Blogs are almost 30 years old at this point, but yes, I do associate a nearly compulsive need to show off one's work in meticulously-crafted blog posts with younger people.
Disagree. This kind of comment is furtively pulling up the ladder behind you. Do as I say not as I do. Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well. Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family, which is fine but it came at the cost of basically zero time to learn or do things other than what my manager asks.
> Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well.
That would require a whole, separate article.
Many (most?) juniors grinding like that in a major company will work hard to get nowhere. Speaking from experience. Yes, I learned some lessons:
1. Get a different job. Deadend jobs definitely exist, and are quite common.
2. Ignore senior folks who say "You're whining. It's crappy everywhere. Just learn to take it."
Number 2 has been wrong every single time someone said it.
> Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family,
This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.
Don't get me wrong. If you want to go much farther than I have, you likely will have to grind and work hard and smart and be lucky. But I assure you - most of the people I know who worked hard are not in a better position than I am (or if they are, the difference is incremental).
I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.
> This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.
HN is not the kind of place I'm going to toot my own horn
> I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.
Agreed that they should explore and experiment and learn. And they should do that at 40 hours a week on the job (I did!).
Not all jobs allow for it. Change jobs if that's the case. Chances are your pay will be the same and more, and you'll have more time for this. You simply don't need to stay and work evenings to do this.
You realize “pairing it back to 50 hours a week” is not a great outcome don’t you?
If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit startup that statistically wouldn’t have gone anywhere.
Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a meaningless “CTO” founding engineer position at a startup.
As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of your experience. You must cruise on that experience when you are older.
When you are old, that is not the time to work and make mistakes.
That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as you can. Eat that frog.
I agree. When new programmers come from uni they sometimes barely did any programming. So at some time in their life they got to actually put in the time and learn how to be a competent developer. It is obviously great if you can do it on somebody else dime in a 9 to 5 but if you can’t get that you should just put in the time and learn. In the end you can at best get paid for the value you can create and if you are incompetent that is not going to be a lot
The knowledge came from former ASML employees. I wonder if countries will sanction these individuals given the geopolitical implications of their assistance.
> The team includes recently retired, Chinese-born former ASML engineers and scientists — prime recruitment targets because they possess sensitive technical knowledge but face fewer professional constraints after leaving the company, the people said.
> Their recruitment was part of an aggressive drive China launched in 2019 for semiconductor experts working abroad, offering signing bonuses that started at 3 million yuan to 5 million yuan ($420,000 to $700,000) and home-purchase subsidies, according to a review of government policy documents.
I guess they won't leave China anyways. So what's to sanction...
Sanctioning won’t do anything. These former ASML employees know that their professional careers in the western world are finished. I bet they know when they are signing that they are going to stay in China or countries friendly with China for the rest of their lives.
Who is "the west" in your eyes? I personally know plenty of people in the USA who are openly cheering for Russia in the conflict. So I don't think we could say that "the west" is mad at Russia. Certain people in western countries are, but plenty are quite happy with Russia and wish them well in their endeavors.
The team includes recently retired, Chinese-born former ASML engineers and scientists — prime recruitment targets because they possess sensitive technical knowledge but face fewer professional constraints after leaving the company, the people said.
and
Once inside, he recognized other former ASML colleagues who were also working under aliases and was instructed to use their fake names at work to maintain secrecy, the person said.
One interesting and ironic part of the article is that one of the mentioned optics research groups has been submitting a lot of patents on EUV sources. Are we meant to be mad about it?
Why would Holland sanction people who switch jobs? Don't get me wrong, I can absolutely see how it might have happened if ASML had been an US company. I'm just not sure how you figure that it would happen in Europe.
Controversial and possibly politically incorrect take, but the People's Republic of China sends many, many, of its citizens to study at top universities and work at top companies all over the world. I'm sure even at sensitive defense related orgs too.
While I am sure that the vast majority of them are just regular people, I'm also pretty sure there are True Believers amongst them whose mission is to go out into the world and enrich themselves with the skills and knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals. Some of them might even attain citizenship in the country they go to while inwardly retaining full allegiance to the PRC.
Heck, I know people from other, friendly/allied countries who obtain US citizenship who, if you pose the hypothetical question "If your former country and the US got into a shooting war, who would you fight for?", they would pick their former country without hestitation.
And despite public policy and rhetoric sometimes stating how the PRC is becoming a rival or even existential threat to the Liberal Democratic World Order (TM), the Western democracies don't do anything to secure things. And quite frankly, I don't know if there is anything that could be done, short of getting into... highly controversial territory. Which if the situation were reversed, the CCP would probably not bat an eye to do.
Controversial take: Democracy and the US are awful at keeping secrets, and are incapable of winning by an information delta, if we followed your strategy we would surely be doomed. Our greatest advantages come when we work in the open, and share knowledge and empower ordinary people and the world with technology. As things stand, we are funneling our brightest minds into creating proprietary (secret) technologies... And it turns out the only people for whom the technology is uncopyable or secret are... American citizens. The "proprietary" technology is trivial to steal, and legal protections don't matter outside of our borders, the legal protections and subsidies afforded to those building proprietary (secret) technologies only deprives Americans of the ability to innovate, while in peer nations like China, individuals and startups are totally free to use and enjoy American technology without any restrictions.
But that only works if China reciprocates, which they show no sign of doing.
I’d imagine a Chinese citizen living, studying, or working in the US has access to a lot more advanced knowledge than a US citizen trying to do so in China.
Up to this point, the US has been the one with the advanced knowledge. We now face a world where the opposite might become true.
But using the previous example, I’d imagine a future hypothetical American going to China to study or work would face a lot more roadblocks to obtaining and extracting any advanced knowledge, especially anything with strategic importance.
It doesn't require reciprocation because it is a generalized version of the rebasing problem in software.
Over a big round table with cigar smoke in the air it's natural to come to the conclusion that the closed party can always outpace any set of open parties since it can take the public work and extend it with an advance that it keeps a secret.
In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party. In the rebasing metaphor, the reason for this is the free coordination an open party gets with other open parties. The closed party never gets to insert its advance into the shared state-of-the-art, so it loses all of the free maintenance of coordination, and it has to choose between paying the maintenance cost of integrating its secret advance with the public SOTA, dropping the secret advance and going back to parity with the public SOTA, or disconnecting from the public SOTA and going all hands in on its own ideas. The maintenance burden of integrating your ideas with the constantly moving SOTA may sound trivial but in practice it is usually prohibitively expensive if there are a lot of parties collaborating on the public SOTA and doesn't leave you with much time/budget to find new secret advances.
Right now in the US, we have all of the disadvantages of the open model: the closed parties of the world can cheaply take ideas they like from Meta, Google, OpenAI and mix them with private advances, and all of the disadvantages of the closed model: our domestic tech industry keeps all of its technology a secret from other domestic competitors, and gets none of the coordination benefits of open research / technology, independents and startups are not only unable to access information about the SOTA, but they are actively attacked by the existing monopoly players with any means available when they approach it independently, including using their access to massive capital to drain the talent pool, or being bought outright. And, as we are all too familiar with, the entrenched players don't even care that much about whether or not they can even use the talent efficiently, denying it to competitors is worth more.
> In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party
An obvious counter-example to this is the NSA/GCHQ and cryptography. They've repeatedly shown that they're a good 5-15 years ahead of everyone else.
Is this still true? I feel like I haven't heard of any crazy cryptography revelations for a while now. My assumption was that cryptography was a bit of a special case because it was only government/defense entities putting significant work into it, up until the Internet/digital telecommunications became prominent enough that there was great individual and private-sector demand for crypto. (Plus the whole mess with it being export-controlled, obviously)
Aside from doubts about whether or not this is actually the case the pertinent question that comes from my point is:
If cryptography researchers were keeping their results secret to within their institution / research circle, instead of sharing with academic community / public, would that advantage or disadvantage the NSA relative to the researchers? I think the answer is obvious, and it's a pretty excellent analogy for the US-China situation.
We haven't always been awful at keeping secrets, see the actual Manhattan Project. I like the optimism of your proposal, but how would those US companies continue the same level of R&D investment without those extra profits? If the government just directly invests, then you've just become the enemy.
In late 2022 our telco soft eng team got purged and everyone who was even friends with people who might be Chinese were removed from the project. That included the original architect and product owner, both Americans but with Chinese roots. So there that!
I wonder if there would be more outrage if this was done to those with Israeli connections? Yes, Israel is an ally but they have been known to spy on us and share our secrets with other nations, like China.
I don't like this. Feels like easily become racist. E.g. people from Southeast Asia, Japan, or Korea who might not even speak Chinese but getting fired because they "look Chinese"
I don’t like this either. It falls under what I referred to as “highly controversial” choices.
But I also don’t doubt that if the coin was flipped, China would not hesitate at all to fire any non-Chinese person from such sensitive projects, and all without any outcry you would see in the West.
> knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals
You're forgetting to mention that they're also getting paid a lot of money. Quite a lot of people will sell out, given the right conditions, for that amount of money especially in lower CoL areas. To be honest, I'm sure Western governments and companies could do the same if they wanted to bring in the expertise from China.
Is there any other way to see it than just we are too divided and 50% of our own people just think we are the bad guys? What you describe is so obvious but one political side in the US at least pretends this isn't happening and actively does anything they can to hamper any response to it. I would love to be convinced otherwise because I am also part of the division, I truly don't understand the other side at all.
I think there was a time when the other side truly believed globalization and economic progress would turn the CCP into a democratic ally. Maybe both sides believed that for a while. What you see now is just the fragmented and incoherent remains of a failed philosophy that hasn’t yet come up with a coherent replacement, so we’re left adrift with no rational foreign policy from either side (in my opinion).
Why is China not an ally to the US other than the fact that it is a growing economy may be too big for US? What happens if US does not want to contain China any more? Are there fundamental issues which will put China and US as enemies?
China is communist and systemically atheist. That's basically it. Americans have always (or at least always since WW2) viewed communism as an existential evil and themselves as chosen by God to eradicate it from the world by any means necessary.
Well, they first saw the opportunity of cheap manufacturing. Then they saw the democratic ally. But let's say...at the very bottom of the top 1000 reasons to do what they did.
For me many Western politicians don't see past 5-10 years. Short-term China was Heaven (for big corp), so they used all the resources they had to justify what they did. Many called BS on that, but were treated like right wing, populists, old conservatives, naive, fear-mongering, etc. Almost a dejavu.
It seems most of those ASML employees were already Chinese engineers. I doubt they would care if they got caught and had their careers restricted to China
Well real question is how much would that limit PRC talent from working abroad. PRC will be producing plurality of STEM / high skilled talent for decades. They're going to be the only country with project intergrated circuit talent glut in next 10 years, every other semi power projected to have 100,000s shortage. No PRC talent, and you cap western semi talent pool.
Ultimately a lot western innovation run on brain drained PRC talent. There is bamboo ceiling in western tech for east asians, specifically to restrict reverse knowledge transfer. Side effect is once PRC talent hits this ceiling they know big title and fat paychecks and upward mobility is back home, where frankly QoL is off the charts. Ultimately PRC wealthy enough to reverse brain drain aka brain recirculation and PRC talent aren't retarded enough to limit their career aspirations because west decides to cap their career trajectory and try to lock their future behind noncompetes, especially in cold war vs their birth country. Worse, PRC wealthy enough even if there's no bamboo ceiling they can afford to reverse brain drain top 1%, hence current equilibirum. West needs PRC talent, west cannot afford PRC talent to climb too high, PRC can afford to take them off west's hands.
Until west figures out another source of talent, they're stuck in this talent trap. And IMO India ain't it, they don't have the integrated industrial chains and academic structure to produce same kind industrial ready workers yet.
Your point is right on. And additionally, why would an average Indian refuse the pay package to work in China? The top r&d guy at SMIC is from Taiwan after all. Liang got both Samsung and SMIC into the advanced nodes.
Yeah it reminds me of the Smyth report, published in August 1945 about atomic bombs, commissioned by the director of the real Manhattan Project. It’s fine to reveal knowledge in detail, if it doesn’t reveal anything related to constructing the apparatuses (the chemistry and the metallurgy) needed.
The press release following the bombing of Hiroshima specifically stated which method of refining Uranium was used. The U.S. spent a great deal of time, effort, and money on researching and testing four different enrichment systems. Just that one detail saved the Soviets 3/4s of a sizeable chunk of the A-bomb effort. Sometimes you don't need to leak much detail to give away a great deal.
My manager asked me to disable CI and gating code owner reviews “for 2 weeks” 6 months ago so people could commit faster. Just because it is in your job description doesn’t mean it won’t get shoved aside when it’s perceived as the bottleneck for the core mission.
Now we have nightly builds that nobody checks the result of and we’re finding out about bugs weeks later. Big company btw
That's his right. In capitalism, company owners have the power (which they delegate to managers) to fuck up the company as much as they see fit. On the upside, it means it's their responsibility and not yours.
Once you've said it's going to cause horrible problems, and they say do it anyway, and you have a paper trail of this and it's backed up onto your own storage medium, then you just do it and bring popcorn. If you think it'll bankrupt the company, then you have nothing to lose since you have no right to stop a company going bankrupt, so you might as well email your manager's manager's manager first and see if your manager gets fired.
Yep, who cares. You put your 2 cent in and if the business leaders see otherwise, that's their problem. You get paid on a schedule, if the app crashes and burns because the leaders demanded to remove PR reviews, that's not your problem.
Too often I see developers getting personally invested in business outcomes which they don't have a stake in. Getting frustrated when they don't have the final say.
It can be your problem if the company goes under and you lose your job: you might not be able to pay your mortgage or bills.
If you believe your manager is asking for unreasonable things in what you are an expert in despite you raising these concerns, and it's not clear their manager is in on it, please raise it to their manager!
"I am willing to continue working this way, but I just want to make sure the consequences it could have on the business are clear to everyone here."
One of my relatives owned an animal farm for a couple of decades and got a very rare muscle wasting disease. A high school friend of his, who was also a farmer, got the same disease. I imagine there were innumerable harmful chemicals on the land and in the water from decades of use before he bought it in the 90s.
I have 48GB RAM on my M4 laptop and get tons of freezing. I had to set the memory heap size to 64GB to reduce it, and I still have to force close once per day
Capital loss carryover is possibly what they were referring to
Unrelated note but the Homestead exemption in Santa Clara County, average sale price $2,300,000, is $7,000. To be explicit, the home’s value is reduced by $7,000 for valuation purposes.
Edit: the tax deferred part sounds like a 1031 exchange
You might be right about the 1031 exchange, but that has almost nothing to do with property taxes.
The homestead exemptions are very small or non-existent in some states, but I believe they are fairly substantial in the south. Ultimately, my point was that they are completely wrong in that I don't know of a single locality where landlords are given discounts on property taxes but owner occupied homes have to pay full freight, but the opposite is true in at least some cases. They could be talking about developer incentives for new construction, but that's not the same thing IMO and it's difficult to understand what they meant.
It's very, very hard to talk to people who have such strong, completely uninformed opinions and seem to be completely unwilling to even attempt to educate themselves on the topic. To be clear, this is not pointed at you, I'm just not willing to invest the time you did to seriously guess at what the parent poster was going on about.
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