Is your "automation enthusiasm" a time sink?
Happy Saturday and welcome back to the newsletter! As always, read on for some of the best software engineering insights, opinions, and news, from Triplebyte’s Compiler blog and around the web.
//From Compiler
When task automation is worth your time
Automation is the end goal for many software developers. It's the ultimate work-smarter-not-harder adage applied. But while there's a general advocacy for automation in software and engineering, it's not always the best solution. In this blog, engineer Aphinya Dechalert explains her assessment matrix to help determine if building an automation is actually a time profit – or if it’s just “automation enthusiasm” trying to creep into your workflow. read()
The history of wildfire modeling
What are the origins of fire modeling? Who actually runs fire models today? Why aren’t fire models as impactful as weather models, and will they ever get there? Triplebyte’s science writer Jen Ciarochi is back on the hot topic of the season with a good deep dive that takes us from fire modeling technology’s first World War II-era wind tunnel tests to its LIDAR-assisted future. read()
All the very ‘programmer’ reasons I’ve taken a pay cut for a programming job
Working as a programmer is great work if you can get it, and there are usually plenty of opportunities out there. So why would someone want to take a pay cut to go to a new job, especially when that is one of the most common ways programmers can get a raise? Engineer Stephan Miller writes about the times in his career where he did (or at least wanted to) take a pay cut to take a new job, including a short-lived period of time when he was obsessed with working in fintech 🤓 read()
//Around the web
🕺 TikTok wants you! The booming-est social media service going unveiled some of its upcoming corporate plans and strategies this week, and among the debrief was a tidbit about hiring 3,000 software engineers in the next three years. Despite its parent company’s off-and-on relationship with the US gov, TikTik does plan to hire engineers stateside (where it currently employs around 500 in California). Of course, there is more to this app than just dancing tweens: Its algorithm technology is the envy of the tech world, meaning a gig working under the hood at TikTok could make for some really fruitful experience. read()
👩💻 New tools to reduce bias in tech interviews: You love to see it! CoderPad, a tech company peer with Triplebyte in the overall fight to help fix the way engineers get hired, just announced a new feature for its live, remote tech screening service that aims to reduce the kind of “performance” pressure that can disproportionately affect women candidates.
It’s called Focus Time, and the idea behind every CoderPad interview gives candidates 5 minutes of quiet time to work on a solution after they’ve been briefed. Focus Time gives the candidate this time to get organized and get going on solving the technical problem - without feeling like they’re being judged by the interviewer. Work is blurred out for interviewers and video/audio is paused…
In [a recent] study, candidates who did a traditional whiteboard interview performed half as well as those who were able to solve the problem alone in a private room … 100 percent of the women who took the traditional interview failed - and 100 percent of female candidates who took the private option passed.
Cool idea. Head over to CoderPad’s blog if you want to learn more. read()
💬 All the ways Slack tracks you – and how to stop it. Since most of our entire work lives are on Slack now, I found many things interesting in this WIRED article, which details how the collab and comm platform gleans your activity via connected third-party services like Google Drive and what messages of yours it lets your boss read. Even though I could tldr most everything here with a single line pulled from the article – “If you wouldn’t say something out loud at a meeting with a colleague, you probably shouldn’t be sharing it on Slack” – it’s still probably worth your time to check out the whole thing. read()
🎃 A truly spooky (and sobering) costume idea. Tis the season, so I’m bringing back a scary Halloween tweet from Jean-Baptiste Queru, LinkedIn engineer and former tech lead for the Android Open Source Project.
Please remember to have a laugh and relax this Halloweekend!
//Jobs
Some companies hiring engineers on Triplebyte right now:
Check out Triplebyte’s Actively Hiring page to find more companies that are looking for software engineering talent right now!
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