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Issue #39 - December 1, 2019
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Tell HN: Google should drop Quora from search results
Top comment by ghostcluster
They should definitely drop Pinterest from Google Image Search results.
2. Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?
Top comment by sriram_malhar
I quit full-time work in 2001, after being burned out in the dot com boom. I did well for myself financially after the startup I was in got bought. The phrase "well" is of course subjective, considering that no colleague of mine quit. I left a whole lot of money on the table, but never once have I regretted it.
I decided that the name of the game is to optimise quality of life. That means, infrequent brutal deadlines, minimal (pref. zero) commute, opportunity to learn, and spend time with family and friends and be of use to society at large.
This meant (1) I'd only do short-term assignments (less than a year) (2) I'll keep my technical chops as current as possible, so no shortage of interesting gigs to work on (3) Not hurry into the next gig when one ended.
I have never learnt the art of work-life balance, but now I'm able to amortise it over the course of a year! Work my ass off when I have a contract, then take off and putter around with different technologies and hobbies. There's lots of time for family and friends. The money is of course considerably less than what I could make, but more money comes at the cost of very high expectations and brutal deadlines. I charge less, and I get more time to do a quality job. Clients remember you for the quality, not for the time taken. Of course, as I get older, I _need_ the extra time too; I just don't have the stamina.
I love it. I am 55 and I code every single day, just for fun.
3. Ask HN: What are you thankful for?
Top comment by didgeoridoo
I’m thankful for the heart donor who saved my newborn daughter’s life last week.
My daughter contracted Coxsackie B enterovirus at 2 weeks old, and it scarred her left ventricle beyond repair. Her donor has given her a second chance. Another family had to make a heartbreaking choice at a devastating moment, and they chose to give life to my daughter and probably several other gravely ill infants.
Check your organ donor status please. Happy Thanksgiving.
4. Ask HN: What should be taught in high school?
Top comment by Iv
Honestly at this point it is not programmers we need but more people with a solid general culture about computing:
What's the internet? where is the cloud? Where are data stored? How do they pass around?
What's a computer? A smartphone? Where is data stored? Where is computing happening?
Most of them will never be coders, and whichever platform you use to teach basic programming would probably be obsolete by the time they are out.
If you really want to do programming, I'd be doing some Arduino Through Blockly (https://ardublockly.embeddedlog.com/index.html) and hit two birds with one stone: it will give them basics of programming and also demystify some things about electronics.
Kids fascinated about blinking LEDs or running motors can then dig into electronics, students wondering what that weird C program on the right is when a blockly program is assemblend can join us in the Dark Side.
Top comment by sakisv
If I were you I'd leave, now.
If you want to be upfront with the founders, go and clearly explain why you're leaving. There is a good chance that they will try to get you to stay by promising all sorts of changes, extra compensation, stock options, trying to guilt you to stay by saying the company goes down without you, etc.
Don't listen to them.
1. Changing something now is too late (and usually too little)
2. Extra comp sounds very nice but think about what you're trading for it: Your time and mental health. For me this doesn't sound a good deal.
3. Stock options: Same as above, but worse because that's something extremely vague which depends on many things going well and also (usually) ties you there for a few years.
4. Using guilt to make you stay: Let's make a couple of things clear: How the company stays afloat is not your problem. You are not the one who decided to open a company to do X while you had no idea, you are not the one who hired the toxic TL, you have no responsibility on the company's welfare. Most people are very, very interchangeable in a company. There are also a few special people who are not easy to replace. In either case, guess whose problem it is :)
You asked in the beginning as to whether your career is salvageable, and then you went on to describe all the steps you took to manage to get a prototype of X. I think that at the very minimum you learned a lot of stuff throughout this process. You also have the experience of how it is to work in a toxic environment. These things make you grow, both technically and as a person.
There are many companies that want to hire people in our tech bubble. For now take some time to yourself and don't worry too much.
6. Ask HN: Best Static Site Builder?
Top comment by nickjj
I'm a big fan of Jekyll. I've been using it for ~5 years and just made a new site with it recently so I would still use it today.
I currently use it for:
- My personal blog with 250+ posts and tons of pages[0]
- A podcast platform[1] which is open source[2]
- The landing pages for all of my web development courses (not going to bother linking them since I don't want to seem like I'm fishing HN for sales)
I also recently wrote about my whole site's tech stack here[3]. That post might not fully apply to you since you want to host it on S3. I personally self host everything on DigitalOcean but using S3 wouldn't be a problem.
You mentioned "static assets" and this is where Jekyll shines IMO. The jekyll-assets plugin (optional) will md5 tag your assets for cache busting and bundle your scss / JS too. It's really handy and avoids having to set up more complicated tools. It pretty much works out of the box with close to zero configuration.
The plugin system is nice too. You can do some really useful things like automatically add certain rel attributes to external links with a few dozen lines of Ruby. It's very handy for a blog.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/
[1]: https://runninginproduction.com/
[2]: https://github.com/nickjj/runninginproduction.com
[3]: https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/1-100k-page-views...
7. Ask HN: How would you bootstrap a space company?
Top comment by redis_mlc
I've worked in aerospace and have been reading HN for over a decade.
Here's some adult advice, for both the OP and HN in general.
Space is a waste of time unless you're a government or a bored billionaire. Objects are too far, and lift is now a commodity.
(SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand, hence their polluting the sky with micro satellites now.)
So if you really want a career in space, go join an existing company or agency.
However, there's a lot of smaller aviation-related projects that are equally challenging, but more affordable.
Examples of recent remarkable aviation advances are:
- Robinson Helicopter (world's largest-volume mfg)
- Williams small jet engines (started in cruise missiles, now certified for civil use)
- uAvionix ADS-B tailBeacon (first affordable ADS-B transponder)
- Scaled Composites' projects. The whole reason Rutan used composites was to make wings 10x faster. You can do that too.
There's room for anybody (who wants to spend their savings) on:
- composite mfg. techniques
- applying the latest in electronics (without competing with Garmin)
- willing to navigate the FAA TSO process
- installing ADS-B. It's literally a gold rush until 2021.
- be like Mike Busch, the world's top aviation entrepreneurial mind:
https://www.savvyaviation.com/
8. Ask HN: Anyone else in constant anxiety and how do you cope?
Top comment by cannonedhamster
I've got terminal cancer in the US. I'm looking at the prospect of losing my job, which means my health insurance, which means I'll have to stop getting treatment and die. I feel you about constant anxiety. Might I first suggest you realize you're human and that where you're at isn't some crazy abnormal place right now.
I've had times where I've gotten frustrated because with a literal deadline I'm still just too tired to get things done and I beat myself up over things I can't control so it's easy for me to negate the small progress I make because I'm comparing myself to a healthy version of myself.
I'm glad to see that you are in therapy. It's going to feel like some days you get nowhere. Remember that any goal you're trying to attain that's difficult is like climbing a mountain. The higher up you go the harder it is to see all the individual steps it took to get there. With life once you get to the top of one mountain, there's always another mountain to climb. It's a journey not an objective.
There's a Buddhist saying that's helped me when I get frustrated at myself for getting set back."Begin Again". Get stuck on something, begin again. Life intrude on your learning for a bit? Begin again. Lose everything in a terrible storm ? Begin again.
For reviving the love of coding, I suggest doing something you either enjoy with coding or something you see as having purpose. Make it small as a project, then break it up into smaller parts. Start with the hard part. When you get frustrated work on something easy or give yourself some time to just think on the problem. Is there a different way to view it, are you trying to be too complicated, what would it look like if you could be absolutely sure it would work, are there smaller tasks this could be broken into that would be easier to solve apart?
You're worth putting in this effort. You can do it. Love and light.
9. Ask HN: Is there a better employment route to high earnings than FAANG?
Top comment by jonahbenton
Not on a salaried basis.
One path is to migrate your thinking from the terms of labor and income to terms of capital and asset development and accumulation. In software this usually means starting a business (eg SAAS) which becomes an asset by establishing a reliable income stream from a customer base. That income stream asset can be sold, yielding a net capital accumulation of more than 300k per year for the time that was put into it.
This is of course extremely difficult to do, with a very high (99.9+%) failure rate, and success is almost always more dependent on non-technical skill factors.
I would advise instead seeking the path of gratitude, finding the capacity to more deeply appreciate your incredible good fortune, and address your psychic discomfort in the value of your labor by performing work that tangibly helps others less fortunate than you.
Good luck to you.
10. Ask HN: What has made you a better problem solver in software engineering?
Top comment by juancn
Practice. A lot. Learn the whole stack (down to the hardware, understand failures modes and limitations of each layer).
Solve many different problems, make experiments and throw away code. Make connections between sub disciplines.
You have to have the attitude that if somebody understood this, then I can too, if nobody did, there's no good reason why I can't be the first one.
Fail a lot and learn. Think about every failure you had, but as a problem to solve not a comment on your value as a person/engineer. What could you have done differently? What were the signs that got you in that situation?
For tricky problems, what works for me is the obsess-and-let-go strategy. Work intensely on some problem for some time, if you make no progress, just let go of it, forget about it, do something else and perhaps your brain will connect the dots. Talk about the problem with other people. Explaining it and different points of view usually change your perspective enough that you are no longer stuck.
Also note that reading about something is not the same than doing it. You need to read and attempt to replicate, even if a toy version of the thing to better understand. Some things just take time an effort to seep in.