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lifg posted:Check out your state’s unemployment benefits, how much and how long. You’ll probably max out the weekly benefit. Make a budget based on that. It's also good to not depend on that at all. The system is slow and uncaring and for high earners that may even get a severance package of any size they are likely to deny benefits (legally or not - have fun waiting for the hearing if you contest). This is obviously going to vary by state, but I've watched this happen multiple times in Pennsylvania. California seems to be much better to start paying right away, but keep your paperwork because they'll come back at you later.
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# ? Nov 17, 2022 14:59 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 22:23 |
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The advice I always got was to start job hunting immediately and not wait to get fired. Even if you don't get cut, you'll be doing the work of everyone who did plus your own.
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# ? Nov 17, 2022 15:53 |
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Also, if you feel like you're about to walk the plank consider: - Start removing your personal things from the office. - Start clearing any personal information and files off of your work laptop/cellphone. - Collect any important files and work that you've done that you want to hold on to (contact information for coworkers and managers, documents that you wrote, copies of yearly evaluations). - Raid the office supply closet. And the snack drawer. - Use any of your benefits that you haven't already. Basically, if HR calls you into a conference room at 9am, be 98% already moved out.
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# ? Nov 17, 2022 16:57 |
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Yep if you get a meeting scheduled with your boss and the VP of engineering on short notice you have about an hour to clean up your poo poo If you're posting in this thread you'll absolutely max out your unemployment benefits. In Texas like a decade ago it was about $400 a week it's probably closer to $500 a week now but that won't pay the mortgage and feed your family Having a six month cushion fund is good basic financial hygiene but rarely happens especially if you're under 30
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# ? Nov 17, 2022 17:17 |
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My state looks to offer up to $999 a week. Haven't actually checked if I qualify for that max amount, but that would actually nearly cover my rent + essential expenses (yay for being childfree and living frugally?). Already padded out my 3-month emergency savings to 6. I hope my coworkers are in a decent spot, though a lot are on visas... seems awfully stupid that the country would force all these smart people to leave just because of a temporary downturn. Still uncertain how many times the axe will fall, but best to be prepared.
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# ? Nov 17, 2022 17:44 |
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Cugel the Clever posted:My state looks to offer up to $999 a week. Haven't actually checked if I qualify for that max amount, but that would actually nearly cover my rent + essential expenses (yay for being childfree and living frugally?). Already padded out my 3-month emergency savings to 6. I hope my coworkers are in a decent spot, though a lot are on visas... seems awfully stupid that the country would force all these smart people to leave just because of a temporary downturn. Remember you'll also want to pay for Cobra/health insurance, plus taxes do get taken out of unemployment (although you may get a larger refund than expected since you weren't paid for the full year). Definitely start looking for a job, it's easier to find one when you have one.
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 01:38 |
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Cugel the Clever posted:The layoff wave hasn't directly impacted me, but there are strong hints that heads may roll later and that folks should put extra effort into documenting how well they're performing for next year's review process. I suck at selling myself like that and need to find the time to thoroughly review and upsell my actions and impact in the previous year. I think of tracking performance and impact as a useful exercise. If you are spending time on something that doesn't show up on your performance then stop. Actively measuring something helps you manage and prioritize it. It can also help boost your confidence like "oh wow I have done a lot this half". It shouldn't take that long to track your impact, and if it does then consider structuring your projects so you get more numeric results like "i recorded the error baseline as 5 and my update reduced it to 2!" Instead of "I think my fix might have reduced errors but i'm not sure".
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 19:56 |
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Feels like Goodhart's Law in action. As seen at Google, Facebook, and other places where you need to demonstrate your impact to get a good performance review, people optimized their career to focus on tangible impact; where they could point to Good Number Went Up, Bad Number Went Down. But that left out the other essential work with no metrics - like, cleaning up TechDebt, or keeping systems up to date, or being a subject matter expert. (Infamously at Google, the trick was to work on a product until it launched then immediate switch teams, because "Launched Product X" looked good but "Maintaining Product X" didn't, resulting in many products lacking maintenance. Apparently management had to put in policy to stop people doing this.) SREs have a hard time with this because their whole job is to keep things stable. "Number didn't go up or down" is actually work. SREs doing perf reviews sometimes feels a bit like the Pool Supervisor sketch from The Day Today. "In 1976, no-one died. In 1977, no-one died. ...." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob1rYlCpOnM
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 20:16 |
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minato you make good points. What's your preferred method of measuring performance? By your logic it seems any approach could get corrupted by people trying to minmax it
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 22:04 |
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No metrics, just vibes
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 22:06 |
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awesomeolion posted:minato you make good points. What's your preferred method of measuring performance? By your logic it seems any approach could get corrupted by people trying to minmax it As soon as you come up with a way of measuring anything, that measurement becomes an objective in itself (if it wasn't one already). In other words, every method of measuring performance gets minmaxed by people trying to play the system. That's just part of life, and one of the jobs that the performance review board has is trying to cut through the bullshit. The problem is that if you want to progress your own career, you can't not play the game. Otherwise the review board will ask you why you deserve a promotion or pay raise, you'll just kinda shrug and wave vaguely at your accomplishments, and they'll snort and move on to the next person.
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 22:15 |
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usual adversarial settings get whacked in algorithms land by adding randomness but if you did this in perf land your sun bleached corpse will be danced around in management books a century hence
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 22:19 |
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:As soon as you come up with a way of measuring anything, that measurement becomes an objective in itself (if it wasn't one already). In other words, every method of measuring performance gets minmaxed by people trying to play the system. That's just part of life, and one of the jobs that the performance review board has is trying to cut through the bullshit. The problem is that if you want to progress your own career, you can't not play the game. Otherwise the review board will ask you why you deserve a promotion or pay raise, you'll just kinda shrug and wave vaguely at your accomplishments, and they'll snort and move on to the next person. The only remotely satisfactory answer I've ever heard is to move the performance evaluations off the individuals and onto either the team or even the product as the whole. That way all the necessary but not otherwise noticeable work gets bundled into the evaluation and everyone rises or falls together. Naturally, I've only ever heard of this being done second hand and never worked anywhere it was put in practice. I'm pretty sure most metrics get used to justify decisions people were going to make anyways and the real thing you need to do is make the right friends i.e. the old-boys club effect.
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 23:10 |
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There's a field known as mechanism design that deals with problems like this, where you have a set of agents with their own preferences and you want to get them to do something in line with your objectives. The problems involved in running a corporation and designing promotion systems that incentivize desired behavior is too hard to be solved exactly, but there are probably some insights coming out of mechanism design that can help us do better than what we have.
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 23:46 |
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lotta the mechanism design poo poo is, as i said, inject randomness into it
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# ? Nov 18, 2022 23:48 |
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https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/11/18/twitter-planned-to-close-offices-friday-but-musk-asks-engineers-in.html posted:Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today. Elon is clueless.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 03:26 |
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I would just send some random APL code as a resignation letter.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 04:18 |
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(=<`#9]~6ZY327Uv4-QsqpMn&+Ij"'E%e{Ab~w=_:]Kw%o44Uqp0/Q?xNvL:`H%c#DD2^WV>gY;dts76qKJImZkj
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 04:25 |
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poo poo, writing the backend in Whitespace finally comes to bite me in the rear end.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 09:41 |
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bob dobbs is dead posted:lotta the mechanism design poo poo is, as i said, inject randomness into it elon trying some mechanism design at twitter right fuckin now
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 13:33 |
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The managing director of my dept liked a post on LinkedIn where someone said it's great that Musk is doing this code review thing. I've never had less confidence in his leadership, and it wasn't high to start with
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 14:09 |
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It's a trumpian request. It's what people who aren't software engineers but claim high IQs think would be a "good idea!" I have no idea if elon has a software background or even claimed to, but that request should make any engineer that has experience and isn't tied by a visa to gtfo. oh ya, and the other day he claimed "all the best engineers are staying". ok sure My malicious compliance would be at a 15 for such bs.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 15:03 |
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All the best engineers left as soon as it was clear which way the wind was blowing. They're multi-millionaires by now and don't have to put up with any poo poo.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 15:47 |
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redleader posted:elon trying some mechanism design at twitter right fuckin now and they're gonna circle around elon's sun-bleached corpse in business books a hundred years hence. as it were...
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 18:10 |
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downout posted:I have no idea if elon has a software background or even claimed to, but that request should make any engineer that has experience and isn't tied by a visa to gtfo. Caring about the number of lines of code committed is a loud declaration that one does not have a software background.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 19:15 |
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Che Delilas posted:Caring about the number of lines of code committed is a loud declaration that one does not have a software background. The original quoted internal message does not say "number" anywhere. Rather the opposite; it asks for screenshots, implying he wants to review code quality. I don't think that's reasonable (or even sane) behavior from a CEO, but if we're going to be mad at someone, it's worthwhile to be mad at them for the real reasons. Deciding to get angry about a story we told ourselves is how witch hunts get started.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 19:51 |
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downout posted:oh ya, and the other day he claimed "all the best engineers are staying". ok sure
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 19:59 |
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downout posted:oh ya, and the other day he claimed "all the best* engineers are staying". ok sure *H1B
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 20:07 |
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LLSix posted:The original quoted internal message does not say "number" anywhere. Rather the opposite; it asks for screenshots, implying he wants to review code quality. I don't think that's reasonable (or even sane) behavior from a CEO, but if we're going to be mad at someone, it's worthwhile to be mad at them for the real reasons. Deciding to get angry about a story we told ourselves is how witch hunts get started. I think people are talking about earlier when he was telling people to print out their last 50 pages of code https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/30/23430008/elon-musk-twitter-homepage-subscriptions-changes There’s also this deeply stupid nugget quote:Managers have been told that the purpose of the reviews is for Musk to see who can work at the speed and efficiency he demands, and that he wants to weed out engineering managers who do not regularly write code. “Managers in software must write great software or it’s like being a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse!” he tweeted in May.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 21:04 |
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Does he repeat this at SpaceX, Tesla, and Boring? Twitter staff are certainly being more vocal.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 21:06 |
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MrMoo posted:Does he repeat this at SpaceX, Tesla, and Boring? Twitter staff are certainly being more vocal. I’d guess it’s chiller just because the eye of Sauron isn’t pointed directly at them all the time like it has been at Twitter. But not that much chiller. Much less noticeable when people with sane relationships to work and authority are weeded out one by one during interviews or annual performance review than 3000 at once.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 21:15 |
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Erg posted:I think people are talking about earlier when he was telling people to print out their last 50 pages of code That's what I was talking about, yes. I hadn't realized we were dealing with two separate events.
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 22:05 |
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Che Delilas posted:That's what I was talking about, yes. I hadn't realized we were dealing with two separate events. imo that’s what makes the second attempt at it funnier. Like man you don’t even have room to fire people rn if you wanted to
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# ? Nov 19, 2022 23:03 |
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LLSix posted:The original quoted internal message does not say "number" anywhere. Rather the opposite; it asks for screenshots, implying he wants to review code quality. I don't think that's reasonable (or even sane) behavior from a CEO, but if we're going to be mad at someone, it's worthwhile to be mad at them for the real reasons. Deciding to get angry about a story we told ourselves is how witch hunts get started. yeah, i sure wouldn't want a witch hunt to get started against musk
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# ? Nov 20, 2022 01:03 |
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People who aren't okay with being treated badly for poor pay just aren't working for Tesla to begin with. Musk's companies have had a reputation for being a bad place to work for a long time.
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# ? Nov 20, 2022 03:01 |
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Erg posted:
It's like saying great coaches must be great players, or editing is the same as writing.
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# ? Nov 20, 2022 04:20 |
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Elon's an idiot.
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# ? Nov 20, 2022 05:09 |
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i like to say that intelligence doesnt exist but organic brain damage does one of the time-honored ways to get some organic brain damage is by sniffing enough llallo, which elon musk seems to have done
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# ? Nov 20, 2022 05:18 |
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StumblyWumbly posted:How could the head of multibillion dollar companies really think this? Managers must be able to identify or understand great code is arguable, but if you're a manager, your job is to manage so other people can write. If you're writing code you are not doing your job (managing). This is devops-brainworms adjacent. Yes, these methodologies work for a <50 person startup (when implemented properly by the right people - and these things are rarely true). No, they are not the best idea for mature companies yet they are continually used because of a combination of startup fetishism and short term thinking around saving on opex.
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# ? Nov 20, 2022 17:54 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 22:23 |
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ive watched the 20-peeps-in-a-room to 150-peeps-over-multiple-offices transition like... 6 or 7 times from the inside, 40, 50 times from the outside now and it deffo is subject to a lotta nostalgia from c-levels, because 20-to-40-peeps-in-a-room is the last time the c-levels feel like they have total control over an org. dunbar's number is 150 peeps, but you reserve lotta those 150 peeps for your actual friends and family and stuff
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# ? Nov 20, 2022 18:45 |