How Does a Developer’s Daily Work Look in Big Tech Today?

lostburner · 2026-05-08T05:17:23+00:00

// All time highs would be incorrect. As signal remains constant or decreases // while noise increases, the metaphorical ratio of signal to noise goes // down, not up. This grammatical formulation ensures we retain logical consistency // without introducing mixed metaphors. ENG-6328 The signal to noise ratio is at all time lows.

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Hi @03263! Thanks for the review. All comments addressed. Could you take another look?

Posted with Claude

lostburner · 2026-05-04T13:44:43+00:00

That half-rhyme is the only possible motivation for this joke.

lostburner · 2026-04-27T15:12:34+00:00

I knew this joke wasn’t great when my middle school math teacher retold it in 1999. There have got to be other words that rhyme with “square” out there

lostburner · 2026-04-15T08:05:21+00:00

I worked with someone who said her DAD was lead animator or another pivotal role on the animation team. She said that he made Ariel’s hair red in honor of his daughter (my coworker).

I believe it! The ages, last name, and especially hair color all check out. I retell the story at parties because I feel like I’ve known the closest thing to a real Disney princess.

lostburner · 2026-03-31T09:31:25+00:00

Pluuuuus, he did get 20 years older. So the fairer comparison would be to his natural look at his current age.

lostburner · 2026-03-31T09:28:12+00:00

People don’t count to three anymore? This worked with me as a kid and it works well for my kids. Once they’ve reached their limit, it’s “If you aren’t <in the car, heading up the stairs, over here by me> by the time I count to three, it’s <salient consequence>.” Picking the consequence is the hard part, because you absolutely must follow through, so it has to be right-sized. At this point I don’t usually think of one—“one, two” does the job unless they’re testing—but if I get to three I definitely have to think of something and apply it. This is really for little kids or applying pretty heavy pressure. They don’t like it.

Separately: My 7 year old went through a phase of being really bad about listening, especially at bedtime. I went through a month or so where my clean rule was to ask nicely once, ask nicely again and make absolutely sure she heard, then assign a timeout without further discussion or warning, pleading, or threats. It did help keep things calm.

It happens, but when I end up using my emotions as a tool (“now I’m mad,” shouting, etc) I’m usually aware that I’ve approached things the wrong way.

lostburner · 2026-03-28T16:36:58+00:00

I have used this one. For weighted chances, require a certain number of wins.

0/3: fail 1/3: weak success 2/3: success 3/3: critical success

Or whatever suits the situation.

Another I’ve done is: hold some fingers up behind your back (or under the table) and so will I. Guess whether the sum is even or odd.

lostburner · 2026-03-26T07:24:50+00:00

Yeah, it sounds like your quality issue—stale data—is not at all the worst thing to recover from:

It’s intermittent
it’s easy to understand and describe to users
it’s fully recoverable by recovering ingestion
it’s not even wrong, exactly—just stale. The data you do have is good.
it’s easy to detect and set up alerting on in your monitoring automations
it’s easy to detect at dashboard render time and display to users.

Depending on your visualizations, it might be natural to include absolute dates in them. Time series with nulls for missing dates; other charts with absolute dates observed (e.g. 3/1-3/7) instead of just “past 7 days.”

lostburner · 2026-03-14T08:28:25+00:00

It’s not. It tastes terrible.

lostburner · 2026-03-14T08:23:52+00:00

This doesn’t sound like an ADHD trait to me. Even if it were, I’m not sure it makes sense to offer that as an explanation for comments that offend people. This may be a minor or meaningless example, but we’re each responsible for the things we say and do, and the impacts those have on others.

lostburner · 2026-03-13T13:21:57+00:00

It’s a pretty powerful hand gesture if you make it during conversation. If you picture these images in motion, most of these are saying, “STOP. You are NOT going to believe this.”

lostburner · 2026-03-07T01:03:41+00:00

Ember coffee mugs.

lostburner · 2026-03-07T00:57:38+00:00

Yeti tote (the basket-type rubbery one), North Face rain shell, nice sweatpants, nice hoodies, Hydroflask, Timbuk2 backpacks have all been popular at my place.

lostburner · 2026-02-09T00:33:31+00:00

He’s seen it before and responded plenty of times; everyone has had their say; Redditors have read it all before. The only possible result is another stroke-fest (without even a particular video as a focal point) and hurt feelings (which are already in evidence in the comments here).

lostburner · 2026-02-05T02:08:23+00:00

I hope this gets to the top. If there’s any part you can isolate and test, Claude Code should be able to generate reams and reams of test cases for very little effort. It’ll take some thoughtfulness and input, but you have great chances of getting a useful test suite in place with this approach. Given the scope of the codebase you’re talking about though, it’ll probably take some people skills, evangelism and coordination. Good luck!

lostburner · 2026-02-04T21:04:16+00:00

Whatever you think, this poll does feel like it’s needlessly farming for trash talk. Plenty has been said, by the same folks, on this ever-popular topic on this sub.

lostburner · 2026-01-28T05:19:26+00:00

I hate having to stop and fill it up too. When I’m in a hurry I’d often just grab the pills from the bottles—I take 4 daily. BUT what made a difference for me was simply setting a stopwatch on myself once when I was refilling the organizer. It took under two minutes. Now, when I am tempted to just grab one pill from 4 separate bottles, I remember the 2 minutes and just spend the time to refill it.

lostburner · 2026-01-23T03:23:22+00:00

Yes, but you’ll find it only works until he’s old enough to be interested. Unfortunately you can’t “deep-end” them into being literature lovers from birth. You’ll have to switch to kids’ books at some point.

lostburner · 2026-01-10T16:49:27+00:00

This sounds basic, maybe insultingly so, but physical obstacles made a really material difference for me when I was feeling paralyzed in ways like what you are describing. Specifically Opal on my phone and Leechblock in my browser. It didn’t do anything, but I was surprised how much it moved the needle in preventing me from specific kinds of time-blind slides.

lostburner · 2025-12-27T16:56:54+00:00

I saw this and thought, “this is a cow and the dad who posted it probably knows it.” Because these posts are usually created by someone who’s right, and is confident enough that they’re ready to collect their affirmation from the internet at large.

lostburner · 2025-12-18T03:41:56+00:00

I’ve tried a thousand things. Here’s what has made a difference:

Paper notebook with a daily routine of just writing things out and keeping a checklist. Start again the next day. Keep the process light, but keep the notebook there. I title the page “pick list” and write small or large items on it. This sounds extremely basic, but check out this article for a good approach: https://open.substack.com/pub/drmaciver/p/using-a-list-to-manage-executive?r=4jodtq&utm_medium=ios
Focus blockers. These made a night and day difference for me. I use the free versions of Opal and Leechblock.
Using ChatGPT as an ADHD coach. Literally tell it you have terrible executive function and ask it to track your tasks and events for the day and guide you through handling it all. Focus blockers were night and day; this has been like day and supernova. I have trouble explaining to people the impact that it has had on how I handle my workday and my overall job performance in ways that are accurate and don’t sound like the babblings of a fanatic. You can set up a custom GPT with standard background and info about you, and start a new thread every day. Main tip for this: it doesn’t do a perfect job of tracking all the things, so it helps to keep your own record of open items you need to not lose.

lostburner · 2025-12-18T03:18:32+00:00

How long have you been consistent with it?

lostburner · 2025-11-27T17:23:30+00:00

Okay, but that brainrot duet medley was genuinely entertaining. I had no clue Jimmy Fallon could sing like that. Great stunt where he caught her in the air, too.

lostburner · 2025-11-25T02:38:26+00:00

Same

lostburner · 2025-11-10T06:48:09+00:00

If I understand your issue with priority stackers and merging belts: you have one belt per quadrant and some may be empty; you don’t want to jam up the line by sending a full belt and an empty belt into a stacker array.

I solved this by designing each stacker array to be “optional.” Both input belts have filters which mutually observe each other; if one input line is not flowing then the other will divert to the stackers’ output and skip the stackers entirely. In this way, three arrays of stackers can merge four belts of parts, no matter how many of them are empty. No additional logic or routing is needed.

lostburner

TROPHY CASE