LA Metro opened up the Expo Line, a light rail between downtown LA and Santa Monica, in May as part of its effort to wean people off car ownership. When it began running, Uber ran a promotion for $5 off Pool rides to or from Expo line stations. For ride-hail companies, partnering with public transportation agencies to market themselves as companion services can increase mutual ridership. Kan, Lyft’s LA general manager, said three of the top 10 destinations for Lyft rides are metro stations.
If this trend continues and becomes more common, it has potential to really change transportation in LA. LA Metro is working on expanding the rail lines but there's always the "last mile" problem (not literally 1 mile, but usually last few miles to get/from rail station to destination). UberPool/Lyft Line can be the solution for this and the more people use it, the better solution it becomes.
Makes more sense in what way? Sure a bus is more efficient, but it's less convenient.
Getting people to take a train for the majority of their journey is far more efficient than having them drive because the bus doesn't stop outside their door exactly when they want it.
Although I can't help wondering if it would eventually become worthwhile to run a full size bus as a carpool taxi vehicle.
But it is not as if those 50 people with a last-mile problem live all within a few blocks of a single street going in one direction from the transit terminal. The people with last-mile problems, really two or three miles, are scattered all over the place, and for that a ride service works a lot better.
Does anyone know how strict is the Google two year update policy for Nexus? It's clear they won't do major releases (such as Android 7.0) for old phones. However, what about critical security updates? For example, if something as bad as Stagefright was discovered, would Google do nothing for all the older Nexus phones out there? Or would something like that be a special exception to the rule?
The word "remote" is so general it's basically useless. We need new common terms to describe the different types, such as:
- Long remote: When someone is offshore or many time zones away (such as India or Eastern Europe).
- TZ remote: Same timezone, but requires airplane flight to meet.
- Local remote: Within driving distance.
Local remote is the best of both worlds and all companies should be doing this. It can be a 3-2 balance (3 days remote, 2 days in office) or 4-1, whatever makes sense for the team and company. Employees get the benefit of remote (flexibility, no commute) and in person meetings (such as designing a new system on a whiteboard). It's sad that so many tech companies (such as Google and FB) don't do this. Considering that it's tech that allows this (with video conferencing, git, slack, etc.), it's ironic that tech companies are so resistant to doing local remote.
TZ remote can work, but it should be only for employees who are already established at the company (spent many years doing local remote). The connections developed during the local remote years will help make TZ remote work. And they can fly to the office a few times during the year to refresh those connections.
Long remote has a lot of issues. The big time zone difference, lack of any history of in-person meetings, and culture differences make it very difficult for this to work.
There is great potential for something like Lyft to fix the rail "first mile" and "last mile" problem. If they can integrate systems with government so that the Lyft cost is part of the rail fare, then it's possible it could be covered by the commuter tax benefit. That would be a big win for everyone, lower cost for commuters, steady income for Lyft, increased ridership for rail.
EDIT: The more I think about it, this is such a good idea I hope Lyft is seriously working on this. With something like Lyft Line, the optimization potential is immense. Assuming each Lyft Line car can have 3 passengers and most workplaces would be within 2-3 miles of a rail station, rides could be very cheap and fast. For example, most coworkers going home would probably share the same Lyft back to the station. The short distance (assuming a 2-3 mile radius) combined with Lyft Line would allow very high throughput during rush hours. If the Lyft cost can benefit from the commuter tax deduction, that's just icing on the cake since the car sharing alone should drop costs by a lot. And there's also networking effect. Coworkers will want to encourage coworkers to do this so they can lower costs for everyone.
Glancing at the map of Centennial, Colorado, tells me that this is way beyond a first/last mile problem. The problem is this exurb is so sparse that there's nothing within a mile of this station. This appears to be the walking path from the nearest residence to the Dry Creek station, and it's a full mile if you make a suicidal dash across a five-lane with a 40MPH speed limit, or 1.2 miles if you follow legally-prescribed sidewalks and crosswalks.
This isn't a "last mile" problem it is a problem with this urban form, which cannot be effectively served by transit. It's hard to believe anyone put a rail station here in the first place. It must have cost a fortune, especially with that multi-story parking structure.
Probably the best thing that could be done with this site is take the rail station as a blessing and level all of those office parks within a mile of the place, building up a walkable transit village instead. You could easily put several thousand residences in that area instead of what appears to be a shitload of surface parking.
>It's hard to believe anyone put a rail station here in the first place.
It's not. Perhaps you've never lived in a suburb with a train. They're incredibly useful in getting to the city.
You don't need to be able to walk to the station for it to be useful. Its surprising you think that's how public transit needs to work.
This is a commuter train. You live in the suburbs, drive to the station or get dropped off, and take the train 95% of the way to work. It saves you having to drive in traffic, and parking in downtown where space is limited and expensive. It's incredibly useful.
Without that train living in the suburbs and working downtown would be shit.
> Without that train living in the suburbs and working downtown would be shit.
I second that. I live in the suburbs of Chicago. When I moved here - I thought I would drive to downtown (my work location). Everyday, my one way drive was taking about 2 hours. It was pathetic. I switched my commute to train. It was about 30 mins ride along with the benefit of either taking a nap or doing my work.
Strangely enough, I live in the Willow Creek neighborhood you selected. For me, living on the opposite side, it would be just over a two mile walk. And for the most part, it's a very pleasant walk through a park-like development of mature trees, creeks, playgrounds, a school, etc. The last section is not too bad either with cross-walks, lights, etc. And the Google map is a bit out of date. There's a new condo development just a block or so away from the station. But for me, it's a moot-point as my commute is in the opposite direction...
The taxi station near my commuter train station did this. When a train arrived the dispatcher would come out and ask everyone who meandered near the taxis where they were going and then pool people into shared cabs. They didn't even ask if you wanted to share or not, they assumed everyone did.
Except Lyft is on demand; I don't have to be waiting in my driveway exactly at 7:45 every morning, lest a coworker have to wait for me and hold up everyone else as well - and I'll never be held up waiting for them either.
It's a fair point about the dilly-dallying (although I believe there are rules like you can't be more than 3 min late, tho I don't know how strict they are.) I've definitely had rough lyft lines where I seem like I'm really being taken out of my way. But most of the time it's awesome, and kind of fun.
But the important difference that pavel was identifying was that you don't have to decide ahead of time that you are heading to the bus station. That's huge! You decide to head downtown or whereever, pull out the app, bam someone's coming to pick you up. To me this feels very different than, e.g., "casual carpool" in the Bay Area.
I think Uber Pool only gives you 1 minute from the time the driver arrives, but I've never had a driver leave without the second passenger when they took 5 or 10 minutes to show up. Plus people never like to admit that they're at fault; if they driver leaves after 5 minutes because a passenger wasn't at their pickup point, the passenger can probably leave nasty feedback and risk the driver being banned if it happens a few times.
I've had a pretty good experience with Lyft Line tbh.
The fare is based on the destination, so I don't get charged extra if the driver takes a longer route, or if the ride takes longer due to traffic, or if there aren't other passengers available to carpool.
The fare is also pretty reasonable - lyft line for 2 people comes out about the same as the Muni, so it's pretty much replaced Muni for me.
They also recently added the option of entering more than 1 destination, which is pretty handy when you're dropping someone off on the way home.
PS: I'm not affiliated with Lyft, just a satisfied customer.
I wish! "On demand" here means waiting 2 minutes to match with a ride that is says it will arrive 5 minutes later, but really arrives 15 minutes later.
Commuting with Lyft/Uber requires planning because of the awful arrival forecasts. It's just easier to pull of because no one has to be the lackey that drives the full group (and spends the most time personally).
I haven't had the same experience in Boston or South Bay. There have been a few instances it has been late by 3-5 minutes but not too often to actually bother me.
In the same way that blogging invented the zine, I guess. The difference between an analog carpool and one with always-connected GPS devices seems pretty significant.
How much would these train + Lyft tickets cost? If you charge a flat rate you risk the someone paying $5 for a $25 commute. What if a taco bell executive gets kicked off the Lyft platform for abusing a driver then buys a trainLyft ticket?
If you charge a flat rate you risk the someone paying $5 for a $25 commute.
Then you make a loss on that ride. Making a $20 loss occasionally is fine if you're making $1.50 profit on the next 500,000 rides, especially if you'd only get 5,000 rides without the flat fee. This is why you model your market structure properly and use as much data as you can lay your hands on to find a workable price point.
It's trivially easy to dream up reasons why, completely hypothetically without any research at all, something might not work. It's not very helpful though.
For what it's worth, where a friend of mine lives in a city in the North West of the UK, getting an Uber is cheaper than taking the bus.
The message is loud and clear for senior engineers (10+ years experience): startups don't want you. They may say they do, but they really don't. And the message from SV big tech is also clear: we don't want you unless you're in the inner club (Google, FB, Amazon, etc.)
The solution is to avoid these companies. There's a huge world outside SV. These may be known as "boring" (banks, insurance, etc.) but they will not have the stupid ageist algorithm games known as "technical programming interviews". And they respect experience. And they won't have an ageist culture, it will be ok to go home early and be with family.
If the problem is that you can't get a job if you're not in the club, why not join the club?
I used to work at Google and I did a lot of interviews. I loved when we finally got an experienced engineer in to interview. I could stop asking the toy algorithms questions and actually talk about design.
But maybe they only want to hire fresh college grads? The company is sorely lacking in experience. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason they can't find experienced engineers to interview is that everyone with experience who is qualified to work at Google either works there already or doesn't want to.
Maybe you're in that camp of not wanting to work at Google. That's fine. I enjoyed it for a while but it wasn't for me. Just having it on my resume has opened a lot of doors.
Interviewing at Google a few years ago (with some experience) was not positive - the interviewer actively avoided talking anything about design or systems, and insisted on asking me brain teasers about weighing boxes of pennies, etc. Was a stupid waste of time for me and turned me off from Google totally.
It wasn't just the type of questions, was the whole experience - I did answer, then then interviewer insisted I could do it in one fewer step, and would not proceed or assist until I came up with a better answer. Then time was up, and he answered no questions of mine. Emailing the recruiter to ask if this was expected or if there was another role and received no replies back. Sorry, but to hell with working for Google after that...
Bear in mind at the time I had 8 years experience in non-trivial roles, including some mgmt and architecture, and they were the ones who reached out to me.
I had a google recruiter call, we spoke, then set up a longer interview. I asked about pay, and was told they don't talk about it until after an interview, which meant travel and time away from current projects. It's not that I couldn't do it at all, but it meant some schedule shuffling and I wanted a ballpark - just a ballpark or ...minimum floor. She wouldn't give me any info.
I then asked another question which she didn't know the answer to ("no one's ever asked that before!") and told me she'd have an answer in a couple days. That was ... Aug 2013? I'm still waiting.
I told the story before and someone said "well, that's no way to get a job!" as I described my questioning the recruiter. "I didn't apply for a job - they called me - they can answer a couple of my questions if they want me to take time out to come visit them".
can you please share what that question was? just curious. I've read many other articles about candidates having had similar experiences. Its one of the reasons i dont like Google as a company
role was developer evangelist. she mentioned bonuses were based on performance review, and I asked what the metrics were. how did they measure the 'success' of a developer evangelist? number of presentations? blog posts? conferences? miles traveled? She didn't know, and apparently no one has ever asked that question (at least at that stage of the process) before.
Interviewing at google was the absolute worst experience I've ever had over two weeks:
First interview was a cold call from a bored sounding engineer-turned-recruiter. The guy asked me some questions and some I didn't know at the time, but since my experience was pretty solid, they scheduled an interview anyway.
They forgot the first interview. No call, no email, no answer from emails, etc. It's not a first, so I took it as, "shit happens".
They forgot the second interview.
The third interview finally happened, but the engineer on the other end of the phone was ~extremely~ uninterested from the beginning of the call. How in the hell am I supposed to be excited for the interview or even working with someone like that?
To make matters worse, all three interviews required me to leave work early. Because that's obviously not suspicious. Never got a call or email or apology after that ordeal.
"Welcome to Google, we hate our lives, want to hate yours, too?".
"A certain age"? I "joined" the club by getting a gig at Amazon at 46. Before that I'd never worked at any of the big tech companies. I also get interest from startups all the time, but from what I can tell they don't want employees above a certain salary, not a certain age.
I don't think it's age but attitude and skills that distinguish people who can get "in the club." If the attitude is "SHOW ME THE MONEY" when Google is well known for paying way above market rates, or if the attitude is "WHY SHOULD I KNOW THESE CS PROBLEMS!?", when it's well known that Google cares about those problems...well, then no, you can't join the club.
At this point I've interviewed at Google but turned them down when they could only offer me what sounded like a glorified accounting programming position (in the Boulder office, which doesn't have as many teams as in Mountain View). I might have fun working at Google on the right team, but I have other options (including Amazon) that also pay well and are very attractive for other reasons, so why not?
Despite my shitty experience last time, I would be willing to give Google another chance (as long as it isn't in California). They've decided to ignore me.
Since when does Google fail to ask toy algorithms question of senior engineers?
I'm not being snarky; everything I've ever read, heard, and experienced with Google interviews is that these trivia algorithms questions compose the majority of the on-site interviews. [1] [2]
You appear to be different, but please don't claim your interviewing style as representative of even 1/4 of Google interviewers.
> [maybe] everyone with experience who is qualified to work at Google either works there already or doesn't want to.
If memorizing algorithms is a necessary condition of a senior engineer being qualified to work at Google, that is fine. But it is disingenuous to claim otherwise, since clearly many have found it is algorithm memorization that has been the gatekeeper from getting an offer at Google, not non-abstract large systems design, linux systems internals knowledge, concurrent and asynchronous programming, etc.
[1] http://www.nakov.com/blog/2007/12/27/overqualified-to-work-i... "Trust me, a 15 years old schoolboy who is a good programming contestant (e.g. some of the Bulgarian National champions) can pass these questions without having any experience in commercial software engineering. I expected more software engineering questions about software design and architecture, large-scale databases and information systems, Internet applications, information security, parallel programming, threads, synchronization, development process, software quality, testing, life-cycle, software project management, agile development, etc. but the interviewers didn’t even mention any of these topics. I applied for senior position and it was normal to expect serious software engineering and technical questions, but this didn’t happen."
[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Senior-Software-E... (the typical response is some variation of "they asked me a question that was similar to a problem in Cracking the Coding Interview while not offering a single question about my previous accomplishments or potential culture fit."
Most start ups really want people in early 20's, Unmarried without responsibilities, who have a very idealistic view of the world and are ready to fail, without any financial profit in return.
>>stupid ageist algorithm games known as "technical programming interviews"
Unless you are in "exam mode" all the time. Spending away all your life in the pursuit of the interview preparation. This kind of interview preparedness isn't possible anyway.
^yes. when an early-stage startup (seed or just hit series a) emphasizes that they are a 'family' this is not quite accurate. yes, caring and support abounds, but its not so much a family as a group of friends...and like every group of friends when you can't hang at the bar until closing a few nights a week or spend a weekend 'adventure camping' the group just stops inviting you. quickly you lose sync, don't get the in-jokes and most importantly you lose value in the eyes of the group. 'oh, she/he used to be cool, but they just don't hang anymore'.
when it comes to work this has a very destructive effect. team-building exercises that require people to choose between spending time with their families and participating are, in my opinion, at the least cruel and at the most nefariously aimed at driving a culture wedge between you and the company.
your children only grow up once. no second chances.
your elderly parents deterioration and eventual death only happens once. no second chances.
most of us will work the majority of our lives, occupying several roles at more than one company. in my mind this amounts to numerous 'chances' to do things better/differently/more carefully/more thoughtfully/ etc etc etc.
To his credit, I had a (rather eccentric) founder in NYC ask me if I planned on having kids anytime soon as the first question of his interview - after all the tech questions from people under him.
When I said yeah, and I was planning on commuting from NJ, he said "well I don't want to break up a family, so see you later" <end of interview>. I thought it was rude at the time, but here I am 3 years later and damn if he wasn't right. Dodged a bullet that only he saw was coming right at me.
I'm pretty sure that in the US that question is illegal to ask an interviewee. It might have been beneficial in your case, but is still totally illegal because it is one of the ways the sexual discrimination in hiring propagates.
> I'm pretty sure that in the US that question is illegal to ask an interviewee.
It is not. (Like most questions that people think are illegal to ask in interviews, its merely ill-advised to ask because it asks specifically about something on which it is illegal to discriminate in hiring, and asking about it in an interview is -- on its own, weak, but still -- potential evidence of its use in a hiring decision.)
(Cargo cult HR helps perpetuate the myth that these things are illegal to ask.)
Okay, it might not necessarily be illegal in the general case, but in the specific case described by the OP, asking that question, getting an answer, and then saying "See you later <eom>" makes it clear that that was discrimination in the hiring process based on family responsibilities, no?
As a long time independent consultant looking for a regular 9 to 5 job, my recent interview experiences would be consistent with this statement. After a series of phone interviews and a 4 hour on-site, all of which yielded positive feedback, I was told the position went to someone "more passionate" about the company mission.
After reflecting a bit on what I may have done or said wrong, it hit me. This place had the typical startup perks: catered lunches, stocked kitchen (with plenty of energy drinks), and a younger demographic (I'm 40). My conclusion is that "More Passionate" is actually code for "willing to work 14 hour days."
And what if I'm past my 20's, but still unmarried with no responsibilities and I love pulling all nighters and am willing to work long hours for relatively low pay? There's no real way to tell potential employers that, is there?
I have faced something similar. Though I have 14 years experience with technologies that are suppose to be in demand (Ruby On Rails, NodeJS) I have had a very difficult time finding work this year. It's certainly more difficult now than in 2012 or 2013.
I had no issue interpreting the likely intended meaning of this: This person is saying they have been keeping up with new technologies the past 14 years (such as RoR, NodeJS now, but years ago Java held that spot, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity helps here especially these days when typing on a mobile phone can easily lead to typos and mistakes.
You can parse that statement in a more favorable way. She has spent 14 years acquiring experience with relatively new (or newly popular) technologies.
So 14 years ago, she would have worked with a technology that is now slightly more than 14 years old--I'd guess C#, which is now 16 years old. Maybe 9 years ago, she worked with Ruby on Rails, which is now 10 years old. Maybe 6 years ago, she started on Node.js, which is now 7 years old. Even now, she is likely keeping an eye on HN to see what would be most useful to learn next.
In other words, she has been continuously jogging on the technology treadmill, rather than staking out a niche to ride out until retirement.
This is likely the only way to avoid moving to progressively stodgier and less interesting companies as you age. The young and hip companies use the young and hip tech stacks. Established companies wait to see whether the new thing can cut costs or increase revenues before migrating, and part of that equation is not paying a premium for specialist developers that are currently in high demand.
Replace "with" with "including" and all the strange comments to this post evaporate. Every experienced programmer knows what is meant by this. By the way, anyone experienced picks up Node.js in a week.
It's interesting to see so many comments on an imprecise wording of a sentence.
As humans, people can parse this sentence and infer the thinking and meaning behind it.
The related part of the problem with this the difficulty in finding a position is that computers and compilers cannot infer meaning - the statement must be exact (not precise, not accurate, exact). And for a programmer, making such logical gaffes is detrimental to speed and quality of a particular piece of work.
Could be unfair in assessing one as such, but a line of reasoning here does exist that I believe to be testable and valid. And life isn't fair.
Perhaps a piece to help you in finding a position better is to form the idea first, then reword it for the right audience (for programmers, be exacting, don't leave room for interpretation).
Skills are skills. Even if you don't have the latest iPhone or Android flavor TangoUniformVoo 8.9.
Considering that i'm a bit rusty (no allusion intended), if i'm certified in Sun's Java 1.5/5.0, can i still program in OracleJava, and what about Google'sJava? ....Though maybe it takes a little bit of elbow grease and sharp elbows to push the script-kiddies currently in HRManagement aside.
>> Though I have 14 years experience with technologies that are suppose to be in demand (Ruby On Rails, NodeJS)
> I don't know why you've been grayed out.
Because we oldtimers know that ruby on rails and especially node.js hasn't existed for 14years. Ruby on rails had it's first stable release about 11 years ago.
Actually used to be a recruiter joke/meme : young rails wizard wanted, minimum 10 years experience (back before 2005 :-)
That said, I didn't downvote, but I suspect this is the reason.
Edit: removed this, I might have misread the post as pointed out by others -> (not being careful with facts, massive hyperbole)
It's more of "years since last studied algorithms". University algorithms classes are useless for these types of interviews for the most part when 90% of the focus is on the proofs.
Most people I know spent time studying by themselves outside of class/class material.
Something that annoys me about all this self-driving focus is that they are not targeting the obvious low-hanging fruit:
1) Focus on perfecting low speed bumper-to-bumper traffic fully autonomous driving on freeways.
2) Focus on passing legislation to allow zero driver liability and awareness when using the low speed bumper-to-bumper traffic self-driving mode.
The speeds are low and so the risk factor is reduced by orders of magnitude. Even if an accident happens, it won't be fatal because of the low speeds. And that should also help with the legislation issues. Also, this feature would be very popular. Imagine a commercial with typical bumper-to-bumper traffic. Then the camera zooms in and the driver is sleeping. When the car detects that bumper-to-bumper traffic is going to end soon, it triggers a loud alert which wakes the driver.
And yet all the car companies are ignoring this. I remember reading about early lane keeping and automatic speed cruise control and it would not activate under slow speeds. I was incredulous when I read it. They made this not work for exactly the most useful scenario? I don't care about self-driving for road trips, they don't happen often. And door-to-door self driving is the ultimate goal, but it's going to take a long time to get there. But helping to alleviate the horrible bumper-to-bumper driving by allowing drivers to do something else can be done with current technology. The whole self-driving effort feels like no one has done any market research to see how to make it help with real world situations.
Volvo XC90 has this feature. It's basically lane keeping with automatic cruise control that works between 0 mph and 30. It also requires you to keep hands on the wheel (that's not a problem, imho).
The only drawback to me is that if the car stops completely, the autopilot shuts down and has to be manually restarted (click button) to resume.
This could make traffic worse. The only thing keeping bad traffic from getting worse is that past a certain degree of badness, some people start choosing to cancel or defer driving trips because they are not willing to drive with that degree of delay and/or annoyance. Making traffic easier to put up with, will have the same effect as reducing the price of any good would have -- increase the amount "consumed"
Self driving cars will lead to worse traffic unless tolls go up enough to make up for it
Samsung is a typical asian electronics company (has a hardware focused history and very good at it, but doesn't understand or respect software). I'm so glad that node.js is not under Joyent control.
Having worked in a Samsung office for enough time to have an informed opinion, I can emphatically say that the "hardware focused history" has nothing to do with their lacking on the software front. They have some amazing engineers (especially at HQ in Korea), but the main obstacles are partly Korean culture in general (especially as it pertains to engineers) and partly the management practices of the company. The best things they develop (either in partnership or internally) usually never have a fair leg in the market. I'm certainly not apologizing for the company, just saying don't think the issues you see are directly the engineer's fault.
I don't remember the exact Korean wording, but a common phrase said by Samsung engineers (under their breath) in Korea basically translates to "I'll do what you say, but it's only because I'm at <name of a Japanese labor camp that I forget now>." My time there really made me appreciate how much better we have it here!
> They have some amazing engineers (especially at HQ in Korea), but the main obstacles are partly Korean culture in general (especially as it pertains to engineers) and partly the management practices of the company.
Can you explain the cultural aspects (and management shortcomings) in more detail for those of us who haven't experienced Korea? Thanks.
Haven't experienced a Korean workforce first hand, but as a Korean I can probably provide some insight into the culture.
In general, the culture is very hierarchical (respecting elders) thus seniority and age play a big factor in leadership. I would assume that this makes it very easy for mediocre (but good enough to survive) management to stay in positions far too long. Asian culture, but Koreans especially, can be masochistic1 and martyr2 like in their methods. In some ways this creates a tremendous amount of excellence, but it also creates soldiers who may not necessarily be incentivized to innovate, and those who innovate, out of cultural respect will tend to not dare "disrespect" seniority. Being a good soldier makes for career advancements.
Management can also claim the failures of the company as their own personal failures, rather than the gray collective failure of a group(e.g. japanese ceo's claiming company failure as their own), thus employees kind of get absolved of blame.
Work in Korea also tends to be a live at the office kind of affair. It's not uncommon for the white collar folk to go into work at 7a, and stay until 7-9p. Then go drinking with coworkers until midnight, and rinse and repeat. While this makes for very strong bonds amongst coworking peers and better teams, I would imagine that it also takes a toll on the mental capacity of the workforces.
Mainly, I wouldn't be surprised if work in Korea tends to be death marches all the time based on the martyrdome syndrome and masochistic syndrome for career advancement.
It's been a while since I was there but as a lowly US Army Private stationed there and working closely with Koreans old and young as an ambulance driver, there are a few things I still remember clearly.
Basic courtesy and being polite are pretty much universal, so try to be humble and keep an open mind and observe. Older people often are more experienced and savvy about how to handle something so being deferential to them is a no-brainer. You'll spot the incompetent ones soon enough and so continue being polite but ignoring their guidance.
One thing that drove me nuts but took a little while to figure out was that people would almost never say no to a request. I would ask if something was possible and they would pretty much always say yes, not wanting to disappoint, but I would have been better off hearing a 'no, sorry'. I wanted a realistic answer and theirs were often far too optimistic.
Me: "Mr Son, can we make it to Osan in 30 minutes?"
Him: "Yes" (always yes)
An hour later we show up late to another hospital with a very impatient air crew idling and waiting for our patient transfer. We would have all been better off hearing a "No, it takes an hour". Just one small example but this scenario repeated frequently.
I learned that when speaking to a group or doing a presentation it was customary to apologize for your inexperience on the subject and promise to do your best. Tim Berners-Lee could start a talk with "I'm sorry I don't know much about the World Wide Web..." for example and Westerners would laugh but the locals would be like "He's off to a good start".
Understanding this helped me get more realistic answers though. Even if I thought I knew an answer I would keep the question more open-ended to solicit a better response.
Me: "Mr Son, I'm sorry but I forget how long it takes to get to Osan, can you remember?" (said even after making the trip solo dozens of times in often difficult and stressful conditions).
Him: "Ah yes, there is new road construction halfway there so I'll teach you an alternate route to bypass it. We'll be there in about 40 minutes".
Had I not learned to ask a better question, I never would have learned his faster alternate route.
Korea was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed hanging out with the older Koreans who worked on our base, they were a constant source of good info once learned how to talk to them. I also had a 'ration card' entitling me to buy the occasional bottle of Crown Royal on base and give them, which always helped!
I only have secondhand knowledge (my brother worked at Samsung HQ for almost two years after grad school & a post-doc), but Samsung managers are often corrupt and treat their employees like trash. Foreigners have it a little better, they're allowed to go home at relatively more normal hours, but if you're from Korea and Korean, you do whatever the boss tells you or they retaliate hard since there are plenty of starry-eyed hardworking Koreans ready to take your place to work for the biggest company in & the pride of Korea. My brother wasn't completely immune either, they stiffed him on bonus pay by 50% on a max bonus year & lowballed him compared to all other foreigners by almost 2x compensation for similar credentials (our suspicion is because he's Korean - they refused to give him a reason. When he tried to go higher through a former Samsung VP relative of ours, who got a high ranking HR person to investigate, he got warned by his HR manager with an implicit threat), and he was a hotshot who finished his chemistry PhD at 25 at a top 25 US program who had his choice of jobs/academic positions. He ended up making it through by making a deal with his boss to leave him alone and my brother would avoid exposing corruption/bad decision making & getting him sacked (boss refused to teach or lend any resource for learning technical Korean chemistry terminology because his experience in American graduate school had him learning it on his own - it was explicit retaliation against western academia), and my brother still hated his life there (thought about suicide almost every day there); his first reaction setting foot on US soil again was "I love the taste of freedom!".
Whenever someone in HQ tells you to do something, you do it, and if not, you get punished, whether that's through decreased compensation or they fire you. You can be the engineer that tells managers that you can't draw parallel lines that intersect (metaphorically speaking), but they don't want to hear it unless the competitor proves them wrong with sales results - they are notorious for not innovating, but copying competitors. Samsung runs on waterfall from top to bottom. Oh, and if they tell you to do something early in the morning, you jump.
Samsung also tends to mainly promote Koreans - if you're not Korean and want to get ahead, you'd best look elsewhere because you're not likely to accomplish it. I hear this also applies to their American divisions as well, but I do not know anyone who has worked for them here. The family who owns the company has had some history with corruption in Korea as well, so this isn't too surprising.
More on the cultural side, Koreans can be very rude by western standards - it also is demanding on expectations. You're often expected to dress a certain way (this part is no different from most of the world, but disregarding norms is probably more harshly regarded in Korean culture than most), as well as join bosses & other co-workers going out to drink and doing karaoke at night. Deferring to father-like/older figures is built into the language with even how one addresses another, and that bleeds into how companies operate (& people treat each other - even being one month older can come into play unless you have leverage of some sorts). There are also built in opinions on processes, from parenting to schooling to work. Koreans tend to also be quite xenophobic/racist, even against Koreans who cannot speak Korean (maybe even moreso towards Koreans who cannot speak the language). Society sort of disowns those who are not immersed in the culture. Non-Asian foreigners are special, but they are excluded from much of anything of consequence (probably to avoid stirring the pot with other nations).
There's probably a lot more I'm missing here, but tl;dr if you aren't an extremely mentally tough person, working for a Korean company in Korea can crush you thoroughly. It is a different world, and people who do so from western society are left without a support base.
Just to provide another perspective, I'm an American anglo who has lived off and on for over 30 years in South Korea, speak the language near fluently, have worked in a variety of Korean institutions from a rural health center to a top research university. Along the way I have benefitted mightily from friendship with some great colleagues and much enjoy the rich culture and fascinating challenges of living in a rapidly changing society. Well-satisfied expats such as myself are not few in number. No surprise, the key is learning the language and using it for creative engagement with Korean society.
That said, I think it's fair to say that among many Koreans Samsung is viewed with respect but no affection. The company history dates back to the Japanese colonial period and is imbued with the pre-WWII Japanese zaibatsu mentality. What some posters are generalizing as "Korean" seems more the rather specialized local culture of Samsung. Personally, I would never work for them.
That's not a corporate thing, it's the culture of the entire country. Try not to condemn an entire culture just because you disagree with how they do things. From the perspective of Koreans, Westerners do lots of really unpleasant things as well.
There's also lots of very positive things about Korean culture, just like there are about Western cultures.
> Having worked in a Samsung office for enough time to have an informed opinion
That's Samsung proper. Not their incubator setup, which is different. Companies like Mapzen were bought by Samsung, but have a completely different culture.
I've heard that too, I remember a story from a worker who said they put all the Engineers into a room and said they can't leave until an issue was fixed. Took them two days.
I have no personal experience working for Samsung but know quite a few who did work for their US team and most don't have a positive experience. I also know some who worked for other South Korean companies. Lets just say the Korean work culture is quite different than in a typical US company. Hopefully the Joyent guys will be shielded from all this.
I worked with two project managers from their US team STA (Samsung Technologies America). One was OK. The other one was a fucking psychopath. I'm talking about needlessly and viciously backstabbing all in range. Totally unbelievable. Never seen anything like it, and god help me I hope I never see it again.
Later, I visited their HQ in Korea and met some of their Indian and Korean development teams. They were competent but the work culture was toxic. People were expected to attend 11PM daily review meetings where the issues list was painfully re-read pointlessly and nothing at all was achieved. Koreans were expected to live in numbered company compounds, catch a numbered company bus and ascend to a numbered floor in a numbered company skyscraper after an airport security style physical check. Smoking allowed strictly twice per day in a designated corner of the compound. All movement is tracked. Psychotic Confucian management style. I honestly thought to myself: if this is a vision of the future, I want no part of it.
Then you should see the japanese way of working, it's also quite fun! I believe this is common in most of asia. I have worked in China and it's not quite different at all from what you're saying.
Working in China is way different from Japan/Korea, at least for the companies I've been exposed to. There is much more freedom in how you get things done, there is less hierarchy, there is more value placed on programmers (which is why Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese seem to come here to work in spite of the pollution).
China is definitely way better than Japan. Maybe imitation of all western products year over year could help them to have more western way of working style and etc but still culture is workaholic, robot like obeying, not criticising at all.
My experience in Shanghai/Suzhou is very different fortunately. Not very long days if not needed, high salaries and quite a bit of freedom. Very Western feel while we work with Chinese companies with no Western employees.
From what I understand Samsung is a huge conglomerate of divisions that have little to do with each other.
Samsung Semiconductor is happy to supply chips to Apple even though they're the biggest rival of Samsung Telecommunications the builds the Galaxy phones. Conversely Samsung Telecommunications may or may not pick Samsung chips for their Galaxy phones, it doesn't really matter.
So I guess it depends to what division they will be attached. If they're attached directly to the group, they may actually keep complete freedom and just have a different owner.
Seems like the average complaints people have working at BigCo.
Compared to the kind of stuff that Microsoft, Apple have done in the past in the software world.
And I do not see how this is bad, maybe Samsung is trying to learn why 'Western' engineering is so much superior to 'Asian' engineering by this acquisition ?
Some of the rumors going on say that management back home is very provincial and are rigidly Confucian (hierarchical), which they enforce on their satellite operations. Also, your basic big corp in tech are quite internationalized from the start even at home; e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Apple already employ those from many different cultures even in their home offices.
> And I do not see how this is bad, maybe Samsung is trying to learn why 'Western' engineering is so much superior to 'Asian' engineering by this acquisition ?
It depends if you want to be part of their learning experience or not! Chinese companies have adapted pretty well to acquisitions and satellites, so it isn't an Asian thing. Japanese companies have been known to have similar problems in the past and even currently (though it really depends on the company, and many have had a lot of time to gain experience).
Actually, Japan is another country that is notorious for not being as great as they should be at software, maybe there is a common thing going on?
Considering Samsung has been known to push for proprietary technology (they tried to create market of Android apps that would only work on Samsung's phones) I'm little worried there is going to be some sort of new node.js fork that's incompatible with current one and has some weird licensing stuff or something.
Microsoft is a software company. Samsung is not. If you think they are, then you probably haven't used one of their bloated, buggy phones that they stop updating way too soon.
What it has to do with it being Asian is the culture of conformity and group think; this is in stark contrast to Bryan's statement that at Joyent everyone leads and is led by taking individual initiative.
Don't know. There isn't even a word about Node in the statement from then CEO, but before today I didn't even know what the main business of Joyent is so I can't say how they and Samsung think it's important for them. Just figure, my first thought was "Samsung wants Node, but why?" :-)
Anyway, it's not tightly bound with Joyent anymore so even a worst case scenario won't affect ot much.
How do you come to the conclusion that the entirety of Samsung don't understand or respect software, when they clearly show great contributions to OSS? [0].
Well, in the case of Linux they are legally bound to provide the source code to any modifications they ship in binary form to a third party due to the GPL, I don't know what their track record is when they don't have to release the source code.
Yeah, this comment is ignorance at its finest. Mapzen, for example, was also acquired by Samsung, and it still operates as its own little startup, just with more financial security. Joyent seems to be going the same way. They will remain Joyent, but with support from Samsung.
There's a reason Samsung seems to be not that great as a software shop. I wrote up a long post on HN almost 2 years ago (God, it's been 2 years!!). I'm reposting the link here.
Does anyone know if the ECMAScript group is seriously considering adding something like TS? Maybe in ES8 or ES9? TS 2 will be impressive and it seems TS has a lot of momentum (such as Angular 2).
Brendan Eich made the following comment here a while back but I don't know if what he hoped for had made any progress:
" Indeed we had structural types in ES4 toward the end, and almost bluffed MS into folding (I'm told by a reliable source). But ES4 was trying for too much too soon. At this point we really need to see ES6/7 and TypeScript + Flow "gene- culture co-evolution". As I said at the last TC39 meeting on the topic, big de-facto standard wins trump rushed de-jure standards any day. /be"
and also:
" Type system implementors and the JS stewards must communicate well for this to win. It's looking good so far, on Ecma TC39: JQuery, Facebook, Netflix, PayPal (Ebay originally, and again), Twitter all represented along with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Also academic researchers from various universities, all of whom love type systems and theory :-)."
Would be nice, but I think we can do much better than what TS gives us right now, on the level of the type system. What's really missing are ADTs / sum types (and pattern matching, though that is more an implementation detail).
Just a little bit of programming can be powerful. If I were designing an elementary school course, it would focus on two things:
1) How to clean data. Real world data is always dirty. It mixes strings and ints, has commas and quotes where they shouldn't be, etc. Knowing how to think of data in terms of a standard format and having a plan for exceptions is very important.
2) How to manipulate data. Python, JS, or some other simple dynamic language. Teach how to do functional style programming such as list.forEach(<lambda>) to transform or analyze data.
It's easy to make homework and tests for something like this. And these are fundamental skills. It doesn't matter if Python or JS fades away. It doesn't matter if popular formats change from JSON to something else. It's about teaching how to think about data and how to get it in a form where it's easy and reliable to do analysis or transformations with it.
We don't need to make programming "fun". We need to treat it like algebra. A basic skill that all should learn. But that doesn't mean making web pages or mobile apps. And it also doesn't mean the theory focused CS topics like data structures and algorithms. Just start with learning how to think of data in a standard form like CSV or JSON. And how to use a programming language like JS/Python to do something with the data. After students master these skills, it can be integrated into science classes. Students will know how to write simple scripts to clean up the data from a lab test and analyze it.
What are some of these companies? A common advice I've seen here and other sites is that the best workplace for developers will be at companies where the software is the main revenue product. It's assumed that if software dev is seen as just a pure cost and not the main revenue generator, then workplace for dev will be horrible due to lack of influence and status in the company.
The reasoning for this seems intuitive and correct. But I'm wondering if there's evidence it's wrong. What are these great companies for developers and are they software revenue companies? If not, what are the forces that maintain a good workplace for developers when software is not the main revenue?
LA Metro opened up the Expo Line, a light rail between downtown LA and Santa Monica, in May as part of its effort to wean people off car ownership. When it began running, Uber ran a promotion for $5 off Pool rides to or from Expo line stations. For ride-hail companies, partnering with public transportation agencies to market themselves as companion services can increase mutual ridership. Kan, Lyft’s LA general manager, said three of the top 10 destinations for Lyft rides are metro stations.
If this trend continues and becomes more common, it has potential to really change transportation in LA. LA Metro is working on expanding the rail lines but there's always the "last mile" problem (not literally 1 mile, but usually last few miles to get/from rail station to destination). UberPool/Lyft Line can be the solution for this and the more people use it, the better solution it becomes.