioned that its unproductive to adopt cultural values that don’t actually take a stance on an issue (with more than one plausible answer). “Be nice to your coworkers” isn’t a cultural value, because it doesn’t tell us how to make decisions; there’s no trade-off there. Nobody would suggest “let’s be mean to our coworkers” […]
By custom, all software engineer job postings in the US are required to include the phrase “must thrive in a fast-paced work environment”. This is usually not a bona fide qualification, but rather an advertisement (“we’re fast paced, so we hope you like that?”). The reasoning is sound: Engineers generally aren’t drawn to listings with […]
The US is home to a huge industry that has been around in some form or another since the late 60s, but which really began to explode in the 90s. Innovation was rapid: massive leaps forward could be expected every few years, and supporting infrastructure was quickly built out everywhere. At its peak, there were […]
Joel Spolsky once made a famous observation: There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a […]
It’s generally a mistake to adopt values like “respect your customers.” True values involve trade-offs. Here’s my humble attempt to list a few reasonable ones for a potential engineering team. We should… Hire and pay for world class peopleHire economically Be togetherWork anywhere Emphasize qualityEmphasize speed Emphasize market share growthEmphasize profitability Be highly leveragedBe highly […]
It’s a well-known truism in software engineering that you shouldn’t ask an engineer to build and maintain software that only saves you a few hundred bucks a month, because engineers cost more than a few hundred bucks a month. You can distill this down into a few easy calls that apply in almost all situations: […]
I’m pondering about software engineer salaries and efficient markets. What intrigues me is how often new software engineers are changing jobs to get significant raises 1, 2, and 3 years outside of school. I see a lot of resumes and it’s actually somewhat unusual if I don’t see a new job every ~2 years on […]
Many years ago, I read an interesting tidbit somewhere about raising capital for startups. There was a checklist of qualities that correlate with fundraising success (and ultimately startup success). The list went something like this: good team good market opportunity good traction good timing …and other bullet points of that nature. But the key takeaway […]
Recently upgraded a 16.04 Ubuntu guest (Windows 10 host) to to 18.04 and saw a massive drop in performance. The lag in the desktop environment was unbearable. This was even with the guest additions properly installed. These settings finally fixed it: System Motherboard Chipset: ICH9 Extended Features: Enable I/O APIC, Hardware Clock in UTC Time. […]
There is reassuringly steady progress in software development productivity. In only a few short years the pace of what is considered acceptable output in terms of development has changed pretty dramatically. The usual culprits are: faster hardware and networks, which lead to better programming languages, tools, and platforms, which produce better frameworks, libraries, services, and […]