EN 23: Job acquired

Hey,

These are some interesting links for the week, you can see them at the end:

• Forms & Shadows

• Reckoning with Reality with Probabilistic Forecasting

• Async Code Reviews Are Choking Your Company’s Throughput

This week, I have signed a contract with a company as a backend engineer! 🎉 I start in September, two more weeks to go.

First of all, it’s a relief to know there are no more interviews! I was already getting fed up with them and my energy was a bit low, answering similar questions, doing never-ending take home tasks, followed up by more technical interviews and behavioural questions.

It’s no secret that most hiring processes are “less than ideal”. In my opinion, hiring should be one of the most important aspects of the organization, specially startups, and should be done consciously, with purpose and humanly. There’s so much room for improvement that any process, just by being slightly better, sticks out like a sore thumb. I’m convinced that a startup that would invest in its hiring process to make it nimble, more humane, with a focus on diversity… would have an advantage.

Second of all, as I’ve mentioned last week, there’s a staggering number of companies which are not aware of high-performance practices, think that what they’re doing is the end all be all, that default to the lowest common denominator. While I’m not surprised in the least, it puts me in a weird emotional situation. Having experienced what it feels to do pair/ensemble programming, Trunk-based development, Continuous Delivery, TDD… and actually seen them work incredibly well compared to the alternatives, it’s really difficult to go back, “once you pop, the fun don't stop”.

In any case, finally getting a job frees a lot of my mental processing (it definitely also frees up my calendar), which means I can start focusing on more interesting things. I would love to keep learning more about software architecture, writing more, diversify my programming languages, think about some side projects/hustles, and restart a hobby or two…