Original link: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2022/05/weekly-issue-208.html
Here is a record of weekly tech content worth sharing, published on Friday. ( [Notice] Next Friday is the Dragon Boat Festival, and the weekly magazine will be suspended. )
This magazine is open source (GitHub: ruanyf/weekly ), welcome to submit issues, contributions or recommend scientific and technological content.
Weekly discussion forum post “Who’s Hiring? “ , provides a lot of programmer employment information, welcome to visit or post job/internship positions.
cover picture
In April of this year, a couple of photographers in Shijiazhuang found that a white-bellied harrier was flying with difficulty after being hit by an arrow in its left leg. They called the police on 110, and after more than a week of trying, staff at the animal rescue finally caught the bird for treatment. ( via )
Topic of the week: The problem with the promotion system
I recently read an article by Zach Lloyd, the former head of Google Sheets who has now left to start a business. He said he was fed up with Google’s promotion system.
After reading it, I found that Google’s promotion system is exactly the same as that of major domestic companies, and the behavior of employees is also promotion-oriented, and the problems that arise are similar, so this article does not read like it is talking about foreign affairs at all.
Now is the promotion season. Many people have been busy for a year and are waiting for this day. The fiscal year of the Internet giants ends at the end of March, and then the supervisor nominates candidates for promotion, and the promotion defense is conducted in April and May. As long as you pass, your rank will be raised, and your salary, options, positions, and status will increase accordingly. If you don’t get a promotion for years in a row, it’s a red flag , indicating that the company is not sure about your work in recent years.
So it is not surprising that the behavior of the employees of the big factory is promotion-oriented . Before doing anything, it will first consider whether it is conducive to promotion. Even if you really care about other things, you have to weigh their impact on promotion.
Zach Lloyd said such a system design would lead to four serious problems. I think the analysis is very good, and I will share it with you below.
(1) The biggest problem with promotion orientation is that the promotion standards are not completely consistent with the company’s interests . Employees’ pursuit of promotion and short-term performance may not maximize the company’s interests, or even harm the company’s long-term interests.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose there are two programmers, A focuses on developing new products and new functions, and B focuses on maintaining old products (fixing bugs, improving performance, optimizing algorithms, upgrading versions, writing documentation, acting as customer service, etc.), who will be promoted?
Usually, A will get a promotion and B will have a hard time getting promoted. Because maintaining old products generally does not produce performance, there is a huge promotion disadvantage. There are two reasons for this. First, the promotion effect of old products on the business has been taken into account in the early launch. The subsequent maintenance is only to fulfill the original expectations, and it is difficult to exceed expectations no matter how hard the maintenance is. The contribution of maintainers, the success of old products, is it because of good design and development, or because of good maintenance?
therefore, Promotion orientation encourages programmers to pay attention to new products and new features and despise the maintenance of old products. This is not uncommon in reality. The software of big manufacturers likes to pursue large and comprehensive, like to build wheels, to create similar competing products, but the old products lack maintenance, this is the reason. There is nothing more important than the landing of your own code in a key business, which is almost certain to be promoted, and the rest are secondary considerations.
(2) The promotion orientation strengthens the hierarchy and introduces too many levels in the company. A company with a stronger promotion culture will inevitably be accompanied by a complex internal organizational structure, and the coordination among various teams will be more difficult.
(3) Promotion-oriented artificially created a terrible “promotion season”. In order to be nominated for promotion, it is easy to generate internal conflicts and even intrigue. Nominated people waste a lot of time making PPTs and preparing for promotion defenses, which reduces productivity and increases company costs.
(4) Promotion orientation creates a bad company culture. Promotion comes first, demoralizing engineers who really care about the product and the health of their code, sometimes having to make a painful choice between “good for users” vs “good for promotion”.
The above are the four shortcomings of promotion orientation, so does this mean that it is a very bad system?
Nor can the same be said, according to Zach Lloyd. The advantage of promotion orientation is that it will generate huge assessment and incentives for employees, and other systems may not be as effective as it.
Therefore, he suggested that it is best to take some measures to align the personal interests of employees with the interests of the company as much as possible, such as emphasizing user priority, and hiring engineers who are not blindly pursuing promotion.
In my opinion, these measures are unrealistic. The only feasible thing is that when the company reaches a certain level, some departments and teams will be split out and become independent startups, and it is better that these startups have a competitive relationship between them. . For small companies, employees understand that only when the company succeeds can individuals succeed, and the company’s interests and personal interests are consistent. They will be more concerned about whether the company will go out of business, rather than their own promotion.
Tool software FlowUs experience report
Last week, a productivity software FlowUs (Chinese name “Xi Liu”), which was just released this year, came to me to try it out, hoping to introduce it to weekly readers through me. After trying it out, I think this product has a good experience and has several highlights, which are worth introducing to you.
FlowUs provides three major functions: document + form + network disk. Through the “block editor”, they can be freely combined as content blocks to meet different scenarios: writing notes, making homepages, managing projects, sharing files, collaborating with multiple people…
Seeing this, some friends will say that this is very similar to the foreign software Notion. Indeed, the goal of FlowUs is localization, adding some local functions, which is more suitable for the usage habits of domestic users. In addition, its servers are all located in China, the access speed is very fast, and it supports multi-terminal instant synchronization, any changes can be seen on other clients immediately.
It currently supports more than 50 kinds of blocks, and there are commonly used services in China (Bilibili, Tencent Video, NetEase Cloud Music, etc.). In the editor, press the slash key ( / ) to view the list.
Because it is a block editor, the layout is very simple, and various layouts can be realized by dragging and dropping. In addition, FlowUs has more than 80 built-in templates, which can be used to make various pages: reading notes, personal (or team) homepage, project management, meeting minutes, recruitment management, etc.
If you don’t write documentation, you can just use FlowUs to manage your data. Its table is actually a lightweight page database. There are currently seven data views available, which basically meet common needs: tables, kanbans, calendars, timelines, catalogs, and galleries.
Finally, its network disk function is very strong, and it can be used only as a network disk: upload files are not limited in size or speed, and support preview of Office files and videos. The free account has 2GB of space, and the professional version with an annual fee of 99 yuan has unlimited capacity.
The above is the official network disk template page, you can insert the network disk block into the document or other templates to make various download pages.
In general, I think it has a relatively high degree of completion and can indeed meet many usage scenarios. Both the web and mobile apps are complete and can be used by individuals and small teams.
The current promotion is very strong, and the free account has no restrictions (except for the network disk space). You can follow the FlowUs official account, join their user feedback group, and the official will provide some discounts from time to time to upgrade to the professional version.
Interested friends, please scan the QR code above, or visit this link to register and use. FlowUs offers special benefits to weekly readers, The top 10 students with the most likes in the WeChat public account of this issue will receive a professional version of unlimited space for one year.
Technology trends
1. The sports car has a built-in drone
Polestar, a joint venture between Volvo and Geely, has launched a new electric sports car. A special feature of this car is the integration of a drone.
When it is driving, as long as the button is pressed, a hole will be opened at the rear of the body, and a drone will fly out to follow the car. After shooting, it will fly back to the car.
Polestar explained that the reason for having a built-in drone is to make it easier for car owners to film themselves while driving.
2. The tallest transmission tower in the world
The world’s tallest transmission tower was recently completed in Jiangsu, where wires have been erected. There are two towers in total, spanning the Yangtze River, one in Wuxi on the south bank of the Yangtze River, and the other in Taizhou on the north bank, with a height of 385 meters, 61 meters higher than the Eiffel Tower.
The reason why the pair of transmission towers is so high is that the high-voltage power lines are above the Yangtze River, and there must be enough height below for large ships to navigate.
Recently, a 5G mobile phone case appeared on the market, priced at 799 yuan. As long as this case is put on, the mobile phone has dual-mode 5G communication capabilities. It was obviously invented for Huawei, which was sanctioned to be unable to get 5G chips and could only produce 4G mobile phones.
This mobile phone case weighs about 52g, has its own CPU, and requires the main card of the mobile phone to activate the eSIM service.
A peculiarly shaped “future parking building” in Hangzhou is nearing completion. The parking lot is made into a ground park with 10 towers under the big roof, where parking is possible. Above the roof will be a public green space.
The tower has 4 floors above ground and 2 floors below ground. Vehicles always enter and exit underground, park at the entrance, and robots move vehicles in and out of the tower.
During the pandemic, demand for bicycles has skyrocketed. Many cities abroad do not share bicycles, resulting in a high rate of bicycle theft. Some thieves use hydraulic scissors, especially for bicycle locks. In response to this situation, an American company invented a new generation of anti-theft bicycles.
The top half of the bike’s body can be folded down to act as a lock. If the lock is cut off, the body will be broken, and the whole car will be scrapped. The bikes are expensive, though, and with a $799 price tag, you can buy several for a regular bike.
article
1. He used 50 sheets of 1080Ti to fight cancer (Chinese)
Four years ago, a programmer posted that he had trained a model to identify early-stage breast cancer from X-rays. Recently, he posted again, using artificial intelligence to treat brain tumors.
2. Looking for “Tree King” Sindab (Chinese)
This article describes how researchers found and measured the tallest tree in mainland China in Medog County.
3. GitHub Markdown supports mathematical formula rendering (English)
GitHub announced that it supports the rendering of LaTeX mathematical formulas in Markdown, and the rendering engine is MathJax.
4. A Preliminary Study of Internet Lost Tracks (Chinese)
This article introduces several real cases and analyzes the exact shooting location from online photos.
5. Inside photos of the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor (in English)
All nuclear reactors are currently nuclear fission, but the ones that are really promising are fusion reactors. Thirty-two countries are collaborating to build the world’s largest nuclear fusion experimental reactor in France, and a photographer was granted access to the construction site to take pictures.
6. Third-party login fishing (English)
This article proposes a fishing method that is easy to be fooled. Phishing sites offer third-party login options, but after clicking, a fake window pops up to trick users into entering their passwords.
7. How to replace web page dialogs with <dialog> elements (English)
This article replaces the alert , confirm , and prompt dialog boxes with the browser’s native <dialog> element, and gives a detailed code implementation.
8. The failed Google I/O 2022 conference (English)
This article believes that the just-held Google I/O 2022 conference was a complete failure. It did not come up with new products that excite everyone, but picked up those products that had failed for several years: Android tablet, Google wallet, Google Glass, Android watch … The author believes that Google, the company, seems lost. It urgently needs to tell everyone what its strategic direction is.
tool
1. Yaade
An open source API development environment, equivalent to open source Postman.
2. Regolith
A new Linux distribution featuring a ready-made desktop environment and window manager, based on Ubuntu, GNOME and i3.
3. Chinese search result blacklist
The URL blacklist of the uBlacklist plugin is used to filter Chinese spam sites in Google and Baidu search results. (contributed by @52fhy )
4. NocoBase
An open source no-code platform that requires no programming. It only takes a few minutes to build your own collaboration platform and management system. (Contributed by @zhouyanliang )
5. Sticky Note
Post-it gadget for Windows. According to the improvement of the sticky note that comes with Win10, many functions have been added. (Contributed by @KeyboardMan1996 )
6. pnpm
An old node.js package manager that supports all the features of npm and is used to replace npm. Its modules are stored globally, and each project uses hard links internally, so it saves space and installs quickly.
7. CRX viewer
A browser plug-in that displays the address of the plug-in source code whenever you visit a plug-in homepage in the Chrome Web Store. It also has an online version .
8. Gephi
A cross-platform desktop software for generating various visual graphic effects, it calls itself “Photoshop for diagrams”.
Some core tools of the Linux system (such as ls , cp , etc.) are provided by the GNU Coreutils package, which are written in C language. This project uses the Rust language to rewrite these tools one by one, replacing GNU Coreutils with Rust Coreutils.
Activity
The rare earth nuggets community under Byte has launched the “Nuggets Member”. As long as you join the membership, you can unlock 90% of the courses and brochures on the website, especially the latest front-end development content.
Now there is a “1 yuan to 100” discount, as long as 1 yuan can deduct the 100 yuan membership fee, and introduce it to friends who have learning needs.
resource
1. K8s/Docker/DevOps interview questions
Recruitment positions for K8s and DevOps are now very large, and job prospects and income are very good. The well-known engineer learning platform “Geek Time” has compiled a set of “Cloud Native High-frequency Interview Questions”, with a total of 80 pages. Scan the QR code above to get it for free .
This set of materials includes 198 real questions from K8s, Docker, and DevOps manufacturers, as well as detailed answers, as well as cloud native knowledge sorting, etc. You can take a look if you need it.
2. Webcamtaxi
There are many 24-hour live webcam channels on Youtube, you can see real-time conditions around the world. The site collects these channels, categorized by region and content.
An original booklet that records the author’s thinking and experience of doing some small amateur projects. (Contributed by @timqian )
Original tutorials to help learners use the Jest framework to complete front-end testing. (Contributed by @haixiangyan )
5. Java Notes for Professionals book
A free Java learning material, the common answers to Java on Stack Overflow are categorized into a book. (contributed by @52fhy )
Official website, 3D virtual tour of Intel Corporation’s museum. (Contributed by @Codeniu )
picture
1. The software interface of the last century
Many young readers may not have experienced what the software interface of the last century looked like. The picture below can help you feel it.
Although this is an extreme example, it was true that most software at the time was in this style. In the past 20 years, the user experience of software has really changed dramatically.
2. Apple’s Financial Services
Apple’s financial services currently has four brands.
All four of these services do the same thing, which is payment. This makes people incomprehensible. Why is it bad to split related functions into four brands and unify them into four functions of one brand?
How many words does it take to explain the difference to users, which service to use in different occasions…
The New York Times compiled the current major producers of metal minerals required for lithium batteries.
And, the current major processing countries for these metals.
abstract
1. The story of traffic lights
Once, I was driving with my three-year-old son, Ben.
We stopped at the traffic lights at the intersection and I said, “Hey Ben, what color are the traffic lights?”
“It’s green,” he said.
I corrected him: “Ben, the traffic light is a stop sign now, what color is that? Take a good look.” He said, “Green.”
After a while, the traffic lights changed. “The lights are turning red and we can go,” he said.
My first thought was fucked up, this kid is colorblind. But on second thought, that’s not right. Color blind people don’t see a green light as a red light, and a red light as a green light.
When I got home, I took out the pictures and asked him to distinguish between red and green, and he got it right every time. But then after passing the intersection again, he still admits the wrong traffic light, I am very confused.
After three weeks, my mother-in-law came to visit us, and we went out in the car together. I was sitting in the back, right next to Ben’s child seat. We stopped at a traffic light and I suddenly understood what was going on. Ben was sitting in the rear child seat. The front seat blocked his view. He could not see the traffic light directly in front of him. He saw the traffic light on the side of the intersection. on the contrary.
This incident made me realize the fact that your location determines what you see. When you’re sitting in the front row and you’re actually doing things, you’re seeing things, your vision, that the people in the back row don’t have. If the person in the back says something that doesn’t make sense, just ignore it and move on.
speech
1,
Maintaining open source projects, lack of funding, and people yelling at you to do this and that makes me not want to do it at all.
— Blaine Bublitz , maintainer of the open source project Gulp.js
2,
You have to learn to separate the code from yourself and not be the owner of the code. You want to optimize your code so that others can find ways to fix bugs and add features, decentralizing control of your code. Because you need to free yourself to move on to the next project or you will never get out.
— “My Guiding Principles for 20 Years of Programming”
3.
A private blockchain makes no sense at all. If you can control reading and writing data, why use a blockchain that prevents data tampering and that parties don’t need to trust each other?
4.
Twenty years ago, deploying a piece of software online required you to have a physical server yourself. 10 years ago, there was a need to have a virtual server. It’s 2022 and you should be using a SaaS/IaaS service, which is usually the fastest, cheapest, best quality option.
— “I don’t need a VPS anymore”
5.
Every day you live is the youngest you can have.
— netizens
this week in history
2021 (Issue 160): The crisis of middle-aged code farmers
2020 (Issue 109): The Value of Podcasting
2019 (Issue 57): Is Sharing Knowledge Against Humanity?
2018 (issue 6): Do you still need to study foreign languages in the future?
subscription
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(Finish)
document information
- Copyright statement: Free to reprint – non-commercial – non-derivative – keep attribution ( Creative Commons 3.0 license )
- Date of publication: May 27, 2022
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