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An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to a lot of people I know. Like me, Mike has 11 years in industry. Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume around to some…
Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool…
Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions…
There's a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that's basically, "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive". We've previously discussed Marc Andreessen's quote that tech hiring can't be inefficient here and here…
There's a meme that's been going around for a while now: you should join a startup because the money is better and the work is more technically interesting. Paul Graham says that the best way to make money is to "start or join a startup", which has been "a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years", and that you…
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean , so the…
I often talk to startups that claim that their compensation package has a higher expected value than the equivalent package at a place like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Snapchat. One thing I don’t understand about this claim is, if the claim is true, why shouldn’t the startup go to an investor, sell their options for…
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework . Some of their results included (lower is better):
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative…
I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it's not uncommon for my blog to get an order of…
Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes,
Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-paying tech company is…
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything…
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…
On large platforms, it's impossible to have policies on things like moderation, spam, fraud, and sexual content that people agree on. David Turner made a simple game to illustrate how difficult this is even in a trivial case, No Vehicles in the Park . If you haven't played it yet, I recommend playing it now before…
I try to avoid making predictions 1 . It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a while when someone does a review of predictions from pundits, they're almost always wrong at least as much as you'd expect…
We spent one day 1 building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping). In the first year, we shipped mid 8 figures per year worth of cost savings as a result. The key feature this system introduces is the ability to query metrics data across all hosts and all services and…
Out of context, you might think they were scouting actors or models, but these are baseball players ("A" is Lloyd Moseby, "B" is Jim Abbott, and "C" is Derek Jeter), ones that were quite good (Lloyd Moseby was arguably only a very good player for perhaps four years, but that makes him extraordinary compared to most…
An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I'd guess that it's more than ten but less than a hundred). If we look at trendy companies that are within a couple…
A statement I commonly hear in tech-utopian circles is that some seeming inefficiency can’t actually be inefficient because the market is efficient and inefficiencies will quickly be eliminated. A contentious example of this is the claim that companies can’t be discriminating because the market is too competitive to…
If you've followed any tech news aggregator in the past week (the week of the 24th of May, 2015), you've probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware in installers for packages like GIMP. For anyone not following the story, SourceForge has a…
Why are people so concerned with hardware power consumption nowadays? Some common answers to this question are that power is critically important for phones, tablets, and laptops and that we can put more silicon on a modern chip than we can effectively use . In 2001 Patrick Gelsinger observed that if scaling continued…
This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.