There’s very little you can do wrong by sending someone a genuine email.

Now if you use AI to automate the personalization and start blasting it out indiscriminately, then yea, please don’t.

But if you are being genuine and hand writing emails expressing why you want to work for someone, it’s hard to screw it up.

I also regularly get cold emails from candidates. Most often for marketing roles, rarely for technical roles.

Cold emailing definitely wont hurt your chances at the job.

But to be effective, the outreach needs to be heavily tailored and personalized. You need to make it obvious you aren’t copy and pasting the email to 20 other people.

Would you actually hire a candidate from a cold email? I did it when I was in undergrad looking for research experience. But for professional level jobs it seems so presumptuous considering how you cost 10 or 20x more than an undergraduate on work study.

Not having a robots.txt is fine as long as it's a 404. If it's a 403, you'll be de-indexed.

I have a feeling there's more to the story than what's in the blog post.

If there's one thing I know about Google search, it's that there's never one behavior you can rely on. De-indexed? It's been decades since Google started drawing a complete distinction between allowing the Googlebot to crawl and presence in the index. Last time I needed to make a page disappear from the index, I learned that crawl permission had nothing to do with keeping a page in the index or not. In fact, disallowing it in robots was actually the worst thing I could do, since it wouldn't let the bot show up to find my new "noindex" metatags, which are now the only way to make your page drop out of the index.

Having a shortcut like 403ing the robots would actually be useful. LOL

I’d say you’re right because I have a custom 404 page returned by the robots.txt route and I’m well indexed by google

The first time I read this I assumed you were joking about hooking up a virtual dom. But I think you're being serious.

Why hook up a virtual dom when you have a real one? Unless you're saying AI can't interact reliably with a real browser yet.

I personally find uninspired boring icons way easier to visually scan than a collection of unique illustrated icons.

But I agree they don’t look pretty.

It's utility vs soul.

And we have plenty of utility everywhere in tech nowadays but very little soul.

I honestly couldn't care less if my UI has soul. I just want it to work and get out of the way.

I can’t imagine holding a job where I had to do work that I expect will fail. Sounds absolutely depressing.

What keeps you motivated?

The paycheck?

The vast majority of software projects fail. Honestly, I can't remember ever in my career working on a project I really believed in.

Sometimes I do enjoy the challenge of doing the impossible. Turning a doomed project around or at least minimizing damage. I had some where I thought "this worked out but if anyone but me had been in charge, yeah this would have been a disaster". That feeds my ego. Though I never ever get any thanks from management or any praise. Though this is more of a German culture thing.

There is a reason why burn out is so high in software dev. You are set up to constantly fail. If you succeed against all odds you get more and harder work until you fail.

You got to focus on yourself and find joy in the little challenges. Don't fret over things that you can't change.

That's insane. I think about 80%+ of the projects I see attempted succeed in at least some limited fashion. Even the failures in retrospect produced some insight into the right way forward and were necessary as part of research.

That’s crazy sauce. I don’t lose.

The one time a project was heading to failure I went to the VP and explained the sabotage I was seeing. This was a very lucrative contract and failure was not an option.

He pulled that manager and his team so far off they had a new office on the moon. They were pulling non-sense like submitting the pseudo code I white boarded as a commit.

Two weeks in and I’m still explaining to them the plan.

Despite the setback I pulled off a mammoth project and strategically moved in devs to areas where they could succeed. If they slowed me down they were given the boot.

Success sometimes just takes drive.

It can go many different ways. You can be 110% invested over years building something (and getting paid for it) for somebody who is ultimately incapable of selling it. It fails, womp womp. You can be 10% invested in a pile of crap (and getting paid for it) for a company that's simply checking the boxes. It fails, womp womp. You can be 90% invested in an ill-conceived idea that actually turns out great (to spec), but ultimately fails, because it wasn't anything anybody EXCEPT the client asked for. Womp womp again! You can even do everything right, do great work for a client, launch it, it performs exactly as was expected, then 3 months later is wiped from the internet because the marketing campaign is over, and a new quarterly budget came in for the client, and then it's on to the next thing.

All of this stuff can be remarkably ephemeral, farts in the wind even, and all you can do is take pride in what you did when you did it, and then take on the next challenge.

Sounds depressing if you frame it up a certain way, but it's actually really freeing to just give in completely to the process and treat it like the weather: you're gonna get everything from sunshine to rain to snow to hurricanes, and none of it is in your control. Just enjoy it while it's good, and ride it out when it's not! There's always something new on the horizon.

I'd say it happens pretty frequently, when in a medium-large corp or larger. The middle layers don't know what they're asking for, and don't listen to feedback, as a general statement. They're just managers, not managers that are also technical experts.

The paycheck is a big motivation, as is "the rest of the work is enjoyable enough to overlook things I disagree with". Work is rarely 100% aligned with every employee's thoughts, so I think this is actually normal. Not ideal, obviously, but normal.

It's why a hierarchy actually does make some sense - alignment is rarely perfect, so choosing a single path and saying "everyone needs to get on board, that's why we pay you" can in fact be better for everyone, rather than bikeshedding everything to death. It can and very frequently does cause rather obvious severe problems, but it's capable of improving some things.

For me it's the people.

I've been at my current company for ~4 years. Every January the upper management folks kick off the same project and every year it dies in the planning/discussion phase. Maybe one or two other "big" projects or initiatives will "start," but it's always the same: lots of meetings between the managers without the engineers or designers, lots of hype about the "big project," meetings start to get delayed, roadmaps and plans never materialize, then people stop talking about the project altogether. Sometimes I buy into the hype because I believe in the projects, other times I try to point out issues/risks. Either way the engineering team as a whole is always ignored.

What keeps me motivated is doing what I can for the people who _actually appreciate_ what I do. I work in manufacturing and spend a lot of time talking to the people on the factory floor. There's nothing better than hearing about their struggles and then a few days or weeks later coming back to them with "Hey, I heard you saying you're having an issue with X, so I made Y. Want to try it out and see if it makes things easier?" And then when they stop by my desk to say "Hey sibit Y is awesome!". That makes the job just tolerable enough to not leave.

> I work in manufacturing and spend a lot of time talking to the people on the factory floor.

Before the pandemic, I used to work doing software for a manufacturing startup and _loved_ that part of it.

I loved hacking something up for the folks on the floor that helped them automate some tedium. They were always so appreciative, not just of the result but also the attention we paid them.

Most of them came from "traditional" manufacturing backgrounds and the way they told it, it was like we were the first software people to ever pay attention to them and the issues they were experiencing.

We weren't even building crazy stuff for them. Most of it was pretty simple, but the bar was _so low_ they were always amazed whenever we were able to give them _anything_ that helped. It was awesome.

We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

"Fulfilling" work is a rarity afforded by a fairly unique time and place in history. For the rest of us, work is a means to an end and ideally a fulfilling life outside work lets you keep plugging away on some rich idiot's hare brained scheme so you can keep living that fulfilling life outside work. 12 years in and I've not had a single project I worked on reach its own benchmark for success. No fault of mine, just the wrong ideas at the wrong time and place. A day late and a dollar short, all those other euphemisms.

Some real poetry from the trenches. Thank you

That first paragraph is a classic not original to the comment here.

I wish I had the literary skills for such brilliance :)

thank you for writing this <3.

Amen

It does sound depressing, along with the "money" replies.

It’s all transactional, that the only reason I with everyday

Years ago I was very peripherally involved in a large project for which everyone in the trenches, so all the devs working on it, knew it could never work. Heck, even the sales guys could explain, with technical justification, why it wasn't going to work. But they were getting paid, and jobs weren't exactly readily available at the time, so they all slogged on until eventually it failed as predicted. AFAICT it was a frog-boiling thing, it was easier to stay, and keep getting paid until the money ran out, than to stick your neck out and point out that there was a problem.

Not sure motivated is the word on these projects.

Needing money to pay the bills/mortgage and getting good money at that, then fulfilment out of personal projects get’s me through.

Not good for mental health when you know your work can be better but sometimes needs must and a job is a job.

> I can’t imagine holding a job where I had to do work that I expect will fail. Sounds absolutely depressing. What keeps you motivated?

The paycheck. I had never expected work to NOT be depressing by definition, though. The only reason I'm working on what my employee wants me to is because I can't afford to live otherwise. They'll get the minimal effort needed for me to not get fired, but not a single minute more.

Every software has bugs. The best course of action to avoid introducing into they world yet another piece of buggy software is to never write any software. But nobody pays for not writing software. Then writing software that will completely fail is the next best thing. You don't introduce into the world another piece of buggy software, but you can write the software, which is fun and rewarding and also get paid.

I'm always delighted if the software that I wrote ends up on virtual scrap heap.

I kept being motivated by frustration and anger. But also, once it starts to be visibly failing and everyone sees the situation, you can actually help and make a change.

That is the point where suddenly people listen.

Money.

But since 2008, I’ve always “kept my running shoes around my neck”. I’m always prepared to get a new job when the pay/bullshit ratio is going in the wrong direction.

Happens all the time

mortgage?

I wonder if there’s some survivorship bias. E.g. did they only study people who started and maintained a routine vs. everyone who started a routine but couldn’t stick with it due to depression symptoms

Most experienced programmers have no experience deploying apps (or their experience is from earlier in their career). Especially engineers at big companies where there are whole teams dedicated to infra/devops.

The percentage of programmers with side projects they deploy themselves is very small. I’d guess less than 10% have a side project deployed somewhere. (And these days

> Most experienced programmers have no experience deploying apps (or their experience is from earlier in their career)

Most experienced programmers in my circles have evening/weekend projects. We are notorious for hoarding unused domains for the "brilliant side project" that gets a burst of commits right after domain-renewal time

Except nearly every restaurant I frequent. Example menu below with cash and credit prices, credit prices being 4% more. I see this commonly.

https://misslucyskitchen.com/menu

Even as somebody really disliking the current interchange fees in the US, 4% is a money grab on the merchant's side that I find hard to empathize with.

Even if the merchant pays the sticker price for card acceptance, it's usually just below 3%, unless international cards are involved. Add to that the fact that cash transactions in restaurants are often accounted for in "more tax efficient ways", and it feels even more icky.

Huh, I thought Magic Leap went out of business.

Didn't know they were still around!

Your sympathy is severely misplaced. Magic Leap was Theranos-sized fraud from the beginning: they never had the goods, put out a whole bunch of misleading hype to persuade consumers and gullible investors that they had the goods [0], and eventually it caught up to them. Good riddance.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9r2Z5v_E9o

I agree they hyped the product too much, but contrary to Theranos, they did ship two products that actually moved AR tech forward. They just weren't efficient enough and the product market fit wasn't there. Even Apple is failing at AR.