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 […]
I once worked a project that stored and pushed hundreds of TBs a month, and cost was an important consideration. AWS S3 is cheap-ish, until you get into multi TB and PB territory. AWS bandwidth has always been outrageously expensive. Google Cloud was cheaper, but only by some factor like “half the price of AWS.”