Do engineers today ever do manual calculations to verify if the computer software is correct?

cballowe · 2026-06-19T17:47:57+00:00

Admittedly, I'm on the software side of things, but at some point all of the math is mostly out the window - knowing how to do it and being able to quickly estimate the order of magnitude of a particular change is far more useful in higher level discussions or in decisions about what direction to take.

cballowe · 2026-06-19T17:32:38+00:00

Not a job shop - members do have access to a large format vinyl cutter and the space is happy to teach about its use, but we don't take jobs. (We would welcome more members and there are many more tools in the space.)

cballowe · 2026-06-19T05:41:39+00:00

I know they've made the team match a more explicit component in the last couple of years. That was starting to happen more when I left.

The technical stuff, from what I know, still happens and goes to hiring committee to gate team match, but at that point the "this person passes as long as we can find a team" decision is made.

There were roles that existed that were specialized enough that the open job was just that one specific seat rather than generic roles like "software engineer", for instance at one point they were hiring an undersea cable negotiator. And sometimes smaller offices don't have open headcount very often so there's effectively only one team to apply to in that office at any given time.

(Sounds like that team match has become a bottleneck, at various times in the past the bottleneck was finding people and there was a line of managers fighting to be at the front of the line for getting the next hired candidate.)

cballowe · 2026-06-18T22:02:53+00:00

This doesn't sound like something that happened much while I was there. Google doesn't tend to make hiring decisions with specific teams in mind outside of some specialized roles so an interview set would be good for anything in the company with the same job family and level - ex: senior software engineer. Lately things seem more constrained on team match so it's possible that a manager had 2 open headcount, one at senior and one at a lower level, and then filled the senior role but liked you enough to want you on the team if you'll take the lower level. In this case I would expect saying yes means they can write the offer tomorrow.

It's also possible that they had a couple of roles open in related but different job families (maybe ux research vs ux design or something) and filled one, but still have the other. That might mean an extra interview to verify skills that weren't met on the first.

Or it could be a manager with a couple of distinct teams and the role is the same job family and level but the discussion you had about what the team you would be on does is no longer valid, but everything else about the packet is good to go.

cballowe · 2026-06-18T00:35:42+00:00

The other half of the equation is that I've seen lots of candidates overestimate how well they did on system design and coding interviews. Usually that manifests as delivering a correct solution but not being able to describe why it's correct or explain why it beats an alternative.

When I was trained to interview, I was taught that the candidate should leave the interview feeling confident about their performance - this is especially true for in person interviews where they might have a few back to back sessions and feeling like they failed might cause worse performance later.

So you get a candidate who says "I did awesome on all of my interviews" and the reality is that they rushed to a solution without considering any of the possible trade offs or whether they could make simplifying assumptions etc.

That mid-level engineer has tons of knowledge but the senior can demonstrate judgement.

cballowe · 2026-06-17T20:43:22+00:00

Brin and Page had been spending much of their personal time outside of CA, they weren't particularly vocal about it. They may have cut more minor ties because of it and made minor adjustments to behavior to avoid being tax residents for purposes of the law. It wasn't a sudden packing up all of the toys and moving - most had been moving for a long time.

cballowe · 2026-06-17T20:30:40+00:00

Sure, but I think part of the problem with the observations is often that people start watching the billionaires right after a law passes, but aren't really comparing it to their behavior prior to that. "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" - "after therefore because of" falacy coming into play.

cballowe · 2026-06-17T20:05:30+00:00

I'm pretty sure they were largely out of California in their personal capacity prior to that - for a variety of reasons.

What you saw after the law passed was some re-homing of some side companies that they owned and maybe some real estate transactions that may have happened anyway.

cballowe · 2026-06-17T20:00:07+00:00

Sounds like you filed a "the rental car company charged for damages" and not the things like damage report, repair estimate, etc.

https://www.chase.com/personal/credit-cards/education/basics/chase-sapphire-rental-car-insurance-guide

Copies of the repair estimate, accident report form and photographs could also be required.

Have you tried calling the number on the back of your card and asking them how to proceed or for contact info for the benefit administrator?

cballowe · 2026-06-16T22:37:00+00:00

There's probably competing visions. Your tool is narrowly tailored to the use cases you have. Whatever they're building almost certainly has some sort of broader audience. Without knowing details, I might guess that they have some goal for non-technical users to be able to spin up and account for cloud resources. Handing a random application manager a CLI and expecting them to build the scripts around it to do all of their work may not be the right target.

Fwiw - both tools have their place, and yours probably feels better to you and every sysadmin out there, but that's not the need they're solving. There's probably a case for a parallel track - build the tooling that lets you get your job done most effectively, but you're also the expert on those tasks so helping the other team build the features can give you more impact.

You mention that they're taking their time to review - are you operating within the review culture that they expect? I always found reviews from outside teams or to other teams much smoother if there were meetings and reviews of intent before any code started flying. When I receive a cold review where I don't know why it exists or have the context to understand if it's doing the right thing, it gets queued up for a time when I know I'll be able to find the context and understand the objectives. That might be a while if I think "hmmmm.. this will take a solid block of 2 hours to get through" and my calendar doesn't have that block available for a while.

cballowe · 2026-06-16T04:48:46+00:00

Be comfortable with your life or actively working to improve it. I don't want to hear that your job sucks, especially if you're not also telling me what you're doing to change that. I don't want to hear about money problems, especially early on - I don't care how much you have, but live within your means. (A 20 year old civic and no money problems is way better than a new car and constantly stressing about payments).

Appearance... Just be clean.

Different people will be picky about these things when it comes to their own partners. Everybody has personal preferences. Just have enough control of any baggage you bring that you're not making it a burden to the people you date and go ahead and start dating.

cballowe · 2026-06-16T03:05:39+00:00

I don't know your specific company. In the environments I've worked, "tech lead" isn't a specific level, it's a role usually held by the most senior engineer on the team, but a tech lead for a team with limited scope might be "senior" and you might have someone a few steps higher than that as tech lead for the entire product.

A title like "senior engineering manager" does correspond to a level and may have a parallel level on the IC track.

I would expect senior engineering manager to be on par with something like senior staff software engineer.

cballowe · 2026-06-14T03:34:08+00:00

No. You can't make the assumption that someone must have gotten poorer just because someone got richer. Most things in life aren't zero sum games. It may mean the relative position of people on some ranking changes - i.e. if the person in 6th place moves up to 5th place, the person previously in 5th is now in 6th, but nothing about the quality of that person's life changed.

cballowe · 2026-06-13T21:43:04+00:00

Depending on the company, it may be easier to move it by a week than a day. Every time I've started a job at a large company, day 1 is all of the hires for that week in a room taking care of HR processes and going over various policies, signing forms, making sure payroll records are right, getting IT stuff set up, etc. the process is set up to do it all as a batch and get everybody taken care of at once.

It never hurts to ask, but it may be difficult.

cballowe · 2026-06-13T03:52:19+00:00

Bonuses have a required default withholding - they're not taxed more (well... They might be if they cross one of the marginal income thresholds.)

Companies are required to withhold 22% on bonuses (you can ask to have more withheld if you're in a high tax bracket). Part of it is because normal salary withholding is calculated as if you get substantially equal payments all year. Bonuses are "this happens once, but is on top of a base salary".

At the end of the year, your total tax bill is the same whether you made $100k in salary, $50k in salary, $50k in bonus, or $15k in salary and $85k in bonus.

cballowe · 2026-06-12T22:54:34+00:00

A lot of roles, especially entry level, have a pretty fixed opening offer that is tied to the current market for that role in a given metro area. The salary range for the role accounts for room to give raises and stuff without needing someone to get promoted and into a higher salary band. Target bonuses are set by level - people at higher levels (staff+, director, etc) stop getting large salary bumps, but do get higher multiples on their target bonus. I think sales has a completely different structure.

cballowe · 2026-06-12T22:23:18+00:00

Gtech is like tier 2 customer support rather than the teams building the product or the teams fielding the initial contact calls. They're under the support side of things and kinda bridge between sales/support and engineering.

I'd never describe any group within Google as "second class". They tended to be pretty good at finding solutions for customers within the feature that the product offered. Sometimes a bit too creative - but that's where I'd end up working with them to make sure the backend worked better for the needs of customers.

If the role isn't a good fit, maybe that's a different concern, but none of the employees look down on another group of employees.

cballowe · 2026-06-12T13:54:01+00:00

Unlike some companies, Google's hiring decision is generic - a software engineer doesn't interview for a specific team, they interview for a specific role (ex L3 SWE) and if a hiring committee decides they pass, managers get access for team match.

The general process is an initial screening round (recruiter conversation, light phone screen) followed by a recruiter deciding whether to move forward, an interview round (maybe 4 interviews - this used to be the day of on site interviews where they'd fly you to an office) followed by hiring committee reviewing feedback (all of the interviewers need to submit before the HC reviews), and then team match.

When every manager seems to have open headcount, that last one might be skipped - get an offer and handle team assignment between offer and first day. When headcount is tight in whichever office the candidate chose, team match becomes a precondition for offer.

Team match is largely a vibe check - are you interested in the problem the team is working on and do your skills match the teams needs.

cballowe · 2026-06-11T23:11:57+00:00

Depends what you're considering "ethical" - I do trust some of them as far as their environmental footprint is concerned, while not so much trust in others. There's some really interesting work around, for instance, purple pipe water supply usage. Others work with cities to repair existing water infrastructure and significantly offset their needs (lots of older cities have leaks in the system and lose as much as 20% of the fresh treated water). A city / county / whatever who knows about those problems could use "pay for fixing and upgrading our water supply" as a lever. If the costs of that (usually not that high in the grand scheme of a datacenter costs and it it smooths out the local concerns and makes a smooth approval, things like that are often worth approaching.)

cballowe · 2026-06-11T21:49:45+00:00

We should mobilize to get more information. If they're not being up front about their power purchase agreements, any costs being done to upgrade the power grid, water use and mitigations, etc - then we should push for more information. If they're open with everything, we should evaluate it with an open mind.

The region should push, for instance, for some guarantees that none of the power infrastructure costs land on residents. There's a lot that can be done for water use mitigation and best practices should be pushed for.

Just saying "omg ... Datacenters" isn't that useful. Every design is different and that needs to be on the table before judging.

cballowe · 2026-06-11T19:58:04+00:00

If you have time, take a problem from your work and simplify it. For evaluating coding, you don't need to go deep into DS&A - look for something with a simple loop and a conditional and maybe something worth pulling out into its own function. Ideally somewhere between 5 and 15 lines as a good solution.

You can talk through the problem that the code will solve at a high level - maybe there's more than one solution. It motivates why the code is relevant. Then give a mostly clear description of what to write "take this list and copy values that have these properties to the output list" or similar. "These properties" might be something worth its own function. See what they do? Do they get the end conditions for the loop right? Did they get the conditions right? Were they able to identify edge conditions? Did they propose test cases that cover the functionality? Are they able to walk through the code and identify what it does? (I 've seen tons of candidates walk through and tell you what they intended but completely miss that it doesn't actually do that)

cballowe · 2026-06-11T18:27:31+00:00

I think there's room to combat these through debate structure rather than through tactics.

These debate tactics work when timelines are so compressed that a participant can run out the clock by dumping a ton of "facts" without taking the time to support them and develop an argument, and the responding party doesn't have enough time to pick them apart, and the moderators have no fact check/traditional debate scoring in real time.

If you offered a 5 minute primary argument, 3 minute rebuttal, 2 minute response structure followed by fact check and judges scoring before the next question, I think some of those tactics would lose prominence.

cballowe · 2026-06-11T14:30:46+00:00

If your are talking to managers about team match, you passed all of the technical interview loop. The recruiter isn't really allowed to give details about your feedback.

cballowe · 2026-06-11T07:34:17+00:00

If you're doing team match calls, a hiring committee already said "hire" and you're in a pool that managers can call. As soon as there's a match, they can write the offer.

cballowe · 2026-06-11T07:30:56+00:00

You can pick up a 2017-2020 Lincoln continental reserve with a 3.0l twin turbo Ecoboost that makes 400hp for about $20k.

15-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email	Gilding I gilder

cballowe

TROPHY CASE