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 morning, and didn't have a chance to talk about how well I was doing or take any part in the decision making. We'll at least I'll get a break. I worked nig...

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 different parts of the world and these orgs are constantly at war. So, each of these orgs has its own effort to do this and the orgs don't want shared...

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 basically the same wrong comments on different sites? I asked this question on Twitter a while back ( 2022-09-09 09:53:34 +0000 UTC View Post

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 fine.

I've generally agreed that's an effective way to develop a set of skills but haven't generally been onboard with it being critical, but I...

"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 missing.

After this happened a few times with the same person, their frustration at being wrong would build up too much for them to hold in and they'...

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 for older games, so writers would play through older games when working on a sequel to be able to read the text. I think that was the first time I heard...

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 at every large tech company I've worked for is "pets vs. cattle", which relies on having no idea how cattle are treated: 2022-02-23 04:59:53 +0000 UTC View Post

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, Hillel is arguing against Uncle Bob's position that "defects are never the fault of our languages. Defects are the fault of programmers. It is programmers ...

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/status/1478877045715202050). It's been twenty years, so I suspect the questions then are now resolved, but we'd been making flash memory for twent...

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 featured on their internal profiles were all the same, in that they'd wake up at 4am to exercise for an hour or two, do some reading or mediation, work 1...

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 in https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1468426115362418691 2021-12-21 20:14:50 +0000 UTC View Post

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 to correct bugs on a few other projects and those projects are also worst in class.

To be clear, this is distinct from a project having a page e...

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 expensive in SF! Some of us couldn't afford to live here if we were paid a lot less.

A: But you don't have to live in SF. Why should I get paid less tha...

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 things (https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/ 2021-11-15 03:41:39 +0000 UTC View Post

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 to him and designed computers his way:

> Neither Intel nor Motorola nor any other chip company understands the first thing about why that arc...

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](https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/), [keyboard](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 together some half-baked solution that will never work, you can apply a bit of computer science knowledge to solve the problem in a better way with less ...

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. He goes on about how the only way to do good design is to have an elite designer do the design. And on the flip side, he trashes designs that have i...

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 they moved K8s into a foundation".

I've seen other comments on Twitter that also indicate that k8s politics are real and vicious, but I haven't s...

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 something with a staggering level of complexity that either doesn't work or has extremely problematic failure modes that a simple system couldn't. This isn't...

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 unfortunate. There's no upside for anyone in publishing his name and Scott would prefer that his real name isn't published. However, I've found the reaction fr...

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 information that the person had been bored at work for many years and was just punching the clock.

I think the most common answers I've gotten ar...

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.
• Correlation between physical attribute and title
  • Scatterplots of various physical attributes vs. level, with data fro...
    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 checks that are between $100k and $200k from each investor. Typical valuations will be $10M to $20M, meaning that a check like that will get you abou...

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 that companies that sell real products are all that much better, if they're better at all. I've worked for a few. Two of the three companies I worked ...

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 median engineer at a company that IPOs for $1B walks away with less than they would've made as a new grad at a big tech company. But I find it surpris...

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 have a "tech-firm like working environment" is necessary, but if you search for their name, it's easy to find a photo of their last intern class. 3/4 of...

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 bought this house ten years ago and it doubled in value, you're throwing money away by renting", but whenever I've looked at my (very boring) portfolio, i...

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 decent race car driver, and especially unsurprising to find that it came from a NASCAR driver -- NASCAR stands out for being and old boys club, even amon...

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 the time. Documentation was poor, the compiler was buggy, stable libraries were almost non-existent, etc. Both languages would go on to make major ch...