namingthingsiseasy

There was a quaint old time, shortly after Google was founded, where people mused about privacy over the internet. It was forgotten about as the profits started rolling in and pretty much all other companies started following along. That was the time when we started transitioning into a period of massive data surveillance. Glad to see that the conversation is starting to pick up again in some areas, though it's definitely being actively suppressed in many others.

GDPR desperately needed on the other side of the pond...

And yet, many (maybe even most) countries in Europe operate on a pension system for retirement. That would include tech workers in said countries as well.

But American companies (and Canadian too?) have mostly done away with them by now

Yeah, I knew someone was going to say that. Usually it's more likely that Python is installed than jq - especially on servers. But yes, that would definitely work too.

I use json.tool a lot to format JSON directly in vim. Simply highlight the text you want to format and run :!python3 -m json.tool. There are probably plugins to do this too, but doing it this way is probably the simplest, unless vim has a built-in for it.

Agreed overall, you will still be competent switching from one language to another, but intricacies and nuance matter a lot here. You may have enough knowledge to solve problems, but will you have enough knowledge to avoid creating new ones too? Like performance issues, or memory leaks, or other unwanted behavior? C++ is a great example here: someone that's smart but inexperienced might just be dangerous enough to start writing classes with dumb pointers without overriding the copy constructors, and this is just a recipe for disaster.

I think it would take more than a few months to develop the kinds of experience that you need to be aware of these issues and avoid them. And while C++ is a very easy example to point out here, pretty much all languages have their share of footguns to be aware of, and it just takes time to learn them. A "deep knowledge" of a language is not just about being faster and more productive; it's also about not creating more issues than the ones your solving.

This one might be a bit controversial, but has rung true in my general experience. Probably a lot of exceptions to these rules, but here goes:

You don't really know a programming language until you understand a fair amount of the standard library and how packages/modules/dependencies work. Syntax is pretty easy, and any mainstream language will work just fine for solving basic leet-code style problems. But when you really spend a lot of time working with a language, you're going to spend more time learning about common libraries and how to manage dependencies. If you're working with a language like C++ or Java, this could also include build systems and how to use them.

Another precursor to being able to say that you know a language is that you should also be familiar with best practices (ie. how to name modules, how to write documentation, etc.) and common pitfalls (undefined behavior, etc.). This is one of the hardest parts about learning a new language in my opinion, because the language may not necessarily enforce these things, but doing them the wrong way can make your life very difficult.

I've never had a chance to try it, but formal verification with Coq always looked really interesting.

I always felt that Silicon Valley was a bit overrated. It was definitely a good place to work, at least at one point in time. Since then, higher interest rates have killed investment, which everybody knows. But the other issue that's practically never mentioned is that there's very little innovation left to be done in the IT field. Ideas have run out, and people have realized by now how silly it is to make start-ups that just reinvent an age-old technology but over the internet.

In any case, I think there are plenty of other wonderful large cities to find good software jobs, based on personal experiences, things that I've read and other colleagues' experiences: Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, New York, Los Angeles are (probably) the biggest outside of SV and all wonderful places to work. Others, like Munich, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo, Toronto, London might be a bit smaller, but still great places to be. And in my opinion, they have less of the "hustle culture" that seems (or seemed) to be pervasive around SV. To be honest, they always seemed much more attractive to me.

the only annoyances are that to use the slash you need to use shift

Oof, that sounds really annoying. I can't possibly imagine how I would use the terminal that way

But Swiss, that’s the stuff of nightmares!

Ha, that sounds funny (in a morbid kind of way...). What's so bad about it?

Well, there's one good thing that will come out of this: these kinds of idiotic moves will help us figure out which companies have the right kinds of management at the top, and which ones don't have any clue whatsoever.

Of course, it will come with the working class bearing the brunt of their bad decisions, but that has always been the case unfortunately. Business as usual...