lagrangian
10d ago
I'd expand from just faang. Get your foot in the door by looking at every generic startup. If you don't already live in the bay (SF), consider moving.
lagrangian
10d ago
I don't think we're really hiring, so hard to say. In practice, the answer is, as it is for everyone at all times, grind leetcode and spam recruiters/your network.
With a PhD, you'd come in at typically mid level (new grad + 1, aka senior - 1). Expectation there is just leetcode, no system design. If you can comfortably do mediums, and communicate well while doing it, that's likely good enough. You might catch a hard now and then, but we'd really rather see if people can write clean code for a medium and communicate well (tradeoffs in algorithms or naming, working through examples, etc)
lagrangian
10d ago
Got the promo! 6.5% raise, although it'll be more over the next 5 years as the 4 year stock grants (each March) come in at senior size, and the base will continue to go up, etc. Maybe 50% total, long term.
lagrangian
10d ago
That sounds like you agree with me, or at the very least, not an argument that it's a spurious correlation due to Berkson's paradox?
lagrangian
10d ago
fire people by the thousand
Generally, this is layoffs, not firing. It's about juicing the stock and moving employees to lower cost areas, not about firing for performance. Re-orgs are also good for your resume as the person doing the re-org: I figure it's like when I refactor the codebase to be leaner, just with people instead of code. Lines deleted are still part of the git diff --stat count, so reorg layoffs are by analogy good.
The difficulty of firing is more about aversion to lawsuits for wrongful termination/discrimination. He was in some protected classes, which idk if lengthened timelines. I don't think so honestly. As much as I'd love to be able to say I think he was a diversity hire or treated more easily because of it, because I do think that happens in general not infrequently, I think this was actually all just par for the course megacorp inefficiency and incentives.
E.g. the actual answer to how did he get promoted is almost certainly that it'd been a reasonable amount of time, and it looks good for everyone for him to get promoted, so he did. I think that doesn't happen as much with the later promotions - the bar for senior seems genuinely high to me (although we'll see what I have to say in 97 minutes after I get my news) - but consider that without the entry -> mid promotion, one is fired by about the 4 year mark.
The ignoring of resumes is weird. I referred a hilariously well qualified friend and he didn't even get a recruiter phonescreen.
It was virtual. I don't think he used AI. I think he got in during a low bar covid era. Leetcode is just easier than the job, in some ways. It's a test of "can you grind for a while with lots of money on the table." It doesn't show if you can sustain that, or if you have the attention to detail, or - in particular - the critical thinking to solve novel problems needed for the job.
As much as I could tell you a thousand stories of him being not up to snuff, he wasn't totally incompetent. I think he'll be adequate at a startup. Hell, he might even be OK if he started with us at new grad level today and just took ramping up more seriously. The bar isn't that high at FAANG, perhaps especially at mine, but it's not low, either.
We finally fired the guy. (I'm a SWE at FAANG.) I'm so relieved. You would not believe how much time and documentation it took. I'll estimate 20 pages of explaining his mistakes, not counting the code itself, over the course of six months. I have no idea how much time and energy our manager had to put into it - probably more than me. After 3.5 years, he was at what I consider 1-1.5 years of skill. How the hell he got promoted, I do not know.
I got asked to be his lead (kill me), which is good for my shot at promo to senior (results tomorrow!), so obviously I said yes. I immediately start complaining. Our manager doesn't see the problem. After a couple months of casual complaining (read: spending ~half my highly-valued weekly 1:1 sharing examples), I put together a meticulous spreadsheet. He sees the problem and says Junior needs to rapidly improve or will be fired. Junior makes no progress. Junior insists he is making great progress. Four months later, Junior is offered a severance or PIP and, in his first display of real intelligence, takes it.
Two of my favorite mistakes:
- He asserted that my code review idea to use an interface was conceptually impossible because when he tried it, the compiler said "attempting to assign weaker access privileges; was public," which apparently he found inscrutable. Solution: change the impl to also be public.
- On a project whose entire point was "set a timestamp, then filter stuff out if it's before that time," he set the timestamp wrong. It was set to the epoch. He had no tests that caught this. After this was pointed out, he pushed a new commit that was also wrong (differently). Twice. After four months on this project, he almost finished - the smaller half of it, which should have taken 2-3 weeks.
I have complained about this ongoingly to everyone I know for months. It was getting to be a problem. Work is so much chiller now. I can literally see the day he got fired in my sleep tracking metrics, as everything discontinuously improved.
What drove me the craziest was that my manager, reasonably, was too discrete to be straight with me about his agreement. I'm not sure at what point I really won him over. This left me chronically feeling unsure if, in the eyes of He Who Writes My Reviews, I was nitpicky and disagreeable, shitting on a coworker who he thought was just fine. Thankfully, the ending of the story strongly suggests he didn't think that, but it's still unclear if it hurt my reputation.
Or helped it - I did just save the company over 1 SWE-yr/yr, in perpetuity.
lagrangian
11d ago
Berkson's paradox
I could construct the argument:
"People smart enough to be in my social circles are more likely to be fat, but only because the ones that are both smart and fit are in higher status social circles."
But:
- I have vanishingly few fat friends
- I don't think that's a sufficient explanation in more generic settings
- I just don't think it's the case. I strongly believe it to be the case that in the overall population, obesity correlates negatively with positive life outcomes and traits.
lagrangian
12d ago
I've written impassioned arguments against shaming fat people, in fact.
I think it's helpful to distinguish two behaviors:
- Shaming fat people: "hey lardo, put down the donut, you're gross"
- Being ashamed of fat people: "the other day, I saw lardo eating a donut, it was gross"
IIUC, you're addressing (1). (1) is actively directing sentiment at fat people. It's unkind for sure, and unlikely (?) to be helpful. Fat people aren't unaware they're fat.
I think (2) is more common, and that you may be conflating it with (1). (2) is a valid, common, reasonable, borderline inevitable way to feel. Any suggestion that people should strive to eliminate (2) is naive. People like beauty, health, and symmetry. The same reflex that makes us avoid corpses, shit, and disease makes us avoid obesity.
That doesn't mean we can't have empathy for the difficulty of losing weight, or the tribulations of being fat. Willpower is hard! Free will is a fuzzy concept at best. But, it also doesn't mean it's reasonable to want people to not have the disgust reaction they so commonly do - that's not the same as "shaming" fat people.
lagrangian
12d ago
Then you can find people who exhibit amazing willpower in all facets of life, and yet are fat.
Can you though, with any significant frequency? I find a remarkable degree of correlation between being overweight and most negative traits/life outcomes, in others as well as in myself.
lagrangian
18d ago
See /r/slatestarcodex discussion of prostate play. I think it's almost certainly the case that all men can enjoy this significantly, with a little learning curve, but do find the extent of e.g. that post's claims surprising.
lagrangian
18d ago
Flowers - 11 colors of Alstroemeria tubers, 9 of which have poked their first green bits out. Here's hoping that having the 2x2x10' raised bed dug out, then filling it myself with a hilariously overengineered mixture of things, works out well enough to justify the effort.
lagrangian
24d ago
That sounds reasonable, but the market often isn't. In fairness, my portfolio composition is still the 100% VFFSX it's always been, and I just chunked my whole bonus into it, so \shrug.
lagrangian
24d ago
I sure hope so, but that's about the size of the 2000 and 2008 crashes, so it's not inconceivable.
lagrangian
24d ago
GP said:
should be in safer assets anyway.
Safer not safe. Bonds will continue to grow in nominal dollars, where stocks could drop 50%+.
lagrangian
28d ago
I second all of this. The correct advise on soundbars, in almost all contexts, is "don't"
lagrangian
1mo ago
The best it's ever going to be in customer service is the equivalent of an Indian in a call center reading off a script. That's not good enough.
I'm big picture with you on the skepticisim, but this actually sounds like a huge upgrade. I can be mean to an AI, feel no guilt, and expect it to actually work out well for me. Oppositely for a person. Nothing irritates me quite as much as bad call center customer service, since I know it's not their fault really, but it's SO BAD.
lagrangian
1mo ago
Ah, in that case, I suggest turning the computer right side up to make it run faster.
lagrangian
1mo ago
Hurrah! Go team!
Pedantry: I'd describe it more as dynamic programming, with memoization being a detail, and memoisation being a dirty British spelling.
lagrangian
1mo ago
Needs more paragraph breaks.
lagrangian
1mo ago
61 dates since mid 2023 is ~3/month. So "attractive" is a reasonable theory, but that's not that crazy. I read the 3-4/week part and didn't realize that was a brief peak, not an average. Now that's a big number.
I went on two dozen first dates last year, all from apps (mostly Hinge), and if you subtract out three months of various compelling reasons to not go on first dates, that's a similar rate. (OP is probably also doing that, so I'm cheating with that math, but still.)
And I am...optimistically middle of the bell curve attractive. My job and such I'm sure offset that some, but you really shouldn't underestimate how effective it is to follow a strategy of "don't be super fat, and do send a lot of messages to women who are not wildly out of your league."
I also think NYC is a culturally distinct place for dating. Lots of dating, not a lot of commitment. Too expensive to live in a nice home, too crowded to hike, so just date and fuck and go to restaurants I guess. I haven't lived there, but I have heard from people who have. It sounds interesting, but terrible.
lagrangian
2mo ago
I don't know about the slab headaches, but crawlspaces definitely have them. Rodents may be hard to keep out since it needs to "breathe" (or at least mine, built in the 70s, does). They love to eat wiring and insulation and can find their way in to the house proper.
Slabs are less creaky and stronger, so if you want a gym/giant fish tank/to invite yo momma over, they may be a better choice.
lagrangian
2mo ago
I personally generally agree with that categorization. If the alternative categories are stimulant, depressant, deliriant, pain killer, etc - then psychedelic fits best to me. Mild compared to a typical dose of more classic psychedelics, sure, but I think the comparison of strong pot to low (but not micro) dose shrooms (~.5g) is particularly good.
Yeah it didn't help. I just try to remind myself that it's OK for someone to be great at some things and hilariously, hopelessly naive about others.
It is possible that AGI happens soon, from LLMs? Sure, grudgingly, I guess. Is it likely? No. Science-fiction raving nonsense. (My favorite genre! Of fiction!)
Scott's claim that AGI not happening soon is implausible because too many things would have to go wrong is so epistemically offensive to me. The null hypothesis really can't be "exponential growth continues for another n doubling periods." C'mon.
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