Especially idiotic are the random references to successful people.

As if not "wasting" your 20s (whatever that means) would somehow improve your odds to become the next Einstein.

If you happen to be the next Einstein then I firmly doubt reading baseless self-improvement drivel makes a difference towards realizing or not realizing your potential.

I think you define "strenuous" quite weakly. The overwhelming majority of jobs don't require very much cognitive effort, even in software. Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work.

Proving theorems is a completely different class of work to chipping away at your failed unit tests or knocking together a CRUD app in your favourite language. Maybe a tenth of one percent of software developers routinely do work that is intellectually on a par with mathematical research; The rest are for the most part skilled tradesmen, doing work they understand relatively well.

It is universally accepted that all but the most prodigious musicians do not benefit from more than 4 or 5 hours of practice a day. They can often easily do twelve or sixteen hours a day, but the extra time is simply wasted. Once your reserves of concentration are spent, you're just going through the motions without learning anything. Most conservatories go to great lengths to persuade their students to practice less, because young musicians are often convinced that they can attain mastery through sheer force of effort.

I can sit and transcribe or arrange parts all day long. I can play from sheet music until my hands give out, all the while daydreaming about what I'm having for tea or what chores need doing. I can't usefully improvise or compose for more than about two hours at a time, or more than four hours in a day. I can feel the point at which I start playing familiar riffs rather than truly improvising; When I've run out of ideas and I'm just writing pastiche. There are composers who claim to do regular eight-hour days, but when you look deeper they invariably spend most of that day arranging or transcribing or recording into the computer, stuff that's essentially just admin.

To solve this problem, I wrote git-crypt[1], which uses git's smudge/clean filters to transparently encrypt/decrypt files when you check them in/out. So it's a lot like this solution except you don't need the manual makefile steps. As an added bonus, git diff/blame still work on the encrypted file.

[1] https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt and http://www.agwa.name/projects/git-crypt/

This is a great post, but my experience with Google is that it doesn't empower individual engineers until they reach the Sr. SWE or Staff SWE levels. There's a Real Googler Line, which seems to be somewhere in the Senior SWE tier. If you're above it, you have independent credibility and you can change projects and as long as you're not a total flake about it, you get enough opportunities that you can find a place where you shine. If you're below the RGL, you get locked out by headcount limitations and your best hope is, after 18 months, to transfer to a slightly less bad project.

What you're discussing is the Credibility Drought. Companies define credibility so that only managers have it, in order to create an artificial scarcity that makes employees easier to control. That's what enables the managerial extortion that forces employees to serve local goals (the manager's own career) rather than the benefit of the company (or the growth of the individual).

Very few companies formally allow a manager to unilaterally fire. That's way too much of an HR/lawsuit risk. Instead, these closed-allocation dinosaur companies define credibility in such a limited way that managers can either support or not support the employee, and then if the person is not supported, that person's credibility is zero and the manager isn't firing that person. "The company" does it, after "careful review" of "objective" performance statistics. On top of this, they set tight headcount limits so that for anyone to get a good project requires a special favor, allowing the company to say "no" and appear consistent on the matter.

Google is aware enough of this problem to allow engineers at above a certain level to acquire independent credibility.

At Staff, you can pull a Yegge (quit your project in public) and be OK. If you're a SWE 3 and you try that, you're fucked.

So Google may be different from the full-on closed-allocation nightmare corporation, but you only if you either (a) start at a senior level, or (b) get on visible, desirable projects when you start, so you can get promotions quickly. The only time it isn't difficult to transfer to something better is immediately after a promotion (and there are some managers who withhold promotions to keep people captive; Google, to its credit, has a system that occasionally overrides managerial objections to promo).

The sad thing is that I don't doubt that Google is better than 95 percent of large corporations its size in terms of internal mobility, individual autonomy, and engineer-centric culture. It might be better than 98%. It's still pretty awful for a large percentage of people who work there, and the fact that it's so much better than most of what else is out there is a damnation of Corporate America, not an endorsement of Google.

Hey, so a common thread here seems to be enforceability of false DMCA notices and how it's a pity there's no penalty.

There are penalties.

Check out 17 USC 512(f): http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

(f) Misrepresentations.— Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.

I was the plaintiff in OPG v. Diebold, which was the first US federal lawsuit to establish the enforceability: we won. You can't just issue spurious, false DMCA notices without opening yourself up to large damages, such as the ones that Diebold had to pay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPG_v._Diebold

I was a Senior Engineer with a manager who talked to me once on the day I joined the team, then forgot I existed for the next 3 months. If I had discreetly transferred without trying to repair this, I think I might have pulled it off.

But instead, I mistakenly emailed him, concerned that he was holding 1:1s with everyone else on the team except for me. He then hastily called a 1:1, apologized for forgetting my existence, and then immediately informed me that I was now behind on his expectations of my productivity.

My friends advised me to go to HR, so I did. Whereupon I found out he had already paid them a visit to inform them of me. At this point, the google immune system geared up to encourage me to leave of my own volition. I tried to get on to other teams. Friends in the company tried to get me onto their teams. These efforts were blocked.

Deciding this was a game not worth playing further, I left a month later when I got a compelling offer elsewhere.

Waste of 4 months IMO - but I also believe that if I had just been allocated to a more relevant team things would have turned out far better.

What you just wrote is exactly what I've been telling people about every new "Python" implementation for the last 3 years. Believe me, I understand this argument completely, that's why I made sure we had all the hard bits (monkey patching core classes, eval, etc.) before I released this.

Think of Pypy as somewhat like LLVM, except the language it's built on is a subset of the python language, called RPython.

Although the most well-known language implemented in the pypy "vm" is python, the toolchain is completely language agnostic.

So, this is more akin to Apple writing a C interpreter on top of llvm than it is to building a ruby interpreter on top of python.

This frustrates me too. I've run into a laundry list of Browser (mostly canvas) bugs over the years, 95% in Chrome (my main browser) and 5% in Firefox.

Typically they'd be ignored, fixed several months later if I'm lucky[1], and still ignored as they get closed by an automated bot[2]. Chrome specifically created an "icebox" to automatically close old bugs.

I'm convinced that the Chrome team at least has an internal bug-tracker they use and the external one (crbug.com) serves the same purpose as fake thermostats on the walls of office buildings.

(To Chrome's credit, they took the only security bug I filed very seriously and fixed it in a couple days.)

[1] Unlucky: Still an issue with broken translating gradients in non-hardware-accelerated canvas: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387

[2] This bug was ignored, fixed, and for a year I asked for it to be closed. It was finally closed by a street-sweeping bot: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=62373

I knew this was going to happen some day. Games Workshop is essentially two separate companies, the raving legal department/copyright trolls (A couple of years ago they regularly put full page colour adverts in all the British wargaming magazines warning that they would enforce their IP with the full power afforded to them by the law, it was generally considered a bad joke by most.) and the (for a lack of a better term) hobbyists who make most of the miniatures and write most of the rules. And it seems like they take turns running the company. For ages, there'll be lots of player-friendly new things and shiny new figures and the terrible quota-driven managers at the shops will be replaced with the people who are there because they love their hobby. And then everything'll change and they'll start enforcing stupid dictats on IP, change the rules of the games to excessively favour those with bigger wallets, bump up the prices of everything and fire those people that sacrifice short term gains for cultivating a long term base of customers and fans.

I find it really sad, I grew up near their HQ in Nottingham. A number of my dad's friends work for them. And I'd love for this to be the push that means that all the other wargaming companies (who in the past couple of years have really progressed in professionalism and quality) will find even more traction. (Although they all still suffer from a lack of space to sell things, there is a GW in almost every town in the UK. They've all but squeezed out the independent hobby shops.) But a lot of people just won't care. And an equal number of people are too locked in, they've spent a lot of money on the GW armies. All their friends have GW armies. You can't just splurge two, three hundred pounds on warmahordes unless all your friends do the same.

All I can hope is that GW gets their arse handed to them and the hobbyists get put back in charge.

If they put that on their frontpage, there would be at least 20 posts on here bashing them for it because they didn't get it right (or just accusing them of outright lying/incompetence).