I think the problem here is the implication of the term "politics". We've been conditioned (at least in the US) to think of politics as a tribalistic "us vs. them" activity where interactions have winners and losers.

The classic picture of "office politics" is about either damaging reputations with gossip or getting special treatment because of who you know instead of what you know.

But this depiction strikes me as less about that dirty version of politics and more about simply accepting that social grease is important in an organization. Teamwork is important. Crafting the message to the recipient is important. Inclusiveness and a shared sense of ownership is important. Culture is important.

I detest and refuse to engage in tribalism - workplace or otherwise. But I 100% believe in the stuff from the previous paragraph.

Yeah, this article says things like "understand the big picture" and "keep higher-ups informed about what's really important" and claims this is "good politics." No, that's probably just part of your job. Are there really people out there saying not to do these things? I'm left with the impression that the article is arguing against a straw man, because there is definitely something called workplace politics that engineers (rightly) try to avoid, but it's not what the article seems to be describing.

The thing I call "politics" that engineers like to avoid is making technical decisions based on personal relationships, making who does the work more important than what is being done and how. As a low-level employee, you might have to deal with that to an extent, and thus you should develop the soft skills to navigate that environment. As a higher-level engineer, you should definitely try to eliminate it from any part of the organization that you have influence over. My worry with articles like this is that it spreads the mentality of "it's fine, you can make this work!" and then we're all worse off because we accept the status quo rather than improving the culture.

To be clear, you can't completely eliminate politics from an engineering organization, since people will always take some mental shortcuts, but you absolutely can reduce it, and things will be much better if you do. Not only will your group make better decisions, but it will also be a more pleasant working environment for everyone.

No, your manager doesn't decide your promotion. The difference between before and now is that before, your manager was expected to make the case for your promotion. Now, the manager is expected not to be an advocate, but to provide their balanced input (ready now, ready soon, not yet ready).

The promotion still goes to a promo committee - although now they try to locate it close enough to your org that they have heard of you, and can have a high-context reviewer (not your manager) at the table.

The carryover from the previous system (and the thing that these sorts of posts seem to miss) is that every level has explicit expectations about the sort of activities that a person at that level can be trusted to independently conduct. A decision on promotion is a decision on whether or not a person has adequately demonstrated that they can do the work of the next level. It isn't some sort of award for doing their current job well. When someone languishes for a long time at a level, it is usually because they aren't demonstrating those next-level signals.

The system can feel unfair - like a team that lacks adequate opportunities for someone to demonstrate next-level signals, or the insistence that work doesn't count until its production impact can be assessed (which may take years for some projects). But it is rarely as capricious as may sound.

Will Google turn into a university next?

Because this sounds to me a bit like how things work in academia. I think the push there is to publish, but the essence is that, for every decision, committees rule.

Google works like academia because that’s all the founders knew.

I mean, it's always seemed pretty academic to me, due to the founders.

Lest anyone draw the conclusion that this is a US thing, it certainly is not. I've lived in many places throughout the US and have never heard anyone say "three or two". Nor does "two or three" carry the connotation that two is likelier. A closer fit to that would be "a couple", which formally means two, but sometimes means "a small number".

This is so cool! And I'm dismayed that you have been subjected to the typical Hacker News cynicism.

By looking through some of your other project and interests, I can see that you likely have a healthy sense of your own capabilities and certainly don't need my validation or approbation. But I'm going to give it anyway.

Piffle on anyone who knocks you on tone! It is not trivial to make this level of technical information available in such an approachable fashion. When we first start our careers, detailed technical knowledge and the ability to solve low-level problems are super important. But the way you "crawl up the value chain" in software engineering is to become a "force multiplier" - someone who can make other people more productive. And the ability to communicate well (both what to communicate and how to communicate it) becomes a more and more important skill. This work clearly demonstrates your communication skills.

I hope you make software engineering your career choice. The field could use more people like you.

When I first entered this field in the 80s, there was a rivalry between vi users (as I was) and emacs users. There was so much about emacs that I couldn't stand, but I'll admit to quite a bit of envy as well.

Then, some time around 94 or so, I became aware of this vi clone called vim. My emacs envy could finally be put to rest because this vim could either do (or had on the roadmap to do) everything I had envied from looking over emacs users' shoulders! I became a rabid user and evangelist, immediately downloading each new version, reporting (and occasionally fixing) bugs. For a while when I was working at Sun in the late 90s, Bram and I had an ongoing email dialog.

My career path has never really allowed me to significantly work on open source, so I never really made the transition to a major contributor. Many years ago, vim hit peak feature set for me, so I didn't really need to track its development - the version bundled on my work desktop would always suffice and I'd download a new version at home whenever I changed out my home Windows PC. Other than that, I lost track of the community.

When I came to Google, I was tickled to find out that Bram worked here, though I never reached out to him personally. Before I knew it, he had retired, and I lost that chance.

For over 25 years, I have only ever used vim as my editor - at home or at work. It is the most dependable tool in my box, traveling with me through multiple employers and programming languages.

RIP Bram.

Roughly 10 years ago, I was working for a startup that offered a live conversational video service where you could also have hundreds (or eventually, thousands) of near-live watchers - with recording and later playback. The founder pitched the service to news orgs and celebrities. Anderson Cooper had a regular "show" there for a while, and we had a number of interviews with mostly 2nd-tier celebrities.

When the service started, they made the decision to not actually delete any content (delete just set a flag which disabled the content but didn't actually remove it).

Fast forward a year or so, and it became clear that a real delete was needed. So they had a junior engineer write up a sort of delayed sweep - delete all the videos with the delete flag set. But then, for some reason, they decided put the implementation behind a delay. Something like "actually delete all soft-deleted videos, but don't start doing it until 30 days from now". However, unbeknownst to the team, there was a bug in the implementation that deleted everything, regardless of whether the 'delete' flag was set.

So one night, roughly a month later, all the content started disappearing from the site. One guy heroically tried to stop the process, but I think he was too late. The engineering director happened to be on a vacation down in South America somewhere and I think the founder fired him in a fit of pique. I managed to reclaim a small bit of content (basically the videos that were cached on the actual recording servers before they were uploaded to S3).

You can imagine the technical over-reaction:

  * Delete switched back to a soft delete
  * Turned on S3 object versioning
  * Started redundantly copying content onto a totally different hosting service

This was fine (hah!) until we had to start taking down the inevitable child porn that always shows up on services like this - I got stuck with writing the takedown code and it took me forever to track down all the various tendrils of stuff.

As you might expect, we lost a ton of users over mass content deletion and the service never really rebounded. The company held on for a couple more years, pivoting a couple of times, but eventually folded.

When I started college, all of our classes would assign a temporary (semester-long) account on one of the various Vax 11/780s supplied by the computing center.

Talk wasn't available yet (pretty sure we were on 4.1 BSD), so we'd use write(1) to communicate to each other (e.g., to figure out where someone was sitting in the lab). To block someone from writing to you (often desired, because write(1) would just spew over whatever you were currently looking at), you'd use the "mesg" command, which our University set as default to 'y'. I figured out that running 'mesg y' effectively just gave open write permission to your tty.

With that knowledge in hand, I started a practical joke where I'd remap someone's keys by redirecting an stty command to their tty, e.g.:

  % stty erase e > /dev/tty03

which would make 'e' the backspace key for the duration of their terminal session. Much hilarity ensued.

There is no way that New York style pizza can be compared to Focaccia. They have almost nothing in common. Now that Chicago thing, maybe. But as far as I'm concerned, that's not pizza.

No one said this was NY style. The original comment was lamenting that Pizza Hut pan pizza doesn't taste as good as it did in the 80s and 90s. I pointed out recipes that directly mimic that classic pan pizza style. Pizza Hut is not and has never claimed to be New York style pizza. It's an entirely different style that's neither New York nor Chicago style. It's closest to Detroit style pizza.

Love it. Pizza Hut slices also worked well for eating with a fork and knife cuz they were thick and crunchy.

Been meaning to try Kenji’s pan pizza recipe. Thanks for jogging my memory.

I don't think this is a "SV techbro" thing. In the 80s (when I was in college), "hacker" had a connotation of someone who built cool things in software, usually outside the "normal" approach. It was sort of the opposite of what eventually became software engineering - quick and dirty "tricks" that explored the edges of operating system. We looked up to hackers as repositories of esoteric knowledge. Long hair and hiking boots were common.

Certainly, some of what they hacked on might be related to security. Or maybe they wrote little games. Or threw together a curses-based interface to the Unix shell. Or some other cool utility.

As I recall, there was a concerted attempt to distinguish between people who exploited security vulnerabilities (aka "crackers") from people who could quickly build these useful things ("hackers").

I feel like the modern use of hacker (ala "hackathon") is actually pretty well in line with the usage I grew up with.

Atherton is a bit of a weird case and seems to derive its land values almost exclusively from lot size (and maybe inertia?). The peninsula in general tends towards low density and high property values and Atherton is just really on one end of the spectrum. However, it doesn't have something like walking distance to downtown Palo Alto or the views of Saratoga, Los Altos Hills, or Belmont. It has... big lots. With big houses. I honestly have no idea why it is so coveted.

Atherton has zoning that, for the Bay Area, is both very restrictive and very permissive, in a way that makes it a sweet spot for rich people to realize a specific but wide-spread American dream.

The restrictive part is that lots have to remain gigantic, but the setbacks from those lot lines are gigantic as well, and this is rigorously enforced, but within that build-able footprint the homeowner has nearly complete free reign. The result is a near complete isolation from having to see or contemplate neighbors, let alone "the poors", and yet it's within driving proximity of pretty much everything; that is, it enables the real-deal modern day version of the "country manor" of which the neighborhoods that comprise over half of American housing stock are merely cheap and shitty knockoffs.

Big lots and big houses are rare in suburban areas. Space between them and neighbours. Room for pools and tennis courts and ornamental gardens and large garaging, etc.