I’ve been in several different orgs that held a lot of layoffs and they’re sometimes performance related but other times just wrong place, wrong time as others have commented.
I also see advice that states you should change jobs every few years to ensure you continue to grow as a person, ensure salary growth (a real thing in my experience) and to ensure you’re staying relevant. So it seems that we want the option to move on our terms but we don’t think companies should view it the same. Management is also painfully aware that key employees can be ‘one bad meeting away’ from leaving. It seems like if we want stability then we probably need to offer some as well; many in this thread describe the relationship as either transactional or a negotiation and if we really believe it then we should view it from both sides.
Finally, there are large industries where there is significant stability: government, defense, etc. They don’t have FAANG comp, but can pay reasonably well.
We might not be able to quantitatively measure it but we can run studies to evaluate what individuals and teams can handle. Human factors people do this and it’s a sub field in industrial engineering. The military runs these studies and I’d imagine air traffic controllers do them as well, etc. You sometimes get really surprising results.
That's something I've noticed: the way we treat systems developed to work on data is _completely_ different from systems developed to work on, idk, oil.
You can build data refineries (ETF) same as an oil refinery. The difference is, the engineers who build the oil refinery create manuals and standard operating procedures to operate the refinery, because if they don't, then the new board operator will press the wrong button and blow out every window in a five-mile radius.
When you build a data refinery, no one documents _anything_ no matter how many times you ask engineers on the team to do it. Will it blow up in a massive fireball if you do it wrong? No, but it will corrupt data and have a business consequence. You can keep the 40 different microservices for the data refinery in your head though, right?
Depending on what exactly it is that you're storing or processing, neither does data.
Think sensor data and the sensor is a vital signs monitor in a hospital. The service that reads its output and stores it glitches out due to some sort of misclick by a user. It distorts the fact that the patient has an arrhythmia. Or a service that reads off the medication dosages for a patient for a pharmacist is stuck on a single message.
Merry Christmas all. Like many of the posters have said, I really treasure this site as this is what I still believe the Internet should be (yep, I’m old). Love all the nuggets I find here and the number of threads and articles I share out. Also, seriously appreciate dang!
Back when I was doing a lot of full time dev, my approach was to figure out how to build Hello World (usually the device driver equivalent) and then debug it and then start for real. But always started with how to build it and debug it.
A couple of years ago I moved from a more structured (not exactly slower paced in the job I was in) employer to a FAANG-like employer. I was making more money (base salary wasn't that different, stock and bonuses were). As I got more integrated and started wanting to make more of a difference, I started having to work longer and longer hours. It became obvious to me that I was on a path to essentially only working and sleeping. It was also physically wearing me out as I'm NOT in my 20's anymore. So essentially, I'd be making more money, but wouldn't have the time or energy to do anything but work. AND ... I'd have to start paying other people to do things for me that I normally would do myself - which then eats into that financial difference. I don't have young kids anymore so technically had the free time, but came to realize that I really didn't want to be forced to spend it solely on work. So I made a change to (again, a bit lower paying) but more structured environment.
This was a more balanced post than I expected. I'm probably older than the median here on HN and I think it's a generational thing. My parents were of the generation when folks tended to work for a company for a majority of their career and work hard to try to stay. But they grew up influenced by their parent who lived through great depression (technically mine did too but they were young) - jobs were a lifeline. So I'm a couple of generations removed from that and, even though I'm still biased towards 'work hard, job is important' my attitudes have been shifting as well (even though I'm in tech, my wife is a schoolteacher and also works incredibly hard).
I did not enter the workforce at an age where I was constantly deluged with 24 hour news and media feeds that the world is a terrible place. I've talked to multiple folks in the past 5 years or so who were just entering the workforce and they were even wondering what the point in getting married, having kids, etc. was. I have to believe that's a factor as well.
I'm a still learning guitar player (I think I've been taking lessons for ~8.5 yrs and did some piano lessons as a kid and was in school bands).
I usually work on solo style arrangements of popular songs but sometimes dabble into learning solos, different parts of songs, etc.
I try to transcribe what I'm working on in standard notation generally. For me the hard part isn't writing down the pitch; it's the rhythm and timing. Trying to document vocal parts and/or solos is hard, because they float all around.
As others have mentioned, different genres of music document their music differently. Standard notation is probably actually pretty rare.
I don't think the pitch notation system in standard notation is harder than learning the underlying concepts (scales are 7 notes, there are half steps between the 3rd and 4th degree and 7th and 8th degree (the octave) of the scales, etc.). It's an interesting approach but I don't think it's solving the harder problem.
I also see advice that states you should change jobs every few years to ensure you continue to grow as a person, ensure salary growth (a real thing in my experience) and to ensure you’re staying relevant. So it seems that we want the option to move on our terms but we don’t think companies should view it the same. Management is also painfully aware that key employees can be ‘one bad meeting away’ from leaving. It seems like if we want stability then we probably need to offer some as well; many in this thread describe the relationship as either transactional or a negotiation and if we really believe it then we should view it from both sides.
Finally, there are large industries where there is significant stability: government, defense, etc. They don’t have FAANG comp, but can pay reasonably well.