skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: After Engineering – What's Next?
Or: Seeking job advice as a mid-career software engineer

Hi HN,

I'm in my early/mid thirties now and I have been programming since I was a kid.

And I still love it! And I'm still good at it! I've become a little bit jaded though.

In the last few years I learned that, of all the things that make a company succeed, "technology" is pretty far down the list. "Process", I believe, is down there too, but you can do a lot more damage when screwing that up.

Not to beat on technology or process, but I see so many people around me getting hung up on it (and rewarded accordingly) while at the same time we're failing to address bigger issues (communication, culture, hiring, direction, etc.)
It's like we're getting tangled up in technicalities, while product development is grinding to a halt amidst our own ambition to reach some kind of technological nirvana.

I switched teams recently, moving from a software engineering position to a technical consulting position, which improved things somewhat.

But even in my current position I feel powerless to address bigger issues. I talked with my boss about this, and they see the same issues, but there's only so much they can do on a company level scale.

These issues are certainly very pronounced at my current company. If your experience differs, good for you! However, I think our industry overestimates the importance of technology.

I don't claim to have all the answers or understand all the problems, but I'd rather spend my time working on a solution.

So that's why I'm asking for help: I want to nudge my career in a direction that will someday enable me to work on making engineering more – for lack of a better word – humane?
But I don't really know what I'm looking for. I guess I'm just asking for some new perspective. Maybe you have changed directions in a similar way and point me to the route you took?

Sorry for this being so open ended. I just don't know enough to know what I want to know :)
Democratic vs. Republican Occupations
In some cases the company making the claim doesn't even own the IP. I remember a case where the youtuber NerdCubed had his Portal videos copyright claimed, even though Valve themselves explicitly states that making videos of their games (and cutscenes) is perfectly okay.

When he contacted Valve they responded - "We didn't make the youtube claim". So SOMEBODY did, but not the actual owners.
The government doesn't require a profit before working on a vaccine. The article clearly states that private companies will not work on new vaccines unless there's profits to be made.
Mars has a built-in advantage of distance from the hordes of desperate people who would destroy a too-small or half-done habitat if it helps them survive next week (if disaster strikes before you are ready for example). Nobody can blame them, yet it is a valid and expected hazard.
Ah the memories. I attempted to integrate J-lang into Clojure at one point.

Imagine doing

(defn average [coll] (j +/ %#))

And have it run at the speed of C :)

(I failed because I didnt have the patience to sort out all the type-casting)
Where is that claimed? There are two paragraphs on the blog that mention secure enclaves or special hardware: your quote, and the following:

> With the exception of APIs requiring specialised hardware, it will always be the case that where an Apple CryptoKit implementation of an API is available, Swift Crypto will use it, but when such an API is not available it will be possible to use the Swift Crypto-based implementation. The core APIs will move in step with Apple CryptoKit, and our test suite is shared with Apple CryptoKit ensuring that both projects must pass each other’s test suites for the API, ensuring that both Swift Crypto and Apple CryptoKit will be completely compatible.

The SC README[0] contains one more mention of it, with the same general idea:

> SwiftCrypto exposes the portions of the CryptoKit API that do not rely on specialised hardware to any Swift application. It provides safe APIs that abstract over the complexity of many cryptographic primitives that need to be used in modern applications. These APIs encourage safe usages of the underlying primitives, follow cryptographic best practices, and should be the first choice for building applications that need to use cryptography.

[0]: https://github.com/apple/swift-crypto
I don't believe Norway has an indigenous car manufacturing industry, at least not one that makes ICE cars, so all cars are imported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Car_manufacturers_of_...
Ask HN: How do you know a career in software is not for you?
I've been working for the same place for about 2.5 years and also have another ~year at an internship in another place.

I enjoy the problem solving aspect of working on software, but I'm finding that I'm barely utilizing my abilities and time here. This is certainly an issue that I'm trying to resolve.

However, I think what I'm having the most issue with is that I don't really feel like I'm serving anyone. I really like working with people to help solve issues, but I don't get that feeling here at all. The only problems I get to solve are the problems I feel like we make for ourselves (environment instability, lack of funding for maintenence, people not testing their changes, etc). I just feel like my job is to clean up a pile of trash that the business wants to put minimal time into. It feels so overwhelming to be paving a new sidewalk on a bridge that has supports falling apart.

I'm also considering the impact that the lack of social and physical activity has on my happiness. I spend time with people and exercise outside of work, but I don't want every day to just be excited to leave work.

How do I manage this? Am I just in the wrong company? Or the wrong career path?

Can anyone else relate and share how you've dealt with this? I'm not really sure where else to discuss this sort of thing.
job security?
I bet it is more like "enemy of my enemies, are my friends" kind of support.
> Plenty of people worked as hard as they did

Right, and one mustn't ever expect this to matter on its own. It's necessary but not sufficient. As you allude to, it's a vector - there's magnitude of work, and direction. Neither on its own is enough, you must have both aligned.

I think this is one of the more important things a successful academic career doesn't teach you. There, the correct direction for achieving success is almost entirely set for you, so all you need to focus on is magnitude of hard work. More or less, working harder directly translates to more success.

When you have to choose your own direction of work, this can be a counter productive takeaway because overly prioritising magintude of work can mean you don't focus enough on direction.

Put another way, you have to work hard, but also occasionally have to step back from the work you're doing, take a look around and get the bigger picture, and decide if you're actually working on the right thing right now.
https://captcha.nsa.gov/intl/en/about.html

There is some truth to this.
I completely agree -- the competitive landscape gets seriously distorted when you play with the tax code and shift costs onto someone else:

https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
TradeRev | Various Roles | Toronto, Canada | FULL-TIME, ONSITE

TradeRev's mission is to make car sales fair and easy for everyone. TradeRev's product is a digital marketplace that is used by dealers across the US and Canada to buy and sell inventory. As part of the group of companies under the KAR Global umbrella, we're currently in a hyper-growth phase to accelerate our domination of the automotive wholesale industry.

We're hiring for various roles software engineers, software test engineers, product managers, a release manager, etc. We're looking for people that will grow with the company and adapt to the new roles and responsibilities as we scale.

Our codebase is in JavaScript, Java, Kotlin, Swift, Python. We're on AWS. We run on Kubernetes (EKS) with Kafka (MSK).

Our interview process:
- Phone screen
- Take-home assignment
- Three on-site technical interviews.
Please mention HN in your application.
https://jobs.lever.co/traderev
Oh wow, they just disabled it while I was reading some comments. It's no longer working, I'm now getting redirected to nsa.gov

Edit: This seems to have been online since 2018, see https://web.archive.org/web/20181206224407/http://captcha.ns....
A good reminder to avoid doing free publicity of big copyright content.

Sure, it's fair use, it's what people are talking about etc. Still, it's free publicity.

If not, content creators should be very aware of possible abuses and should add anti-abuse language to their contracts, like this: https://hacked.com/sony-filed-copyright-claim-man-licensed-c...
Huge fan of your work. Use it daily with no problems. Just wanted to say, from the bottom of my heart, thanks.
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia | Bioinformatics software engineer | Philadelphia, PA | Full-time | ONSITE

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Research Institute and its Dept of Biomedical and Health Informatics (DBHi) are seeking a software engineer to help build an enterprise-level data and informatics platform called “Arcus”. The Arcus team integrates with major scientific initiatives in the Research Institute strategic plan, high-impact research areas such as lifespan, rare diseases, novel devices and therapeutics, and precision health.

This role will work with a team of bioinformatics scientists, software engineers and genomics faculty focused on architecting and implementing a cloud-native platform to support storing and analyzing enterprise wide genomic data including data management, harmonized pipelines, and variant warehouse components. We are looking for highly creative people who share our mission to advance child health and who will thrive in a continuous learning environment, acquiring and applying both new technical skills and biomedical domain knowledge.

https://careers.chop.edu/job/Philadelphia-Bioinformatics-Eng...
And it's gone (redirects to nsa.gov)...
The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHIkrotSwcc

I wrote up a reddit post for a possible workaround for removing the overhead. It's standard C++, no ABI break is required. It's not without caveats though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/do8l2p/working_around_...
For me (in Sweden) that URL seems to just redirect to https://www.nsa.gov/?hl=en ...
Yes, he probably was an idealist who grew disillusioned by what he saw.

Otherwise why risk divulging state secrets?
Quoting from cia.gov:

"Preempt threats and further US national security objectives by collecting intelligence that matters, producing objective all-source analysis, conducting effective covert action as directed by the President, and safeguarding the secrets that help keep our Nation safe."

I'm trying to be as non-judgemental as possible and could see that some people might find this mission compelling.
When I buy picture books for children, I will not buy anything that was obviously made on a computer. They look so bland and lifeless. (I don't care how it was actually made, it's about the look of the result.)
Tiqets | Backend, Front-End, Data Engineering, Product | Amsterdam | Full-Time | ONSITE | https://www.tiqets.com
Tiqets is revolutionizing the way people buy and use tickets to culture and attractions in cities all over the world. Our technology allows users to easily find and book tickets to the worlds best attractions in seconds, meaning customers can enter museums, zoos, theme parks and more, simply by showing their smartphones. We're here to make culture more accessible.

We started our journey about 5 years ago, and have been successful in gaining a major position in this rapidly expanding and evolving market, having sold more than 10 million tickets in the past years. Our main office with about 200 people from 40+ nationalities is in Amsterdam, but we have feet on the ground all over the world.

Our stack includes Python, Postgres, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Redis, React, Typescript, Swift and Kotlin. Also see https://stackshare.io/tiqets/tiqets. We care about using both stable and new technology, as well as building an excellent product that our customers and partners love.

We have several tech and product positions open, on different levels. Check out https://tiqets.homerun.co/?tags%5B%5D=department%2CData&tags..., or e-mail jobs AT tiqets.com for more info.
> If (and it is a big if) electric power had an advantage, surely they would just have a support vehicle with a big generator that they could recharge from.

On the actual power generation side, electric might have an advantage. But the range and recharging story is just too awkward to make sense. I'm not saying never: if battery power density jumped up 10x, they might be able to make it work. Just not right now.

1. Armored vehicles can have enormous gas tanks. The Abrams has a 500 gallon gas tank. If needed, it's pretty easy to double the size of the tank by strapping 10 5-gallon gas cans to the size of the vehicle. I just don't see how current battery technology could hope to compete with that.

2. The vehicle that refuels front line troops is the HEMTT. It carries 2500 gallons of petroleum and can fuel 2 vehicles at a time, maybe 5-10 times faster than a gas station.

That means that these vehicles can drive up to the front lines, fuel up vehicles and leave quickly so that they're less of a target and the front line vehicles can get back to doing what they need to do quickly.

In your generator scenario, you still need the fuel trucks, but there's an additional truck that has to sit there, charging vehicles for a long time.

I just don't see it working.
Or paid as dividends? Stock buybacks are in part a way to financial engineer around dividends and capital gains being realized and taxed differently.
Transparent Systems | Principal Engineers (Rust), Security Engineers, PM (Financial), Applied Cryptographers | Seattle, WA | ONSITE or REMOTE| https://transparentsystems.com

Transparent Systems is evolving financial infrastructure - building real-time settlement solutions using distributed, cryptographic systems. We just had a major milestone where we did something that hadn't happened since 1863.

We are looking for awesome people to join us. We’re a Rust shop, in Seattle, of 25+ collaborative, fun, smart people looking to make a huge impact doing something that truly hasn’t been done before. Currently, we are hiring for principal backend engineers with a good amount of Rust or functional experience, security engineers, applied cryptographers, and a product manager with experience in financial products.

If you’d like to be part of our team, please reach out directly to careers@transparentsystems.com or mary.kypreos@tpfs.io

You can also apply online: https://jobs.lever.co/transparentsystems
Greetings! Mail to jobs@qri.io is bouncing.
The money isn't compelling. It's below market and requires more hoop-jumping than most employers.
> Not only it's bad for the planet, it essentially turns every new flu virus to a pandemic.

So you want to go back to the days of growing your own tomatoes in your own garden, and abandon trade and modern technologies?
The title should be more something like "The State of AWS Lambda". The FaaS/Serverless ecosystem is larger than AWS Lambda.
skype is terrible.. especially, the skype client for macOS..

It's barely usable.
A new hash algorithm for Git
Make PHP Simple Again 2020
I had to downgrade from Catalina back to Mojave on my 2016 MacBook 15 TB, for some reason the browsers (Safari, Chrome) would stop responding to keyboard at all after a few hours in Catalina.
My guess is that these companies are a lot more aggressive internally about getting their employees to author patent submissions. They either actively screen code submissions and projects for patentable ideas, make patent authorship a condition of advancement, or otherwise tie authorship to performance reviews in a meaningful way.

Companies I've worked for have teams that facilitate employee patent submissions, and they will tell you why patenting is important to the company. They have had some kind of bonus structure so that you get rewarded if you submit a successful patent. But they pay well enough otherwise that, unless you're personally motivated to see your name attached to patents, it's just not worth the effort.

To put this another way: the patents you author as an employee of a company are probably not that valuable to you. But, because of the potential legal protections they offer, they are very valuable to your employer. I think the companies that are more successful in having high patent counts are doing more to align employee interest with corporate interest w/r/t patents.
Is it just me or PHP is trying to become Java? I remember 7~ years ago PHP devs were "mocking" Java and not it kinda feels like its moving there
"Once you factor in time" is a very good point, and one I shouldn't underestimate because it's almost always a factor in scams. Most people can avoid being scammed with enough time and space to consider, and most scammers are excellent at denying those to their marks.

And yeah, now that I look at the list of people who've claimed to be Satoshi, it's pretty alarming to see how many have gotten at least one major Bitcoin figure to vouch for them. Even Craig Wright, who claimed he'd move the genesis block and then simply didn't - I guess being a Bitcoin guru isn't enough to make sure you actually verify somebody's published transactions.

I suspect that you need several times the technical sophistication of a scammer to catch them out, and if they know who they're pitching to the bar might rise unattainably high. The fact that it normally doesn't, that even I know enough to catch out scammers, has less to do with protective expertise and more to do with not being in their intended demographic of marks. Which ties into your last point: I don't really regret not buying into Bitcoin given what I knew, but my takeaway is "don't be afraid to throw $100 at a crazy idea", not "try to search out hidden gems", and so I'm not likely to be a high-dollar target for later scams.
My problems haven't been with drivers, but rather with Windows being unable to allocate enough PCI resource lanes even though the hardware can physically support everything.
I guess we’re violently agreeing? Exceptions are an order of magnitude (or several orders) slower than function calls and returns; but that can still be efficient overall, if only a tiny fraction of calls fail.

I’d simply add that most people greatly underestimate how expensive exceptions are, even in C++.
Female Founded Club (get your startup in front of investors)
The FFC is a database of awesome female founded startups that investors browse to find compelling investment opportunities. Investors also reach out to founders through the site. Apply to get in front of over 100 investors here: https://members.femalefoundedclub.com/business/register/
All Pascal dialects supported conditional compilation.
SEEKING FREELANCER
hi, I'm looking for a web designer who can create a fancy landing page including illustrations and content for my startup. It's about a SaaS product.
Please contact me at Mail@pm92.de
I'm based in Germany but you can apply from anywhere.
Thank you and kind regards
Philipp
Show HN: Swift Cookbook
Just went down, now redirects to www.nsa.gov.
Getting people to invest money in crazy ideas that have no hope of working was also Elizabeth Holmes' gift. It's not rare or even that difficult. Now Musk has had previous successes, but I'd hardly call electric cars or even rockets and satellites genius or novel. The sad thing is that while he focuses on this, he's not only wasting his money and time, he's wasting the time and money of all the fools who believe that's it's possible and desirable, diverting what could be resources for fixing our own planet. That is the exact opposite of genius and that's why he rightly gets criticised for this insane idea. This Mars idea is no different than Theranos' product. In fact, it's a lot less likely to ever happen.
Location: Edmonton, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: HTML/CSS/Javascript, JAMStack (Gatsbyjs), PHP, NodeJS, Go

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10HN_4Y89qj4uqjgEakixgXTBrH5...

Email: danprime@gmail.com

Experienced Technical Product Manager with over 15 years of developer experience. I have helped various organizations from small startups to large government organizations. For small startups, my dev experience has helped deploy MVPs to validate business concepts and lead to early profitability. For large government organizations I roadmapped and prioritized features that helped departments deploy solutions 2 years ahead of schedule and massively under budget.

I can help you determine, deliver, and iterate on the core value of your product.
Hi,
There is no reason to think the community will continue the financial support in the long-term, even if we are running for years now, this is the reason why we offer free and unlimited download to people, we believe that sharing is the best way to preserve things. :)
yes, i'm being redirected too. engadget also does this, locking me out of both pages.
They appear to have change something in the past few minutes. When I first opened this HN thread it showed me Google's homepage. Now I'm also seeing that redirect.
You're Too Cheap to Fly Faster: https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/youre-too-cheap-to-fly-fast...
I can confirm that I'm being redirected as well.
They intentionally created the system that allows this sort of abuse to happen? If you don't hold Google responsible for giving a few megacorps carte blanche to remove any content on YouTube that they don't like, who would you hold responsible?
Vaccines are prevention.
>This will allow Swift developers, regardless of the platform on which they deploy their applications, to access these APIs for a common set of cryptographic operations.

How often is swift used on a non-Apple platform? Also why?
NSA has just shut down the proxy. The link was a Google Doodles game.
C++ doesn't but Windows C++ does, to the extent it's implicitly used for things like COM. Any breaking change would have to be managed carefully.
I understand and will refrain from doing so in the future. Separately, I think it is worth having a discussion about whether some job postings are inappropriate for HN (e.g. companies which spread misinformation, etc). I have a hard time believing the HN job postings are really an "anything goes" situation, but I could be wrong (I hope I'm not).
You do not need an MBA to be a PM. Unless you expect other serious ROI on it (which is plausible), I would save yourself the time and money.

I moved from EM to a PM role. Did this at a startup where I expressed interest/aptitude in product, and they let me transition over. I recently moved on to another startup where I was hired as a PM.

It basically came down to showing interest and effort, taking on product type tasks even without the title or permission, and forming relationships with decision makers.

Answer to #3 highly depends on what you want your days to look like and what you want to achieve. Both roles require you to talk to a lot of people, cross-functionally. PM you'll likely have more say in the business strategy, direction, and more interaction with other disciplines (e.g. design is just as important as eng to a PM). EM's will require more people-management, like 1:1s, mentorship. Expect to be your team's leader, therapist, and professional unblocker, even if that means running to the office supply store to get them another whiteboard.

If I could reduce it to its simplest terms, as a PM you will have more impact on the product (duh), and as an EM you will have more impact on the people on your team.

Both seem equally likely to lead to VP roles - to me that will come more down to your reputation and relationships than your specific job title.
So it's footage spread out across the entire season then? More like 0.07% of the show? If that can't qualify for fair use then it seems the entire concept of fair use is moot.