I think there are a lot of strategies for dealing with the kinds of issues you're working with, but a lot of them involve building a good engineering culture and building a disciplined engineering practice that can adapt and find best scalability practices at that level.
We do billions of requests a day on one of the teams that I manage at work, and that team alone has sole operational and development responsibility for a large number of subsystems to be able to manage the complexity that a sustained QPS of that level requires. But those subsystems are in turn dependent on a whole suite of other subsystems which other teams own and maintain.
It requires a lot of coordination with a spirit of good-will and trust among the parties in order to be able to develop the organizational discipline and rigor needed to be able to handle those kinds of loads without things falling over terrible all the time and everybody pointing fingers at each other.
But! There are lots of great people out there who have spent a lot of time figuring out how to do these things properly and that have come up with general principals that can be applied in your specific circumstances (whatever they may be). And when executed properly I would argue that these principals can be used to mitigate the burnout you're talking about. It's possible to make it through those rough spots in an organization (that frequently, though not always, come from quick business scaling -- i.e. we grew from 1000 customers to 10,000 last year) etc.
If you're feeling this kind of feeling and the organization isn't taking steps to work on it, then there are things you can do as an IC to help, too. But this is all a much longer conversation :)
It works really well.
It has the playlisting/queueing metaphors that I prefer and it has a decent interface for finding things or even playing all of the albums from a specific artist.
Having read some of Dan Luu's other prose I think this is a bit unfair. The sort of meta analysis of writing always comes off a bit navel gazy I suppose, but I don't think you have put his post in context with some of the other things he's written. In those entries of his blog I always find the prose flows quite nicely.
`phone` and `talk` were two of my favorite things to do on the internet way back in the day. Almost better than IRC was starting up a chat with somebody on the local University VAX or Unix boxes that you had never met before.
This and the .plan/finger posts from a few days ago are playing to the nostalgia of a better time on the internet. :). Iirc you could also do fully animated .plan files on VAXes at the time.
Talk was really easy to use and worked well as I recall. Split screen, real-time communication. It was better than anything available on a PC OS. I remember trying it with someone who knew nothing more about computers than any other student.
Depending on your time perioid, PowWow [1] offered a multi-party talk experience on Windows. It also had a shared painting area and a shared browser experience (IIRC, it just launched the same URL in each participant's browser, which at the time was sufficient; there may have been something that detected new URLs loaded by the host to pass along)
I was a programmer and manager at a large tech co in a space that became increasingly problematic over the last ~5 years or so.
In the time off, I decided that climate change was the issue that mattered most to me - I felt I would feel guilty at the end of my life if I didn't at least try to do something in that space. Given that and my set of skills and general beliefs about the world, I wound up in SynBio, which I think has the promise of providing both the ability to significantly shift how we build our world and also the tools to repair the damage we've done so far.
I'm now working as a programmer in a company in that space, learning amazing science from amazing people, and seeing the impact of my work on helping advance their work. I'm learning a ton every day, I'm excited to go to work, and I feel like even if we don't succeed as a field as I'm hoping we will, at least I tried.
The US government provides this online for free. Only the edgiest of edge cases aren't supported. You can e-file your federal return with this regardless of how much money you make. You still have to do the calculations yourself. But you don't have to use paper.
Right. But doing the calculation is pretty hard for most people. Add that to the risk associated to making mistakes and most people will probably prefer paying a bit and have a “””guarantee””” that there are no mistakes. (I don’t disagree he. Just pointing it out.)
Yes, and it's not just calculations. It's things like, "if section F line 27 is greater than the total in section B line 12, subtract the amount in section z line 127 from this total and multiply the result by the appropriate tax rate (see long form instructions for form 478B and fill out Worksheet 12C to calculate your appropriate tax rate).
This is not a verbatim quote, but solar to what you have to do now to calculate health care insurance subsidies.
I build a spread sheet for all the forms and worksheets that require calculations. FreeFillableForms does some of the calculations for you, and does not have any worksheets. Excel has formulas for everything I have encountered paying taxes, and I have a joint account with stock options and several rental property LLCs.
As a bonus, the spreadsheets are generally reusable, after checking to make sure there are no changes.
FreeFillableForms is great and has saved me a ton of time, but it does not do the calculations automatically for every field. You still have to manually lookup certain things from tables. It's freakin' frustrating, because there's no reason why it couldn't automate those as well.
Even more frustrating because it doesn't tell you that you haven't done the calculation or worse, you haven't transferred a field from one form to another.
I failed to copy my self-employment tax back to my 1040 for 2020, despite having calculated it correctly. No warnings, the form filing went smoothly, and 4 months later I got a notice from the IRS.
Except it's very useful to be able to import the many many forms for the various sources of income automatically. If you're just a w2 and a 1099-int then yes, obviously it's not hard to file taxes manually.
Those features are really only viable at the scale of large commercial tax software, not the efforts described in the submitted post.
PDFs aren't exactly used in a standardized way, so trying to make this work for even a fraction of the numerous tax form issuers requires a lot of work, and a lot of ongoing maintenance. You'll need to prioritize the actual tax forms, and annual updates to those first.
I used TurboTax online last year and was pretty happy with it's ability to import 1099 data from several companies I use like vanguard and Ameritrade. So the PDFs aren't standardized but many providers have apis to pull the data. In fact, they may be using something like Plaid that consolidates all the APIs into one.
Well, TurboTax happens to be the most widely used large commercial tax software, and the brokers you mentioned are also quite large and popular. Whatever integration has been done is almost certainly proprietary and not freely reusable.
Hypothetically, even if an API existed, building the integration in your own app also costs FTE hours that are likely drawn away to higher priority tasks.
Sure, but this just means open source tax software isn’t viable. TurboTax integrates with most financial services Americans use, to compete with them this functionality has to be matched somehow.
I use Free File Fillable Forms together with excel1040.com. First I fill in the numbers in Excel, then into Free File Fillable Forms, and check that they get the same answers. It works well for me.
Nextroll | Remote, various locations in the US | Senior + Staff Engineering, distributed systems, Erlang, Rust, etc. | Full-time
I'm hiring for several senior/staff engineering positions working on distributed systems in Erlang with some elixir, go, and exploratory rust sprinkled in here and there. If you're interested please feel free to send an email to the link in my bio.
Empathy. A lot of these suggestions here don't show it. Sure, Notion should fix this feature. If your backlog is completely free of features that are no brainers, raise your hand.
Anybody with your hand raised should be ashamed of yourself because I bet it's not true :)
Sure they should fix this -- but is this something they should be fined for? Or be DDOS-ed by Hacker News readers? Or GDPR reported for?
It's just not a great way to get help from up and coming businesses to force major financial pain on them and it's certainly not empathetic to what's likely a hard working, reasonable set of people on the other end of this service.
I dunno -- if you work on software you get used to the fact that there's always something that could be better, something that could be fixed. Something that could have a smoother user experience. This is just part and parcel of the nature of the medium. Given that they likely didn't realize this was a high priority feature until the pile-on here, and given that they're likely to re-prioritize this item to the top of that long backlog... do they really owe compensation for just having a backlog?
I mean -- I kind of feel like if you're going to store your core business information in software, you're just going to have to deal with the fact that software has bugs. It's the nature of the beast. So, is it really something they owe compensation for?
Probably they owe a bugfix, that I grant you, but compensation? I mean I guess if there was an explicit contract for the feature that tied compensation to it I could see a good argument that they owe compensation. But do they owe compensation to the good people of Hacker News who are suddenly talking about DDOS-ing the feature? That seems like a much harder case to make.
We do billions of requests a day on one of the teams that I manage at work, and that team alone has sole operational and development responsibility for a large number of subsystems to be able to manage the complexity that a sustained QPS of that level requires. But those subsystems are in turn dependent on a whole suite of other subsystems which other teams own and maintain.
It requires a lot of coordination with a spirit of good-will and trust among the parties in order to be able to develop the organizational discipline and rigor needed to be able to handle those kinds of loads without things falling over terrible all the time and everybody pointing fingers at each other.
But! There are lots of great people out there who have spent a lot of time figuring out how to do these things properly and that have come up with general principals that can be applied in your specific circumstances (whatever they may be). And when executed properly I would argue that these principals can be used to mitigate the burnout you're talking about. It's possible to make it through those rough spots in an organization (that frequently, though not always, come from quick business scaling -- i.e. we grew from 1000 customers to 10,000 last year) etc.
If you're feeling this kind of feeling and the organization isn't taking steps to work on it, then there are things you can do as an IC to help, too. But this is all a much longer conversation :)