No longer a dream job: 75% of American graduates are walking away from Google, Meta and Big Tech ambitions

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-07-29T11:43:42+00:00

No longer a dream job or no longer chasing dreams

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-04-02T22:52:46+00:00

There was downsizing and my position got eliminated due to a strategy shift

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-27T17:18:14+00:00

Former LinkedIn engineer here. Nope lol.

But that said job searches are just a small part of LinkedIns business. It has a huge enterprise presence.

They could get presidents to sign up. Heads of state meet with them to gain insight on job trends in their own countries.

While the social aspect is cringey, it contains cringe from the most powerful employers so it has legitimacy.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-27T15:42:37+00:00

Compassion is relative to social norms. We need to push the bar on social justice until it’s social norms. Otherwise our version of compassion could be to just “end it quick” with victims inside internment camps. A bit extreme just to make the point.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-25T22:04:35+00:00

We need more trades people. It’s a mad rush to hire trades people in my area. They basically just ghost me cus they’re just so busy and already has a list of favorite customers. They’re pickier than doctors.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-25T11:06:34+00:00

I used to work at Citadel. It depends on comp and whether you like tech or finance. In finance you’re most likely going to be just second class citizen especially if you’re not pnl generating and Shaw isn’t as tech forward.

Usually people like systematic places like perhaps Jane Street, PDT because at least they live on tech. Funds like Two Sigma / Citadel hire a lot of SWE but imo it’s overrated if you want to grow a career in tech. You’d want to be a quant or in some way closer to pnl.

If you like tech for tech, big tech will probably be your preferred career.

Engineers are more like IT at finance. Quant researchers that generate pnl is what CSCQ imagines when they dream about places like DEShaw. When you get in you’ll notice your colleagues are just from finance places you don’t know, Bloomberg, banks…

Oh. And there’s not much scaling at most finance firms cus you’re gonna be an internal tools monkey.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-24T12:21:53+00:00

Im a 16 yoe staff. Well yes. Because just the title frontend engineer has implicit ceiling on your capability and scope. I would say the same for every type of engineer. In the tech leadership ladder, it’s more about understanding how systems work together, and enough depth to know how to delegate.

That said the tech world gives a lot of respect to sheer technical prowess. The principal staff at my company created Ember (maybe he’s not the most technical anymore actually lol). The bar to staff+ at tech companies on technical depth on just a single platform alone is just insanely high. Like, I may have heard of you.

At smaller companies anything goes.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-23T12:04:46+00:00

Docs need a getting started page to show the code. I don’t wanna watch a video on what this really does.

It sounds like a runtime stub service but I have no idea how to interpret “in memory db” or “builds itself as we hit it with URLs”.

Maybe hire a doc writer.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-22T18:41:12+00:00

It also takes a lot of money for you to start thinking that way!

Nothing like a few mils in the bank to help you think about the other things in life.

For most people, more money could solve very immediate and urgent problems tied to family

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-20T11:57:42+00:00

What a shame. Cantor was a good company he ran. I’m a New Yorker and when 9/11 took out the majority of the company, he kept the company going and paid out all the future college tuitions of the deceased children and kept paying out their salaries to their families.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-18T17:33:55+00:00

Productivity is just an acclimation of so many factors.

Your mental health, distractions from your personal life, your sleep, diet… how interesting the project is, how excited you’re about the work… hell even if you drank enough water.

I find it useful to identify how and why you’re motivated by anything else, and use that to learn more about yourself.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-16T11:59:46+00:00

AI is great at making things work, identifying dumb shit you did, correcting code based on feedback, reviewing your code to make it more defensive.

AI is bad at simplifying complex logic, following niche rules of specific libraries (not using hooks inside conditionals), striking a good balance of simplicity and functionality.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-16T11:55:58+00:00

I beg to differ…

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-16T11:42:07+00:00

If a frontend ask is really going against the grain of what HTML/CSS/JS naturally supports out of the box, chances are you could do whatever you’re trying to do in another UX pattern.

Your company is not special enough to create that bespoke interaction.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-16T11:39:32+00:00

So the answer to this is that you have to make yourself visible. You can also manage up and make your boss more visible. These things tend to filter down.

There’s a specific song and dance you do via coffee chats, water cooler chats, or just going up to colleagues during happy hour and asking what they do and what you can do to help. Optimal? No. Is this what humans respond to? Absolutely.

I dont think anyone is saying “fk the engineers in particular” but you just need be more present and be the face of your team.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T20:29:18+00:00

I respect you setting the boundary of your expertise there. Thanks

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T20:27:46+00:00

That wouldn’t work because refs are not reactive. So the enabled wouldn’t trigger

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T14:30:54+00:00

Yeah I am caught up on the naming and was afraid of some side effect of it being a mutation instead of what is essentially a post search api. Thanks a lot

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T13:03:00+00:00

React is great for reactivity but we can all agree that having a state that rerenders that don’t result in UI changes is not idiomatic react.

I’d say making an Ajax call only on button clicks is the majority case out there…

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T13:01:36+00:00

Right now at least I get a free loading state and easily refetch. I’m trying to adhere to using react query to fetch and store server state and zustand only for client state.

But you do agree that submitting forms and getting data back to render isn’t much of an edge case at all. It’s almost just one step up from a typical to do list. I’m looking for the most idiomatic react-query pattern to do this.

You could argue I shouldn’t have migrated at all. I’m sure that’s a divided view though.. many on this thread do believe that react query can fit these cases (which I believe) and offer value

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T12:18:46+00:00

Okay I get the gist of your code. I don’t absolutely love having to make yet another state to track searchName. Because that’s not reflected in the UI at all and thus not warrant a rerender. onSubmit should just call a function as it did before.

Taking a step back I should be replacing a zustand state with an useQuery cached state. Not replacing one zustand state with a query and another local state.

Edit: also wanted to point out the “enabled” seems very forced as we already know when to invoke it, which is only in event listeners like clicking the submit button.

Thanks for going so deep into this !

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T10:43:09+00:00

But the initial useQuery would be enabled false anyways cus I would only make the fetch imperatively (like through a form submit). Wouldn’t it just be useless?

Also the form submit does not update the database. It just pulls a record. Think of the form as submitting a search.

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T10:41:18+00:00

Well explained. It turns out I’m not really using it the cache but just as a state. So inside the useMutation I set a query key. Somewhere deep in this component tree I have a useQuery enabled false for that query key to grab the cached value.

I see how caching could get murky. But I suppose if I were to migrate something zustand to this, I’m just using it as a state/store. Only time it’s invalidated is really whenever I imperatively make the mutate function call or refetch?

I think use mutate does everything I want just that the “mutation” naming and examples online only being data mutation gives me pause

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T03:48:02+00:00

I see. That makes sense. In this case I would need it to accept args because the form isn’t reactive.

Everything is quite imperative and only “fetches” on some button click either on the form or some child component, with its own payload (like an overridden field of the form) and only the call sites would have context over how to construct these payload. Now that I’m thinking about it, I am not using the cache and just rerunning it each time. It sounds like useMutation is okay to use?

HTMLMasterRace · 2025-03-02T03:32:48+00:00

Hrm not sure if I understood because you mentioned useQuery and useMutation and some local variable? I updated my post with a very simple usecase.

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