skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made the mistake and told the truth one time early in my career.

I got fired, err... I wasn't retained after a multi-month temp period, and was brought in to be fired, then exit interviewed.

I was upset, but stuck to the truth. My direct boss was passive aggressive, didn't like me, and excluded me from the team. His code was awful, in the long term wasn't maintainable, and wouldn't be able to meet the needs of the road map because of poor design decisions. Some cliques had formed to the determent of the tiny company.

Unfortunately after that exit interview, it became extremely difficult for me to get work in that community. Unknown to me at the time, I made an enemy of my direct boss, who had much deeper connections with that area tech community than I ever could have imagined. I only found out after making friends with someone else who told me they had heard nothing but bad things about me.

It was a lesson learned. After a many years, and a move, it is no longer a problem, but it derailed me for quite a while.
Mostly agree, though I think some companies do gather and act on feedbacks that they get over and over. I'd give real feedback if it's innocuous and positive:

"It would be cool if we had more social events!"
"I liked working with product and I wish there was better collaboration between product and engineering orgs."

But I stay away from criticizing individuals or the company at large. Nothing to gain at this stage.
When I was in Physics this dude from off campus stapled up all these posters that said the inverse square law was rubbish and to come to a conference room in the library on a certain day.

There were like 10+ physicists and 10+ grad students in this meeting, they respectful when they smoked this time crystal guy, but of course he just used it as an example of the cabal keeping the truth down.
I made this mistake early in my career.

HR setup an exit interview that was meant to be anonymous. Asked questions about improving the department. I took it seriously I was direct in my feedback thinking that I was helping my coworkers have a better workplace in the future and helping the company identify potential issues. I was wrong. HR immediately gave my feedback to the boss because the HR person and my boss were friends. Nothing changed in the department but I created an enemy with someone whom I had a good working relationship with. Lesson learned.

If asked to give an exit interview just say everything was great, you are sad to go, but are pursuing a great opportunity that you can't turn down. 99 percent of the time your honest direct feedback will do nothing to improve a situation and only burn a bridge for you.
> criticize bad managers.

What do you do when you work for a company where you think managers are bad, and their managers are bad, but they all think they are great and they think you're the problem? How do you objectively (not subjectively) determine if a manager is bad? If 200 people in the organization are "happy enough", it's your word versus theirs on what a good manager vs a bad manager is.

HR doesn't care (in my opinion) that you think a manager is bad. They need bodies to do jobs. They just do what they are told in my experience. They aren't going to go up the ladder and get rid of a manager because you don't like their style.

It's a cruel world out there. Worst part about doing IT for a living if you ask me (or whatever it is you call what we do). Same boring stuff every day M-F 9am-5pm. Everything's always broken. Login/auth/2FA/plumbing data back and forth from one system in one format to another in a slightly different format aren't "sexy" problems. Are humans really designed to do the roughly the same thing from 21 years old to 65 years old?

Some manager chirping in your ear about a deadline or an estimate, like we don't do this same song and dance every week. Projects with no requirements. I worked for an organization that valued how nice you and be versus how much you can get done. I understand how important collaboration is and how important teamwork is. It's just frustrating to log on to a job where... your manager controls your happiness and they think they rock and you think they suck and the truth is somewhere in the middle but it doesn't matter because... their managers and the managers of those people are all about a certain culture. How do you quantify culture?
The basic idea is, if somebody last committed more than 28 days ago, it is likely that they are not a "core contributor" since you would expect "core contributors" to commit more frequently than every 28 days. Hope that makes sense.

For Next.js, the percentage of people that last committed more than 28 days ago accounts for 80% of all unique contributors, which is what makes their project quite staggering from a "popularity" standpoint. Assuming everybody that last committed more than 28 days ago are not "core contributors" (which may not be accurate of course) we can see that Next.js had 169 contributors that basically decided to create a pull request that was good enough to be merged. For Redwood they had 23, which is respectable but not on the same level as Next.js

Based on my analysis of very popular open source projects, most projects typically only have 50% of their contributors in the +28 days range, while Next.js has 80%. Looking at last commits more than 28 days ago is a very good indicator of community health/interest.
"Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson,"

How do you mean? I think of popular science writing as always being for the layperson.
ever considered db views instead of doing a bunch of joins at fetch time?
Of course, they don't get an embossed label with the name(s) of the one provided feedback. However, depending how high are they on the ladder - even directly asking may yield results.

What struck me was the belief 'all feedback', e.g. no exceptions, no redacting that may reveal details, no language replacement.

The other issue is mixing with w/ regular feedback - aside personal integrity what's the reason for anyone to be honest on an exit interview.
>But still doesn't address a baseline of how effective natural Immunity is.

Until we can figure out a way for large pharmaceutical companies to sell natural immunity, you won't see much work spent on answering that question.
For people who can study physics (such as students) it's confusing and misleading, and harms their efforts to understand the real material. (Source: studied physics in college, and had a hard time dislodging the nonsense metaphors about things like "virtual particles".)

For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding?

Physics is mathematical models + experimental data. Good physical intiution comes from familiarity bred of working through math problems and observing experiments. Bad intuition comes from metaphors.
That's true, but also there exists a population that's unfortunately been misinformed by Quantum Pseudoscience Grifters. Physics (and medicine) seem to suffer particularly from this sort of thing. Enough misinformed people asking for real engagement will eventually wear even a patient person down (of course the ire should be more accurately targeted toward the grifters, not their victims).

I mean -- as a programmer, my significant other thinks that my presence soothes the Machine Spirits and makes the computer magically cooperate. Imagine if this was a superstition! The random requests for IT support would be really annoying.
My pet theory on Putin's ability to maintain power and avoid a coup at this point is that he has spent the last 20 years rigging this system (or something similar) to a personal dead man switch, and is actively holding the entire country of Russia hostage. Everyone in his inner circle is made aware of it once they get close enough, and any leak about it ends with you falling from a window. He's just cynical enough that it goes from "comic-book farce" to "terrifying possible reality" the more you think about it.
Tech workers describe detentions and interrogations as they flee Russia
As someone who has done exit interviews on both sides some quick notes:

1) I would dial back dramatic sweeping criticism. Now is not the time to relitigate every grievance, claim doom will befall company etc.

2) Treat it as any other feedback cycle. Here's what was working well, here some areas I might look at improving. Keep it light and friendly.

3) Do a slight "I" perspective. I'm moving for higher pay and to have a bit of a bigger role / influence on decisions etc. I'm moving in part because progression options were unclear to me. I'm moving in part to be able to do a masters program with an EAP program, start a retirement plan match (401K) etc.

I had great references from all my former employers AND I did the exit interviews they wanted. They were friendly.

I left one very very cushy job, did a very friendly exit interview, they hired me back on as a consultant at x times my normal rate. It really worked out better. I'd had a split reporting structure internally (nightmare), and when I came back consulting each project had a clear "customer" I could work with / manage against. Everyone was happier. When I left I just said, One area that was tricky for me was the split reporting structure which made it harder to prioritize my work. When I consulted I had a point of contact clearly defined.
I don't see that at all. We're never going to spacefare on chemical rockets, unless you mean maybe going as far as the asteroid belt.

Reusable rockets are about satellites and maybe the space station. But until we see something use the cheap launches to improve life on earth, it's meaningless.

That said, I'd invest in SpaceX for the Starlink potential if it was public.
Doomsday devices and Mutually Assured Destruction where invented by those not wanting to destroy civilization. They're actually pacifist devices.

Their very reason of existence it to remove power from those _wanting_ to use the bomb.

It's a very scary equilibrium, but a possible one at the time when people were advocating for a preemptive strike as the only equilibrium.

Of course no bomb at all is a much nicier equilibrium, but much much harder to achieve at the time (even now).

A even better equilibrium would be uninventing the bomb, but this is pretty much impossible.
> In these languages, this sort of narrowing is a great deal more complicated, because it implies a new type, which will probably require more allocation.

Flow typing need not imply any kind of "narrowing", though. It could simply endow a control-flow branch with a statically-typed proof object, asserting whatever post-conditions were established in the branch. The "narrowing" could then become a separately-coded step, taking that proof object as part of its input arguments.
Curse of Monkey Island acknowledged it and gave an explanation in its endgame exposition if you got deep into dialog trees during the LeChuck Does a Major Villain Monologue part. It was a satisfactory enough follow up for me.

But yes, Ron has announced this will be his follow up to LeChuck's Revenge entirely ignoring the direction that Curse of Monkey Island took with it and directly forking the sequel paths.
It's not possible to be Racist towards White people in White majority countries.

"Racism" was invented by Trotsky: a Bolshevik who applied Karl Marx's ideas about class oppression to race. The idea behind Racism is that you have an oppressing race that is Racist towards the oppressed races. The English dictionaries have attempted to change the definition to mean something more like racial bigotry but that's not how people use it. The behavior of the policy makers who argue for this kind of thing still matches Trotsky's ideas.

If you don't like this then stop using their words, what you want to talk about is called "racial bigotry."
Don't know if this is regional (Dane here), but I've never encountered an "exit interview" and couldn't imagine ever accepting an invitation to such a thing.
I mean, one has to wonder how many real physicists are chasing crackpot theories in exactly the same sense. The drive that results in self-delusion is probably the same mentally/emotionally.

Also it isn’t just physicists on the receiving end. As a software engineer I get people wanting me to help them with their “crackpot” business ideas (although they sometimes don’t want to tell me their secret, and I heartily encourage them not to!). I have seen an acquaintance explore a crackpot electrical mechanism for perpetual energy. Mathematicians surely get their fair share of crackpots too!
As I understand it, the problem is the defense strategy, not the particular case at hand. They’ve essentially composed an argument that makes it impossible for bird, or the city, to ever be at fault, irrespective of circumstance.

That in this case they shouldn’t be at fault is not the issue; if the case was more blatantly the opposite (the user was clearly not at any fault), bird would still be making the same argument
Hey, another core team member. You certainly can use whatever client you want with the Redwood API - you just might not get all the bells and whistles that are built into our web side!

The GraphQL api in Redwood is powerful, yet simple - so you would build your backend in Redwood, and have your angular front end make gql queries like you would with any other backend.
I was kind of like that. 30 ACT, barely graduated high school, joined the Marine Corps and chose infantry.
"The soldier doesn't get to decide that it's immoral to carpet bomb El Salvador; they've already agreed to kill whoever their leadership tells them to."

People always have a choice. They can refuse.
The post suggests that respected co-workers would bother to give negative feedback about you simply because of your feedback.

It is an absurd generalization. People have more important things to do in their lives than resent a quitting co-worker (which is pretty standard in the industry).
People at the company want to believe that the exit interview is a good way to catch and fix retention issues. The problem is that unless you have an engaged manager giving the interview, then nothing will change... And if you did have an engaged manager, then they would have fixed the problems before you were leaving.

In my opinion, the only way to cause change during an exit interview is if a bunch of leaving people say the same thing, and management is forced out of denial of the issue. When I exit, I just give one sentence about one problem, and otherwise just say things are fine. It's now up to management to realize the urgency of the problem, and no longer mine to deal with.

In the past I gave detailed, documented feedback about how a certain individual was unfit to be a manager. Shortly after I left they promoted them (and then fired them shortly later). I'm no longer going to give detailed feedback at exit interviews.
This is good advice for people with a lack of social abilities and no tact. However, it is possible to give very frank and difficult feedback but do it in a way that is professional and non-petty. A 30 minute download of every conceivable grievance is not professional.
I'm a politician first and software engineer second.. I have _never_ given anyone or any sub-organization bad feedback, directly or indirectly. I've advised someone on something that could help them be better, but I've never externalized it as grumpiness I have.

It's never worth it. Smile and nod, disagree and commit, focus on whats in your control, and tend to your network. If they're not paying you for an honest exit interview, don't give them one. Just focus on hitting the targeted outcomes, however that may be. That's all that really matters
If only there was a way to safely and economically send Earth's garbage into it!
Core Team member here.

Many RedwoodJS contributors have startup experience and we applied much of that in delivering features that often get lost in the rapid MVP pace where you have a small team and iterate fast ... only to face those decisions later. And it's not a surprise that these feature get left out early on: they take time and money -- two things startups have to manage from the get go.

Testing, logging, webhook support, setting up authentication, involving your designers more with Storybook, seeding data, mocking data, deploying, GraphQL best practices.

These are all common solvable problems that RedwoodJS has already thought of so you can focus on building a product.
China has no well known flagship brand demonstrating that level of quality.

Japan had Sony.

South Korea has LG.

What equivalent brand comes from China that US consumers know?
Not surprised. Though we've seen senators going through security so I'm not sure what the lower threshold for 'fancy' is. Still can't escape the schedule or having to fly with commoners of course.

Fun anecdote: friend of mine's dad is a ~billionaire, and not only does he still fly commercial, he flies coach. And has family come pick him up from the airport. Epic tightwad. Never spends money unnecessarily. To his credit, he also works at the local soup kitchen once every week like clockwork. How he does that while maintaining a 90 hour a week schedule, I have no idea.
AMD Acquires Pensando for Its DPU Future
The intention needs only to be true at the time of the filling. Intentions can change. I wouldn't be surprised this is yet another troll.
Great advice here.

HR is NEVER your friend. They are not on your side. DO NOT TRUST HR.

Anonymous feedback is never anonymous. DO NOT TRUST HR.

Here's the deal... Exit interviews, as a manager, were annoying because they could ding me on my annual reviews. And that's fine, except... people would complain about things I had no control over. "Oh, my manager made me do something stupid that I didn't like!" Yup, I get it. Only it wasn't ever me making them do that, it was my boss, or a client. And still, as the manager, I'd get blame.

And you know what I did with that information? Every time someone trashed me, or the company, in an exit interview, I'd remember it. And 2-3 jobs from now, when you need a rec, or you need someone to say something nice about your time at my company, I'd be unavailable. Or if the new place you were applying called, and asked me, "Do you have any feedback about X candidate?" You better believe I had things to say about the people who were negative.

The advice in the post are spot on. Keep your mouth shut. Odds are it's not your boss that's making the bad decisions. Odds are the culture is exactly how the people at the top want it to be. Anything you dislike, it's likely out of your manager's control. Trashing them is just a sign you don't see the big picture. And bosses are petty, they'll get revenge if they can. And odds are you'll need them to say something nice about you at some point.
Good lord, what terrible advice. If anyone is reading this and thinking of adopting his ideas, please consider (with the exception being if you're still early in your career):

1) Being true to yourself is worth more than any of his purported wins

2) Be your own merit, and don't rely on others for references or goodwill

3) If every exit interviewee states that the CEO is a dick, that can't be ignored. She won't lose her job, but it's not going to do her any favours either

My counter-advice then, is:

Be honest every day, and do your work well. If you get in trouble for telling the truth, that's not a company you need to be at. I have yet to get into trouble for being honest, even when when it the truths were difficult to swallow, but of course it depends on where you are in your career.

Also important; don't be a dick. There's a difference between telling the truth to constructive ends, and being a whiny critical negative contrarian.

EDIT: For formatting
Nothing new under the sun. Ivor Catt was proposing wafer scale computing in the '70s. Large numbers of processors with the ability to route around defective units.

https://www.ivorcatt.org/icrns86jun_0004.htm
One other bonus for laptops is that it's way easier for an IT department to manage. It's got all the guts, all the connectivity, some version of all the major peripherals, and all of that under one SKU.

Support and warranty work is simplified when you only have 4 or 5 models of computer in your org, and can reference a spreadsheet to see exactly what a given user has in front of them.

I still prefer a desktop PC for my personal use, because I play videogames, and a desktop is what's historically best for that. A side benefit of having a personal desktop means that I can reuse whatever peripherals, furniture, etc between either my 'work' or 'home' desk configuration.

If I wanted to go full-circle optimized for my next PC build, which I may as well think about, I could plug all of my peripherals into the same thunderbolt dock, and only worry about that one cable, instead of the (potentially) 4 USB devices I'd be switching back and forth.
I feel they are 20-30 years too late.

It seems like the winds have shifted.

In the late 1990's to early 2000's, it really did seem like human conflict was winding down and all the divisions/ideologies were slowly being subjected to "hey, let's all get along together and make a lot of money". You saw that with the EU, with China, NAFTA, etc.

After the 2008 crash and with covid, it seems things are changing. People are no longer willing to let go of ideology just to make money. Nationalism is returning. Religious fundamentalism is returning (see Trump, Modi, Erdogan, Orban).

Hong Kong was the ultimate "startup city" with a huge amount of autonomy, but that is going away, as China asserts control.

My guess is that in this current environment, startup cities will breed a lot of resentment in the surrounding areas and serve as easy scapegoats (see for example the Blue cities in Red states where there is a lot of conflict about governance and who has prerogative).
$150/hour is pretty cheap for a lawyer these days. But even still, a lawyer has a bachelors and a law degree, while this gets 20 minutes talking to someone with a PhD--and in this case, someone with a lot of experience both doing physics and communicating it. The lawyerly equivalent to Sabine Hossenfelder would a partner at a major law firm, whose hourly rate is likely around $1,000.

Even if she's now farming it out postgraduates in physics, it still seems like a fair price to me.
I told my boss at the time that the reason I was leaving was because they where forcing us back into the office to do meetings from our desk in the middle of the pandemic (which it was, 18mths ago June).

I also told him that if they didn't change that policy they'd haemorrage their most senior staff.

Of the 9 lead devs they had at the time (including me) they lost 7 over the next 8mths (I already knew three where leaving in the interview just hadn't announced it yet).

It took them another 8mths to decide that remote might be an option, after literal decades of experience on their systems (not me I was a relatively new hire) walked out the door.

Now they are constantly posting vacancies for leads and fighting in a market where a lot the good jobs offer remote first if wanted.

Now if my boss was smart he'd have seen the writing on the wall, saved his dev team knowledge and could have hired before the boom in remote dev.

The thing you realise as you move up in seniority is that the people in "charge" are really no brighter than the people they are in charge off, he was my boss because he was the senior of the two devs on the original spinoff company and so just moved up a level every time they expanded, he was a fairly terrible manager of people and didn't have the backbone to deal with his boss when it was necessary.

References really aren't a think in the UK (at least no one has ever checked mine that I know off) so I was less concerned about that and I had zero intention of ever working for that company again so if I set the bridge on fire, so be it.
Kosmic – The Code Activism Manifesto
You use far more than that. The vast majority of water you “consume” is in the production of the food you eat, especially meat.