| ▲ | kayo_20211030 3 days ago |
| Every engineer should read this. It's a wonderful collection of heuristics that might seem banal, but which are shimmeringly true. The two that stand out are > Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead. and > Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call. as a warning against about being too, too clever. |
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| ▲ | gdulli 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| There's rarely a bullet point advantage that some new language or tech stack can offer me that would outweigh ten years of observation of how a familiar setup behaves in production, such that the space of unknown unknowns is reduced to almost nothing. |
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| ▲ | simonw 3 days ago | parent [-] | | My personal rule is that the new technology stack item needs to either make is possible for me to build something that I couldn't have built without it, or needs to provide a productivity boost significant enough to overcome the productivity lost by straying from the more familiar path - even harder for team projects where multiple people need to learn the new component. | | |
| ▲ | kayo_20211030 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah. I'm in agreement there. I guess that it's an application of The Law of Least Surprise for a future developer (who might actually be me, which it often is) |
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| ▲ | pcurve 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Agreed. Not just engineers, but basically everyone involved in creating products including designers and PMs. Every single bullet point here is gold. |
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| ▲ | imiric 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Eh, sure. But at the same time lessons aren't learned by reading what someone else has to say. They're learned by experience, and everyone's is different. An engineer with "14 years at Google" hardly makes them an expert at giving career advice, but they sure like to write like it does. This type of article reads more like a promotion piece from self-involved people, than heartfelt advice from someone knowledgeable. This is evident from the author's "bio" page: written in 3rd person, full of aggrandizing claims of their accomplishments, and photos with famous people they've met. I'm conditioned to tune out most of what these characters have to say. If this is the type of people who excel in Big Tech, it must be an insufferable place to be. |
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| ▲ | gosub100 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | And google wasn't founded by people who just kept their heads down and employed the simplest, most direct solution to the problem. If they had done that, google search would have been done on a super-fast server or mainframe using an RDBMS. | |
| ▲ | doublerabbit 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Mood. As someone who normally leaves after two years because the opportunity never raises to what was offered in the job spec these really don't for for me these bullet points as well wouldn't work for office culture in the EU. 15 Years worth of jobs and none gel. I'm a contractor now which feels more me. I have a contract length, don't have to deal with red tape political bullshit. Turn up, do work and leave when contract had ended. | | |
| ▲ | willi59549879 3 days ago | parent [-] | | If you can easily acquire new projects and are happy with what you do, that can be very nice. I would probably fail at selling myself | | |
| ▲ | doublerabbit 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I've never needed to sell myself. $corp will advertise needing a contractor and you apply as usual. If you have the skills and experience you tend to get hired. The only difference is you don't get job security, pension or any perks. But you do get a lump sum though. Where you can then decide what's best. |
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| ▲ | morshu9001 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Google still suffers the most from not understanding those two. Probably more than other companies. |
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| ▲ | moffkalast 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Have they ever had an outage in recent years though? Pinging 8.8.8.8 is the gold standard of making sure there's internet in my book. | | |
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