You have accurately re-stated the situation, yes. I know for a fact that there are teams like that! And what are they going to do now that the scientists who could have helped them make those decisions in a principled…
Thank you, that's kind of you to say!
I appreciate the sentiment behind your post, but in the future could we all please not conflate "neurodivergent people's difficulties in expressing empathy" with "being a jerk on the internet"? I've had many gentle,…
I was regretted attrition. And very, very far from the most vital person on my team.
People are leaving. In droves. There has been a huge exodus of senior talent in the last year. Zuck mentioned that in an earnings call and rather than assigning himself any responsibility said that those people were…
We were a team of mathematicians focused on cost savings and improving decisions. We know how to subtract costs from benefits. I was not the lead. A team focused on helping the company make better decisions is all the…
I do have data to back this up for employees. You'd win that bet. Shareholders, I have no data on that.
Nor did anything compel you to read it, or post whiny comments here! I did choose to work for Facebook. The pitch I was given seven years ago was that (1) the mission of the company is to lower costs of building…
I am very thankful for that opportunity. I learned so much from my colleagues! And they were genuinely great people to work with. I was well compensated, it's true. It's also true that for every $1000 I was paid, I…
Not the first time I've made that joke, but it's none the worse for having been used before.
I'm 100% sincere in that praise of my colleagues. Many people, myself included, had a lot of concerns about the products the company was building and their effects on the world. When you work on a team whose mission is…
"Signal loss" is the overarching term for all the factors that lead to the company being less able to make good inferences about users. Not just the obvious consideration of "how do we serve an ad that is relevant to…
That's all very kind of you to say, thank you. I have several times been offered the chance to teach a masters level course on compiler design but never had the time to develop it. After a bit of a break, maybe I'll…
And thanks to all the repliers below for their kind words. My goal was always to share knowledge and enthusiasm and it is genuinely touching to know that I succeeded.
I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections. First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years. Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my…
The team was all mathematicians. We did the math. I helped one of our data scientists put a model into production that saved $15M a year from that model alone, and we had a dozen people like that. We were working on…
Thank you, that's kind of you to say.
The question -- if sincerely asked -- is not rude. My goal for this blog, which I have written for 17 years, is to write about algorithms, programming techniques, language design, and other stuff I find interesting. If…
And that you would read it that way says more about you than it does about Tim, believe me.
It's not clear to me why you think that this anecdote had any particular intention. My intention was not to promote any position at all, but rather to tell an amusing personal story that I was reminiscing about because…
Yeah, all the links are wrong now. I'll fix them!
As I noted in the text, the actual problem that we had to solve was complicated by a great many factors not the least of which was the fact that the library had to handle strings from different string encodings.
Noted.
In this case I think not. However I strongly agree with your position and have tried hard to ensure that my code is commented such that it explains why the code works as it does. See…
It does a full lex and parse. Then if there is an edit, it determines based on the edit which tokens need to be re-lexed; maybe we went from "[10,20]" to "[10.20]" and so now the [ and ] tokens are fine but everything…
You have accurately re-stated the situation, yes. I know for a fact that there are teams like that! And what are they going to do now that the scientists who could have helped them make those decisions in a principled…
Thank you, that's kind of you to say!
I appreciate the sentiment behind your post, but in the future could we all please not conflate "neurodivergent people's difficulties in expressing empathy" with "being a jerk on the internet"? I've had many gentle,…
I was regretted attrition. And very, very far from the most vital person on my team.
People are leaving. In droves. There has been a huge exodus of senior talent in the last year. Zuck mentioned that in an earnings call and rather than assigning himself any responsibility said that those people were…
We were a team of mathematicians focused on cost savings and improving decisions. We know how to subtract costs from benefits. I was not the lead. A team focused on helping the company make better decisions is all the…
I do have data to back this up for employees. You'd win that bet. Shareholders, I have no data on that.
Nor did anything compel you to read it, or post whiny comments here! I did choose to work for Facebook. The pitch I was given seven years ago was that (1) the mission of the company is to lower costs of building…
I am very thankful for that opportunity. I learned so much from my colleagues! And they were genuinely great people to work with. I was well compensated, it's true. It's also true that for every $1000 I was paid, I…
Not the first time I've made that joke, but it's none the worse for having been used before.
I'm 100% sincere in that praise of my colleagues. Many people, myself included, had a lot of concerns about the products the company was building and their effects on the world. When you work on a team whose mission is…
"Signal loss" is the overarching term for all the factors that lead to the company being less able to make good inferences about users. Not just the obvious consideration of "how do we serve an ad that is relevant to…
That's all very kind of you to say, thank you. I have several times been offered the chance to teach a masters level course on compiler design but never had the time to develop it. After a bit of a break, maybe I'll…
And thanks to all the repliers below for their kind words. My goal was always to share knowledge and enthusiasm and it is genuinely touching to know that I succeeded.
I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections. First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years. Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my…
The team was all mathematicians. We did the math. I helped one of our data scientists put a model into production that saved $15M a year from that model alone, and we had a dozen people like that. We were working on…
Thank you, that's kind of you to say.
The question -- if sincerely asked -- is not rude. My goal for this blog, which I have written for 17 years, is to write about algorithms, programming techniques, language design, and other stuff I find interesting. If…
And that you would read it that way says more about you than it does about Tim, believe me.
It's not clear to me why you think that this anecdote had any particular intention. My intention was not to promote any position at all, but rather to tell an amusing personal story that I was reminiscing about because…
Yeah, all the links are wrong now. I'll fix them!
As I noted in the text, the actual problem that we had to solve was complicated by a great many factors not the least of which was the fact that the library had to handle strings from different string encodings.
Noted.
In this case I think not. However I strongly agree with your position and have tried hard to ensure that my code is commented such that it explains why the code works as it does. See…
It does a full lex and parse. Then if there is an edit, it determines based on the edit which tokens need to be re-lexed; maybe we went from "[10,20]" to "[10.20]" and so now the [ and ] tokens are fine but everything…