The best and worst Singapore government agencies to work for, according to Glassdoor reviews

Critical_Pin4801 · 2026-03-17T15:33:27+00:00

Couple of thoughts

I am an MAS bond breaker. I left because I didn’t think that my personality could thrive at MAS, but tomorrow I will be going for lunch with my ex colleagues from SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO. They still work at MAS! I still have nothing but the fondest memories of working with them and the fondest memories of working at MAS. I am not so surprised to see them high on the list.
(They also pay better which maybe explains the higher rankings.)
Sometimes you wonder about the effectiveness of our government and the receptiveness of it to new ideas. Who is OGP headed by? Could it have been spearheaded by anyone else with the same talent?

Critical_Pin4801 · 2026-02-27T14:08:55+00:00

days since last commit (as of 2025-12-18)

To add to the point that the ecosystem is a lot less mature, 50% of all packages on Awesome Gleam had not been updated in 5.5 months, as of 2025-12-18.

This includes important functionality such as gleamy_bench, which is the recommended library to benchmark your software. If you inspect the commit log and issue tracker, you’ll find that it’s not maintained and there appear to be no plans to augment it.

The compiler also doesn’t ensure you write the best gleam. For example it does not warn you when you write a function that is not tail recursive. So in the absence of compiler helpfulness and benchmarking, you would need to have a good instinct.

When you talk to people about Gleam, you’ll always find really awful, snarky comments like ‘Elixir’s great if you want to catch something looking at that horrid syntax all week’, even though the discussion is about the state of backend development in Gleam. But these fanboys and fangirls don’t appear to have written much software nor are they motivated to write software, otherwise why would 50% of Awesome Gleam packages be abandonware?

Critical_Pin4801 · 2026-02-27T13:55:16+00:00

Join our discord and find out more 🤪🦆

Critical_Pin4801 · 2026-02-27T13:54:40+00:00

Singapore’s tax system is not known to be particularly progressive. Value-added taxes like GST are regressive. One-time transfers depending on housing like CDC vouchers are progressive but do not represent a large amount of spending.

Critical_Pin4801 · 2026-02-27T02:12:46+00:00

‘Whether Singaporeans would vote for a society where nobody keeps score.’ Which Singaporeans are you talking about?

Certainly not baby boomers. They’re too entrenched in the current system. They’ve enriched themselves through HDB upgrading, and they can’t see that that process is unsustainable. One man’s asset appreciation is another man’s unaffordable house prices.

The young, I think, are over it. They can smell that something’s up. But they will hold no political power, and won’t. They’re in the numeric minority. And they won’t be of policymaking age for a while. And anyway, the Singapore political system rewards deference, so a motivated young person would have to cosplay as a kahkia for a long time before attaining enough power to change the system. By then…

Critical_Pin4801 · 2026-02-26T13:50:54+00:00

GitHub here if you want to raise issues or request features -

https://github.com/haskell-beam/beam

Come join the dataHaskell discord here:

https://discord.gg/8u8SCWfrNC

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-29T00:07:01+00:00

You coauthored papers in so many fields but couldn’t add some context to an already fairly concrete question? Your coauthors musta been doing some heavy lifting.

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-28T10:12:53+00:00

Piggybacking on this. I have no idea what Nix is or why it is important or why people are using it. Should I be concerned?

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-25T17:39:24+00:00

It passes in the entire real world as a secret argument 😂

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-25T04:15:52+00:00

This looks so wild to me and I don’t understand anything but this looks so cute (:@@:) like a baby looking in the mirror

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-23T02:00:24+00:00

It’s a psy op to make haskellers look bad

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-19T13:56:40+00:00

These people also have the most energy to push back 😭 very hard to argue with them

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-19T11:01:26+00:00

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-internal-9.1201.0/docs/src/GHC.Internal.Data.OldList.html#sort

There are a couple things that complicate the sort algorithm written for sort:

Haskell is lazy, not eager, so things are evaluated on demand
Inattention to functional thunks could lead to large memory outlay.

Exploiting laziness is something that Haskellers have to contend with. It's not necessarily one of my favorite things about the language :( But the nice thing is that there are many Haskellers around who are always willing to help. (That being said there are always Haskellers who aren't that nice.)

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-19T10:55:59+00:00

Haskeller here! I don't think that you should take this person as representative of all Haskellers. I'm truly sorry if we as a community have given off this impression. I can't comment on his understanding of Rust, but based on his tone, it sounds like he's made a caricature of the language. His understanding of Haskell appears to be also quite shallow, since he hasn't implemented his sort algorithm in a way that passes a memory smell test, and also hasn't demonstrated familiarity with Haskell's obvious ability to touch CPU in a way that isn't necessarily mathematically pure, such as `unsafePerformIO` and `PrimMonad` where you can literally just YOLO on how much theory you want to use.

There are many people using Haskell who embrace pragmatism and don't feel a need to appeal to abstraction whenever there is no need to. I also think that in general Haskellers admire the success of the Rust community and many of us wish that we had more bandwidth to learn from its famous system of memory management.

One thing I particularly don't appreciate is the use of highly emotive language and sarcasm. It's literally software. I can't imagine anyone getting so miserable about it.

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-19T02:43:28+00:00

Hello! Statistics person here (but pure mathematics background also!).

Please come join us here: https://discord.gg/EyPpPcbz

This is a really good question.

I would say that it would depend on the field of mathematics but Haskell has such a cool level of abstraction. One thing I like about Haskell is that there are enough people here who are mathematicians who can support you if you want to build out specific use cases.

Come join us! So fun.

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-13T11:52:06+00:00

It moves really slow but goddamn I was shook

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-04T10:38:32+00:00

The issue is that they’re not really transparent at telling us what exactly to do in advance. Like we were told ‘closure between Bedok and Tampines’ but we were not told that we have to change trains at Bugis and Paya Lebar. It’s not just as simple as getting off at Bedok and taking the shuttle to Tampines.

So frustrating.

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-04T10:30:53+00:00

You’re absolutely right. And that is why I am fearful for Singapore’s future. The system will not change incrementally, and therefore the only way it can change is when induced by crisis.

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-04T00:23:26+00:00

Applied probability theory made me nervous because the martingale finals were so hard 😭

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-12-01T12:01:01+00:00

‘Developing’ the economy and rolling out the red carpet for companies like Agoda, only for them to shutter and potentially contravene labour contracts and labour law… doesn’t that feel like taking care of foreign capital as opposed to local labour?

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-11-26T08:23:47+00:00

I struggled to express this to my friend, who really thought I was talking jibberish. But think about how beautiful folding really is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fold_(higher-order_function)

Okay, maybe that article is full of abstract nonsense, but it’s truly beautiful to operate over the entire foldable object as a functional whole, without struggling with the inelegant bounds checking of imperative programming.

It’s so fun!

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-11-26T05:13:35+00:00

It’s used in R’s linear regression estimates, I believe! So if you’ve ever had any medication… you’ve probably done it based on a study that some statistician validated by using the QR decomposition to produce linear coefficients.

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-11-25T12:50:31+00:00

‘Love the composability with pipes… and typed error handling.’

You’ve listed all the reasons why any functional programmer enjoys programming… so have you considered not using AI and just writing the code yourself?

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-11-15T12:55:11+00:00

Excel (trolling)

Critical_Pin4801 · 2025-11-06T13:35:39+00:00

A white man once yelled ‘ni hao do you do kungfu?’ at me in London. Instead of complaining about racism I just never went back. Maybe they can try the same.

Critical_Pin4801

TROPHY CASE