HN Lament - <AUTHOR>

I really don't want this to be yet another of those "HN is going to hell, folks!" posts, but I'm at a bit of a loss at how to continue. So, like always, I'll talk to myself by writing. You are welcome to join in. Or not.
One of my many side projects is a cute little photo blog. I won't name it, because if I do somebody will just accuse me of trying to promote it, and I'm not.
It's been around for about a month. My goal? To tag my funny photo collection and share with people. I also put things on there I want to remember.
Today I found a cool picture that involved programming, protesting, and outsourcing. It's not a "funny picture" but it grabbed my attention. I couldn't attribute the damn thing, so I posted something like "Anybody know what kind of protest this is?" But it occurred to me that traffic was so low I was unlikely to get a response.
Speaking to a friend, I mentioned maybe submitting it over here. You guys love coding, love protests, and love talking about stuff like this. Surely you've seen the picture and could have fun explaining it.
My friend was adamant: "Don't do it! If you post that over on HN, they'll flag it and ban your site forever!"
I'm like what? Why wouldn't they just let it slip off the new page and ignore it? Why wouldn't somebody just post a comment like "Here's where they got it from, Daniel. It's related to X" and that would be it? After all, it's just a picture and a question, it's being submitted from somebody who's been here over four years. There are no ads. It's not attributed, but hell, that's why I had the question to begin with.
In short, it's something I think would interest hackers. I might be wrong, but hell, been wrong a lot before. It's nothing new.
But, you know, he's right. Looking at the new page with ShowDead on, there are dozens of real people out there submitting stuff that nobody will ever see, and they don't even know it. Any kind of article that can be perceived to have be some kind of trick ("they'll say you're just blog spamming!") will not get ignored -- nope -- that'd be too nice. It'll be flagged. We must assume the worst and we must punish immediately.
But that's not all. Just last week I submitted an article about startups. I wrote it myself, it was highly on-topic, and I have written many similar articles over the years. It got five votes fairly quickly -- it was a good read -- and then somebody flagged it. That's right. They didn't comment on what I did wrong or correct me or anything. I pissed in somebody's cornflakes and this was payback time. Over the years how many people have I pissed off? Now I have to try to figure out when to submit when none of them are online? That's fucked. A couple of weeks ago I said something slightly unflattering about the Chinese government. I was refreshing the page to see if there were any new replies (I am anal like that) when I saw somebody come in, downvote my comment 3 times, then go and downvote the last 3 comments I had made. I wasn't trashing anybody, I just probably wasn't as PC as they liked.
So here's my simple question: is this what we want the site to be? Have we reached the point where if you piss off a few percent of the population, you can never submit things? Do we want to have third-world people hungrily trying to get attention for their blogs while we secretly just waste their time? Is anybody taking a look at the poor saps who add reasonable comments to the discussion, think they are contributing, yet nobody can see what they're typing because they've been banned without their knowing it? Have we reached the point where anything that can possibly be spun a bad way will automatically be assumed to be deceptive? The front page is full of gossip, meanwhile we have to plead with people to be nice to the new startups that are posting because it seems you can't submit anything here without some snarky response? Is that what being a hacker is all about?
I'm just asking. This isn't the kind of community I joined. I'm just wondering what happened to it.
It's a lament. Probably not a lot to add. <comment><USER2> It's not clear to me that people are submitting stuff, not realising that it'll never be read. I wonder if you've conflated having an item flagged dead as opposed to being hell-banned.

The only instances I absolutely know of people being hell-banned were pretty clearly appropriate. When I've occasionally turned on "Show Dead" and looked down the list, I've pretty much agreed with them being inappropriate, off- topic, repeats, or otherwise of little value.

Having said that, I have seen what appear to be instances of vengeful downvoting, and cases where I really haven't understood why something has been flagged, but I've not seen the nastiness you describe.

And even so, I'm no longer finding much to interest me here. That's why I'm doing two things. The first is to create a personalised filter for HN items. That's starting to pay off - I'm seeing mostly stuff that interests me, and less of the - to me - uninteresting.

The second is to create a different place for people that caters more readily to a wide range of interests, while still providing each person with things that they find valuable and interesting. That, too, is starting to work.

If you're interested in either project, reply to me here.

</comment><comment>==

ADDED IN EDIT:

It was some time ago that PG increased the ranking penalty resulting from flags, but certainly it doesn't take many flags for an item to fall quickly from the front page, if indeed it ever gets there.

The problem is that with such a hugely diverse "community" here now, for every submission, there will be a substantial number of people who consider it "off- topic". My concern isn't the topicality, my concern is the complete lack of content or depth of so many items.

<comment><USER3> So, I always browse Hacker News using "showdead" (and have since I started using the site): there are definitely ghosts walking among us that have no clue they have been hell-banned; to be clear: "people are submitting stuff, not realising that it'll never be read".

Yes: a lot of the time, when a comment is marked "[dead]", it makes sense that that comment is dead. However, you cannot use this to determine whether the instances of hell-banning are appropriate, as most comments that are marked "[dead]" are not dead because they were posted by someone who is hell-banned: that one single comment is dead.

Sometimes, though, a comment is actually useful (occasionally even, the most useful response), and you wonder "why is this dead?": the result of seeing someone who has spent the last few months talking to the small handful of people who care enough to use "showdead", not ever realizing it or being told it, is kind of sickening.

At some point, I decided to start leaving tabs open with these people (my really pathetic way of bookmarking stuff), so I could one day find them all and write an article about "why you have to be careful when you implement hell-banning", but unfortunately (as this is a really pathetic way of bookmarking things), I can't find some of my better examples, despite spending the last two hours searching through current and archived browser states.

However, I do have at least one example for you: this comment has a response from a user named "Pooter" that I found interesting--in fact, multiple people found interesting (enough that someone actually asked after it)--and yet the user is hell-banned, so I don't get to see it. This user is /still/ posting stuff, and probably /still/ doesn't realize they are hell-banned.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2519863>

Now, when you look at this user's comment history, it is not at all clear to me that he deserves to be /hell-banned/. Yes: some of the things he says are not terribly useful, but if you check the threads there are other users who say the same things and are simply slightly downvoted; in some other cases these alternative comments are standing fine.

But what is really bothersome is that sometime this is the only user who went out of the way to correct someone else, and Pooter is actually right:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2872773> <\- in fact, iOS has support div scrolling for years, maybe even since the beginning: Pooter is right

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2846808> <\- while I'm not certain who I agree with there, I think Pooter's argument is a reasonable one, especially if you connect it with his other rebuttle: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2843802>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2808094> <\- this comment is downright insightful: I am fully in agreement with it, and I wish I had been there to say it.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2755767> <\- while he didn't need to say "This is a stupid idea.", his reasoning for why the idea is not "very good" is sound.

When I come across these cases, it really makes me wonder what is going through the minds of the people who are making these moderation decisions. I mean: Pooter is abrasive, but I've spent a bunch of time over the last few days staring at HN users (and tagging them: I got sick of not remembering who is who, so I've built a user tagging framework), and there are people with many thousands of karma points who cause a lot more strife with a lot less useful content than Pooter (or the other people I swear I have sitting in tabs somewhere on one of these numerous web browsers :().

<comment><USER4> All of Pooter's posts have five hyphens on the last line. So maybe this triggers the spam filter.

<comment><USER5> You might consider reading [http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.htm...](http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html) before making comments like this in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've started spending more time over at <http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/> it's much closer to what HN used to be than HN is now.

<comment><USER7> It seems ironic that a lot of users moved from Reddit to HN, and now HN users may move to Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's largely just a function of growth. There are enough people here now that a tiny tiny fraction of them flagging can easily kill stories. Same problem with random comment downvotes. This will continue to be a problem unless we have categories, but that's also not without its issues.

Meanwhile, what was that picture? :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> I think you kind of misunderstand what flagging is and it leads to you fear it unnecessarily. Flagging tends to be used as kind of a downvote, since HN lacks proper downvotes on articles. It reduces a post's ranking and, if flags accumulate much faster than upvotes, will cause the post to be killed. AFAIK, it doesn't ban you, your site or anything else, and certainly doesn't cause a magic hellban out of nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER10> A few weeks ago I had an article dead'ed after getting 10 upvotes. And now all my submissions are marked dead seemingly permanently. So what am I todo except stop contributing to HN

<comment><USER5> > to do

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm constantly seeing posts from hell banned users who are contributing. Here's an example I saw just this minute (you may not be able to see it if you don't have show dead turned on.)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2930421>

Since I see these posts and the spam and I've left it on for several weeks this way, obviously the spam that is getting thru with showdead on is not enough to make me want to turn it off. In fact, except on the new posts feed, I rarely see spam at all.</comment>


Silicon Valley Hiring Perks: Meals, iPads and a Cubicle for Spot - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/technology/26recruit.html?hp

<comment><USER2> "But even with a glut of engineers on the job market, few have the skills that tech companies look for, said Cadir Lee, chief technology officer at Zynga. Colleges rarely teach the newer programming languages like PHP, Ruby and Python, which have become more popular at young Web companies than older ones like Java, he said."

That seems a little demeaning to portray a computer science education as one of languages and syntax. It's not about learning PHP or Ruby; it's about learning programming paradigms, concepts, algorithms, etc to make better software.

Perhaps the author of the article isn't particularly versed on how the CS => Software jobs process works. But to suggest that many engineers can't find jobs because they weren't taught PHP in school is grossly incorrect.

Does anyone actually know of academic programs that teach PHP?

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't that universities don't teach Blurb. The problem is that at most schools, computer science students go into the field because it pays well, and aren't otherwise interested in programming.

If you aren't interested in programming, you aren't going to take the time to play around with new languages. You won't spend thousands of hours outside the classroom, hacking on your own projects just for the sake of creating something you think is cool.

The end result is that there are two strata of programmers; those with passion, and those without. In my experience, it's easy to spot the difference with one question during the interview process: "What's the coolest thing you've ever built?"

If the answer to this question is something they built because they were told to, they lack passion. If, on the other hand, they built something because it scratched an itch (at school, work, or otherwise), then that's something else entirely.

My best hires have always been programmers with less on-paper experience, but a ton of hours building stuff because they wanted to.

<comment><USER4> My main resume to interview filter is finding out what projects they have worked on in their spare time. They usually have a homepage, blog, github or bitbucket account, or something similar.

On the other hand, there is a class of 'rockstar' developer who are actually not very good. The best way I can explain this is by giving an example.

I was hiring for a new higher-level dev, a Rails role. I was referred to a developer whos name I knew by somebody internal. I thought 95% of the task would be me convincing him to join us, and his profile was lots of twitter followers, a good following on HN and other forums, a high profile as a developer, attached his name to a lot of open source projects and spec work etc.

Turned out he knew none of the basics. He had 'C' on his resume yet he could skype chat me the simplest C routine. I asked him to scp a file up to a dev server, and he said 'I had no idea that you could FTP over SSH' - which he said after a 3-4 minute pause where it was obvious that he was googling. I learnt then that a public profile and being involved in such projects sometimes also isn't the best indicator.

<comment><USER5> Unix and and C expertise seem like lousy litmus tests for a Rails dev. How was his rails work?

<comment><USER4> Terrible - he mixed controller and view code. I was only testing what his resume said, and since we are small the role also requires a bit of everything

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's just my age showing, but going to work somewhere because they're buying you an iPad seems totally ludicrous. One would think that with a $90,000 salary, a $500 tablet should not be a deciding factor.

<comment><USER7> I think the haircut part is much stranger. The iPad is about moving people into the multitouch paradigm.

<comment><USER8> The haircut part is about not having to leave campus and go do errands on a weekend, so your weekends can be about having fun (or more realistically, doing more work for the startup ;-)). It's actually pretty handy, being able to tuck away a 20-minute haircut appointment in between two meetings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Then there are salaries. Google is paying computer science majors just out of college $90,000 to $105,000, as much as $20,000 more than it was paying a few months ago."

That's a pretty remarkable stat.

<comment><USER10> Everyone got a fairly substantial raise in response to heavy poaching by Facebook and others.

<comment><USER11> I do wish we could get rid of the "poaching" term for at-will employees. Either it's easier to bag trophy talent on the Google reserve than in the open field (in which case, good on those employees for improving their lot) or it's harder (in which case, good on Facebook and others for figuring out how to compete for them.) Either way, it's hardly a situation for which an external observer needs a judgmental descriptor.

<comment><USER12> Actually I disagree - the poaching between FB and Google actually sets difficult precedents for pretty much everyone else.

You get FB enticing talent from google, and google giving raises to keep people and this makes all other companies at a disadvantage.

Further, paying college grads 100K+ sets them up to be prima donnas almost immediately.

Last, it is against the stance that when starting your own company, and taking on money, the VCs want you to take smaller salaries to show that you have skin in the game, that you're hungry etc... This makes it such that lifestyles become set and the likelihood of anyone willing to take less is not going to happen.

Over time - the overall market salary expectations increase, but now the available talent pool that is actually worth those salary levels shrinks - putting both talent and employers in a catch 22.

Every single entrepreneur in the valley should see Google, and even more, Facebook as nothing but their enemy (until they try to acquire you, that is)

<comment><USER13> Considering inflation over the past 20 years, $100K salary is not prima donna material. Engineers aren't overpaid; they are fortunate enough to have salary keeping pace with inflation.

Much of the rest of the educated working class is underpaid, with real wages falling, due to weak bargaining power against the aristocracy.

<comment><USER12> Based on your comment then, do you believe that the only thing anyone should be really interested in is stock?

Here is why I ask, my salary ranges between 110K and 175K depending on the project, position, how interested I am in it etc...

I am a very senior infrastructure deisgner and PM.

I am 36.

To say that someone out of college getting 100K as an expected base salary is not pirma donna material -- then you are setting them up to believe that, as an engineer, their salary expectations should grow over time to say ~350K.

However - nobody pays that.

We can argue that everyone is underpaid, sure, I feel underpaid. But the truth is that the only way I am going to get a comfortable windfall is to build / sell somethinf of my own.

The fact seems to be that the mean salary is fairly flat regardless of experience in general - but in the relatively more rare cases that people cash out, there i wild profit to be made.

This is clear in SV where it is far more common for people to make out on their stock -- but that clearly indicates at least some sort of bubble for silicon valley as compared to the rest of the country/world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This has been happening for the past 12 years. At ArsDigita you got 100k, free food, massages and weekend drives in a Ferarri. And that was to compete with places like "Sapient" who offered more money. Even further back in ancient history, I believe Symbolics used the same approach to recruiting. I guess the new twist is that Google and Facebook can actually afford these salaries and perks.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Shannon Callahan, who recruits engineers for the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's portfolio of companies, said a third of the engineers she called ask for financing to start their own companies instead."

This seems like it would be the biggest problem in finding top talent.

<comment><USER13> Not every talented engineer wants to be a CEO.

<comment><USER16> Nor does every entrepreneur.

I think a lot of entrepreneurial engineers just want to be CTO or VP of Engineering or Product. There's a lot of selling and all that goes around that I think many entrepreneurial engineers are not predisposed to even when they can be good at it.

I know a lot of startup execs and enterprise execs step back after a while to rejoin the ranks of individual contributors for a while to catch their breathe. It was worse during the IPO dotcom boom where I had friends that really felt that as execs they were forced into ethical compromise in handling the finances and misleading analysts when they were running public companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 90k for entry level is pretty crazy. Any Googlers in the Atlanta area who can give the range in those parts now?

<comment><USER18> From another HN discussion a while back: "entry level", as in starting position at a company is not the same as "entry level" as in first job ever. Yes, the article mentions recent grads, but I bet most of those who end up hired already have industry experience (through internships or otherwise).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "cubicle for spot"? What does that mean?

<comment><USER20> Companies let their employees bring their dogs to work. Dog=spot (popular name for a dog, google "see spot run")

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not a bubble!

</comment><comment><USER22> So proud to be working with two of the startups mentioned in the article.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article makes many claims. A few of the claims I am in a position to verify, and all of these are false.

This observation does not give me confidence that the other claims are true.

<comment><USER23> Care to elaborate?</comment></comment>


How ISPs are shamelessly trying to scare you away from supporting net neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://computermagazine.com/2014/05/14/how-isps-are-shamelessly-trying-to-scare-you-away-from-supporting-net-neutrality/

<comment><USER2> I can't seem to find anything on the link OP provided, either due to some sort of rendering issue, or because it's not actually there.

The source link points to a post on Reddit which points to this article:

[http://bgr.com/2014/05/13/fcc-net-neutrality-comcast-twc- ver...](http://bgr.com/2014/05/13/fcc-net-neutrality-comcast-twc-verizon-att/)

<comment><AUTHOR> the link seemed to work when I pasted it. I originally oasted the link you shared, but HN immediately pronounced it as [dead]. The below seems to be working for me. Sorry for the fuss.

[http://computermagazine.com/2014/05/14/how-isps-are- shameles...](http://computermagazine.com/2014/05/14/how-isps-are-shamelessly- trying-to-scare-you-away-from-supporting-net-neutrality/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Please review my startup (www.spibby.com) - <AUTHOR>

Spibby intends to be a game centered around check-ins and purchases (via the Foursquare and Blippy APIs).
Our minimum viable product is a real-time, user-generated stream of what people are spending on / recommending. We plan to gradually integrate location and purchases into this stream.
Foursquare integration: A user will see a list of recent check-ins and be allowed to enter purchases made at these locations. Blippy integration: A user's credit card swipes will be pulled into the Spibby stream from Blippy. Points will be earned from a combination of swipes, transactions and Spibby posts (and the conversations around these posts).
NOTE: In its current avatar, Spibby might seem like a non-automated version of Blippy / Swipely, but that's quite intentional - we hope to integrate with these services and eventually build our game on top their APIs. The value-add around the user generated posts (that we currently allow) is the ability to discuss wishlists / cash transactions / questions before a purchase, which we think is quite significant.
We'd like to a) receive feedback and b) start building a community as early as we can. Spibby, right now, is extremely basic - we let you make simple posts and follow other users, but we've already seen some interesting conversations unfold between our initial users.
We're quite sure we're in for some really compelling feedback from the HN community.
1) We'd love to hear what you think of the concept. 2) We'd like to know if you think the path we're taking (from MVP to version 1.0) and our complete apathy towards stealth makes sense 3) We'd like your inputs on how we can make Spibby better
Thanks a ton in advance! <comment><USER2> I haven't visited your website yet. I would recommend that you work on your pitch. Your first line was not compelling, doesn't explain to me why I want to use Spibby, or why the world needs it!

After reading the second paragraph, itjust seems like you tie Blippy/Foursquare together via api's and aggregate the data. Is there anything I'm missing?

Sorry if this comes off as negative, it's really meant as constructive criticism. I went to your site and I'd love to see more thought put into explaining why, as a user, I want to 'earn points' or 'recommend' on Spibby when I can do it on a ton of other sites (for exampleI'd probably use yelp right now). Some sort of analysis of what happens when the service gets huge (why is it valuable to me? Why does my contribution make a difference? What is it working towards?) could be very helpful in making people interested :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you make a point that I was blind to because it's hard for me to look at the app purely from a first time visitor's perspective.

The reason we've kept our description on HN very matter-of-fact is: we feel most readers on HN will likely want to know the concept for what it is rather than have it sugar coated. I'm not sure I want to turn that into a sales pitch. Should I?

Yes, we do plan to tie up the APIs and build a game on top them. We look at it as a universal game that you can play irrespective of the check-in service you use (Your Yelp check-ins will fetch you points that will let you lock horns with Gowalla and Foursquare users). I guess being more loud about 'universal' might help. And we hope to see some very interesting conversations around purchases that should help users discover new stuff (think hollrr.com meets location). If it does get traction, we'll be able to offer users some pretty sweet deals from the locations they check-in to / shop at.

That being said, I recognize that we haven't answered the "what's in it for me if I sign up now?" question convincingly. Since this value will become apparent in the future, do you think its alright to beat a drum about how cool it will be and make promises we might (possibly) not be able to keep?

<comment><USER2> Perhaps something like this: "Don't you hate 'checking in' to five different services, updating your facebook status, posting a tweet every time you go somewhere? 'Spib it' once then sit back and enjoy your latte."

I realize that's a bit snarky but that's the type of message I would want to see: "This is your problem. Here's how we solve it."

<comment><USER3> Agree, also I think the last step is of little value. I wouldn't include it on your sell page. Would be a nice to have once you have power users but too early to invest time in to that this early on.

I would try writing a short narrative to illustrate the value added. Good story telling never gets old. I don't see it being a good selling point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.spibby.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> it's too complicated / how do you use it?, let me know what it does within 5 seconds or fewer....

</comment><comment><USER6> a red signup button would result in more conversions

<comment><AUTHOR> we could definitely make that change.</comment></comment>


DikuMUD 3 Is Released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Seifert69/DikuMUD3 <comment><USER3> I am thankful to Diku and it's derivatives for many important lessons in life. The situation when a mob kills you, takes your exp and all your equipment and you are faced with dire reality of starting all over again from nothing - <USER2> the one that we are facing in life ever so often. MUDs have taught me to persevere, focus on what is important and keep going. I am thankful for every friend I met via MUD and every friend I will make. As a matter of a fact I am in the middle of MUD renaissance right now - rebuilding the MUD I created in 1995 and playing it with a handful of buddies - all of us now in our forties and we are having the time of our lives chasing down mobs and magic items (and of course playing only after the kids go to sleep). On top of that I get to code in C again. Life is good. Wish the best of luck to DikuMUD 3.

<comment><USER4> Luckily I've yet to face mob kills me and takes all I got in real life ;) But then I used to play MUDs at some point in the 90's so maybe that's because of the lessons I learned there!

<comment><USER5> When a bug or a mistake wipes irremediably many days of work, you need that kind of perseverance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Holy crap. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, _long_ time.

To give some perspective, the last public release of DikuMUD was in 1991.

<comment><USER7> Weirdly, my initial thought there was "that's only 9 years ago", and then did a quick double take when I realised that it wasn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Downloading and trying to figure out the code for DikuMUD-based distributions is what drove me to learn C as a kid.

<comment><USER9> Same here! I remember making my own port of DikuMUD because I wanted to start my own community but quickly learned how daunting the writing workload is and I sadly never finished my beginning city but it felt magical to have a friend from AlterAeon join me and enter this world I had built. It was all so accessible if you could just put in the time to world build.

<comment><USER10> Ditto! Digging through Diku and the derivative Smaug codebase was my gateway to programming and I am forever thankful that such software existed and was available for a young teenager to dive into.

<comment><USER11> Me too. Learnt a lot about Unix, c, networking and compilers getting it working in 1992.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. When I dealt with the problem of wanting to give people access to my MU* through a web-browser, I worked around the problem by building an ANSI- aware bridge between the existing MU* and the browser.

[https://gitlab.com/hlieberman/webmu](https://gitlab.com/hlieberman/webmu)

<comment><USER13> Check out Iron Realms' MUD client. Nobody else's web client comes even close, I think.

[https://nexus.ironrealms.com/Main_Page](https://nexus.ironrealms.com/Main_Page)

<comment><USER14> [https://writtenrealms.com/](https://writtenrealms.com/) client is pretty nice.

<comment><USER15> This client is what I think of in my minds eye for a modern day MUD that still stays true to what a MUD is but has an accessible interface. Whoever designed the UI did a nice job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> it's nice to see so much of the original DikuMUD surviving this far into version 3, but don't understand why raw html is being generated instead of something to be parsed on the client given that the client is a web browser using web sockets.

as an aside, I have a nicely working copy of sillymud hanging out in my GitHub, and local copies of phoenix (the successor to sillymud), and epic (another highly customized mud that ran off of goldman.ai.mit.edu).

<comment><USER6> > ...don't understand why raw html is being generated instead of something to > be parsed on the client given that the client is a web browser using web > sockets.

Looking at the repository, the impression I get is that this codebase had a web interface grafted onto it relatively recently. Most of the code looks like it was written with the expectation that it'd be used over a line-mode interface. (A lot of it also looks like it was converted from C to C++ very late in the development process -- outside of the WebSockets library, there's hardly any code which uses even basic STL features like string or vector.)

<comment><USER16> > _Looking at the repository, the impression I get is that this codebase had a > web interface grafted onto it relatively recently. Most of the code looks > like it was written with the expectation that it 'd be used over a line-mode > interface._

yes, if you know the history of muds, and diku specifically, you would know that, but where those changes were made it could more easily have been changed to respond either as text, and styled in the browser without adding all of the html elements, or as json. it was a very weird decision to be made given its history and the new goals of the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> DikuMUD is _the_ influential mud code base. So many derivatives came from it - including my favorite, CircleMUD. There were also rumors that Everquest was directly inspired (and perhaps even some code lifted!) from DikuMUD. Millions of hours of gameplay across MUDs and MMORPGs owes its life to this C codebase built by a handful of university students in Denmark.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hey look we interviewed Seifert about this.. months ago :)

[https://www.titansoftext.com/28](https://www.titansoftext.com/28)

<comment><USER3> You do a fine job with that podcast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is DikuMUD by any chance affiliated with the Department of Computer Science at Uni of Copenhagen (Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet)? FWIW that's where Peter Naur did most of his work on formal grammars.

<comment><USER20> Yes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DikuMUD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DikuMUD)

<comment><USER19> Geeky. The owner also wrote Sitecore, a very expensive CMS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This brings me back. I wasted so much time on MUDs when I was young. I had _the best_ TinyFugue scripting when everyone else was dragging with zMUD.

<comment><USER22> MUSHclient represent! I spent so much time on Realms of Despair, it's basically where I learned to program.

Being text-based, MUDs were basically made for scripting. I have very fond memories of that entire world and its people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I got my start on a DikuMUD running from the pulmonary labs at UBC (AoD, if you're still out there, thank you). I was still a high school student at the time, but fortunately there was an unprotected dialup (604-822-2222) into the NIM system, from which you simply typed in the IP address of the machine you wanted to connect to.

This was my gateway into serious programming. I'd already learned some C, but the idea of a networked multiplayer RPG really stoked my interest in network programming as I tried to write my own MUD from scratch, and it's because of this that I chose BCIT to study in the datacomm program.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fond memories of playing my warrior and cleric at the same time using a program called tintin++. An early form of multiboxing only with unix shells instead. The server was Apocalypse which appears to still be running.

<comment><USER25> Tintin was amazing. I kept a copy on a zip disk so I could use it in the computer labs at college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is extremely cool. I cut my teeth on C by writing code for a DikuMUD derivative, SMAUG, and used it to learn a whole lot: socket programming, parsing files, basic interpreter scripting languages.

</comment><comment><USER27> Inquiring minds want to know: Are the fidos still beastly?

<comment><USER6> The beastliest.

[https://github.com/Seifert69/DikuMUD3/blob/master/vme/zone/m...](https://github.com/Seifert69/DikuMUD3/blob/master/vme/zone/midgaard.zon#L7483)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> used to play MUDs back in junior high / high school. DartMUD, Seventh Circle MUD, along with a few others (I think there was a Dragonball Z MUD at some point that I played, too).

Never played DikuMUD, but I honestly miss those days playing DartMUD for hours on end. I looked up DartMUD a while back, but it doesn't appear to be very active, if it is even online anymore.

<comment><USER28> Just tried getting on DartMUD. Their character registration process is so hostile with their requirements (no free email providers???)

Yup. DartMUD will remain squarely in my memory, and I won't bother trying to play it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I still sometimes log in to a MUD, Diku as well! Fond memories of roleplaying and PK.

<comment><USER16> I still relish my time as a darkside member.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This can be hosted online right ?

</comment><comment><USER31> C++ is the worst possible choice for something like this.

I tried compiling it and got flooded with screens full of incomprehensible errors of the sort:

        /usr/include/c++/v1/type_traits:1547:38: error: implicit instantiation of undefined
          template 'std::__1::owner_less<boost::weak_ptr<void> >'
        : public integral_constant<bool, __is_empty(_Tp)> {};

<comment><USER32> > _incomprehensible errors_

Maybe incomprehensible if you don't know C++ or don't bother to read them or carve them entirely out of context (like you've done here). Every error tells you both where the error occurred, how the compiler got to that file location, and what the problem was. Literally what more do you want?

But, yeah, everything is incomprehensible if you don't comprehend it.

<comment><USER33> I hardly think that an error such as this one points to a solution

../../build//vmc/vmc.o: In function `fix(char _) ': /home/user/DikuMUD3/vme/src/vmc/vmc.cpp:254: undefined reference to `init_lex(char_)'

<comment><USER25> I don't have a lot of experience with C++ and even I know that the most likely cause of that error is not having the linker configured correctly. It's probably something simple like a common library not being linked in.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Developer auction starts today - <AUTHOR> http://www.developerauction.com/

<comment><USER2> hmmm. something about that makes me uneasy.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to think I consider myself more than a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder.

Also, _if_ this takes off, I am sure people will find ways to game the system six ways til Sunday.</comment></comment>


Robot can forge handwritten signatures (2015) - dfeojm-zlib http://betabeat.com/2015/01/this-fleet-of-robots-that-can-identically-forge-handwriting-signitures/ <comment> dfeojm-zlib As a protest, I always draw a figure in the signature box. There's no authorization, authentication or non-repudiation provided by a handwritten signature; it's antiquated, historical business/social theater.</comment>


ClojureScript vs Coffeescript - <AUTHOR> http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/clojurescript-vs-coffeescript/ <comment><USER2> Hmm. This seems like an odd comparison to me as Coffeescript and ClojureScript really have two different target audiences. Coffeescript seem to be more targeted towards people interested in writing JavaScript application with a more clean syntax whereas it seems ClojureScript's aim is to allow people who want to write Clojure, do so targeting a JavasScript VM rather than a JVM. I'd expect people looking to use either would probably know which one they were looking for from the get-go.

Interesting summary of ClojureScript's current weaknesses though.

<comment><USER3> I think the audiences are not as different than you think (I use both). CoffeeScript is for anyone wanting to write in a more expressive language.

ClojureScript offers that and even more without requiring people to fork ClojureScript. For example I got my pattern matching library working for ClojureScript - [http://dosync.posterous.com/advanced-pattern-matching-for- ja...](http://dosync.posterous.com/advanced-pattern-matching-for-javascript). match looks deceivingly simple, it's a fairly involved extensible optimizing pattern match compiler implemented as a macro.

EDIT: a fun example of how expressive pattern matching can be - here's a pattern for checking red black tree balance and the incredible output - <https://gist.github.com/1177437>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is Pacman in Clojurescript: <https://github.com/mjg123/pacman>

This is Pacman in Javascript (I couldn't find one in Coffeescript): <https://github.com/macek/google_pacman>

</comment><comment><USER5> 60 of the ClojureScript lines are due to unidiomatic formatting of parenthesis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to get a pull request with an idiomatic version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice writeup! I hadn't heard of rbcoffee before. I'll definitely be using that in my coffeescript projects. One point – doesn't ClojureScript support user macros via refer-macros? :

(ns my.namespace (:refer-macros '[my.macros :as my])

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Rboffee has its own project[1].

About macros, I get _WARNING: Use of undeclared Var cljs.user/defmacro_ when I even think of using them.

If you manage to use them, please let me know!

[1] <https://github.com/danielribeiro/rbcoffee>

<comment><USER3> ClojureScript does indeed have macros. They are compiler macros. You can't define macros in your ClojureScript file (because ClojureScript doesn't itself have access to the compiler) but you can refer to macros defined in a Clojure file and the ClojureScript compiler will use this to expand your ClojureScript. That's what refer-macros is for. I'm looking forward to getting my pattern matching library, <https://github.com/swannodette/match>, working with ClojureScript.

As far as the compile times you should checkout Chris Granger's <https://github.com/ibdknox/cljs-watch>. This is analogous to "coffee -wc *.coffee".

Nice writeup.

<comment><USER7> To me it was obvious that the time-to-compile measurement for ClojureScript was all wrong. It's a common, but annoying mistake people who aren't used to the JVM make. Startup Time != Compile Time.

<comment><AUTHOR> If it started once and watched files for changes, it would only be the compile time (which, if fast, would be great). As it is, the total time is the only one that counts, as it is the one that affects your productivity.

JRuby guys were so aware of this that they actively promoted nailgun[1].

[1] <http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New wonder material, one-atom thick, has scientists abuzz - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090708/sc_mcclatchy/3268145

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure about the 'new'. When I saw the title I thought hey, graphene has competition ? It turned out the article was about graphene, which may be news to you but is now already 5 years old.

Instructions on how to make your own using some sticky tape: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=diy- graph...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=diy-graphene-how- to-make-carbon-layers-with-sticky-tape)</comment>


28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/28-year-old-makes-millions-buying-from-walmart-selling-on-amazon/ar-AAupB8i <comment><USER2> Planet Money did a story on retail arbitrage in 2015

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/03/411777635/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/03/411777635/episode-629-buy- low-sell-prime)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's nice people are able to hustle and make a profit but are you really adding VALUE to the equation?

<comment><USER4> If people are willing to pay a premium for the convenience of buying the stuff from Amazon instead of driving their ass to wallmart and looking for sales themselves, then there is definitely value being added.</comment></comment>


Hardware for Deep Learning, Part 3: GPU - <AUTHOR> https://blog.inten.to/hardware-for-deep-learning-part-3-gpu-8906c1644664 <comment><USER2> Tesla apparently designed their own chip specifically for neural net vision as GPUs were not fast enough - including nVidias Tesla chip which is currently being put in their cars.

Musk mentioned they got a 10x boost from doing so in their last investor call:

"I'm a big fan of NVIDIA, they do great stuff. But using a GPU, fundamentally it's an emulation mode, and then you also get choked on the bus. So, the transfer between the GPU and the CPU ends up being one of the constraints of the system"

"And as a rough sort of whereas the current NVIDIA's hardware can do 200 frames a second, this is able to do over 2,000 frames a second and with full redundancy and fail-over."

Peter Bannon lead the development.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many companies designed or designing their own chips. The most prominent example is Google TPU.

There will be another articles in this series on FPGAs, ASICs and so on.

<comment><USER3> Eagerly waiting for the one on FPGA's and ASIC's

<comment><AUTHOR> The original plan was this:

[https://blog.inten.to/hardware-for-deep-learning-current- sta...](https://blog.inten.to/hardware-for-deep-learning-current-state-and- trends-51c01ebbb6dc)

<comment><USER3> [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6787/2017fa/Lecture11.pd...](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6787/2017fa/Lecture11.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great article!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


14TB Hard Drives Now Available - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/11901/western-digital-now-shipping-14tb-hgst-ultrastar-hs14 <comment><USER3> SMR drives can be thought of as tape libraries. You have a bunch of large, independent tapes that can all be written sequentially. But you can't do random writes to the tape. (SMR drives also have a lower density, non-SMR "scratch region" that can be used for metadata, or to build up to a larger I/O piecemeal. My metaphor is breaking down here.)

They're not generally useful for the kinds of applications harddrives are classically used for (classic filesystems). They're mostly useful for applications that already use tape, with the benefit of much quicker random reads.

Log filesystems may be able to take advantage of them. There will necessarily be I/O overhead to garbage collect deleted files out of SMR regions. (Because you have to rewrite the entire SMR region to compact.)

Is anyone using or planning to use SMR drives in production? If you're able to share, I'd be curious to learn about your use case and how you plan to make efficient use of the disk.

<comment><USER4> I use a bunch of 8TB SMR Seagate Archive drives in a ZFS pool for backups and media storage.

I run ZoL, and honestly they've surprisingly been relatively solid drives. You can expect roughly 10-15MB/sec or so write throughput per drive, and latency is of course pretty bad. Across 24 spindles though, I haven't had too many complaints - it's archival storage and reads are fast enough for most use cases - about 50-70MB/spindle sustained for large files.

I would not try to say rsync millions of tiny files against this pool - <USER2> would not hold up well. However for it's use case - write large files once/read occasionally I'm quite happy - I just wish price would have come down over the course of 2 years as I had originally expected. You can expect to pay $200-220/drive even today, and that's what I paid the first batch when starting my pool.

Out of 24 total spindles I had 2 early failures (within 120 days of install) but otherwise no other failures. These drives were replaced hassle free via RMA. My I/O pattern is pretty light - probably 100GB written per day across 24 spindles, and maybe 1TB read.

Basically if you try to do anything but streaming writes you're going to have a bad time. They are a bit more forgiving on the read side of the fence however. Don't expect these things to break any sort of speed records!

If I were buying today I wouldn't buy 8TB SMR - I'd pay the $20-30/spindle premium for standard drives. I'd have to look at the 14TB costs to see if the huge speed tradeoff would be worth it. When I first started using them, the cost per GB was compelling enough to give it a shot and I'm pretty happy with the results.

<comment><USER5> What do you need to do to get FreeBSD to use SMR drives properly with ZFS? Are there special drivers?

It seems ideal for a write-once/read-many media server.

<comment><USER4> These are drive-managed SMR, so no special drivers needed. I agree they are ideal for write-once/read-many media servers :)

Today I'm not sure the 8TB drives make any sense as prices have come down so far on regular 5400rpm slower drives that are _much_ faster. These new 14TB spindles will be interesting to keep an eye on.

I imagine SMR won't really take off, if it does I'd expect more direct kernel/driver support for the hardware. Drive-managed SMR is always going to be exceedingly inefficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> white-flame I bought an 8TB shingled drive. While the initial hundreds of MB of backup files wrote at reasonable speeds, it quickly dropped down to 4-5MB/sec sustained average for the rest, until it was idle for hours to catch up. Host management probably can help, but I'm not touching another SMR drive again.

<comment><USER6> I guess if you use these for a log-style database, write only backup (e.g. a replacement for tapes with better random read), you'll be happy. But for a general purpose drive they suck.

<comment> white-flame What I was doing was large backups, no overwriting, and it slowed down massively. I reformatted to a linear log filesystem, and still had the same unusable performance trend. However, since the drive was already somewhat used, and the drive itself knows nothing about the filesystem but only about sectors, I'm sure it was shuffling all the old data around as well.

Strangely enough, I could imagine it might work for a primary hard drive, as writes tend to be small and bursty allowing the SMR shuffling to catch up. But installation would take days.

Marketing them as "Archive" drives as Seagate did is the absolute wrong case for these. It's impossible to get any backup/archive copied over in any timely fashion. As a live mirror which gets piecemeal changes as they happen, then maybe. But that's still not an "archive".

<comment><USER7> > since the drive was already somewhat used

You are spreading a lot of FUD based on one single anecdote with a used drive. Let me counter that anecdote with my own complete satisfaction of using such drive for over a year of daily backups without anything 'taking days'.

<comment><USER8> Why does it matter that the drive was used? If I can permanently damage my performance by using a different filesystem for a while, that's a big deal. It's not FUD to talk about how drive-managed SMR is unpredictable, and might work great or might work horribly, and you can't entirely predict what you'll get.

<comment><USER7> Why should filesystem specifics matter to the device itself? If you believe that is the case, did you rewrite the whole drive with zeros or something, or better yet use some device builtin erase function?

<comment><USER8> > Why should filesystem specifics matter to the device itself?

I agree! That's why I think "drive was used" should not be a disqualifier for seeing horrible performance. Why should a former filesystem matter?

> did you rewrite

Not my drive.

<comment><USER7> A used drive might have been treated badly, have thousands of online hours etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "2.5 million hours MTBF"

How do they calculate that? That works out as 285 years!

Half of these drives will last 285 years of constant operation. I find that hard to believe.

<comment><USER10> It's predicted statistical failure rate in aggregate for the drive model. Two drives running for 24 hours is 48 hours for MTBF purposes, so scale MTBF by the number of drives. 1,000 drives would expect to have one failure per 104 days. 10,000 drives would expect to have one failure about every week and a half. It's not "half these drives will run 2.5 million hours." I agree, the "mean" is confusing until you know that. It also doesn't predict low quantities well, including 1, for obvious reasons. The larger the quantity gets, the better the prediction tends to get IME. Backblaze has published work on this.

Failure rate is also independent of lifetime. Drives have other measurements for lifetime.

<comment><USER11> So, in layman's terms, if I buy two of these and mirror them is it a pretty safe bet they'll last my whole life?

<comment><USER10> No, because design lifetime is distinct from failure rate. Failure rate is just that: a predicted _rate_ of _failure_ (not lifetime) in aggregate for a model within design lifetime. Beyond lifetime, all bets are off. Think of this MTBF as saying "your two drives probably won't fail within lifetime. A significant number of your 10,000 will."

Regarding longevity, often the predicted lifetime of a drive is close to its warranty. You will sometimes experience no issues exceeding design lifetime, and sometimes drives immediately explode. I've seen both, from four-year lifetime drives entering year 13 in continuous service to other drives buying the farm one day after lifetime and SMART wear indicator is fired.

As drives age, mechanical disruption becomes a much bigger deal. That rack of 13-year drives is probably one earthquake or heavy walker away from completely dead in every U. Even power loss, including from regular shutdown, will probably permanently end the drive when they're far beyond lifetime. That's the danger in a 24x7 server setting if you're not monitoring SMART wear indicators (even if you are, really); power cycling your rack can, and does, trigger multiple hardware failures. All the time. If all the drives in it were from the same batch, installed at the same time, and an equal amount past lifetime, it's _very_ possible for the whole rack to fail when cycled — I have actually heard of this happening, once.

MTBF is unexpected failure. Design lifetime is expected failure.

<comment><USER12> I've had a nice rack of discs, though small by today's standards, AFAIK well within any MTBF, wrecked when some junior decided to see what the phased shutdown button in the machine room did during the middle of the bank's trading day, cutting off half the power to my cabinet at one point, which SCSI doesn't protect against.

There's always events dear boy, events!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does Linux kernel have the code to manage these SMR drives as they need to be? (Seems like HGST purposefully left that to the OS to do - imho a smart choice)

<comment><USER14> Here's the recent-ish status: [http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/...](http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/lemoal- Linux-SMR-vault-2017.pdf)

Looks like F2FS should work as of Linux 4.10.

<comment><USER3> See slide 21 — F2FS garbage collection after file/directory deletion is _very_ expensive compared to classical filesystems on conventional disks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you want a reasonably massive HDD for (relatively) cheap that's usable in general purpose applications, the Seagate Ironwolf is starting to look pretty good. Their 10TB drive has been hovering around the same $/TB as an average 4TB lately.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm curious why helium would be used instead of a vacuum. I can imagine a vacuum would be difficult to maintain but would it be any worse than preventing helium from leaking out?

Helium is rare and critical for research and MRI machines it seems wasteful to use it in hard drives.

<comment><USER17> Hard drives need a gas because the heads use it to float over the platter. And helium is hardly that rare that it is an issue; it is used in balloons for children.

<comment><USER18> Helium used for balloons is low grade helium that has already been recovered from another process. Medical grade helium is virtually pure helium and that is in short supply. Question whether this HDD needs pure or low grade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My hesitation to a drive this large is that you stand to lose that much more in a failure?

<comment><USER20> You are expected to deploy these in very large RAIDs or similar protection schemes.

They are terrible as single disks, or even in small arrays. Think of them as an alternative to tapes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> And 14TB RAM in future</comment>


Software to monitor employee behavior (outside the office) - <AUTHOR> http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/12297_3905931_1/Pre-crime-Comes-to-the-HR-Dept.htm Bruce Schneier points out:
This is being sold using fear:
...company spokespeople emphasize liability. What happens if one of your employees freaks out, comes to work and starts threatening coworkers with a samurai sword? You'll be held responsible because all of the signs of such behavior were clear for all to see on public Facebook pages. That's why you should scan every prospective hire and run continued scans on every existing employee.
In other words, they make the case that now that people use social networks, companies will be expected (by shareholders, etc.) to monitor those services and protect the company from lawsuits, damage to reputation, and other harm.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/monitoring_empl.html <comment><AUTHOR> Bruce Schneier points out:

 _This is being sold using fear:

...company spokespeople emphasize liability. What happens if one of your employees freaks out, comes to work and starts threatening coworkers with a samurai sword? You'll be held responsible because all of the signs of such behavior were clear for all to see on public Facebook pages. That's why you should scan every prospective hire and run continued scans on every existing employee.

In other words, they make the case that now that people use social networks, companies will be expected (by shareholders, etc.) to monitor those services and protect the company from lawsuits, damage to reputation, and other harm._

[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/monitoring_emp...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/monitoring_empl.html)</comment>


Live Map Poll: Who will be the 45th President of The United States? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jabbermap.com/who-will-be-the-45th-president-of-the-united-states

<comment><USER2> Obviously not Barack Obama... Bush II had 2 terms, but is only #43, not 43 and 44...</comment>


Apple Park employees revolt over having to work in open-plan offices - <AUTHOR> https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-employees-rebel-over-open-plan-offices-architecture-news/ <comment><USER3> At work, I currently sit in an enclosed room that fits eight SWEs, all of whom are on my team. We have sliding glass doors on the room that we only use when we're having our stand-ups so as to not disturb the people outside the room. Incoming noise never seems to be a problem. All of the conversations I overhear are from my team members, and are thus relevant to me. I also have my back facing a wall. I consider this a near ideal working environment, even better than everyone having private offices, as that seriously hampers spontaneous discussion.

In another month we'll be moving out from our room into the general open office seating area, which I'm not looking forward to. It's not even the noise that bothers me, it's the raw animal insecurity of having things going on behind your back. I get horribly distracted in a big open area when people are moving around behind me, and I thus can't concentrate effectively. I also feel self-conscious about what others can see on my screen, and can never relax. I feel a low-level anxiety from it throughout the entire work day.

<comment><USER4> > raw animal insecurity of having things going on behind your back

Finally, someone else who gets it. When I've mentioned this, people tend to assume it's just about what's on your screen, but that's really not the heart of it.

<comment><USER5> I once was placed with my back to the entrance doors of the office, which frequently had people coming and going. HR and IT were both in arms when I rotated my desk around.

<comment><USER3> That desk situation sounds like my worst nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Such a failure to learn. The US school system went through this with "open classrooms". Schools were built to support the idea of no walls between classrooms. For years, teachers trying to maintain sanity erected temporary dividers. These days, most of those schools have been rehabbed to include actual walls, or they've been demo'd. Such a waste.

<comment><USER7> Ugh, I went to a horrible elementary school like that, in the 70's, in rural VA. When my parents complained, she was told "these kids were destined for factory work, so the noise was not an issue". That shithole of a school is still there. I wonder if they added interior walls?

[http://bhe.frederick.k12.va.us](http://bhe.frederick.k12.va.us)

They pulled me out of 2nd grade and put me in private school where we had an orderly array of desks facing a black board. Had to start over again in 1st grade, since they were much ahead. The teacher kept our class in order; it was peaceful and quiet. I really excelled in that environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Once you work remotely (and you have your own office, in your own house) you feel bad, terribly sorry for anyone that stays in an open office "cultured" tech company making 200k+ per year.

The quality of life and lack of freedom you exchange for the "next 100k" above and beyond a 100k base Salary is never worth it.

Time and health is your most precious resource and asset. And many are deluded into thinking it's ok to trade that for (what they mistakingly) thing is a lot of money (hint: it's not when taking taxes, commute and accomodation into account)

<comment><USER9> Don't assume that your own preferences apply to everyone.

I worked remotely for a few years, with my own dedicated room/office in my home, and am much happier now that I moved back to our company office even though it has an open-floor plan. I enjoy face-to-face contact with my coworkers, and the light level of noise really doesn't distract me from my work—if anything, the surrounding activity motivates me.

We don't all thrive in the same environments. The best you can do is find out what environment is best for you and then work for companies (or start your own) that provide this environment.

Edit: since you're also mentioning health and commuting, I bike 30-45 mins each way with most of it on a shoreline trail. It's a net positive for my health since I know I wouldn't exercise as much otherwise. If I had to commute 1 hour or more by car, then I would likely agree with you—I completely despise long car commutes and would rather work from home at this point.

<comment><USER10> The same for me, worked for almost 2 years remotely and thoroughly missed having co-workers, face-to-face communication and discussions. You lose a whole level of expressiveness being remote, doesn't matter what tools you try to use to mitigate that (video-conference doesn't cover having a whiteboard to draw and people interacting, virtual whiteboards are clunky to use with a trackpad/mouse, etc.).

The perfect situation for me would be to have an office where I can go to when I feel like or it's necessary and working from home whenever I can.

I also like pairing or mob-programming a lot and still haven't found a proper solution to do those remotely.

<comment><USER11> Using Zoom is totally fine for pair/mob programming, but if you want a collaborative IDE, Cloud9 offers this functionality, and everybody on the task can hop onto Zoom (or really anything) in order to facilitate the audio/video. People behave as though there is no way to do this because of their _preference_ for doing it live (the "proper solution"). But this is _absolutely_ possible and I would say actually better facilitated using these tools than everybody gathered 'round a single machine. Anybody can jump in at any moment and make a comment and a change and have it immediately propagated to everyone else's screen. No need for "Let me sit in the chair" or taking five minutes to nitpick over the minutiae of programming to convey an idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a really bad feeling about Apple and this building.

Companies tend to have bad things happen when they build or move HQ anyway, and the fetishization of Apple Park is a level beyond.

Even their product marketing is distracted by talking about how awesome the building is. How much time has been wasted in the company on the topic?

<comment><USER13> My thought exactly, nature of many organizations changed when they moved to new fancy offices. Being in crammed offices, sharing and collaborating with your colleagues makes things special.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm moving my office at work from a nice office next to the production office (noisy, people banging in and out all day) to a much bigger windowless space on the other site across the road _just because of the noise_.

Boss keeps asking if I'm OK with no windows and I keep saying "Have you ever seen me with the blinds open?", It's amazing how even good managers don't get that for some of us a cave with fast internet is the _best_ environment.

<comment><USER15> Yes, noise is a total productivity killer for me. I can't think, and thinking is most of my job! And what people designing offices never seem to understand is that noise is situational, relational.

Some of my best working experiences have been in open-plan space with shared tables. And some of my worst have too. The difference is whether the people around me share the same definitions of "signal" and "noise".

If the only people in earshot are my team, we quickly work out a shared sense of what's good to talk about in the team space.

But if the people in earshot are on different teams, it's a fucking nightmare. We have very different understandings of what "signal" is. E.g., to a recruiter or someone in sales, "signal" is loud, emotionally intense conversations. But to me that's the worst kind of noise. And there's little social context for negotiating shared use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good.

Apple is one of my favorite companies. I just absolutely love what they're doing and have done in terms of personal privacy.

I'm really disheartened that they've moved to an open office layout. It's a surefire way to lose huge amounts of productivity from their engineers.

Open office layouts are a travesty. They make literally no fucking sense. As engineers we're expected to maintain abstractions in our minds which can span hundreds if not thousands of lines of code.

So why would you put us in the middle of a fucking zoo?

I can hear sports TV while I try to work. I can hear my friends/coworkers shoot the shit about the new South Park or Game of Thrones episode while I work. I can hear people talk about their weekend plans while I work. I can hear my coworkers planning projects I'm not involved in as I work.

And here I am, expectected, as a full stack engineer, to abstract complex data flows while all of this is going on.

To produce, while all of this is going on.

And do not forget that even if every single person was a deaf mute, their mere presence can knock me out of the zone.

I remember college. I remember working on projects and losing track of time. Because back then I had a room where I could work without distraction. Boy, how wonderful, to be so absorbed as to forget how much time has passed.

I literally have never felt that in an open office layout. It sucks. I love what I do. Why take that pleasure away from us?

It burns me out.

<comment><USER17> I work in cubicles but the noise is also driving me crazy. There is always some conversation going on somewhere. In the office I am having more and more trouble holding on to a complex thought and in the evening I am totally exhausted. On the other hand working from home feels like paradise. It's quiet and I can look out the window when I need a break.

Because of the office environment I am now looking for a new job, either remote or an office. Open space has turned work from being interesting to plain misery and exhaustion for me.

<comment><USER18> I know this may sound like a poor substitute to private corporate space, but I can't praise enough the combination of noise reducing earplugs and active noise cancelling over earphones.

This combo plus somafm and a pomodoro timer app can instantly boost my productivity

<comment><USER19> > active noise cancelling over earphones

Some folks cannot wear those without discomfort or dizziness. I tried them out an fell into that category (I have some ear issues) which is damn annoying because my brother loves them for airplane rides.

Right now, I am in an office with my back to a window that looks out to insulation[1]. I'm pretty comfortable programming away.

1) they added a building expansion where my outside view was and we haven't gotten around to replacing the window with a shelf. I think I might add a moonscape, grain field, or some historical reservation appropriate image.

<comment><USER20> Get some action figures and make a diorama of happy people throwing a frisbee in the park.

<comment><USER19> I'm going more for freaking out the students than any up-up feel of a window.

Truthfully, I rather like not having a window behind me. I see several posters in this discussion who sound like that is preferable. Maybe we have a paranoid streak our just don't like people looking over our shoulders. The fact I handle some confidential information also makes me happier to not have a large viewing port behind me. Plus, I suppose I've seen one too many horror films and already had a "only idiots in horror films do that" moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Steve Jobs is said to have poured in a lot of thought on how the architecture of the building is supporting work. Steve also had some architectural experience from Pixar. On the macro level the alignment of the architecture with the organization as it was explained always made sense to me.

On the micro level changing from offices to open floor is a huge change. How was that supposed to preserve and foster the engineering culture? Apple is the company where walls and secrets are not accident but carefully designed. I could imagine a part of the organization going to open floor but the whole building?

<comment><USER22> For all the loving of open offices, I've never seen an exec that works in an open area themselves. I heard about one, but never saw it with my own eyes.

This is in 30+ years of working.

<comment><USER17> Me neither. I am still waiting for the company where all the VPs sit along one table elbow to elbow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "Judging from the private feedback I've gotten from some Apple employees, > I'm 100 per cent certain there's going to be some degree of attrition based > on the open floor plans, where good employees are going to choose to leave > because they don't want to work there," Gruber said.

But where are they going to go? Is there a single company left that hasn't adopted the open floor plan ideology? If so, are they hiring because I'd like to send in my resume. :/

<comment><USER24> This. I so strongly wish companies would start including their office arrangement in the job description. It would make it easier for me to avoid open-plan places, and it would let those who like them avoid offices/cubicles - thus making it more likely employees will feel good and thus work at peak productivity. It would also let the industry gather some real feedback about people's preferences. I don't really see a downside of including that info.

<comment><USER25> It's a great idea - as there are very few these companies, their ads would stand out. Honestly, I don't know one single developer who loves open-plan places and wouldn't like to have a quiet room to work in. Most just wear headphones and try to eliminate cognitive noise in every way they can.

<comment><USER26> I enjoy them. It strikes me as extremely odd that the main complaint against open floor plans is that they kill productivity. This is such a complaint that there's people up and down this post moaning in agony as if it were literal torture that they're unable to be as productive as possible. Personally, I don't think that a company is entitled to me working at 100% productivity constantly, because I value my sanity too much. Yet, here are people begging, pleading for their employer to make them be able to produce more for their corporate overlord.

M'eh. I work at the efficiency that is comfortable for me. Occasionally I chat with my coworkers about stupid shit to keep my mind loose and give it a break. If I absolutely need to be in the zone for a couple hours, I put on headphones, find a private room, or work from home. I'm completely ok with open floor plans.

About the only things that would draw me to a private office job is, first, the prestige of having your own office, and second, the sense of ownership of space. I imagine it to be very comforting to go into work and have one little 8'x10' space which is "yours". If we're being honest, I think these two things are actually what the anti-open office people want. They just use productivity as a way of masking it and making it appear better to their employers.

<comment><USER24> Disclaimer: I'll tell you how it is in my case, so it may not reflect the feelings of other open-plan-haters.

It's not about wanting to "be able to produce more for my corporate overlord". It's precisely about preserving sanity. I simply can't focus well with people around me - not just when they're talking (in an open plan, at any given point in time, there is someone that has something interesting to say). The _very presence_ of other people next to me is stressful to me, especially if they're paying attention to me and are within visual range of me. That stress destroys my focus, which leads to lack of productivity, which leads to more stress - <USER2> "vicious cycle".

When I can ensure that nobody can walk behind my back, I can survive an open- plan office with just headphones and loud music (to cut off audio distractions). Still, in some cases, the very presence of other people in the same room will make me unable to concentrate hard enough to solve some tough problems - at which point I'll either go to the conference room, do the work out of office, or just come in late so that I get ~2 - 3 hours alone in the room in the evening.

Some time ago I managed to persuade my employer to give me 2 days/week of working from home; this alone did _wonders_ to my sanity. 3 days between people is just about enough direct human interaction for me. 5 days tends to take a toll on my psyche.

And again, it's not about productivity for the sake of pleasing the boss. It's just that I feel _really bad_ when I feel I'm continuously underperforming (compared to my performance in proper conditions, i.e. not having other people around).

<comment><USER27> This is exactly how it is for me. Even when I actively thought my job was stupid bullshit and that no amount of work from me or anyone else would ever make the thing we were working on profitable or useful to anyone, feeling like I could be getting more done if it wasn't for all these distractions was a huge source of stress for me. The fact that there was no material difference to me or anyone else was ultimately sort of irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I cannot believe how short sighted companies can be when it comes to these things, but I don't think it's malice per se, it's usually a variation of the person who makes the decision does not have to live with it and so doesn't have any incentive outside of spending as little as possible.

It's like how in many cases the desktops/monitors for developers come out of the IT budget, so the IT department tries to buy the crappiest things possible (24" single 1080p monitors, because they can't find anymore the 22" 900p they had before, 500 gig hard drives, etc.) because it does not impact them if developers are happy or not or are hampered by having to work with substandard tools.

In several past companies when we moved offices or had an office redesign, it was always up to the facilities department to deal with this, and developers were involved only at the very end when it was time to pick the seating and by that time all the design was locked, contractors hired and so on and so there was no way to change anything of significance anymore.

If I ever had a company I would make it a rule that any decision has to be made by the department / people affected by it. Other departments can offer support as needed, but I would never have IT control which hardware the developers get, or facilities decide for open office/cube height/chairs, or the CTO decide for the code review tool, etc. etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> I am no fan of open-plan office or just going to an office but there is a huge difference between a cramped open-plan office and one where you have so much space around your and your peer's desk that you need a hoverboard to get to the next couple of coworkers. Also carpets, semi-wall, calling booths can make a difference.

So what I want to say is that every open-plan offices is different and yes, most are terrible. But I guess that if somebody made them right it must be Apple?!

</comment><comment><USER30> If you really want a private office, there are a couple of spaces available right next to mine for $225/month each - [http://www.klopferbuilding.com/](http://www.klopferbuilding.com/) ;)

Obviously you'd need to live nearby (Northwest of Dayton, OH), but houses here go for ~ $120k - [https://www.redfin.com/city/16281/OH/Pleasant- Hill](https://www.redfin.com/city/16281/OH/Pleasant-Hill)

You could literally retire here and work on whatever you what with a few year's worth of bay area salary. (Which is, more or less, what I intend to do.)

<comment><USER31> Hi, what's the crime rate there? Does it snow a lot?

<comment><USER30> The crime rate is so low that the town closed the police department a few years ago. (Now we contract with the sheriff.) I think I've locked my house twice in four years.

We do usually get a couple of good snows each winter.

<comment><USER31> Thanks!, last question, how's the tech employment in there?

Which TBH doesn't really matter since i like to work remotely.

<comment><USER30> Yea, there isn't much _in Pleasant Hill_. There's an Air Force base, a couple of hospitals, a couple of software/web agencies, and a few other things around Dayton, though.

I work remotely for IBM, and also have a side business that's mostly wound down now.

<comment><USER31> Thx, sorry to hear about the business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Open plan "offices" need to go away. I'm a professional and the products I develop make my company lots of money. Telling me if I need quiet I should put on headphones is insulting and is treating me like a child.

<comment><USER33> Yes, open workspaces make me feel like I'm back in college.

<comment><USER34> It's worse. In college I could work in the lab with partners when we needed to collaborate but then work from "home" when I really needed focus. And I got to choose when I went to each.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We have open plan, I revolted by never returning to my desk. I work from random location, old unoccupied desks, home, the cafeteria, but never my desk. You just burned that real estate.

<comment><USER35> At my current job, out of circumstance of the stuff I'm doing, I started going straight to the lab without stopping by my desk. On average, there will be 1-3 people in the lab including myself. At my desk? It's an open-office styled lab-converted loading area where one "wall" is a floor-to-ceiling roller door; loud rattling on windy days is only one perk.

The lab is much nicer. Smaller, fewer people, generally quiet, a door, controlled environment [lights, temperature].

<comment><USER20> Make the space you need by what ever means necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I guess, once you're big enough, you can afford to have people quit and let the rest work inefficiently, just for the vanity of a "design" chief.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why bother working for a company that has _that_ much money and still won't invest it back in giving employees proper working conditions?

</comment><comment><USER38> In EU all those glass doors would have to have matt texture/stickers around eye level so you don't enter them by accident - I'm surprised in US there's no such requirement?

<comment><USER24> As someone who managed to crash into a glass wall by accident (someone was _really_ good at cleaning them), I second the suggestion - such stickers are a good idea.

<comment><USER39> I went to a mall in Manila, walked into a glass door that had just been cleaned really well. I felt like a bird for awhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Apple people: Don't quit, just refuse to work in unpleasant conditions. If they fire you, sue.

See my relevent comment yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15253333](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15253333)

(But do talk to an attorney before taking internet advice.)

</comment><comment><USER41> Where are they gonna go, though? The whole Valley has succumbed to this fad.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, all those idiot successful companies succumbing to this fad. It's probably some kind of conspiracy!

<comment><USER43> Maybe now Apple will be a successful company!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Similarly, Gensler's 2016 UK Workplace Survey found that workers were more > likely to innovate if they had access to a range of spaces supporting > different working styles – including private, semi-private and open-plan > environments.

This is my favorite part, because it confirms an intuition I've held for a long time: both open areas and private offices have their uses, so provide both. The only downside I can see is that it's expensive to implement, which is, I'll grant, non-trivial.

<comment><USER44> And this is the part that I don't understand. According to most articles about this, they do offer private, shared offices. They're shared in that anyone can badge into them and use it privately but they're not assigned to any individual. That seems like a great compromise and yet it's rarely mentioned in articles like this.

<comment><USER45> What about something in between where teams can work together?

<comment><USER44> Isn't that what's being referred to by the shared working offices? I thought the whole point of the article was that these spaces are what people are complaining about. They're on a team that needs to collaborate but they want it to be swapped around from the default. They want private spaces for everyone and a shared area for team work. Apple wants them to work in teams for most of their time and to have private spaces for the rarer occasions where they really need to be alone and focus on individualized tasks. I think they're making the debatable assumption that the most valuable work is done collaboratively and that the menial work is done individually.

As for the engineering team that got moved to their own building, I don't see how or why a private area for everyone would make their jobs better. If everyone's coding and not talking to anyone else, then what's there to distract? If people need to talk, they go to the collaborative space. If they don't want to hear people talk, they can go in one of the private spaces. Some people will simply spend more time in the private space or will work from home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Steve Jobs saw a productivity increase when he was at Pixar according to Ed Catmull's book (Creativity Inc.)

The problem is that what Mr. Catmull described as open space for creative people to let them mingle and bounce off creative ideas. That's the whole premise of an open office space.

Now, programming can be a creative field, but most of the time when I code I'd like to be quiet around me. If anybody distracts me that's an instant 15 minutes loss (at least) of whatever I was doing. At least for me.

<comment><USER47> Pixar is "open" only in the sense of having a central atrium and common areas to encourage chance encounters and interaction. The rest of the building where work is done is nooks and crannies, studios and offices.

Creative people doing the grunt work of raw design and animation will need and want isolation from distraction just like programmers do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> In all my 25+ years in the valley, I've seen office trends come and go. None have been more hated than the open floor plan. Especially when you don't have a wall behind you.

It's why I now work from home. Why many work from home. Open offices are not comfortable, collaborative, friendly, or enjoyable. They make people feel watched, interrupted, and stressed.

Want me to come back to work in the office? Give me walls.

</comment><comment><USER49> we had a web group to great fan fare had all new work area created for them, open ceilings, glass walled conference rooms, and open-plan in general. I am not sure if anyone like it. from lack of perceived "my space" to simple increase in noise. plus if the computer setups are not well planned out it just looks wrong.

for me, it reminds me of one especially bad contract where we worked on school lunch room tables. five of us in a row facing a wall with one phone at the end. amazing after spending our hourly rate what they thought they could save without realizing the impact on productivity if not turn over.

people deride cubicles now but they are last safe haven, just like dogs and other animals, there is a lot to be said from the subconscious feeling you have from the walls of the cube and single entrance

<comment><USER24> > _people deride cubicles now_

Yeah, I don't understand where the hate comes from. I suspect it's just about using cubicles as _symbols_ of corporate environment in general. Because from a floor-plan standpoint, they're a _fucking great invention_. It's a perfect compromise between the need to give everyone their personal space, and the need to fit in lots of people cost-effectively. Today, if a company offered me a cubicle to work in, I'd consider it as _hugely positive_ about them.

<comment><USER50> Cubicles were considered the worst of both worlds. No proper privacy because there is not enough sound blocking and the faux walls isolate people and prevent collaboration.

<comment><USER24> I wonder why. I think they provide enough privacy for a workplace (as long as you're allowed to use headphones for extra sound blocking, and as long as the entry is to your side, not behind you) - the only way to get even more would be closed-door offices, but that takes much more floor space.

As for "collaboration", at this point I consider talking about it as a negative thing about a place. I mean, frankly, I know "collaborating" is fun and games, but at some point somebody has to sit down, focus, and _write the fucking code_.

<comment><USER15> Having worked for years in a pair programming environment, I am pretty sure you can get a lot of code written collaboratively. Indeed, even though I'm an introvert, pair programming teams with frequent pair rotation (pairing with 2-3 people per day) is my favorite way to work because I think we end up with better code.

<comment><USER17> Pair programming is fine. It's real collaboration. But just sitting in one big room while doing their own work is not collaboration.

<comment><USER15> Sure, I totally agree. I was responding to the introduced false dichotomy: collaborating vs writing the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm always reminded of those stock photos of typing pools or pre-computer accountants, where you had a vast noisy field of people (usually gender- segregated) clattering away on typewriters: [http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/secretarial- pool-1...](http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/secretarial- pool-1930s-high-res-stock-photography/10075686)

Really if there is to be a change in the industry it has to be led at the biggest, most fashionable employer. Everyone else will then be able to follow suit without the tedious need to actually think about the problem.

(Maybe there will even be a union threatening a strike over working conditions?)

<comment><USER52> Apple is hardly the first to do this, many other large companies already have.

The problem is the people doing typing pools or accountants weren't doing creative work, they were doing more rote tasks. They weren't trying to come up with complex abstract thoughts or get into a state of flow so the additional noise wasn't as big a deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm one of the outliers who likes open floor plans, BUT at densities much lower than what makes economical sense. 1 person per thousand square feet would be my minimum and I'd really like half again as much space.

Problem is the economics of it. Open floor plans I see on blogs are often side by side working stations with less than 200sqft per worker. That's not really open floor plan in my mind, just removing the walls to recoup a couple of inches to cram more people in.

</comment><comment><USER54> The article links to a previous article on the local impact of the campus that is also interesting: [https://www.dezeen.com/2017/06/13/apple-park-new-campus- fost...](https://www.dezeen.com/2017/06/13/apple-park-new-campus-foster- partners-sucks-wired-magazine-review/)

Edit: clarification

</comment><comment><USER55> I think it's easy to reversed TOP floor for quiet working environment and noisy environment at lower level.

Looking at Singapore has an office look similar to Apple Park spaceship. Directors, professors and councillors are working in open space, I don't see why not?

</comment><comment><USER56> Where will they go? Facebook/Google? That won't solve their problem... maybe Oracle?

</comment><comment><USER57> They just need to get a pair of DND Shades™ for everyone ([http://www.dndshades.com](http://www.dndshades.com)). Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER58> First world problems

</comment><comment><USER31> Chicken farm

</comment><comment><USER59> If as an engineer your only Job is to write code based on perfectly written functional specs, then open offices may not be the best. However, In larger project communication and transparency is an as important part of the job. While many people are more comfortable alone, you are part of a team and not just a coder. I find it selfish for people to feel their alone time is more important than learning how to work as a team. Noise canceling headphones do wonders when you need to focus.

<comment><USER16> Hm. Maybe I'm nuts but I have literally no idea what desiring a private and quiet space for concentration does to ruin a persons ability to work as a teammate.

My coworkers love their noise canceling ear phones. That's great. What I'd love is to not hear their ratatat as they drum to their music.

And I do not fault them for that, because I love to ratatat to my own music when I'm listening to it as well.

A place to be myself while I work, what an odd concept.

<comment><USER60> Some examples: Wanting a private and quiet space means you won't be there to provide help for the new person who has spent all day fighting with their dev environment or trying to understand an area of code that you wrote. And if two people who sit near you are trying to solve a difficult problem that you've already solved, then you won't be able to overhear and chime in with your solution.

Focus is certainly important, and can help you be super-productive if you have a well-defined task and are already comfortable with the code you're working and your tools. But I think newer people at a company are in an opposite situation; they're overwhelmed with complexity and need collaboration and guidance to be productive, and they can level-up much faster by hearing the problems people are working on around them.

<comment><USER16> If someone pings me I'll be right there for them. Setting up development environments absolutely sucks but it's usually a one time thing.

Pair programming is great and I'd never advocate a development environment where senior engineers weren't available to mentor junior engineers.

But I also think tenacity is a huge part of our job. My first job as a junior engineer had me working with a fellow in Israel, I'd get two hours with him in the morning and then he'd cut out due to the timezone difference. My colleagues were consistently impressed that I'd produce despite this. One time my code didn't work, I sat there for eight hours until I realized I was missing a space in my jquery selector. It was simultaneously a moment of relief and a more existential questioning of "what the hell did I get myself into?".

At the end of the day, if you're paying a premium salary for a senior software engineer, while you shoukd encourage mentorships, you should make sure that individual has the environment they need to produce high quality, maintainable software.

Putting them in an environment where people are talking about football is not the way to accomplish that.

<comment><USER60> Makes sense. Some thoughts:

* Agreed that (too many) discussions unrelated to work can be frustrating. My experience is that the vast majority of conversations I overhear are work-related and at least a bit relevant to me, but I imagine different office cultures are different, and it also probably depends significantly on how you arrange seating.

* The tradeoff between asking questions and figuring things out by yourself is an interesting one, and I think people start their careers in different places. My personality is more on the shy side, and for a long time I was worried about wasting people's time, so I would spend a very long time on any given problem before asking for help, which hurt my overall productivity. Having an office environment where it feels normal and welcome to ask questions would help people like me quite a bit. But I understand that some people are on the other end of the spectrum and give up too soon and end up asking more questions than they should.

* Another thing that I think differs from person to person and from office to office is how much you expect work to be a source of social connections. At one point I moved from a "social" office to one where people quietly focused on individual work all day (and where it felt very difficult to start a conversation, even a work-related one), and it was much more lonely than I would have liked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Every time I hear someone complain about open offices, I want to say "Shhh! They'll send us all back to our cubicles and chain us to our desks!". Seriously, if you have an open office it's not that hard to put headphones in or pop into a side office for some focus time. But being required to spend 40 hours a week alone in a tiny box is my personal definition of hell.

<comment><USER62> There are some environments where headphones are discouraged, sadly I worked in one that was semi-open (more of a bullpen).

The reality is some people work fine in open environments, some don't. If you really want to have happy, productive team members, you need to offer some different options.

<comment><USER63> This.

I don't understand why more companies don't copy university libraries and create a mix of spaces for different tasks. Sometimes you want small collaborative rooms, sometimes you want a quiet cubicle.</comment></comment></comment>


I'm a founder and a tech company approached me for a job. How should I respond? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently working on my own company but I'm also potentially open to getting a job. A big tech company reached out to me by email (they likely sent out the email to many candidates) and I'm interested in learning more about the position. How do tech companies perceive a founder being open to leaving their company to join them, and what's the best way to respond to their email? <comment><USER2> I say just be honest. Ask if they have any policies that forbid moonlighting in case you want to run this on the side. Focus on the fact that what you're hungry for are interesting problems to solve, not necessarily being your own boss. Something along those lines.

</comment><comment><USER3> Suggest an acquihire.</comment>