It’s bad for your sense of self-worth, even if it’s not objectively a bad thing.
One day you might ask yourself “Where would I be if I went all-in on something exciting rather than just putting 10% effort into my work for all those years?”
That is a terrible way to live your life. If a person has interests they should pursue them, not act out of fear that one day they will be called to judgment.
Consider taking a longish holiday (like 3 weeks)? If at the end of it you don’t want to come back, quit. But that might be long enough to scratch the itch and feel refreshed.
Easy to say when you're confident you can get a job that's just as good as what you have. Fact is, I am not. The ads I read these days for IT positions all look terrible.
"Those who trade freedom for security will loose both in the end"
But dramatic quotes aside, since I have kids myself, I am leaning towards security, too. But I feel that this has indeed been blocking me a lot and I felt stagnating. The world is big and full of opportunities, but only if you go out and dare to look at them.
I was a younger, inexperienced tech lead sitting in on an interview led by an engineer about 10 years older than me.
I was shocked when he spent the whole hour asking soft questions like “So describe your previous team structure. How did ideas and plans arise? Who took responsibility? How was conflict resolved? What were your impressions?”
I always went hard on technical stuff when interviewing, was always worried that an incompetent would sneak through.
I asked the senior engineer his rationale. He told me “This guy went to X school and got Y degree and worked at Z company. So I know he’s smart enough. And I can teach him to write good software. But I can never teach him not to be a prick.”
To be fair, all the other interview rounds were with more junior, low-EQ CS nerds like me, so he could still be pretty confident the candidate would get a good grilling.
Those maximums in Europe are largely ignored in high-paying roles (like what Tesla engineers would certainly be).
As an example, in London when you get a high-paying finance job, on day 1 the HR person comes by your desk and has you sign a waiver to waive away any rights to overtime and to accept that you will work as and when needed regardless of national limits.
Edit: I would also like to point out that when I did that job, the builders working on the skyscraper next door were working substantially longer hours than my 50ish hours per week, and probably for substantially less pay.
Oh I know, it's implicit, but I guess there is a big difference between implicit and writing it down in such a way that makes it clear that more is expected of you, like I feel this email does.
> Can't he just keep it focused on the cars and the share price?
I actually agree with your sentiment, but for a different reason - I think tweeting is a massive waste of his time which I would prefer be spent either working on any of his amazing companies, or for restorative rest - but obviously I don’t get a vote where he spends his time!
For the same reason, I really hope he doesn’t buy Twitter - not because I don’t like what he’ll do, but because Twitter is a dumpster fire and I don’t want his valuable attention squandered on something so worthless as fixing discourse Twitter.
> I hope this pushes folks at Tesla to unionize.
Elon corporate culture/values seems like it’s definitely unique, and not something for everyone.
It’s probably better for everybody if those who aren’t onboard go work somewhere that aligns better with their values.
> survivorship bias, that countless projects never got the chance to be developed due to the too high of a burden of doing it properly
I would contend the cost of doing things “safely” is much higher in C++. since a human being has to mentally do all the work the compiler would do in a safe language.
Right. Op is saying an unsafe program that’s paying the bills and we can fix later is better than being a Rust evangelist on hn because your startup never got off the ground.
Somewhere out there, a startup is writing a browser in pure safe rust, and there won’t be any memory errors in it because they’re never gonna take on any tech debt and it’s never gonna ship.
If you race a skilled Rust team against an equally skilled C++ team to build some big complicated fast software, the Rust team would likely ship first, and with less bugs.
The C++ team will eventually ship too, but it will take much longer. The software will also be of high quality, and very slightly superior performance, but there will be a couple of memory leaks, maybe a couple of exploits, and possibly a tricky segfault, somewhere down the line. Maintaining the C++ team’s software without introducing further issues will require superhuman intelligence, so it won’t happen - there will increasing issues as the team turns over and the detailed understanding of the code is lost over time.
The Rust team will mostly suffer from frustration about how bad async is, go down the rabbit hole of using it, and then rip it out and replace it with hand-rolled state machines and epoll. Down the line at some point, future programmers will decide this is legacy garbage and replace it all with async again.
There will be no segfault or memory exploits, and a similar number of logic bugs to the c++ team.
I say this having worked on large C++ projects and large Rust projects, and with no particular religious love for Rust other than a grateful appreciation for the compiler.
* It’s not standardised “repeatable” in the sense that you cant generate datasets from this that let you correlate interviews with subsequent outcomes and improve hiring metrics company wide
* It requires expertise in pair programming, which most companies don’t have
Basically, OP’s hiring process is an excellent example of “doing things that don’t scale” to gain an asymmetric advantage as a small organisation.
They don’t need to derive metrics, they can invest the time, they have a team who are skilled at pair programming - so they can have this hiring process and other people can’t.
Moreover, parents should own their kids since they gave birth to them. They should be legally be able to take every decision for them, and be their guardian, until they die. They gave their children birth after all.
It’s bad for your sense of self-worth, even if it’s not objectively a bad thing.
One day you might ask yourself “Where would I be if I went all-in on something exciting rather than just putting 10% effort into my work for all those years?”