George Mayer @GeorgeMayer Twitter profile | Pikagi

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George Mayer

@GeorgeMayer

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1,086

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Self-taught engineer. I like to build things and write things. Startups then @meta . Mostly talking tech and engineering. Building @ParadocsDev

🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ living on a prayer

https://t.co/wWRGjvDijj

Joined August 2009

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

I'm an E7 at Meta (principal-ish). I worked hard to get here. Here are all of the ways I was privileged/got lucky (in chronological order): 1) When I was in college, my mom wanted to start an online dating site. She had personal insight. I studied marketing and English in school

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

11 months

Remember when someone thought this was a good idea for a mouse?

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

Without other reliable heuristics, this is what companies will do.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

Burnout is the result of working on something where effort and success are not correlated. Burnout is not a sign you should take vacation. It’s a sign you should find another project or job because the one you’re working on is probably going to fail.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

I think something many people don’t understand is that the workload and hours go UP as the title goes up. Directors work a ton, and VPs work non-stop. There is a whole storm raging above project-level ICs that mostly goes unseen.

@JemYoung

Jem Young

8 months

Coming up on 3 years of being an engineering manager, my honest take is that at the FAANG+ level it's difficult to advance your career only working 9-5

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

11 months

Ok it turns out I was wrong on like all accounts. They still ship today and people love them.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

I don’t actually get the point of kubernetes.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

As a high-level IC at meta who isn’t in charge of a specific large-scale system, my job is basically to fix big, ill-defined problems. The problem with these problems though is that they usually can’t be solved by one person, or else they already would have been solved. They’re

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

One of the biggest reasons an organization isn't innovative is that managers looks to parse out who did what on a project. This causes ownership anxiety and hoarding behavior, especially for ideas. But an individual can only have the start of a good idea. It takes a team to

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

I wrote that my job at meta was to find and tackle ill-defined problems. People asked about my approach. I guess it's being creative. But my version of creativity is when your brain connects two unrelated ideas in an elegant way. And it can be systematized. Here's how I think

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

The actual optimal software engineering path is to shoot up to senior and just stay there and code for the rest of your life.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

I worked in new product experimentation at meta after @nikitabier . He literally wrote down his playbook. I’m not going to share it because I don’t think it’s mine to share, but oddly it’s somehow both fully repeatable but also he might be the only person that can repeat it.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

@growing_daniel This gets at the truth about ny pizza: its floor is higher, not its ceiling

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

5 months

Such hard theranos vibes.

@jasonjoyride

Jason Carman

5 months

Exclusive first look inside @Extropic_AI , pioneers of thermodynamic AI compute, on episode 41 of S³

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

11 months

The other thing I’ve learned is that there seems to be a pretty big gulf in quality between Apple trackpads and windows trackpads. I love my mac trackpad.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

Yeah, it’s called HTMX and the JavaScript people are super bent outa shape about it. The guy lives in Montana or something and loves memes. It’s weird. But here’s the thing, the JavaScript people also hate each other! React released a new feature called server components but you

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

List of best-in-class products shipped by the big five: AAPL: iPhone, AirPods, iOS, lots more META: IG, WhatsApp GOOG: docs, gmail, android, search, maps, lots more AMZN: 1-day shipping, AWS MSFT: ???????

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

5 months

The tech industry has moved on from agile. It was a clear step in the right direction, but we shook it down for what it was worth and left the rest behind. Now practicing a strict version of agile is a sign of rigidity and a top-down management, ironically.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

Eng growth hack: diagram every task or project end-to-end. Should only take like 20-30 minutes. You’ll identify the boundaries of your knowledge quickly and you’ll uplevel your technical communication skills. Plus if you can diagram well, people will think you’re smart.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

1 month

The only thing that makes code good is its ability to make money

@ImLunaHey

luna

1 month

no. he’s not an “absolute chad” he’s a liability. idk why anyone would see this as a good thing. it really shows he cares more about money than he does about writing good code.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

I’m self taught. I’m not saying it’s right, but it will continue. This is a precision and recall problem. Ironically, I imagine more CS grads are going to understand what that means.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Eng growth hack: Don’t take your extra hours and pour them into your day job. That has diminishing returns for growth. Instead, use extra time to explore new and different technologies through side projects. Bring those learnings to bear at work.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Poorly worded: I do get the point, I just don’t know why you’d choose it

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

Every engineer has a little 10x in them with the right project, right time and right music.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

1 year

@Madisonkanna This is explicitly frowned upon at meta. There are docs when you join that tell you not to do this. Write your whole intent in the first message.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

I think one of the reasons people hate JavaScript is also the reason it’s winning. It’s a hacker’s language. It’s just a spec. No one owns it, which means everyone owns it. It doesn’t have smooth edges, but instead grows haphazardly in all directions. It’s consuming use-cases

@eclecticjohny

Johny Hoffman

8 months

@jamonholmgren This should be performant for a range as low as 1-100

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

Eng growth hack #3 : read the docs in their entirety. The irony is that the longer the docs, the fewer the people that read them. So your leverage increases exponentially, not linearly, with their length. It’ll take a day or two and you’ll jump ahead of the pack immediately.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

10 months

There are only two real places to keep files on a Mac: downloads and Desktop.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 years

I’m launching an app where everyone can just rate these four dudes.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Lots of bait accusations, but there is a broader point here and it’s that Microsoft has a different approach to product and corporate strategy than the rest of big tech. They don’t build product for the tastemakers. They build a suite of mid—but good enough—tools and win with

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

2 months

You only realize senior engineer is the promised land once you’re past it. I guess this is how all wisdom works.

@ayushunleashed

Ayush Yadav

@ayushunleashed

2 months

Bruh, If 8 years later I'm just some senior engineer at a company, I failed at life.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

Meta succeeds because the employees are closer to a standing army ready to be mobilized when mark has a priority than a collection of organizations with a set of independent priorities. The latter is what the company *looks like* but the former is how it *works*.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

4 months

@unclebobmartin He was convicted by a jury of his peers, not a political party. TBH, when I saw that one member of the jury’s entire news diet was truth social I didn’t think this would happen… must have been rather persuasive.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

Eng growth hack: just do bugs for like 18 months. You’ll ramp up and grow way faster than doing feature work.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

11 months

@snwzy Didn’t know there were different styles

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

Layoffs will keep coming for the foreseeable future. The common refrain is, "you need to learn that your company doesn't care about you." That's true. And caring about your job doesn't make your company care about you any more in return. But blackpilling yourself on your job is a

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

People are missing the point here. Even if I did share it, you probably wouldn’t be able to use it. A muggle can’t become a wizard by stealing their wand.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

@jtc_ai All business is just a series of bundling and unbundling

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

10 months

@ChappellTracker They sell those remote slots

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

Never been a big coding book reader, but going to pick one up. Looking for suggestions. Language doesn’t matter. What’s the best coding book? The one that changed how you think about programming. Should be obvious, but alas: Don’t reply unless you’ve actually read it!

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

@knowclarified It’s not that no one cares, it’s that everyone’s known about onavo for years.

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Facebook will shut down its spyware VPN app Onavo | TechCrunch

Facebook will end its unpaid market research programs and proactively take its Onavo VPN app off the Google Play store in the wake of backlash following

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Simple guidance to go from e5 (senior engineer) to e6 (staff): Stop focusing on executing your project well and start focusing on driving your team or organization’s goals forward. You can ask yourself every day, “is the work I’m doing driving our goals?” If it’s not, speak

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

Being able to articulate your ideas clearly and convincingly is easily worth as much as the idea itself.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

I’ve worked at startups of less than ten and tech orgs of more than 800 engineers. One thing I’ve learned is that if/when I’m running a startup, I will avoid imposing deadlines for as long as possible. You can’t do this at large companies. There are too many layers that require

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

The irony is that I missed GitHub

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

1 year

when I learned that bun uses apple’s JavaScriptCore I also learned that I don’t really know what a runtime is.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

I’m 35 and an e7 at meta. I’m grateful for the people that helped get me here, but here’s a random list of things I did of which I’m particularly proud: 1) in high school I wrote an underground satirical newspaper. We snuck into the school at night and distributed copies into

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

3 months

One of the goofiest things about big tech is how much QA comes from director+ Like 90% of tickets are filed by people making 3 million dollars a year.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

The reason to have a free tier isn’t so THOSE companies eventually grow into big customers; it’s to allow engineers to experiment with your product and eventually sell it into the companies they work for.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

If you have great engineers actually just letting them do whatever they want is a good strategy. The lost productivity caused by incorrect decisions is outweighed by letting people just crank.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

2 months

How to go from junior to senior eng in very little time: be thorough. Take logging seriously Take testing seriously Handle your errors and fail gracefully Document well Read your own PRs and submit clean code Won’t necessarily get you past senior, but will get you that far.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

Too many people in their 20s are focused on making money instead of leveling up skills. Money is a second-order effect of skill.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

I've hired on teams big (Meta) and small (startups in NYC to digital agencies in Minneapolis) and in competitive talent markets and... less competitive ones... The "A player"/"B player" conceit is naive at best and actively harmful at worst. It reveals an inability to see

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

1 year

Turns out remote people care less about their jobs… which is obvious, but something team “we’re just as productive” will need to contend with.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Don’t read books about the habits of the super successful. Both the success and the habits are downstream of being super intense and focused weirdos. Getting up at 4am is a symptom of that intensity, not a cause of the success.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

10 months

I will not follow back, but I’ll probably look at your profile, and I’m a pretty generous initial follower. After that you get 2-3 bad posts in a row and you’re out. Examples of strikes: Uninteresting bait: “Ok devs, let’s settle this: tabs or spaces” (interesting bait otoh is

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Devin will be to standup on time every day. Devin will always want to pair. Devin’s slack light is always green. Devin reviews every PR right when it goes up. Devin loves feedback and comments on his code. Devin is a good little coder.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

5 months

I mostly think technical debt isn’t real. It’s just the nature of coding that routine mildly suboptimal decisions pile up. Only way to avoid it is to go out of business first.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

@engineering_bae There’s almost no such thing as coding 15% of the time unless you’re doing simple scripts / data analysis. So that’s a red flag to me

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

The inverse are the tech bros that sacrifice their youth grinding because they think if only they work hard enough they can make a dent in the universe, but eventually they wake up in their 40s doing the same thing, no dent yet wondering where their youth went so they end up

@benhbader

Ben Bader

6 months

The saddest archetype I observe is the comfortably numb 27-year-old guy with a “stable” job making around $150k per year. He probably wears a no-date submariner and lives in a respectable apartment. He looks forward to his 7 pm Chipotle burrito accompanied by the new show he’s

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

People don’t improve at writing in a professional setting because there’s no feedback loop. Correcting someone’s writing is viewed as pedantic at best and insulting at worst. If you want to improve at writing, find an editor and welcome feedback. It’s that simple.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

There are a variety of ways to break through to the staff/principal level, but the two most common that I see are: 1) think like an engineer and be a really effing good engineer 2) be a pretty good engineer and think like a CTO/CEO Most engineers gravitate toward the former

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

5 months

@emerywells I don’t think scrolling PH is good criteria for having product sense or being interesting in product

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

1 year

@Rainmaker1973 This guy is basically Steph Curry

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

1 year

@erikras It’s weird, but it’s the same as setting it to a variable above and using the variable

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

One of the worst pieces of startup advice is “build something you’d use.” This is why we have a million and one productivity apps. Engineers and product people building for themselves is a hyper-optimized space. Build something for someone else for once.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

So many class names/function names at Meta include the ID of the massive bug they fixed lol fetchData_RACE_CONDITION_SAFE_bug2384374

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

There’s nothing more fun than working with a small team of devs building a product together. All work, no process. Everyone chasing success together.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

1 year

@anothercohen If there was a free option of coffee, I bet lots of people would choose the free option

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Here’s the problem with every function being 5 lines or less: eventually you have complex enough code that in order to do this you have to continue to stack functions on functions and the names lose clarity so the whole thing loses readability.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

To be clear, I’m talking about faang-ish companies here. Mega-corps that makes tons of money and are highly competitive.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

4 months

@Carnage4Life He feels so strongly about it too. The irony of the tech right is that they think they’re crusading for autonomy of thought and speech but really they’re just parroting the groupthink ethos of the United States since its inception.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

3 months

@allgarbled Cuz there’s stuff to do and people to do it with

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Eng velocity hack: build your features end-to-end low fi first, so you can test. Then add the real logic and test as you go. If you go from one end to the other you’ll add tons of time once you’re “done” working through each bug in order.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

@CodeSlingingK Can’t interview everyone.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

1 year

@nostalgebraist Lots of speculation that this is retuning other users’ queries. This seems unlikely to me and instead it’s bouncing off a random neuron like a pinball machine. It only needs to be pushed in a direction to keep going that way.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

Even today at Meta most “algorithms” are really just a bunch of if/else heuristics.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

2 years

@ojoshe @fireship_dev Well it doesn’t feel pain, so that’s a plus… there are no pain points for ai. It’ll happily try and try again and try again. It’ll maintain the code forever.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

4 months

@GergelyOrosz Apple is a hardware company and google is a software company. Apple bakes things pretty fully before release and google releases iterates. It comes out in everything. Demonstrates how hard it is to change or flex your DNA.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

9 months

@fredine Way underrated. With trust you don’t need process. And conversely process is usually implemented *because* there’s a lack of trust.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Ok so here’s my take on excel: 1) for basic spreadsheet stuff, I prefer google sheets. It’s more collaborative. 2) for more complex stuff I prefer a database, it’s more flexible.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

I think this is my least favorite part of this app. This is just gibberish parading as wisdom. I’m truly not trying to dunk. But I guess what I’m trying to do is share helpful information and this is discouraging. Like i get that he was probably interested in computers and now

@shl

Sahil Lavingia

8 months

What you do at 13 is what you’ll do at 31

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

11 months

@JamesRLandrum Fair enough, but like i still don’t want one

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

10 months

@ThePrimeagen Straw man. No one says they’re worthless. Just sometimes not worth the opportunity cost.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Everyone becoming a software engineer is the same thing as software engineers going away.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

11 months

@Jeff37912267 Too edgy for this crowd

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

@davidadamojr I think a lot of the work that gets done has the potential to massively change priorities of the orgs. So to some degree it's supposed to be hidden. VPs don't want to cause thrash on things that might not come to fruition.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

3 months

Instagram is django

@yacineMTB

kache

3 months

using python for a web server is like using bash for a web server. why lol

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

I think better and easier startup advice is attack a known and profitable problem with new tech and design. Datadog vs. new relic Linear vs. asana vs. jira RelateIQ vs. salesforce Posthog vs. mixpanel vs. GA Fashion cycles are real. Older companies get sclerotic.

@samswoora

Samswara

6 months

Good startup advice seems to be “find an urgent problem people have” but I seem to only find problems that I think are important but other people can’t see? So maybe they aren’t actually important?

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

2 months

Sounds obviously but it’s crazy how rare it is: if you are a SOFTWARE company you should make sure it’s easy to write software at your company.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

6 months

@ElCbreezy Interesting. Makes sense given the market tbh

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

1 year

@DanaWoodman Many of these also shouldn’t be dot files. If we’re going to check them in, they shouldn’t be invisible

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

@DamnGoodTek I think lots of companies use k8s and it’s probably a mistake.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

Eng growth hack: thorough code reviews. Actually reading and trying to understand the code is a more efficient learning method than writing code yourself. You get exposed to new styles, patterns and portions of the codebase. Yet… everyone skims. Igtm.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

10 months

My father-in-law is a software engineer. He is uniquely gifted. He was showing me one of the applications he built years ago. It was stunning, beautiful, fast, intuitive. I asked, “how long would it take to build something like this?” I’ll never forget what he said. “Oh, you

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

3 months

@allgarbled Lots of them are juniors

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

Parenting is like coding without unit tests. You think you’ve got the whole thing figured out, boom—regression! Try something new? Wham! Unexplainable new behavior. You definitely can’t repro anything. Worst part is TDD doesn’t exist. You can’t prepare.

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

@svpino Inference cost is too high right now for LLMs to stop spam bots, but they’re probably already “smart enough”

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

8 months

@mscccc CTO

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@GeorgeMayer

George Mayer

7 months

At Meta, we have ways to measure clear product impact like DAUs +/-, user actions, etc isolated to specific features shipping. This way, we can attribute progress toward goals to specific teams and people. Do other companies (more interested in b2b/saas) have things like this?

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