Obligatory Michael Lewis quote, from Boomerang (2011):
> Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.
They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.
Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."
"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"
For example, if you've ever wondered why useless art trades at such eye-watering valuations, the answer is that the high valuations are fictions that governments will accept for tax purposes, from which you can derive a variety of exciting tax consequences: https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-f... more-or-less because they agree among themselves what the art is valuated at for their own benefit.
Well while the pile of shit makes it a joke, isn't there a real advantage here of legibility?
Like you have a measure (GDP) and it can't accurate measure things unless a sale occurs. So even if the money is a wash there was an actual activity occurring in the economy and now it's recorded.
That scenario does not work for this discussion because the first economist has no reason to expect the second economist will ask him to eat shit for $100.
That’s how I imagined it, kind of a hybrid of what I’ve seen called Product Marketing Manager and Product Analyst, but other replies and OpenAI job postings indicate maybe it’s a different role, more hands on building, getting from research to consumer product maybe?
What AWS services are you using currently and what drives your costs?
We’re a nonprofit with apps that see ~1000s of users a month, but mostly in the US. I think we see good savings using Google Cloud Run and scaling down when there’s less traffic. You could probably set up AWS Fargate similarly. Modern app frameworks start quickly so cold starts aren’t terrible. Docker containers are portable if you outgrow that kind of environment and want to shift to dedicated VMs or the other way to serverless in future. I would also look at fly.io.
Like you, “engineer’s engineer” was the phrase that came to mind for me too. Just really loved the craft, always happy to get into it and unpack a problem with you. Everything was tractable through code. So long as it was Java.
Like you, and hundreds of other Square engineers, I was asked to implement a circular buffer in my interview with him. I did it, not having the fortitude to decline, and I’m glad I did. I learned a thing or two, including that I would learn a hundred more things if I joined Square. What a great way to sell candidates.
I remember Bob kicking off the effort to get every Square engineer to come up with a pairing question and carry that culture forward when it no longer scaled for him and a handful of others to do it. I don’t think people thought it was reasonable. I do believe it worked!
I remember new folks asking earnest questions about why we had a monorepo and Bob replying that it was self-evident (a rare miss). But when I called him out on that he took the time to explain to me how it was all about being able to do global refactors across all our apps… something that only made sense when you were the kind of seasoned Java programmer who really wanted to refactor shared libraries on behalf of all teams at once. So glad he attracted more of you ;)
I remember working with Bob to update some of the Square visualizations that Mike Bostock of d3 fame had created. The “can do” attitude prevailed, even though Mike’s code was not documented, we were able to get it working and I believe we did truly novel work that day. Pretty sure (thanks Hindenburg) that code is still running.
I remember a lot of hiring bars, where not only was Bob responsible for scaling up the pair programming interviews, but he was actually really interested in the code people wrote, and in reviewing it with his colleagues. I later saw some flaws with that, but I’ve always respected the passion and the attention to detail.
As Cash scaled, before he left Square, I remember Bob went back into IC mode and was there, late nights and all, headphones on, cranking out the code. Pretty sure it was Minus the Bear on repeat for hours.
Last memory, I remember a surprising number of hugs and enthusiastic handshakes when things went well. Candidates closed. Features shipped. Fridays.
Just the raw exuberance. That’s why this hits so hard. RIP crazybob.
> the Department of Homelessness itself applies a multiplier of 2.89 to the PIT count to estimate how many individuals are homeless not just on one day but throughout the entire year.
The PIT number seems like the best single number to use. Unlike the one you quote, PIT is not influenced by the somewhate arbitrary choice of a year as a unit of measure. And even if you include people who are homeless for a single day over the entire year (who are, as the article mentions, also spending time in jail or the hospital, which get their own budget), the difference is less than 3x.
Square started with payments (the little reader that plugs into your phone) and now we do a whole lot more. Our team is focused on getting people signed up to Square, from account creation through identify verification, to discovery of the products and features that are a good fit for their business. There's a range of work: from highly polished front-end web development through highly available distributed systems and third-party vendor integrations. Interview process is a phone screen or two, then onsite, then offer.
> Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
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