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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It can be. I often find it “bursty.” I’ve had months at a time when I had stand-ups and then “do whatever you want” for the rest of the day. I generally did do useful work, but there were plently of days when I was just chilling out.

    Ive also had months where I ran from fire to fire while on fire, spreading even more fire. Also, there was fire.

    It juat depends. If some org treats you as disposable, pays like shit and lights your hair on fire as you walk in, y’all should walk back out. The next org will probally treat you better, because there are good orgs out there. Even the good places get busy for a bit though. Just make sure that busy comes with money and that it ends at some point.










  • In a hilariously circular way, EA has this beat still.

    The Simcity 2013 launch was so terrible it killed Simcity and the studio Maxis, basically paving the way for City Skylines to take over the genre 2 years later.

    It was online only, to the point where if you disconnected from the Internet you were booted out of the game. It also did most game rendering server side to force multiplayer/anti piracy/EA Origin store, and they only had enough infastructure for 1/10th of their player base on launch. That 10% isn’t exaggeration, either. They underestimated server load by 90%.

    It was also a severely buggy, local resource hog somehow, even with being mostly remotely rendered. Since only a tiny fraction of the servers needed for the game were online, the game just chocked itself to death.

    It took months to get it to a “working” state, at which point people had discovered all the insane and dumb behavior by ingame actors like citizens just picking a random house to go to end of day/etc. The tiny city limit size caused by being always online was also a very sore point for players, as you could barely build anything in a city building game. You could finish buillding your “city” in just a few hours, at which point you had to buy another “zone” that was separate from your current one. They didmt seamlessly connect like old SimCity or city skylines, you actually entered another tiny city slice to build on. It was terrible, and the size limit was clearly one of the measures to reduce server costs, as each zone looked like it was a new small server instance.

    By the time they actually resolved the server issues, the game was dead, ending a 20+ year legacy in gaming for the brand and the studio. EA hasent made a simcity game in 11 years because of its failure. It was a shitshow and a half.





  • Its a yearly event that collects directors and above fork across the company to a week long “convention” that is supposed to be about building cohesive between leadership.

    The author went in 2022, when they had bon jovi play, and said it was just a boozy networking event where leadership was dictated to by the execs with no actual exchange of ideas.

    In 2022, Amazon made a record profits, but even then they were admonished to save money. Still, no layoffs.

    This year? They also made record profits, but had record layoffs, yet the party goes on.

    The authors overall point is that Amazon is successful by asking people to “lean in,” to go the extra mile. When you freeze wages and layoff 10,000s of people while threatening more and still throw your 10 million dollar party for yourself, you are telling good people to not only leave, but to lean right the fuck out before they do.




  • Infinite and astronomical are used interchangeably here. Since you have to return a share to the person you borrowed it from, if you borrowed 1000 shares at $5 and sold them to make 5k, if the price jumps to something like $350 like gamestop, it would cost you $350,000 to cover them.

    Making 5k to lose 350k might as well be an infinite loss ot that investor, even though its technically a “smallish” sum. At that scale, it would destroy most people.

    You can also pay to keep a short going generally and try to wait out the madness, but you have to stay solvent to do it. The very stupid and very surprising “diamond handing” apes caused some hedge fund issues, although I think most just shrugged into other financial instruments.