skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The manager’s described behavior is bad, but the author’s reactions and responses are also bad. This reads like a meeting of two flawed personalities, neither of whom is willing or capable of adapting to difficult interpersonal situations.

The appropriate response to the (obviously) unhealthy manager in the situations described is to tactfully de-escalate while beginning the process of switching teams. Instead, the author seems fixated on “winning” every disagreement. If you think you can undermine your manager and backseat drive their processes, however flawed they may be, you are not going to produce positive outcomes for yourself or the team as described in the article.

A common misunderstanding of less mature employees is that only one person can be in the wrong in an interaction. The author writes as if the manager’s wrongdoings are a free pass for them to respond however they felt like, but the described responses come off as petty and unprofessional. Both parties can be in the wrong in interpersonal conflict situations, and these writings are a good example of what that looks like.

Going so far as to create a website publicly defending one’s behavior while seemingly oblivious to the fact that the described behavior is not a good look is an immature move. If I found this person’s resume in our application queue I would be extremely hesitant to hire them anywhere except maybe under the close guidance of a very strong manager who could mentor them closely and who wouldn’t hesitate to remove them from the company if they started demonstrating signs of combativeness or being a disgruntled employee. Advertising your “disgruntled fired employee” status online is not a good look, especially when you describe your own unprofessional behaviors in the process.
I have lost hope that public torrents can serve as a good availability system. The issues are not technical but "societal", ie what rules do we collectively follow, to make content available. Private trackers are perfect for this specifically because they have a way to nudge people into re-sharing poorly seeded torrents. Bittorrent helps do that, but any technology can.

> being an only seeder and getting it downloaded maybe five times

I haven't seen/conducted a thorough study, but I believe that a ratio of 5 helps content be alive for a longer duration, even if imperfect, taking into account 1 or 2 or those 5 that will disconnect and stop sharing. Everyone should target this ratio. That's why I'm ok seeding for hours as long as I hit that number, but for more obscure content I might be seeding it forever

> Which reminds me that the cost is not really nil

True, nothing is really ever nil. What I meant to say is that the cost of distribution is nothing compared to the cost of production.
As opposed to burnout, hurt yourself and your family, and possibly die or have health issues?
The first buyer of the F-150 Lightning
High fossil fuel prices are good for the planet–here’s how to keep it that way
This is my sentence.

There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The title, both here and in the original article, is pure clickbait. Especially the "former AWS engineer" bit, how is that relevant to anything?
I don't really see how this looks bad for OP. If anything he(?) looks like a very capable engineer with strong technical skills. (I hope your username trollied isn't in bad faith.)
> our role as the employee (triply so as a contractor!) is to stay professional and follow directions.

Not really. Your job is to advance the business of your employer/client. While staying professional, of course. Moreso, because by being a duche it's pretty hard to convince anyone, so it's a prerequisit for doing your job of advancing the business. (Unless you're so good/so much in demand that they will manage around it.)

But in general caring about the business interest of whoever pays you, means the exact opposite of following orders. Now, if you're not unfortunate it doesn't mean fighting around management styles, but something more related to your direct area of expertise.
We accidentally discovered personal data in a popular Kaggle dataset (2020)
Facebook didn't accept new user accounts at the time. You have to remember that Facebook was for university e-mails only before September 2006. By that time Orkut was already widespread in Estonia, taking market share quickly from the previous dominator rate.ee, which was a domestic hot-or-not clone that didn't offer discussion opportunities. Orkut was a breath of fresh air compared to rate, because of its wide selection of features.
Even in this completely one-sided story, out of which I'm sure many parts are missing or are presented as favorable to the employee, the employee sounds horrible. I wouldn't want to work with someone like that neither. Was the manager great? Absolutely not. Does the employee come off as someone that's a good culture fit in pretty much any work environment? Absolutely not.
Ask HN: Who is working on the African market?
Hey all!

One topic I've seen quite neglected in the general Silicon Valley/Startup scene is the African market. Google tells me some companies, but I'd love to hear from founders/PMs/developers who have entered that market and what your biggest takeaways are!

full disclosure: I'm a startup founder who decided to take crack at the African market and somehow (by chance) found a niche and got 400k users in a year. However this was, as said luck, and I've got no idea about how to move on next. Hence this post.
“On the other hand, we need girls in STEM in order to stay economically competitive.

...

There's the meat of why they are pushing this so hard, they want to drive down wages and seem to think there's an undertapped portion of the peasantry.
Game ENGINE Development; forums like osdev.org or books like Dragon Book
The reviewing company is paid by the other company. There is the incentive to decide in its favor to ensure contract renewals.
Phrasing is irrelevant. My senses are not little people talking to me about what they perceive, they are sensing organs connected to the brain. Saying that they "lie" is just a twist of the phrase so that I avoid something more unwieldy, like "my sense organs perceive the world incorrectly because of some defect".

> Starting with just the existence of the arguers and their arguments, can they argue for the existence of anything more? If not, what else do they need to assume?

No, you can't argue the world into being from these axioms. They could probably invent logic and mathematics, but nothing of the natural sciences can be discovered without the senses.
Honest question. Should we expect senior engineers to manage up properly? That means having mature and level headed conversations about where managers can improve in a way that makes both parties feel psychologically safe.

I would say yes, and that the author failed to do that here. I would also say the manager was clearly very weak, and that Spotify's bureaucracy may be producing suboptimal outcomes.
You made a claim:

> extraordinary claims failed V.

I asked you to list such claims. You fail to do so.

There's no way it takes 15s to compile 1m_helloworld.v. You're probably using a debug build of V.

What's your hardware? CPU/SSD.
So what you're saying is it's fine for a power tripping asshole manager to be a power tripping asshole manager because the victim is a contractor and therefore deserves to be treated worse than a regular employee?

The manager was affecting his ability to do his job.

I don't think it's fair for anyone to have to put up with shitty managers just because they're contractors. The thoughts and feelings of a contractor are just as valid. It shouldn't just be "put up or shut up". It should be Spotify ensuring their managers aren't assholes.
I agree, but mostly only because they were a consultant. Imho - the consultant's job is to 1) get things done, 2) be the blame magnet for shitty decisions and 3) get paid well to do 1 and 2. It's not to integrate or change the company.

If they were an employee, that's a very different story! Though all this is from a US perspective, so take that with a grain of salt.
However you look at, it's brutality expensive. It's nearly always cheaper to drive.
I have 1000+ karma on many of my accounts and all I can downvote is comments that aren't replying to my comments... I guess you already knew that since you have almost 20k karma
I mean, sure, but they are not paid more because they are code monkeys, they are paid more because they have less stable employments, and in europe at least have a lot overhead costs they are responsible for that the employer would normally pay.

From the sound of it, Spotify was treating them like employees - most places would definitely not have contractors do hack time, or put code monkey contractors in the path of major feature estimations
Searching? I think it's a viable option if you don't know which path leads to the desired seting.
Yeah, the manager trying to get the details of the PRs that he was going to take credit for is a giveaway:

"I am writing tickets for you and don't want to add overhead."

I hope the Spotify CEO reads this and takes action.

In many companies though the CEO is in on the game (e.g., in the scientific Python space this sort of thing is quite common).
Apple Silicon Likely to Benefit as TSMC Aims to Launch 2nm Chips by 2025
Orkut was huge in Brazil in the early-mid-noughties. I always wondered what the factors were that caused this kind of social network to take off early there, at a time when phones were dumb and hardly anyone had a PC, and well before even myspace was big in N. America.
No, you would look at the version of the language, realize it's 0.2 and not production ready yet.
You need to account for the total cost to the company, not just the before-taxes salary.

In France a young developer easily costs €100k/year to employ, even if he earns a third of that before taxes.
This is interesting actually, I didn't even know there was a free version of the business suite. I've been paying for years and really only use the email feature. Mainly because I don't want the hassle of running a mail server etc.

I think it's fair enough that Google might start charging for the service, and it's not a significant amount for sure, but what is quite startling is the short deadline. That seems excessive but I don't know when the small businesses were notified.
Bricks and mortar opticians.
Which part of the story paints the OP as a capable engineer?
Because surprise it's 0.2, and autofree has bugs, can you imagine?
Maybe users with enough high karma? I have unlocked a "flag" button recently.
> iOS doesn't have windows, so if it wants to get the user to do the captive portal without them sitting there in confusion it has to pop it up.

It does, they're just normally fullscreen ones.

The point is that that captive portal windows persist in the app switcher, and they can't be splitscreened on an iPad. So if you need to look at your email or text messsages to find your user credentials or the login page is badly coded and doesn't pick up your password manager you're screwed. It's really, really annoying.
> Ever been told to do something by a developer and you firmly disagree? I'm not going to give in and do what he says

How do you go about doing this? A direct confrontation? Or by asking for documentation for their request (like a JIRA ticket), and then replying in the ticket with your suggestion? etc
The problem isn't this one person though, it's Spotify itself, it has grown large enough to need multiple managers, but no one is managing them
Wtf no it isn't. People should stick up for themselves. Don't be part of a shitty system. Better to have it blow up on you because you said the wrong thing than keep quiet and let it stay shit.
WASM is sold as being 100% secure.

No it isn't true for all sandboxed environments, there are sandboxed environments where memory accesses are bound checked for the underlying data types, instead of only the complete linear memory segment.
> really just excuses for selectively bullying out companies they don't like

That seems a strong claim—why do you think Apple doesn’t like Tumblr? They’re not a competitor in any space.

> Sure they could have "provided a web app" that gave a really really shitty experience to everyone compared to an actual app

Tumblr is an actual web site, right?
Probably a good heuristic, but weirdly I've never had a dentist try to sell me a single whitening product of any kind. Unfortunately that hasn't prevented some of my dentists from being terrible. Thankfully some of the bad ones have given me such obviously bad advice ('wait until you start feeling pain before you come back to me') that I knew to find another one pronto. I wonder if pushing products differs a lot between countries, my experience is exclusively of Australian dentists, I'd be curious to know if anyone has experience in multiple countries!
I think the group setting is really helpful. Being surrounded by a bunch of people who are also doing deep work on themselves can be really supportive. The place I worked did minimum 10-day stays (6 ceremonies), but usually longer (1 month or more). You get to know your group and the staff very well and find yourself being very open and vulnerable. The day-after-ceremony meetings are full of common experiences and people will often get inspiration from each other's stories. Working at the center was incredible, the people are one of the best parts. I made more friends in that short period than any other in my life.
I've been in the same boat, twice. It's unfair and frustrating, especially when you feel you contributed a lot to the company and everyone else except these few managers showed appreciation towards you and your work.

I also felt the urge to denounce their unprofessional behavior online, hoping that someone else would not end up in the same position as me, or make their customers aware of how bad their behavior is towards employees. But the truth is, it would not change anything and just paint me in a bad light.

After reflecting on my experiences, I found that we were just not a fit. Their way of working was not aligned with mine. Instead of changing myself to fit in or them to accommodate me, we clashed and it ended badly. Both are at fault, I take the loss and move on to the next gig.

Found my happy workplace now and I'm using these experiences to spot potential red flags early.
Weird to dedicate a domain to the story of how you got fired. Oh well.

Without hearing the other side of the conflict, this whole thing could mean multiple things. It's possible that the manager himself was a bad culture fit, for example. If the manager wasn't actually a bad culture fit and his managing clashed with the author of this blog, then the author is actually a bad culture fit for Spotify.

This is exactly the sort of problem I can easily see brewing with remote-only development. Conflicts escalating in DMs, opinions stewing on both sides because if limited interaction, and no good way to get body language across that might help add understanding to the situation.

Telling your manager to go read a book on managing seems like a terrible idea. I don't know in what mindset this is acceptable. Using sarcasm and mocking someone remotely is also a terrible way to get your point across.

Then there's the Kanban board thing. It's great that you communicated the problems you've been having in the sprint system. It's great that you came up with a working solution. What's not great is implementing this behind the manager's back. You can't go "oh yeah we changed the way we do this" to your manager and get defensive even if the team agrees with you, you should've taken his opinion into consideration before you even came up with a solution.

Questions like "how long do you expect x to take" seem pretty normal to me. As a developer it's obvious that there's no real answer to this that will satisfy everyone, but companies need long term strategies and predictions to shift resources around. Dealing with this uncertainty is a manager's problem but asking for an estimate is hardly the unacceptable crime against dev teams that this blog makes it out to be.

Reading through the emotional descriptions of what happened, it seems to me like both parties were heavily affected by covid, lockdowns, and forced remote work, but neither side seemed to get much of an understanding from the other.

I think it's unfair to blame either party for this. I don't think there's anything wrong with publishing your experience per se, but come on, put it up on a blog somewhere, don't dedicate an entire website to the story of how you got fired. That just seems petty.
Well, they get paid to be terminated much more easily. Typically at companies where that's "harder" for employees.

But the entire idea of contract + senior/architect is somewhat bizarre, given how much of the latter's jobs are consensus, relationship-based, and political.
To save you writing the DB query: I sometimes upvote based on the discussion itself.
> actually there’s a huge reason: they built it, they own it.

Microsoft also built IE6 and they also built Windows. Should they have kept the power to bundle IE and to make it difficult for other browser developers?
In the local galactic supercluster it might be less than 0.1%, but Tumblr happens to be predominantly used in the US, and that's what matters to their business.
The comment was a "yes, and" not a "no, but"
Everything you own is an investment in your portfolio. It's just that some things have shitty returns or lose value. Some don't have any value to resell.

In any case, joining a coop usually means you have to buy some shares in the "company". This may be disguised in some form or another, maybe through withholding some wage initially. But in order to get a share of the profit you need to own a share in the coop. This is what "employee-owned" means. So the employees do have their own capital involved in the company with all the implications: A risk of the shares devaluing and loss of opportunity to do something else with that capital. And if the wages are higher than somewhere else, than they are part of the return on investment. If none of that is the case, it's not a coop but rather a not-for-profit.
In democracies the populations get the politicians they deserve. It's not like it's a surprise to anyone that Boris Johnson's sole political project is Boris Johnson, but people still voted for him.
I haven’t seen a more obvious case of someone pulling the tail on the cat and then being surprised when it scratches them. Then blogging about in a way where you try to put others on the hot seat.

Take some ownership of your life.
I would say definitely - the OP did fail to manage up properly.

I think it is less of a part of the role for a senior engineer - Principal and over it is pretty much a core of your role - but it is something you should be doing.

The groundwork for doing it effectively comes from both sides however, and everyone sucks here for that.
Those lost their polish identity though.
Historically, the best approach by far has been through forming a union.
Which is why the professional thing to do is leave. Why continue to work for shit, as you allude to? This whole argument sounds like a strawman. Especially given the fact he is a contractor and not just an employee. You make your own bed as a contractor, and you will lay in it.
The multiple facts that

a)both the Product Manager and team were surprised,

b)another person from another team reached out pretty soon to try to take OP on their team (having worked with op in the past)

And c) recruiters who kept reaching out, AND op kept passing interviews till the HR part
It's funny because browsing (original) Orkut was the first time I became aware of just how bad the nascent white nationalist movement was becoming, because while browsing around there I stumbled across several very active white nationalist and NAZI-type groups. Most in Portugese, but some in English.

I also vageuly remember when Orkut & friends were working on "Hello.com" while still at Google sometime I think around 2012 or 2013?, running sort of hush hush in parallel to G+, with assets checked into Google3 (the monorepo) and people being like "what is this? Do you know about this, Larry" because it seemed to go against the messaging we were getting about G+ being the unified social platform, we were all being forced to pivot to etc.

And then there was a bit of a minor scandal and memegen-storm about a bunch of animated GIF emoji assets that included animations of people slapping women and other things some people found distasteful. I believe after that it all disappeared from Google3.
'Full Stack Engineer' is a problem because it assumes that you're an end-to-end expert and that you're equally happy working on backend or frontend applications. I've spent 80% of my career working on backend systems and 20% on the frontend. I consider myself to be a rare bird in that while I'm most comfortable with backend systems development, I do actually enjoy delving into frontend work. That doesn't mean I'm going to do things the same way or as well as a dedicated frontend software engineer. I'll get the job done though.

Most of the folks I know are "allergic" to either frontend or backend work. Can they do it? If forced to, yes they can. But they won't be happy doing it and they may not do it well or it may take them a long time to do the work.

In all of the teams where full-stack has been attempted to be forced on us, we always wound up naturally reverting to our preferred tier once the manager found another idea to be distracted by.
If you're really hungry, don't bite the hand that feeds you. If they're evil then plan ahead.

If you have a full pantry, go ahead and bite.

Or live somewhere where you get free food.
Whenever you think about creating a public post like this on a company, consider first if you have grounds for suing them. In some countries, instead of suing you may instead look up if the situation has grounds to report them to the relevant regulatory entity (health or labor violations for example).

If you don't, it is likely that the temporary satisfaction of publicly shaming the company will be less than the nagging feeling of forever doubting if you didn't get a job because someone read your previous post and thought you'd be "difficult" to work with.
That's how I view it as well. There are some parts of the stack where I am more proficient than others, but I know I'm able to onboard pretty quickly to start solving problems regardless of whether it's frontend, backend, infra, whatever. I guess when I think of full stack, in practice I think of someone whom the linked article describes as T-Shaped: probably especially proficient in one thing, but able to rotate and be useful wherever needed.
> dance monkey, dance

See def. contractor.
I think you can't install Nvidia drivers without signing them or something.

I wasn't able to install them last time I tried.

Good luck with that.
Meh ... give people what they want. "I cannot estimate Z" is a refusal and I would suggest an ego-driven one. I would just say "between 1 and 12 months", or something like that. If they were then not happy with that I would go into why that is the best I can manage given the circumstances.

"failure by the manager to take the point on board" is not relevant really when you think of the manager's perspective. From their perspective they have a contractor refusing to do what they are asked.
Theoretically, such an integrated timetable likely also exists in Germany. And I definitely don't want to complain, all connections from my hillbilly home village to the capital run at a one hour clock cycle or better, and I only need to switch trains twice on the whole journey. If it works, it works great, but if any train is late (and usually that's the ICE between Hamburg and Munich), then all bets are off :)
Yes, but I still find it more convenient to have sentences on their own line. Vim's sentence text object does also not always correspond correctly to actual sentences.
500 and more, yes.