Outside Google, ClojureScript (with a "j") used to depend on the Closure compiler (with an "s") - partly because the library that came with the compiler provided a Java-like API which was convenient as the Clojure language was originally written targeting Java, and partly because the language had quite a large runtime and tree shaking was necessary for performance. You also had to write extern declarations if you used outside code, much like you have to manually declare types for untyped dependencies in when using Typescript.
Edit: ClojureScript still depends on Google Closure.
I use ClojureScript (it's excellent along with the rest of the Clojure ecosystem) and thus use the Closure compiler every day. It no longer requires manual extern declarations and is able to inform externs from your source.
I find it frustrating that web development moved away from encouraging developers to use a collection of consistent visual styles and basic components (like Bootstrap offered - and even Bootstrap itself is moving towards being a collection of utility classes).
It's very frustrating to have to make a lot of decisions around standard component styling on each new project.
In many organizations (but not nearly all!) going to management is a relatively straightforward way to get more compensation than at your IC position.
But what applies in most organizations is that if you want to have influence on what the organization does, how it does it, and how your product or service will behave, that influence is mostly given to the management - so if you stay as IC, you'll be implementing the vision of others, and if you want others to implement your vision (or even to have a seat at the table where that vision is decided), you need to be at a management role; if you want freedom and decision-making ability and self-actualization in your job, well, in many large organizations ICs get limited opportunities for it, you have to climb the hierarchy until your views start making an impact.
There is a advantage I see very few people talk about publicly but saw all the time: no more pressure to run the dev skills treadmill. No more need to keep up with the latest JavaScript frameworks, or the latest micro-weave clustered engine architecture fad of the day. No more signalling technical superiority for promotions.
Many dev managers breathe a sigh of relief since they feel they "no longer need to keep up" and let their skills atrophy.
Being a manager in a company with more than 25 developers is a new arena that is often even more competitive, but the rules are totally different. No one gives a shit if you're the best engineer in the room, but if you still want promotions you need to learn all the new ways to show your value. It becomes about telling the most compelling stories, doing great research to prove your points, using charisma to charm the right people, and being clever or lucky to lead projects you can turn around or have a big impact. The things that will get you promotions as a manger are rarely tied to team performance, and often tied to people's _perception_ of their performance. I realize this sounds cynical, but it's just the reality of how politics is played, and management almost always is playing politics.
I was a manager for many years, and then director of several teams for a few years. I was next in line to be CTO of a 1000+ developer company when I walked away to become an IC again.
I just missed it too much.
However, I'm very social and love people. I love scheming new ways to do things or improve things. I really enjoyed one on ones with most employees (which was good, at one point for a year I was managing 25 people, and one on ones took 15-20 hours of my week!). Sometimes it was terrible, mostly with high performers who resented the process or people who were quiet quitting. Most of the time it was people who just wanted to get better, and I loved helping them scheme out how I could help. I did everything I could to help my people succeed and get promotions, and they often were loyal and hard-working in return.
I love building a team of people who are gelled together, who feel a real sense of belonging. I very much missed the fast dopamine feedback of TDD, but I learned to enjoy slower metrics like:
- reducing WIP limits (down to 0.5 stories per dev, started at 3.1 per dev when I started)
- increasing dev retention rates (my teams were up to 6 years average! It was 2.3 when I started!)
- reducing dev weekly meeting minute averages (my teams down to 3 hours of meetings per week average! It was 15 hours when I started!)
- prioritizing technical debt payoff (it was 50% of the time when I left, up from 20%)
- ensuring all devs had unstructured research time (10% weekly)
- ensuring teams prioritized high value efforts like CI/CD, one button deployments, etc
- making my product high profit margin (it was 100% ROI three years running, up from 30% when I started)
Building a place devs loved to work and wanted to stay was extremely rewarding.
Ultimately, the politics of the boardroom and upper management really ground me down. Eventually, the company wanted to move development to India, with me managing larger teams there while reducing my American staff, and I just got burnt out and left.
There's a universe where I manage a team again, and possibly will be doing so this year, but for now I'm loving getting to play with tailwind, digging into vite, and cranking out out CRUD forms.
many companies see it as a natural progression and you begin to get pressure to make the jump. I don't want to bring up the ageism boogieman but as you get older the expectation to be a manager goes up as well. Being a good manager is very hard though and a vanishingly small subset of the skills that make a good swe or even team lead apply in management. It's almost like starting a new career.
I'm in the process of making the jump, my title is even Sr. Manager which at the consulting firm i'm at is pretty high up the food chain. I still serve as architect, TL, and the last point of escalation for dev teams in projects though.
For me, it's just the pay increase that keeps me climbing the ladder. It's all management form here on up where i'm at unfortunately. However, my firm has very VERY nice golden handcuffs so it's not so bad. I still write tons of code with my hobbies and kids so i get to scratch that itch.
By who's authority should the word "who's" be spelled "whose" and not "who's"?
In all seriousness, it's interesting to see how the live language is diverging from the rules. The dual ending "-ayim" is supposed to be used with the singular stem: nekuda(-t) - giving nekudatayim "two dots", and likewise shnatayim "two years", dakatayim "two minutes", etc. But in practice, speakers classify dual as plural and use the form with both plural and dual endings: nekudotayim, dakotayim
To be fair, Hebrew does have an official regulatory institute in the (ironically named) Academy of the Hebrew language. But indeed 100% of modern Hebrew speakers will say "nekudotayim" and not "nekudatayim" and maybe eventually the academy will catch up with that and make it official (just like they somewhat recently did with socks :)).
- got an applied maths / CS degree in the beginning of 2000s, followed by a non-STEM master's degree and almost 10 years in a non-tech career
- burned out, quit job
- spent about a year working on pet projects and (re-)learning programming, then a couple of years on a startup with co-founders (which didn't gain much traction)
- moved to a different country for a developer job. I didn't want to ask my old connections for recommendations, so I just took an offer from a small company that found me on Monster or something similar
- after a couple of years, things at the company became worse, so I started looking for a new job. By that time, I had a circle of friends in the new country, some of which worked at FAANGs and asked me if I wanted a referral.
- I had remembered most of the theoretical stuff needed for LC interview from my CS course from 15 years ago, so I just needed to refresh it, cover the topics I didn't know and have some practice. That took me about a month or two of weekends,
evenings and lunch breaks.
- I was so frustrated with my job that I took leetcoding as a pleasurable distraction - I didn't really need anything to maintain discipline. The country was in lockdown, so I didn't have much else to do anyway.
- the whole process from deciding to change jobs to getting an offer took about 4 months. I interviewed at around 5 companies, got 2 offer (one FAANG and one non-FAANG) and decided to take the FAANG one instead. Not sure if this job is a viable road to FIRE (and not sure if this concept is for me at all) but I like it so far.
The argument that US companies have a larger addressable market is valid, but it doesn’t seem particularly convincing. Israel’s domestic market is tiny, and most Israeli start-ups go global from day 1. Probably partly because of that, Israel’s tech salaries are generally above those in the UK, being second only to US salaries. I don’t see anything that prevents, say, a French tech company from going global from day one and unlocking the same value per engineer as Israeli companies do. Many companies based in Cyprus, Estonia or Belarus plan to go global from day one too.
Also, the global market forces (i. e. the demand for engineers from US companies and the overall increased impact per engineer thanks to globalisation) are driving the salaries upwards globally. However, this effect seems to be less pronounced in the EU than it is in other countries. As an example, in Russia in the last several years engineering salaries (while remaining modest in absolute terms compared to UK / US) have become a multiple of those of other white-collar workers, making engineers quite a privileged class. However, in Western Europe, a senior engineer’s salary and a (for example) bank compliance officer’s salary are still within the same range.
One reason might be that the so-called tech sector here in Europe often acts as a service provider to other, more traditional industries which in turn hinders them to build IP resulting in lower pay.
Why is Facebook singled out vs. all social media? I feel worse after half an hour spent reading Twitter, Reddit or even Hacker News than after half an hour spent on Facebook or Instagram.
The amount of hate I see on the first three platforms is much higher.
They are an easy target. FB scandal stories garner a lot of public interest and so there is a financial incentive for news orgs to dedicate staff to the FB beat. Not enough people care about Reddit, HN, etc. Even Twitter comparatively. They also don't have the same level of influence.
There are obviously issues that FB amplifies but the heart of the problem in my opinion is people. People like information that confirms what they already believe, other people are greedy and like to take advantage people for personal gain. It was easy when FB just had to worry about removing porn and gore. Now the line is much grayer. Half of the people think some piece of content must be removed ASAP and the other half call removing that exact same content censorship.
The answer is simple: because FB is seen as a conservative propaganda distribution network and the others are not. The subreddit that was seen as a conservative propaganda network: r/the_donald was successfully eliminated and liberals want to do the same to FB.
Edit: ClojureScript still depends on Google Closure.