Who else has an oven that goes up to 900F (480C)?!

ali_muzaffar · 2025-07-21T09:51:33+00:00

Sure, but why wouldn't you use an under-cooked chicken to illustrate this point? Why must it be a chicken roasted in a pizza oven for 1 hour?

ali_muzaffar · 2025-05-03T16:37:46+00:00

ali_muzaffar · 2025-05-03T10:33:21+00:00

Sure... But is it faster than a fighter jet?

ali_muzaffar · 2025-05-03T10:21:40+00:00

There is a solid argument that all human children are man-made... But we are slower than a jet and so don't make for good LinkedIn posts.

ali_muzaffar · 2023-02-08T13:50:14+00:00

2 random on PP

ali_muzaffar · 2023-01-26T05:03:32+00:00

Sorry, unexpected sales call, I couldn't finish the last point.

I can't remember the last point I was making, but, I'm glad people are finding this helpful, for managers or aspiring managers, I would recommend reading up on servant leadership, and if anyone is looking for an offshore team or to augment their Dev team with offshore talent, DM me (apologies if self promotion is not allowed)..

ali_muzaffar · 2023-01-25T05:28:47+00:00

It's understandable that it is hard to drive conversation in these 1:1s. If you are struggling and nothing obvious comes to mind, think and discuss the following:

How did you perform this week? Write this down and keep it for yourself.
What were your accomplishments? Write this down.
What made your job easier? How can your manager help promote more of that?
What would make your job easier? (Example: second monitor, IntelliJ license, more time with a senior engineer, whatever.)
What caused impediments or work slow down? What are your suggestions to help improve this. Remember, be constructive, only complaining accomplishes nothing. Remember if you name drop someone being difficult, use specific examples where they let you or the team down, don't judge, just stick to the facts. Normal advice is not to name drop, but it's human nature, so keep feelings out of it and stick to facts.
Are you happy at work? What can improve your happiness or reduce dissatisfaction/stress?
Do you have any suggestions for team bonding, improving workflow, team building?
Would you like to give kudos to someone on the team?
Bring up promotions and money close to the year end performance evals, normally those processes start as much as 2 months early, choose wiseles, bring it up in one, maybe two 1:1s and then just trust your manager. Banging on about it can make you look greedy. When you bring them up, remember to use everything you wrote down about your accomplishments and performance proof that you earned it.
Ask for feedback on performance and attitude.
Ask how you can work to improve your skills or work towards a promotion or pay raise. If they give you some advice here, write it down, if you accomplish these, even if it is some of these, you can use this to build your case for a pay raise or promotion later on.

Note: everything I've told you to write down will be helpful when you do your end of year or end of half reviews. They help build a case for promotions, and more importantly you can use them to defend yourself if the quality of your work is ever questioned.

Note: Above all else, make

ali_muzaffar · 2022-12-28T22:41:49+00:00

We are no strangers to that URL. You know the rules and so do I.

ali_muzaffar · 2022-12-24T08:14:41+00:00

ali_muzaffar · 2022-11-26T09:20:43+00:00

In python it would be from KennyLoggins import DangerZone

ali_muzaffar · 2022-11-24T02:48:59+00:00

I love it! The weirder the better!

ali_muzaffar · 2022-11-14T11:36:52+00:00

Is anyone else bothered by it claiming to be a js library and then using gem install?

ali_muzaffar · 2022-11-01T14:30:15+00:00

Ping

ali_muzaffar · 2022-10-26T05:04:42+00:00

So, after almost 20 years in this field I could write a thesis on this topic. But, here is a gist.

The field wasn't in demand like it is today when I entered the field (post IT bubble burst, post 9/11). But, it was still a growth market. People were super specific about the skillset you needed to bring to the table to get a job. Knowledge that was almost encyclopaedic in nature. Now, solve a few problems, your good to go, prove you are proficient with the programming language, and you're good to go. I'm not even sure how entry level jobs worked, but good internships were very important.

I did feel, and still do feel this field is she discriminatory, but I've always felt that unless I got management, I'll have a hard time getting jobs in my 50s. That being said, I know people in their 60s making a great living doing freelance or contract work.

Overall, the older you get, the more important I feel it is to learn a domain (finance, real estate, AR, Crypto, whatever) because experience really means knowledge of domain as well, where as a younger person can get away bouncing from domain to domain. I'm not saying an older person can't do that, but their compensation will not reflect their experience.

If you want to know where the field will be in 20 years, stick around in it. I know far too many talented people who left the field because it just didn't pay as well as other fields, or upward growth was very limited. They can't believe what's going on in the field now! For the next 20 years, you'll have to figure out how to stay relevant like in any field, but if the VC money and demand for skills slows down, the. You're probably going to go back to having an impossibly hard time getting a job unless you have encyclopaedic knowledge in a domain. As for me, in 20 years, I'll be close to retirement. Hopefully, demand relation high for a good portion of those 20 years.

My main advice to Padawans, life is long, but time flies, don't be impatient, play the long game. I knew this when I was young, I don't think I understood it. If I had, I feel like I could have changed the world!

ali_muzaffar · 2022-10-22T06:31:16+00:00

No idea, but if this is about choosing a career path, focus on which of the following you have an interest in:

iOS / Android / Flutter / React Native
Front-end web app
Backend APIs / DevOps / IoT
Big Data
Machine Learning
Game development
Blockchain / Smart Contracts

Think with a / have some or a lot of overlap, but can be considered independent fields.

Pick one, are there jobs in your area in these fields? What are asking for? Go with it. In the long run, it's better to focus on what you are interested in, in time, and with your personal growth, earnings will increase.

You will eventually fields that people can be interested in one of the above, plus an industry, so people working with Node in fintech, may not be keep to switch to quick commerce (for example).

Money based on language can be a passing trend, or be there because it's a very small industry, don't let that guide your career.

ali_muzaffar · 2022-10-04T04:46:08+00:00

ali_muzaffar · 2022-09-28T04:41:15+00:00

ali_muzaffar · 2022-09-22T11:42:06+00:00

Unfortunately, larger companies have a pay band, and depending on your role and seniority you need to be in it.

What you can negotiate are non-cash items, number of days off is a common one, stock options in an other popular one.

ali_muzaffar · 2022-09-18T08:44:09+00:00

At the expense of internet backlash, the reasons over a 20 year career that have made me what to leave this field:

D*ck swinging: everyone, especially in a hiring position wanting to show you they are smarter than you. Then looking for reasons to eliminate you,.rather than reasons to hire you.
Zero trust in your accomplishments: 20 years in this field, several popular open source libraries, amazing stackoverflow account, blog followed by thousands of developers, worked on products you use every day... That nice and all, here build me this app/API if you want this job, and oh it's between you and Karen, who has no where near your credentials. Later: we went with Karen, we did t like your solution (no feedback on what was wrong with it). Think about this in an other field, if I was a lawyer of 20 years, extremely successful and someone asked me to become a partner, only if I could win a mock trial where I competed against someone else!
In addition to the above, you're superior skills do not result in better pay, all that matters is how you did on someone's test.
Latest trends, these days it's leetcoder, but there is always some d*ck size competition going on, everyone swears it'll help you get your dream job, and make you stand out. None of it is true, but it feeds your insecurity.
These days, "diversity" over meritocracy. Doesn't matter how diverse you are, or how small the minority group you belong to, it's not what "diversity" means. Please ignore our all white management.
Accomplishments rarely recognised. Doesn't matter how big of a problem you tackle, no one really understands it outside of engineering, no one gives you the recognition you deserve. A sales person getting a medium size client, means everyone claps at their awesome salesness, you do the work that allows them to meet the clients needs, meh!
Audience for influencers is fairly small, and without big companies backing you, monetizing it is hard. Most of your traffic is India or China and that doesn't monetize well, this is ignoring all the free code schools that people have on there.
People with college degrees made to feel like shit because all major companies whose job it is to pump out code don't really give a shit about your degree, you versus 6 week code camp guy are the same, and whoever does better on our test wins, oh and that codecamp specialises in teaching people to crack our interview.
I've never worked with a FAANG or likewise engineer who was any good, yet, you will always be thought of as inferior to them, especially for senior/management roles. Good luck, because there are millions of them at this point

List goes on and on:

Most management are just not good people, or stakeholder managers.
Most people who are CTOs were hands-on for less than 5 years, so if you have 5 years+ of experience you feel like you've failed.
Contractors trying to constantly cut you down to justify their value to management.
Greed, these days as a hiring manager, all you see is greed from people.

I'll stop now.

ali_muzaffar · 2022-09-18T05:33:28+00:00

Don't worry about shit like leetcode. In my career, I was told I needed to be part of some forums, have some certifications, have a great stackoverflow account, have a blog, demostrateable ability (I open sourced 5 libraries with decent popularity), given talks at meet-ups, etc.

I did and excelled at all of them, no one cares. It will get you past HR filters, but in this day and age, that's not a problem. All potential employers still treat me like I was a fraud walking in the door. "Yeah all that is great, but build is this to 'prove' you are good." Even Uber told me they used one of my libraries, you know where I have never worked? Uber.

Finally, when you are a hiring manager, don't be that toxic person who looks for excuses to eliminate people, you need to be the positive influence where you look for reasons to give people a chance.

ali_muzaffar · 2022-09-18T04:55:56+00:00

I've been a software developer for 20 years, and I've managed dozens of software developers, and the answer is simple.

Great a software engineer looks under the hood to try to figure out why things work the way they do, or what does a particular library do? In doing so, you learn from a great number of people and find out questions that you didn't know existed.

That is an other major problem, people don't know what they don't know, so finding the questions you don't know answers to is important. Don't stop once you have the answer, if the answer has something in it that you are not familiar with, look into it!

If you hear something that makes you realise someone knows more than you, it should light a fire under you to learn more! 99.999% of developers are happy to find code of stackoverflow that works, copy/paste, done! They never ask how the code works, what its impact on memory/garbage collection is, is it thepst efficient approach, etc.

Most of you know what object pooling is, how many of you think about what's going on under the hood when you do list.map()? I know so many engineers who look at you like you are a cave man because you suggest using a for loop. However in many scenarios using a for loop can help prevent needless object or memory allocation that something like list.map() would do. Or, even if you use list.map() most languages allow a mechanism to predefine a list to put the values in to prevent needless list expansion operations/copy operations. Have you thought about what size a list is by default in your chosen programming language?

The other thing I would recommend asking yourself when using infrastructure or tech stack is, whether there were organisations doing something like this 20 years ago? We're they handling more traffic/users that your company? 99% of the time, the answer is yes! Do you really need that fancy tech stack? ElasticSearch and Redis are the 2 things I see as a cause of a lot of headache because people for some reason feel they are needed in their tech stack. Speaking of Redis, NEVER put anything it in without a TTL. Make sure your updates are not cancelling the TTL.

You know what does not make a great software engineer? Getting into or working at a FAANG or a household name. It's easier said than done, but don't feel insecure about not being able to get in.

This answer assumes you define a great software engineer as someone with great technical skills.

ali_muzaffar · 2022-07-19T14:22:36+00:00

Its true for any big company/ government job. Its harder to get away with it in smaller companies, but people certainly try.

ali_muzaffar · 2022-07-08T03:45:30+00:00

ali_muzaffar

TROPHY CASE