"Zero passion 10am-4pm" doesn't necessarily describe not working hard. You can only do three to five hours of sustainable deep work a day unless you're a freak of nature. Usually anyone saying they do more just pads it out with breaks on Hacker News or Facebook, or has failed to automate the repetitive work in their job. A focused, organized engineer can pretty well exhaust their sustainable capacity plus do their overhead in 10am-4pm. As for zero passion, why do you need passion? And what does it have to do with not slacking?
Facebook makes you demonstrate your impact to the company twice a year. You would be hard pressed to be a slacker long term there.
The work does appear different because at that scale you spend a lot of time tracing out what's there, figuring out context, and trying to figure out how to make a change without bringing down everything else. If you're used to a small company or a small codebase where you spend most of your time writing new code it seems less productive, but it's mostly just different.
Slacking means doing the minimum required to get by. It doesn’t mean doing nothing and getting fired. I was replying to the parent comment idea that engineers at Facebook work hard because in my experience they do not. Which is fine. Slacking in many ways is optimal.
Yes, passion and slacking are not mutually exclusive. I am very passionate about the industry I'm in and the importance of the type of work I do, but....
I met two FB engineers a few years back. They seemed average, at most. But one quality stuck out (we spent half a day together at an event): They seemed to be excellent at following company rules.
That's what top schools teach you - conform 100% to the assignment requirements or there is no A/A+ for you. Also, most companies "get what they measure", so figuring out which metrics are visible and preferred is the way to go in large corps.
What does 10-4 have to do with anything? If you don't have significant equity, putting in more hours on a daily basis just makes you a tool in my opinion. There is more to life..
And many people in ads are certainly not working that schedule, and discourage those around them from doing so since it slows everything down long term.
The quote is from “Howl”
by Allen Ginsburg, a poem about burnout (among other things). That’s applicable to a report of people working a 9-9-6 schedule, a recipe for burnout.
I'm speaking specifically to this quote which seems to have drawn from it and hardly seems separable in this case. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” As if the FAANG-type companies are somehow the centerpieces of modern intellectual activity, which is such a tech industry thing to assume.
For what it's worth, I don't work in the "tech industry" exactly.
Rather than being the centerpiece of intellectual activity as you put it, it would seem the vast majority of the "best minds" are employed in the field. Rather than more necessary pursuits, more people are applied to making us click advertisements and applied to the surveillance of our browsing habits and other activities. It's not just the FAANG companies. The city I live in is flooded with small ad-tech startups who are going to "revolutionize the world". On top of that, to hear the ad-tech teams are probably the only teams at FB that are working a crazy schedule speaks loudly. Very loudly.
I lived in Montreal for three years and for at least eight weeks of the year the air outside was so cold that it hurt my face and made my eyes tear up. It is also a beautiful city and was a great period in my life.
(0.4) Start building a portfolio. Nobody will hire you without examples of past work or past clients they know. Blog posts, LinkedIn recommendations, case studies, screenshots, mockups, anything is better than nothing.
(0.6) Give free advice to your friends, former roommates, former classmates, former colleagues. Sit down, have coffee, listen to their app idea, compliment them, show them who did it already.
(0.8) It’s hard to meet people if you work at a desk. Conferences and meetups can help you build your network.
(1) At this point, every month at least two people should be reaching out to you about software projects.
In my experience consulting opportunities come through personal connections and often to work with early stage clients that are not very technical. What you bring is experience they can trust because you were referred by someone they know. Clients often don’t have the ability to get the project started or hire the right people so often consultants start as the interim lead developer and then migrate to the interim hiring manager and then pass the baton. I recommend asking for equity if you’re launching early stage companies for clients.
Off topic but it would be cool to have function types use just > for brevity, such as “add: int>int>int” and have equality operators use two characters, such as << >> >= <= ==.
It sounds like you do your best work to impress others. What if you hire a code mentor to review your code every couple weeks? It’s worth $100 if it works.
Value is captured at the point of sale for everything, not just ecommerce. Also, there’s a number of successful publicly traded logistics companies in the $20b to $70b range.
My great-grandmother died a month before her 100th birthday. Born in California with valid records and survived her husband by decades. She was pretty active and alert considering her age well into her 90s. We would walk together on the grounds of her retirement home (she needed a walker) until the last year or so.
It depends. Are you paying for the visit or per hour / per treatment? Paying by visit aligns the doctor to perform the minimum required treatment instead of something expensive “just in case”.
