AStellersSeaCow

12 ms·

1.
by AStellersSeaCow 3y ago
Depends on the company and management. Google codifies this role to some extent as Tech Lead, which is an engineer expected to act as a force multiplier and mentor more than an individual contributor. It doesn't always work as designed
2.
by AStellersSeaCow 3y ago
I chuckled at the implication that BAH's work has any value to begin with.
3.
by AStellersSeaCow 3y ago
Came here to post about LCM too, amazing place. Sadly "in stasis" is pretty generous. I know several people who were in that win of the Allen org and they've all said that Jody Allen viewed it as a waste of time and money and
4.
by AStellersSeaCow 3y ago
I worked in a part of Amazon that had a lot of ability to help detect and flag this sort of fraud. I had to fight hard to get even a proof of concept project greenlit. There was exteme organizational disinterest - partly for a bad but predi
5.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
Maria Bamford is excited. But not too excited.
6.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
My answer is yes to all of the questions.
7.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
People making $250k on average getting laid off is admittedly less of a tragedy than people making $75k on average getting laid off. The former would have more opportunity to save and potentially less impact on their lifestyle and financial
8.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
Yeah, I hate the way they were conducted but can't think of a better way that wouldn't open the company up to a lot of risk. I'm not convinced that announcing them in advance is actually better anyways. We have partner teams
9.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
> Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose? This isn't how layoffs work. They don't to go each manager and tell them to reduce their team
10.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
> You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews I know this local to my org. I can say first-hand that most low performers from the current and prior cycles were not impacted by
11.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
I'll temper my general "layoffs must be done without regard to performance" into a more specific "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance". Google and other big tech companies who
12.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/layoff.asp First sentence: "A layoff is the temporary or permanent termination of employment by an employer for reasons unrelated to the employee's performance."
13.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
Current Googler, I have no insider info at all, found out about this the same Friday morning as everyone else. Everything expressed here is speculation based on my own observations and conversations with HR leaders at Google and other compa
14.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
Not so sure. I was in a research lab at a similar school a couple decades ago. There were two staff lab assistants (not sure they'd be considered administrators by any stretch), and the PI shared an executive assistant with three other
15.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
Counterpoint: you don't have enough good metrics.
16.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
That said, serious competition would also be good for Google. The maps org is still huge but a lot of what they are doing is tiny iterative improvements these days, not enough swinging for the fences to really add new and exciting products&
17.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
And yet, here you are.
18.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
Managers are heavily expected to keep growing their team(s). A manager whose team is flat in terms of size and scope year over year is going to be viewed as underperforming, even if they dramatically improved what they do own (in most of th
19.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
Part of the issue is they can't/won't compete on comp or benefits with other big tech companies, but still have high-ish standards on hiring, relative to the industry as a whole. That means they need a huge candidate pool,
20.
by AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
My perspective after five years in tech management: Effective managers from a pure tech background tend to have happy, functional teams that get things done well and add a lot of long term value to the company. They focus on "managing
21.
by AStellersSeaCow 7y ago
I think he's cherry piketting data.
22.
by AStellersSeaCow 7y ago
So to some degree that's preaching to the choir around here; I still use emacs extensively and adore it, but I'd also never wish it upon anyone who doesn't value work efficiency over low cognitive load and nice aesthetics. I
23.
by AStellersSeaCow 7y ago
To call this rose-tinted glasses when considering how things worked in 1983 is a massive understatement. A counterexample: in 1983, enter two search terms, one of them slightly misspelled or misremembered, hit f3: "no results", sp
24.
by AStellersSeaCow 7y ago
I'm at Amazon now, my team is fairly shitty - let's say in the bottom third of engineering teams anyone at the company would want to work for - and the average tenure of people on the team is close to 5 years. It's hard to ge
25.
by AStellersSeaCow 8y ago
I don't doubt that the findings are the case, I've experienced it myself and seen it in plenty others. What I would've liked to see in the paper, though, is more proof of the cause-and-effect relationship's weight here:
26.
by AStellersSeaCow 8y ago
I'd been looking for other uses for my angle grinder, and this is way better than the other ideas I had.
27.
by AStellersSeaCow 8y ago
When this news first came out, I tried practically all the alternatives. My personal experiences: Wadded up aluminum foil: really does not work well. It gets loose grime off, but anything at all burnt on will take very vigorous scrubbing
28.
by AStellersSeaCow 9y ago
I know a guy who worked for that company. Sounds like they had no goal beyond refactoring their ActionScript as better ActionScript as recently as a couple years ago, denying the ample writing on the wall that this was a fool's errand.
29.
by AStellersSeaCow 9y ago
Yep, I did software development in academia for a biochem lab and they paid less than 1/3 what I make in industry. Not only that: I was lower on the totem pole than a first semester PhD student, there was zero potential for career gro
30.
by AStellersSeaCow 9y ago
FTA: "Fortunately, American roadways are safer than ever, with highway fatalities at historic lows. Roads can be dangerous, but the perception of roads getting increasingly dangerous is a false one." ... "Published Jul 23, 20

More ›