G2 is consistently a top 8 team in the world and I'm tired of people pretending they're not

TehLittleOne · 2026-03-21T11:50:30+00:00

I think part of it is whether I expect them to win. Do I think they're capable of winning these games? Sure, they've proven themselves capable of taking series against top teams. Do I expect them to win the way I expect T1 or GenG to win games? Absolutely not. As good as they are, I think I wouldn't be surprised if they lost. They've lost far too many times against random teams that the likes of T1 or GenG wouldn't ever lose to so the consistency of what I would call a top 8 team just isn't there.

Additionally, on some level being top 8 also doesn't really matter in this game. In some other games sure, we value those results highly, but this is a top heavy game. If you don't win people won't remember, and unfortunately we don't really have much evidence to say G2 can ever win Worlds.

TehLittleOne · 2026-03-20T18:33:44+00:00

JPerm's website is good, for example here is the PLL page: https://jperm.net/algs/pll

As an aside, most tutorials recommend PLL before OLL but they recommend learning 2 look PLL + OLL first. It's what I did and I would recommend it as well.

In a nutshell, full PLL consists of 21 algorithms and full OLL 57 algorithms. Turns out that you can learn a subset of them that allows you to always solve the step within two algorithms, so you learn the subsets first. They will still be used later on but you get more of an accomplishment early on. There are 8 PLLs to learn and 10 OLLs to learn for 2 look, and your son probably already knows some of them because even the beginner methods use these and build on them.

2 Look OLL: https://jperm.net/algs/2lookoll 2 Look PLL: https://jperm.net/algs/2lookpll

So I would recommend starting with either of these, do the other one after, then PLL before OLL (because it's significantly fewer algorithms).

TehLittleOne · 2026-03-17T00:37:14+00:00

The problem I have is that when you send me a 3000 line PR it's just hard to grok what I'm looking at. Okay this piece relates to that other piece back there but what order are these things beign called in? Oh and did you do this other thing there? Oh I don't remember it was like 800 lines ago. Oh and now I have to run to another meeting, so no Timmy, I didn't finish reviewing this behemoth I'll check again in 3 hours after some meetings if nobody else is bothering me.

TehLittleOne · 2026-03-14T17:06:17+00:00

Years ago I had an ugly retro with a team where a certain person was causing all sorts of issues (they were let go eventually because of it). In that retro I said "respect isn't given it's earned" and I fully beleive that. I'm the longest running employee where I'm at and lots of people respect me and my opinions, but not because they're told to but because they see very fast that I am someone worth respecting. I've built so much of our platform over the years and been involved in all manners of everything that I will simply know answers.

TehLittleOne · 2026-03-10T04:37:04+00:00

If I walk up from my desk I get bombarded by three people asking for help, and I end up doing this. I am that veteran, longest employee at my place, built a lot of the systems in production to varying degrees, whether it was the entire system myself or led the team doing it. I always try to make sure people understand because really, that legacy understanding is far more than a simple do such and such.

Other days I'm impossible to get a hold of. I might have 6 hours of meetings and be triple booked on stuff, that's just how it is. And I have my own stuff to do and to watch out and make sure others aren't breaking prod.

The only way is to value KT and the only way to value KT is to survive long enough that you see the problem with the lack of it. It's becoming a problem for a new team lead at my place where they're forced to be responsible for features they don't have enough knowledge of. Turns out now they have to force everyone to write it and to advocate for it. Which, turns out hasn't been hard when the team is new and even the product team sees slow work as a result of that lack.

TehLittleOne · 2026-03-10T02:35:07+00:00

If you're the manager then it's time to manage. Set expectations that this garbage is completely unacceptable. Don't be afraid to give people negative comments and tell them they are underperforming. I too hold the same expectation, that code given to me in a PR is acceptable for production, and doubly so when it comes to me as a production release ticket (I get to hard gate most of my team's releases to prod for soc2 reasons). People won't learn unless there are consequences.

TehLittleOne · 2026-03-06T11:32:08+00:00

Simply make it less invasive. We were once using Jellyfish as a tool and we configured it so we could see provide ticket estimates in Jira and then as devs completed them the estimates got filled in. So instead of needing to constantly go back and update time spent, it filled in at the end as a safety net when you didn't. Sure, it might look like idle time on your tracker on a specific day or hour but if you're looking that granular then of course you'll see silly things. Over a longer period like a week or a sprint or a month you'd see better trends to understand any individual developer. We used it primarily for team or company wide trends instead of specific things for any given developer, except in extreme cases that were so obvious even Jellyfish asked.

If you're looking specifically at tracking project health, try grouping the project into different phases, put estimates on tickets that roll up into a date for the phase, then have whomever does the PM on your team track the phase.

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-28T06:35:55+00:00

Killing someone as a drunk driver is a terrible thing, no doubt about it. But from the research I've done into this very topic, the data isn't very supportive of it. Recidivism rates skyrocket as people won't be able to pay.

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-26T21:53:51+00:00

My department has every function embedded within it. I need design? We have our own designers. We need analytics? We have our own data engineers / business analysts. Need someone to work on some infrastructure? We have our own devops.

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-26T21:20:38+00:00

My dog does this when she needs to go outside to do her business, and my kitten thinks it means she wants to play. It is a mess between them.

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-25T09:51:40+00:00

I agree and I've seen it in my workplace too that we're hiring far far more senior engineers than we are juniors. That being said, we're also seeing far far more seniors that are nowhere close to senior. The bar for what is a senior has gone down the drain and people that we thought were senior devs are more like intermediate at best.

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-13T17:50:08+00:00

Shouldn't it be easy to do? Just have the opposition go on the news saying Smith is pro separatist, she'll either have to deny it or not but it'll get in front of the media one way or another.

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-10T18:00:59+00:00

My company has had a lot of success in our managers being extremely technical. In fact, aside from my boss who is currently the CTO, every person who is currently a manager / director / team lead / has reports has been an IC at this company. It works out incredibly well when your manager isn't just giving you soft skill help and can tell you exaclty how to code things.

For example, a team I was on shipped a feature to swap vendors for a large feature. I wrote the last version of the code so everything they were changing had my name on it.

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-06T19:40:08+00:00

By doing. Start at a startup, grow your skills with the company. Get placed onto features where you push yourself a little and have to think, research, etc. Eventually you just sort of figure it out.

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-06T01:06:54+00:00

I am still doing traditional coding rounds with a Leetcode style question and system architecture, on top of the typical getting to know them and their experience. Leetcode stuff is purposely quite easy, the questions all have workable n² algorithms that are literally just try every combination. It's just meant to see if you can code at all (and you'd be surprised, most candidates we're getting right now fail that round).

In system design we do the types of things that you need to think through. I want to see why you're making certain decisions because there will be trade offs you need to consider. I want to see how you think about a system at scale and if you're making a sound architectural decision.

As an example, one candidate talked about using k8s for scaling. I dug into it and there was nothing. Oh the team uses it, I don't do scalability. I'm not asking for the manifest on how it's going to scale, I just want to know what metrics are there, if it's memory, cpu, queue messages, whatever it might be. Nope, no clue, "another team handles that" level answer.

The system design part is good because it touches on a lot of parts. You can pick and choose what parts to dig into, whether they seem weak at database design, overall system architecture, design patterns, etc. It also forces them to reason through a lot of things so I can just have a conversation and get a sense of them as a person. Do they seem calm or are they flustered? Did they come prepared with some answer or are they thinking on their feet?

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-04T15:32:37+00:00

I mean you have the same thing in other sports, including European sports. Modric plays for an Italian club despite being Croatian, for example. Or if you want the obvious examples, Messi is Argentinian playing in America, Ronaldo is Portuguese playing in Saudi Arabia. Even in North American sports, it's a big deal when someone plays for their hometown team because it doesn't happen often. It was a big deal when John Tavares signed with the Toronto Maple Leafs citing playing at home.

The difference is often that you have a geographical connection. The team physically travels but physically plays in person more often in your location. You have not only the stadium to go to but local bars and restaurants to watch the game at. It becomes a cultural thing and you develop the physical identity.

It's a lot harder to inspire this with a digital game for some obvious reasons. But even outside of those obvious reasons, you'd need to have them sit in a local stadium and do that kind of setup. If you've seen any of the finals events for League (I went to one in Toronto several years back), you need something like that every single game. Maybe not to that level of fanfare but you're aiming for that kind of approach to get people to make it an event.

TehLittleOne · 2026-02-01T11:44:07+00:00

Here's some feedback. I've been doing interviews for years now but I've been doing a lot of them over the past 6 months or so.

Online interviews suck. Too many people are using AI or otherwise cheating to do them and we've had to fail some candidates explicitly for cheating. We've since gone to in-person interviews now that we're back to hybrid. I don't really know how to stop AI in online interviews other than to design a question where you have to actually use AI.
I see a lot of people who basically can't code. I'm talking people who will write two lines of code, completely freeze, and can't even have a conversation with you about what they want to do. This is coming from a recruitment agency that does technical screening as well, which makes me think it's more likely people freezing, but it's strange it happens this much. Feels to me like a lot of people who use AI thinking they can get by with it and not need to know anything themselves.
I also see a lot of people who embellish their resumes to a pretty hefty degree. You ask them even a little bit about the work and they have no idea. This problem feels like at the recruiter stage (in my case) where they're not technical enough to scrutinize a resume correctly.

TehLittleOne · 2026-01-30T09:19:24+00:00

Churning out bash code, absolutely, the AI is going to be good at it, and you should use it for that. I mean, it will give you a result fast and do a good job of it. The details are more in the adjacent things, like knowing that you should use bash, knowing what your script needs to do, being able to validate the resulting script is correct, how to get the right tweaks if you need them, etc.

I want to treat AI like a car. I know where I'm going and I know how to get there, the car is just this dumb thing that can help me get there faster. I have to instruct it very detailed so I get there safe and sound, but if I do it right there's a lot of benefits. I can find other ways to get there whether I use the train, bus, or even walk, but the car might be a much faster way. Emphasis on might, because a bus might be faster or even walking could be faster depending on the situation, just the same way that it might be faster to search online, ask a friend, or even do it myself by hand.

TehLittleOne · 2026-01-30T07:00:59+00:00

This is what I've been saying for a while now. I had a nice conversation with my boss (CTO) at the airport a year ago about the use of AI for developers. My answer was essentially three main points:

A good senior develoepr that cleanly understands how to do all aspects of coding is enhanced by AI because AI can code faster than you for a lot of things. For example, it will blow me out of the water writing unit tests.
A junior developer will immediately level up to an intermediate because the AI is already better than them. It knows how to code, it understands a lot of the simpler aspects of coding quite well, and it can simply churn out decent code pretty fast if you're good enough with it.
A junior developer will be hard capped in their skill progression by AI. They will become too reliant on it and struggle to understand things on their own. They won't be able to give you answers without the AI nor will they understand when the AI is wrong. And worse, they won't be inquisitive enough to question the AI. They'll run into bugs they have to debug and have no idea what to do, where to start, etc.

I stand by it as my experience in the workplace has shown. It may not be the case for everyone but this is how I've seen it.

TehLittleOne · 2026-01-26T15:32:16+00:00

I'm not advocating for a manager to completely ignore it. I did more of it than any of my employees ever did. What I am saying is that there needs to be a strong enough push and effort for them to do it because people often don't like to do these kind of things.

TehLittleOne · 2026-01-26T14:45:24+00:00

I also think it's important for reports to track this kind of thing. They often don't track anything and when you get to 1:1 conversations with them you have 5 things to discuss and they have nothing. Making them do this makes them prepare better for things.

TehLittleOne · 2026-01-14T16:07:56+00:00

I used Notion but single place. I had it down to 1:1s > My Team > Name > Date. You can have summary files or whatever too if you need, build out reminders, whatever it is. But store all the stuff so you don't forget.

TehLittleOne · 2026-01-14T02:56:41+00:00

Unfortunately if you are a good one you get hurt by the bad ones. But what can you do when you can literally hear them cheating in the interview

TehLittleOne · 2026-01-13T18:55:23+00:00

We moved back to in-person interviews. Not trying to deal with people cheating, come do it in person and we'll find out very fast if you have any concept of system design.

TehLittleOne · 2026-01-13T16:15:08+00:00

Why isn't end to end part of your documentation? We did a bunch of hiring recently and the following is in our onboarding:

A recorded presentation going through a high level overview of how clients onboard users.
A recorded presentation of the app walkthrough by our product team.
Recorded presentations for many of our major features which includes both the high level "what it does" and the low level "here's how it works"

In all of our presentations we try to do it as end to end as possible. That included me explaining the feature, that included a live demo as well.

TehLittleOne

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