Wow that's a pretty easy going list. Just wait until you have to fire a bad hire that you made, have an entire team quit after a bad crunch, or have to lay off an entire team due to that exciting startup just you joined going bust.
This is hard, specially when you have very little control over the root cause of the problem.
Some years ago I was in a small company going through a cash flow problem. We had zero revenues for two straight quarters, cut salaries, laid off people, and drove the remaining developers to burn out by treating the situation as BAU instead of the crisis that it was.
I would dread those conversations with the engineers, telling them there's no more work. They were very good people and we're still well connected but it sucks when this happens.
When this happens, morale is at rock bottom and the smart ones start to quit. Been through this too, until the team was just me and 2 more engineers trying to do the work of eight people, until everyone quit for saner roles.
The company is still trying to generate some cash, they're around like a zombie.
I'm a senior technical IC (have a phd in tech along with many years of exp) who moved to management about 2 years back. I am having very mixed feelings on being on the other side. Being a manager is a lot harder than I expected. It feels like wading in slush all day long and I don't really get a sense of accomplishment (as an IC, I could take credit for what I did; as a mgr, I definitely add value and am a force multiplier to the team .. be it in setting direction, utilizing learnings from all my old experiences .. it just doesn't feel the same in terms of pride in technical achievement .. i.e. my coding days are over). I am also completely clueless how to switch jobs as a manager. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
> I am also completely clueless how to switch jobs as a manager. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
I share my own (humble) insights right here, its a huge topic but I post regularly, you might find some of those posts helpful: https://techleader.pro/
> it just doesn't feel the same in terms of pride in technical achievement .. i.e. my coding days are over
Same for me, I had to learn to take pride in building successful teams and individuals, and not code anymore.
As an ex-engineer, the key "eureka!" moment I had was when I realized that management != leadership, and leadership > management. After that, I started to study "leadership" as a formal topic, everyone from Marcus Aurelius to Steve Jobs, as if I was learning a new programming language for example.
The combination of technical chops + great people leadership skills is very rare, if you nail that many opportunities will open up for you during your career.
Is there a network of managers in your company you could sync with? If you consider switching companies or even career paths you might be at a point where learning might be more important than keeping (secret sauce type) leverage or saving face.
How much time do you spend on helping your team members grow? It takes a long time (years not weeks), but this can be very rewarding!
> All of your problems are people problems, the tech parts are much easier to manage.
This cannot be emphasized enough. I have seen lots of smart engineers attempting to "architect" the engineering manager role, while not being able to handle the people aspect at all.
I have an opportunity to apply (and be very competitive) for manager positions that just opened up and this is the part that scares me the most. I could (and likely will) be managing a team of 9 college hires with 1 senior dev. Not a great ratio but that's about what it is from the new teams that were created.
I can stay technical in my role as an individual contributor and be content. IMHO I'd be more valuable to the company in a leadership role...but also at the same time not sure if I want to have to deal with it for a 10% raise.
I'd always recommend you try it! The really brilliant part about engineering leadership is mentoring, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing one of your teams succeed, or growing your own leaders and watching them thrive autonomously.
If it does not suit you in the end, your technical skills will still be there as a fallback option.
A part of my does want to try it because rarely does my company opening up so many managerial spots (we are in a growth phase). I wonder if anyone has "falling back"? And how that experience was. Is there a stigma? I assume there was a paycut?
Funny thing is I'd feel less pressure as a senior dev with 9 other college hires, than a new manager w/ 1 senior dev and 9 college hires (even though technically the team would have 2 senior devs including me if the development parts get rough!).
Be careful about diving in and doing too much work yourself as a developer. If you do, sure, your team now has 11 engineers instead of 10. 10% bump!
What can you, as their manager, do to instead increase their productivity by 10%? Likely many things, and this is a lot more sustainable, because otherwise the team gets neglected from a manager support perspective while you're busy working with them.
Of course, find things to do technically to help the team if you want, that's a great idea. But don't assume that the best thing you can do for them is always to do what they are doing.
Re: going from management back to IC, yes I’ve done it, not within the same company though. It was a good experience for me. Later, I swung back to management.
> All of your problems are people problems, the tech parts are much easier to manage.
That's just ... management. Management is mostly about people, it is mostly about the HOW instead of the WHAT. I'd go one step ahead and make a statement that "Management is mostly about dealing with people's observable behaviours".
Pfft okay - if you only consider Apple's purposes I guess lol.
On an M1 you can run exactly one OS - macOS. And in that OS you have to get permission from Apple to do all sorts of simple things, from running programs to blocking network calls that go back to Apple.
I can run any OS I want on my hardware and I can run my OS on any truly general purpose hardware. Every time I run a program, my OS doesn't go ask the manufacturer if it's okay to run it. That's a general purpose computer.
Mac users had to wait for Apple's permission to do it :)
You generally can't do things on a Mac unless Apple allows it. You certainly can't do them the way you want to unless it coincides with the Apple way. If you don't think so, try writing an app and giving it to your friends without jumping through all of Apple's hoops :)
You must be new to Macs. I'm still on the MBP 2015 and it's "the best computer I've ever owned". Everything since then has technically upgraded parts, but the regressions (touchbar, butterfly keyboard mishaps, etc.) are not worth the upgrade.
I just switched from a 2015 MBP to the current 16" MBP and it is an amazing computer and a significant upgrade towards the 2015 one. The keyboard is nice, the screen much better, great sound and speed. I also like the touchbar. So the 16" is an easy buy. Though of course, you now might want to wait for an ARM based one.
My 15" 2015 MBP was the best bang-for-the-buck Mac I've owned. Got it used (to avoid getting a butterfly keyboard MBP), almost max CPU, max RAM, swapped in an NVMe SSD and a semi-permanent microSD card.
I love my 16" MBP but wasn't blown away by the upgrade. Touchbar is meh and mostly in my way. Speakers are a big win. Keyboard is a tossup but at least I avoided the butterfly era. Everything else is just noticeably better but not a "wow" better. My biggest annoyance is fan noise when attached to a monitor. Running at native panel resolution seems to help.
I LOVE my 13" 2015 MBP and only stopped using it because of keyboard errors. With that said, I believe the new Macbook Air and Macbook Pro have the Magic Keyboard which I think is essentially the same as the 2015 Macbook Pro keyboard and more up-to-date (though maybe not upgradeable).
I recently bought a Zephyrus G14 which I think is one of the closer equivalents to a 13" MBP for Windows with a powerful GPU.
Generally this is surprising because the user bought the "Air" model instead of his usual "pro" model which is much more expensive. The impressive part here is that the air outperforms last years pro (according to the author) which is 3x the price.
this is what people meant prior to the m1 coming out with "macs are a horrible deal"
they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market. they finally fixed their co-dependency with intel and suddenly wow the price gouging goes out the door because gasp the macbook air could have always been the pro it was just never possible with using old chips.
Those ARM Chromebooks are/were the slowest computers on the market. There is nothing with an ARM CPU that "flies" except the new Macs. Using the same benchmark (Geekbench 5) the M1 has a single-core score of ~1700 and contemporaneous ARM competitors like the Lenovo Yoga 5C and the Surface Pro X get 700-750. The other ARM CPUs have equivalent performance to bottom-of-the-line mobile Intel processors from 2012. Apple M1 has the equivalent of Intel processors from some point in the future.
I daily drive a lenovo duet and its absolutely the closest thing to perfection in the modern computing realm. Its a surface go but running arm and chromeos and it flies thru all of my webapps like Framer, Figma, Plectica, Notion, Photopea, Visual Studio Code, Blender etc
m1 is scary fast, but also x64 is dead and needs to be transitioned to the new age. Apple or not this is a major shift in the dev market
It's clear that you don't have enough experience with computers other than that one to support the statements you are making. I'm glad it is adequate for your purposes but to say that "it flies" is absurd. The Chromebook Duet scores 27 in the javascript benchmark Speedometer 2, while the MacBook Air scores 234. It is nine times faster. Looking at the single-thread geekbench 5 score, the Duet gets a score of 263, about half the performance of the dual-core Pentium CPU from 2008, a part which AnandTech once reviewed as part of a joke article. There's a supportable argument that the Chromebook Duet is the slowest laptop on the market today, without exception.
> they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market
Were they though? With comparable displays and build quality, I think their laptops have been competitive with the upper end of the market for a while now, with maybe a 10-20% markup on that.
I have tried arm computers such as raspberry pi and they are slow. The linux arm projects seem to target just the cheapest price, m1 seems more like bang for buck. I hope linux hardware develops towards that.
the duet, the laptop I actually use is $300 which apple does not have a competing product with, its fair to claim in my head that even now its 3x more than what I am paying.
as an ex macbook pro main, I bought 3 of them over the course of last decade and a half and they have always had older intel brains than any xps or razer stealth I would try to cross shop with. after m1 apples price to performance ratio is at unreal levels
some older intel chips are good and faithful (apple wasnt the ones passing the savings on to you like HP) they prefered to both give you outdated intel chips but also ask you $3500 for the honor
Not always. I'm somewhat disappointed with my 2020 16" MBP that I bought after owning a 2015 MBP for 5 years. This one is faster for sure, but also noisier, gets hot often for no good reason (even with the lid closed for the whole day!), takes 7-8 seconds to wake my Eizo monitor, while the previous one would take only a second to do the same.
To be honest and quite unexpectedly the 16" MBP is not the best Mac I ever owned, despite the hype. The display is amazing, the speakers are incredible for a laptop, I'm also glad the T arrow keys are back, but everything else is a disappointment.
Strange, I did exactly the same switch recently and consider the 16" MBP a significant upgrade from my old machine. It even stays completely silent most of the day while the old one would constantly spin the fans.
It is a an upgrade in some ways, no doubt. When Apple said the 16" MBP has the best ever laptop display they were right - it's hard to go back to the previous models after this one.
Something just feels a bit wrong about this machine. Running trivial Swift code in Playground can get it so hot that it becomes uncomfortable to rest it on the lap for example.
Do I need a processor that powerful? I'm not so sure if the price is the unsettling fan noise and being practically constantly warm. And no, there's no 3rd party software that could cause it, it's all Apple apps.
I went from a 2017 MBP 15" to a 16" 2019 MBP late last year and the keyboard is clearly a big selling point but lets not forget how much better the audio is either. It's under played in most reviews but it's a night and day difference. I feel like I'm in a home theater every time I use it.
Ya, but before improvements were much more noticeable, and now they are much more incremental. They might be nice to have if you even notice them, but they don't really change the experience that much. And that isn't really surprising, when a technology is immature it will grow quickly, and when it matures, it will grow much more slowly.
The recent MacBook Pro's are IMO not superior to the experience of using the first Retina MBP's. I'd rather have that model of MBP's, only with performance increases and without the Touch Bar.
This is the predictable HN response I envisioned after reading the title.
You'd start to have a point if they were only talking about raw performance. But they aren't.
Also, raw performance alone doesn't make things better. My Windows PC almost has the best parts on the market yet things don't always feel faster. The UI even feels slower than my previous one. It's my latest PC, but it's not the best computer I've owned.
I don't know what your experience buying computers has been, but my 2012 MBA was the best I'd ever owned. The 2015 MBP was worse, the 2018 MBP I owned was worse than that. The Thinkpad X1 carbon I bought after that was the best I've ever owned, and every time I see my wife struggling with her Macbook I'm glad I finally ditched that rubbish.
Sorry I wrote MBA, I meant MBP - it had the terrible keyboard, I also went for a low end CPU and it really felt worse than my 2011 where I max'd out the CPU.
> They get better every year, why is this still surprising?
If my pre-butterfly keys MacBook stopped working some time between 2015 and 2019, and I had to get a replacement, I wouldn't consider the MacBooks produced during that era to be "better".
Uh the dell xps 13 I bought in 2016 definitely refutes this experience. That machines touchpad singularly ruined the experience. It’d ghost swipe in strange ways. It was very user hostile. Also there’s the long stagnation of performance during the previous decade.
But generally I agree with you. I just think it’s important to remember it’s not all been a monotonic function of good.
also people have been absolutely IGNORING the massive speed gains and battery life of say an ARM chromebook or surface pro X
apparently only apple does good when they modify the ISA for x64 memory instructions to not have to be emulated so they can pretend rosetta is miles ahead of other virtualization when its hw based...
apparently only apple does good when they modify the ISA for x64 memory instructions to not have to be emulated so they can pretend rosetta is miles ahead of other virtualization when its hw based...
Those sneaky bastards – making their products perform better by introducing new features*! Whatever next?
EDIT: Or assuming you like to watch media on a range of devices at home, and share your media with your family and friends, maybe the ability to transcode h264 or h265 content also matters to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK3xVXAd6_o
TL;DW: Plex Transcoder running through Rosetta2 doesn't even break a sweat.
A chromebook is a toy and a surface pro X is a terrible computer. Apple wasn't the first to transition to ARM, but they were the first to do it right. If they added things to the hardware to enable this, so what?
they ended up shipping the m1 macs running essentially SafariOS so... I guess they wanted to join the ranks of "toys" people can actually use to have all their modern apps run well on (webapps)
idk if you've noticed the transitions going basically as well as it went for other brands minus being able to... point to higher geekbench scores when emulating x64???
never did I think I'd see the day when apple is trying its best to rush literally chromeos but based on bsd out the door at the last second because catalyst barely runs any apps in a useful way
idk if you are at all familiar with arm computers but they have been out for a while, mainly running things like ChromeOS or for microsoft EdgeOS or "Windows 10 S"
the strategy revolves around using web performance on arm to overshadown the general lack of optimized arm apps. as apples release of the M1 has shown, no apps are really optimized yet even 1 month after launch for an APPLE product...
thats where the SafariOS explanations makes more sense, they essentially just have safari, and a similar but equally broken app store ported from the iPad but with most devs chosing to opt out of supporting safariOS... weird how they mocked google and then pulled a google
Except the M1 Macs with Big Sur ship with Rosetta2, which mitigates a _lot_ of the issues associated with the architectural transition. Most consumers will not notice a difference.
You can't just ignore that and then make the disingenuous claim that it's anything like the Windows ARM situation, especially given the fact that Apple is throwing their entire weight behind the transition which will (eventually) result in most major applications being natively compatible. I'd be curious if anyone thinks that this transition is going to fail somehow
Note that macOS does NOT ship with Rosetta 2. You have to install it afterwards. What's worse, upgrading macOS removes it, so you have to install it after each upgrade (same as with Command Line Tools)
No, the version of macOS on M1 Macs is the exact same version as on Intel Macs. They don't run absolutely every piece of software that Intel Macs do, but it's pretty damn close. It's certainly not even in the same category as something like ChromeOS and ARM Windows.
It sounds like you may be pre-judging the M1 Macs based on your past experiences with ARM desktops/laptops. I strongly suggest that you put those experiences aside when looking at these, because Apple has gone to a great deal of effort to ensure that the experience is as close to the previous iteration as possible, with the benefit of the extra performance and battery life the M1 gives. It's really nothing whatsoever like the comparison between Intel and ARM Windows, or Windows and ChromeOS.
For me, Google only sends organic traffic to my posts that are 10-20 years old (no joke). My newer content, while verified by me as indexed by Google, receives zero traffic.
For my old content, I have started to place warning banners for my users that they are reading old, and sometimes outdated content, that I only leave online for archival reasons.
It makes me wonder if Google is doing this with my little blog, is it doing the same more broadly? I don't believe it is providing a good search experience to its users anymore.
Start embedding links in the text of your old content that point to your new content (when contextually appropriate, of course). Not as warnings, but if for some reason you mention a topic or word that's relevant to a newer article...
Which reminds me, I was really impressed with Justin O'Beirne's blogs on Apple & Google maps, specifically that older blog posts are explicitly flagged as being no longer accurate.
And his design is so clean that the flags are obvious without being obnoxious.
Thanks for the tip, will try that where appropriate content relationships exist, but suspect it's minor occurrences (when you blog for 20+ years, your output varies considerably in terms of topics over time!).
Google does not like my new topics it seems, starting around 2012, but thankfully unlike the OP who I have a lot of sympathy for, my blog is for fun and not livelihood.
We write for bots, so they can decide to share with our fellow humans (or not), such is our lot...
Same for me, mainly for privacy concerns. And I back it up daily to my local NAS. It's so easy to configure and run your own mail server, that I'm surprised we are the minority in the tech community.
> It's so easy to configure and run your own mail server
Is it? Is dealing with IP reputation, getting your emails accepted by major providers, and being on the hook for fixing everything yourself very easy? I haven't tried, so I don't have personal experience, but I've heard enough horror stories to think that it's not a good use of my time.
Sending side of the MTA can be set up manually in about an hour on a Debian server, with dmarc, dkim, spf, etc. Make that a day if you want to read up on and understand each of the things in more detail, if you haven't configured them before. There's really not much to play with in this direction for a typical personal mail server.
Receiving side is where there is a great range of options, and many things to try and have fun with. You can have anything from a single catchall mailbox with no filtering, no GUI, and a simple IMAP or POP3 access for MUA, to a multi-account, multi-domain setup with server side filtering, database driven mailbox and alias management, proper TLS, web MUA access, etc. It can also be built up gradually, starting from very simple setup to something more complicated so that you never lose account of how things work.
Mine are accepted by Gmail so I am good. Considering how dominant Gmail is, that's all that really matters.
Regarding getting a bad IP rating, normally that's due to having an insecure config, like acting as an open relay, or not having DKIM enabled. There are lots of tutorials online about this, if you know Linux it really is easy.
I had an IP reputation issue and managed to resolve it after some time.
TLDR: Before you spin up a mail server, check if your IP address is on any of the blacklists [0]-[1] as well as Proof Point's list [2]. If it is, then try and get a different IP address.
I spun up a hosted server on Digital Ocean and received an IP address. I checked several black lists from a few email testing/troubleshooting sites [0] and [1] and all was groovy; my IP address wasn't on any list.
I got a bunch of 521 bounces when I tried emailing a neighbor who had an att.net address.
So, I checked the troubleshooting websites, and my IP address was listed as clean.
My logs said I should forward the error to abuse_rbl@abuse-att.net, so I did.
Those emails were never delivered, because abuse-att.net had its own blacklist. I was getting 553 errors. In the logs, the message from their server told me to check https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com.
Proof point runs their own blacklist that some enterprises use (e.g. att and apple [3]). I checked their list, and lo and behold, my IP address from Digital Ocean was blocked [2]. Digital Ocean wasn't able to remove the IP address from their blocklist and suggested I spin up a new droplet with a different IP address.
I didn't want to do that, so I sent Proof Point an email that went unanswered; the email asked them to remove my IP address. I forgot about the issue for five or six months (this is a personal server), and ran into the issue again a few months ago. So I sent Proof Point an email again, this time with different wording emphasizing that "my clients" were having delivery issues. Within a day, they removed my IP address from their block list.
So, my main suggestion is to check if your IP address is on any of the blacklists as well as Proof Point's list before you start on your server. If it is, then try and get a different IP address.
Does anyone have more "enterprise" lists, like Proof Point, to check?
"To make the default Fedora experience better, we’ve set nano as the default editor. nano is a friendly editor for new users. Those of you who want the power of editors like vi can, of course, set your own default."
I can only imagine the mailing list discussion around that one :-)
Looking forward to upgrading as Fedora remains my daily driver, so thank you at all involved.
Even as a vim/neovim user for the best part of twenty years I think nano being the default is a good idea. Attracting new users to the shiny world of desktop linux, only to put them off by getting 'trapped' in vim is a pointless exercise.
> I can only imagine the mailing list discussion around that one :-)
Here it is [1].
This was actually discussed on HN a few months ago as well [2]. I've used Linux for 20 years and still use nano for all quick config file edits. It's part of my setup so I didn't even realize that it wasn't set at all by default.
As someone who used nano in the late 90s, it makes me nervous. I recall that you had to be careful to always use "nano -w" otherwise it would silently corrupt long lines, breaking configuration files which use one entry per line (like crontabs). Since then, I have always removed nano from every system I touch, to prevent accidents.
Nano is the first thing I install on a system. It is the closest thing you can get to Pico from the Pine email client from back then, and it's great because it's simple and gets the job done. No muss, no fuss.
