Dan Luu

Big company layoff stories

Earlier this week, a story about Stripe layoffs was on the front page of HN. Multiple Stripe engineers commented to say that it appeared that, in general, managers were not consulted about who would get laid off:

One engineer said:

> I work for Stripe and got laid off this morning. Sucks because my manager was only told this morni...

A cloud migration story from a car company

Once upon a time, a car company was trying to set up operations that let it read live data from all of its cars. Actually, basically all car companies were trying to do it because the data is valuable (selling user data is a lucrative business).

One quirk about the company is that it's split into different orgs that handle operations over ...

How do commenters coordinate their independent "obviously" wrong answers?

I keep a list of questions that I'm wondering about in my head and, when I'm talking to someone who I think might have an answer, I'll ask them a relevant question. The per-ask hit rate on this is very low but, over time, most of my questions get answered.

One that's been on my mind for a while is, how do people know to write & upvote ...

Against epistemic learned helplessness

There's this theory Jamie Brandon has that often comes up in our conversations about how, for mental development, it's important to do some kind of mental activity that connects to ground truth where there's real right and wrong and people get incontrovertible feedback about being wrong. This doesn't have to be something empirical, e.g., math is...

"You just have to be right, don't you?"

A pattern of interaction I had quite frequently when I was younger was that someone would have strong opinions on a topic they know nothing about, as in the kinds of ideas presented in https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/, and then I'd explain to them what they were missin...

Stories of source code loss

It's funny how often source code gets lost.

Once upon a time, I went on a few dates with a writer who worked at Bioware Austin. Of course, like almost every game studio, it was a famously bad place to work that also had terrible development practices.

Something that surprised me at the time was that they'd lost the source material fo...

Pop analogies

I find it funny when people make analogies to things they don't know much about to clarify something, making an analogy that's absurd to anyone who understands the topic. This often "works" in a way, in that the person reading the analogy often also doesn't know anything about the topic and has similar misconceptions.

An example I've seen ...

Some ironic rebuttals

I really enjoy ironic, self-refuting, rebuttals. One that really sticks in my mind are these comments from Uncle Bob and a supporter of Uncle Bob to Hillel Wayne: https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/917242771253145600.

In the thread, Hille...

Doing good engineering with bad mental models

One thing I find interesting is how much can be built without understanding the building blocks. For example, when I worked on flash memory, there was still a debate over the physical mechanisms that caused some things to work (https://twitter.com/altluu/...

The backlash against doing work (no, no that one)

A lot of people valorize working long hours in an unsustainable way, e.g., lots of VC Twitter, such as https://twitter.com/danluu/status/870718101528039425, profiles of various successful people (at Google, it was a running joke that the people they fea...

My style vs. monetization

I've been thinking about whether not it's plausible that I could make "serious money" (say, 1/5th of what I'd make as a full-time programmer) by writing.

One major strike against this is how much time I spend fact checking things. One example of this is there's a post I wanted to write on training intuition, where I wanted to use the story...

Phrases that mean their opposite

I'm reading a github issue on a correctness bug where the first comment from the lead developer is about how much they care about correctness and how much effort they put in.

I find the comment quite striking since the project is, for things I've used that are in its class, worst in class on correctness.

I've seen a similar response ...

Cost of living adjustments and location-based pay

In discussions I've seen over location-based pay, almost everyone I've seen conflates cost of living adjustments with location-based pay. A typical discussion goes something like this:

A: Why do people living in [some remote location] get paid 40% less? That's not fair to get paid less for the same work.

B: But housing is so expensiv...

Writing down the most obvious things

A while back, I convinced Jamie Brandon to write down "obvious stuff" he's learned about programming effectiveness over time that he thought was too obvious to write down (we have a weekly call where we chat about various ideas and my suggestion was just to publish the thoughts he had).

More recently, I've been writing down very obvious th...

Why do so many great engineers hold Alan Kay in contempt?

To answer this question, let's look a claim that's representative of Alan Kay's "systems" claims.

In this ACM interview right before 2005 (https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523), Alan Kay claimed that computers would be 1000x faster if we listened ...

Some reasons to measure

A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his response to some future measurement projects I wanted to do (in the same vein as other projects like [keyboard vs. mouse]( 2021-07-27 00:16:26 +0000 UTC View Post

What to learn?

Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers. His reasoning is basically that, if you understand compilers, you'll see compiler problems everywhere and will recognize all of the cases where people are solving a compiler problem without using compiler knowledge. Instead of hacking tog...

The glorification of elite teams

I've been reading older, influential, writing in software (Brooks, Yourdon, etc.) and here's a thought that I suspect I'll never flesh out enough to turn into a post on the "real" blog: I've been reading his "new" 2010 book, The Design of Design. As is the case in his better known book, Brooks really has a thing for superstar engineers and teams...

What does it mean that some Google execs think they gave away the farm with k8s?

Matt Klein has this Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/mattklein123/status/1229513048378888193) where he talks a bit about k8s politics and says the politics "are primarily driven by a few execs who believe that Google "gave away the farm" when t...

You'd have to be very smart to come up with that

When I look at system designs that have produced failed or extremely problematic systems, a lot of them fall into the category that I think of as "you'd have to be very smart to build something so problematic". A "normal person" would've produced a straightforward system that basically works, but someone who's very smart managed to build somethi...

Reactions to the NYT's potential doxxing of Scott Alexander

For those of you who haven't been following along, Scott Alexander took down his blog, Slate Star Codex, "because" Cade Metz, an NYT reporter, said he was going publish an article that includes Scott Alexander's real name (Scott Alexander is a pseudonym) despite Scott's protestations that this might cause problems.

I think that's unfortuna...

Why are you still working?

Sometimes, when I find out that someone has been at Google for 12+ years or is a managing director at a hedge fund and they've been unhappy with their job for years, I'll ask them why they're still working and they're not retired.

In one typical case where I asked this question, I knew a lot of the person's co-workers and had pretty good i...

Blog posts I'm not publishing

• Nominal company values vs. actual company values
  • This would be a list of companies with their stated company values next to what we can observe their values are from actual behavior, which might be things like "preserve the status quo", "an error must be taken to its extreme before it can be combated", "deny, deny, deny", etc.<...
    2020-05-04 02:20:37 +0000 UTC View Post

Another case against taking startup employee equity

Since moving to SF, I've had a number of people ask if I want to invest in the seed round of their startup. Until I moved here, I didn't realize that you could do this without being incredibly wealthy (as opposed to just normal programmer levels of wealthy), but it turns out that, when raising a seed round it's common to cobble together a set of...

Working at an ad supported company (or not)

I have a lot of friends who refuse to work for an ad supported company. I get it. I think everything they say about the pernicious effects of ads is true. In terms of being good for the world, I put ads up there with hedge funds: possible to justify as not evil in an abstract way, but with plenty of downsides in reality.

But I don't think ...

Startup vs. big company compensation in practice

I recently caught up with a friend of mine who spent four years at Uber as an engineer starting in mid-2013. They were employee number 60-something or 70-something. I was surprised to find out that they'd "only" walked away with a couple of million dollars.

I read S-1 filings and watch IPO prices, so I'm not surprised when I hear that the ...

We're just like a tech company

Here's a glassdoor review for a famous trading firm:

Pros

Nice people

Tech-firm like working environment

Cons

Need to arrive 7 AM or earlier

I don't think more evidence that they don't ha...

Buying a house as an investment

One thing I find interesting about living in SF is that it's the only place I've lived where the "I bought a house and it was a great investment" people who tell me that I should buy a house haven't been very wrong (historically; they could be wrong in the future, who knows).

Everywhere else I've lived I hear people say things like "I boug...

Kyle Petty on Danica Patrick

I haven't followed motorsports for maybe 20 years or so. While I was catching up on what I missed over the past 20 years, I found out that Kyle Petty was a consistent critic of Danica Patrick, saying that she's all hype/marketing and not a real race car driver.

It isn't surprising to find out that there was criticism of a woman who's a dec...

The "production ready" / "beta" duality

I tried Elm and Rust out in 2013. They both seemed interesting in that they had conceptual models that promised to make programming easier. Elm was particularly compelling to me since its model wasn't too different from how I think about hardware design, which I'd done for almost a decade at that point.

Neither language was really ready at...