I’ve never worked at FAANG so I don’t know what I’m missing. But I’ve hired (and not hired) engineers from FAANGs and they don’t know what they’re doing either.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

My job is easier because I have semi-technical analysts on my team. Semi-technical because they know programming but not software engineering. This is a blessing because if something doesn’t make sense to them, it means that it was probably badly designed. I love the analysts on the team; they’ve helped me grow so much more than the most brilliant engineers.

A lot of progressive companies, especially startups, talk about bringing your “authentic self”. Well what if your authentic self is all about watching porn? Yeah, it’s healthy to keep a barrier between your work and personal life.

A few of many amazing/hilarious bullets from Drunk Post: Things I’ve learned as a Sr Engineer, via Hacker Newsletter #557