you sound like a very empathetic person. But hear me out - at end of the day, it's all just business. I was let go on Thursday, 1 hour before end of shift, in a 60 seconds zoom call. Got told that core team is working hands on in the office, has high velocity, and me being remote is slowing them down. I strongly suspect it was also about the fact that this week they had me work on a project I haven't touched yet, and I got no support to set the dev env properly even. So I was developing blind, while also working overtime to push changes to backend I joined to work on. My wife just lost a kid, this was first job I had in 8 months, just started on new year. We are in small debt. I worked from 6 in the afternoon to 5 in the morning (timezone difference) to output a lot, so they keep me and raise my rate. Company raised 16mm but they're still startup, yknow. So when push comes to shove you get let go without them asking about any of that, or concern themself with it. CEO almost bitterly thanked me for working with them and notified me my contact is over and that's it, hung up and left to work on their launch. Team didn't even notice I m gone. I still went to coworking space today to send CVs because I didn't have heart to tell wife we are cooked again. But look, it happened before, I chose to do this job. I'll deal with the fallout, find new one. It is O.K., I'm not entitled to anyone's pitty. Like I said, that is the risk of business. As manager you cannot set rules of the company. And even if you could, sometimes you still need to make hard decisions. You're not a rock in the stream they can latch on, you are another man floating downstream. Don't lose sleep.
People use those as magic words to absolve people of responsibility, humanity, and guilt. Nothing about 'business' mitigates those, IMO. Why would it?
I think it's laziness and irresponsibility to just elminiate essential requirements and responsibilities because you don't want to put in the effort.
At the same time, the risks of 'business' are affordable to some people: They can get another job, can afford the layoff, etc. But for many people, especially in the US with a poor workers comp situation for very many people and where health care, housing, education, and nutrition (for many) depend on income, it's not affordable.
I wouldn't call them magic words to absolve people of responsibility, but rather a cliche name for situations like that. Of course you can have ethical business, I mean business ethics were first class we had in economy. But in real world you WILL get bulldozed sooner or later by "it's just business". Read the geravis principle. It's not condoning, it's observing.
Another cliche or magic word is 'reality' - as in, 'my point is reality' and therefore anything that disagrees must be fantastical. It's also the old rhetorical tactic of claiming inevitability.
The reality is that everyone acts with ethics; it's a matter of degree: businesses don't murder people, for example. Another reality is that we make reality the way we want it; to say we can't make it otherwise is simply to fold.
I don't quite understand your point. It's not about bending spoons, but about the arrogance of certainty.
And why not be your own boss? It might take some work to get there, but I think the most important requirement for being your own boss is the drive and adaptability to overcome all the challenges.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope you'll find new, better work soon. Where I work, we do not have any open positions I'm aware of at the moment. But if you like we can connect. I'm trying to start my own start-up rn. But can't promise anything.
I'm doing my last engagement on toptal rn as well. Will quit after. The company I m working for is awesome but toptal part not so much anymore. From staff to FUD. They cut down my rate to 1/3 of what I used to charge few years back. (They still bill client 2x what I get, of course).
Perhaps ;-) I'm the "Tim" in "timsort". The name was an inside joke. I'm not a self-promoter, and never have been. As the so-called "Zen of Python" author, I thought it would be funny to pick a name I'd never pick ;-)
CPython had a unique (in my experience) combination of cheap data movement (only pointer swaps) and very expensive comparisons. That's what I was aiming at. I never publicized it, never wrote about it outside the CPython repo, and never thought I'd hear about it again.
Of course I'm pleased it found wider use, but that took my wholly by surprise. If I had it to do over again, I would probably have named it, say, gallopsort.
If this new sort catches on, Jesse should rename it before it's too late ;-)
I think its an excellent name mr.Tim haha, I m glad it stuck. Always reminds me of effbot (rip) and others. It felt more personal and memorable than gallopsort would.
Yea but guy paying closedai to get "insights" that basically copy-pasted content from my blog is definitely violating my blogs copyright, and in the end no coin comes to me either. What about that?
Could you provide an example where OpenAI outputting verbatim quotes actually constitutes the copyright violation? Because mechanically retrieving relevant quotes seems analogous to grep/search - the copyright status would depend on how downstream users transform and use that content. Like how quoting your blog in a technical analysis or critique is fair use, but wholesale republishing isn't. This suggests the violation occurs at usage time, not retrieval time.
Yea but I also suck in 95% of FAANG like interviews since I'm very bad at leetcode medium/hard type of questions. It's just something that I never practiced. It's very tempting at this point to trow in my towel and just use some aid. No one cares about my intense career and the millions I helped my clients earn, all that matters (and sometimes directly affects comp rate) is how I do on the "coding task".
> I suck in FAANG interviews... it's just something I never practiced.
Well, sounds like you know the solution. Or set your sights on a job that interviews a different way.
I think it's mostly leetcode "easy", anyway. Maybe some medium. Never seen a hard, except maybe from one smartass at Google (they were not expecting a perfect answer). Out of a dozen technical interviews, I don't think I've ever needed to know a data structure more exotic than a hash map or binary search tree.
The amount of deliberate practice required to stand out is probably not more than 10-20 hours, assuming you do actually have the programming and CS skills expected for a FAANG job. It's unlikely you need to do months of grinding.
If 20 hours of work was all that stood between me and half a million dollars a year, I'd consider myself pretty lucky.
On the other hand, if 20 hours of leetcode practice is all that stands between you and half a million dollars a year, isn't that a pretty good indicator that the interview process isn't hiring based on your skills, talent and education, and instead on something you basically won't encounter in the workplace?
10-20 hours is assuming you’re qualified for the job and just bad at leetcode. I think many qualified people could pass without studying, especially if they’re experienced in presenting or teaching.
If you’re totally unqualified, 20 hours of leetcoding won’t get you a job at Meta.
Right. Almost any time somebody fails an interview it is not because of "very hard questions" but because they did not prepare properly in a sensible manner. People don't want whiteboarding, no programming questions, no mathematical questions, no fermi problems etc. which is plain silly and not realistic. One just needs to know the basics and simple applications of the above which is more than enough to get through most interviews. The key is not to feel overawed/overwhelmed with unknown notations/jargons which is what the actual problem is when people run away from big-O, DS/Algo, Recursion, application of Set Theory/Logic to Programming etc.
