There are a sizeable number of Meta employees that have jobs due to Zuck’s sheer generosity and the fact that he cares about his public image and laying them off in service of Meta’s bottom line won’t look good.
Elon firing half of Twitter just normalized layoffs to such an extent that it’s considered par for the course now, of course macroeconomic conditions have changed but layoffs were always a bit taboo in tech.
To all the sheep at Meta who weren’t sacrificed because Zuck thought it would look too bad on him, how do you know your game is up at Meta ?
The Elon X layoffs are instructive in the difference between Twitter run as a public company vs as private (or buried in another company's balance sheet)
In a public company, you need financial growth. You need 75% of employees to be developing towards a promising new future. In a private company, with no real growth goals, you can get by with 25% and keep things running and basically the same.
You can argue whether Twitter's extra 75% actually was effective at driving growth the stock market likes, but its hard to argue against needing more staff to drive at least a perception that investments are happening in bold new product directions.
Twitter had 0 product growth for like a decade before elon tookover. If 75% of their staff was working on product growth it's hard to say they didnt deserve to be laid off.
>>Elon firing half of Twitter just normalized layoffs to such an extent that it’s considered par for the course now
The site was broken for eternity after that, but people continued to use it as it was the only source of real time news. In many ways its not the old Twitter at all.
Now the head counts dont even matter because its all agents writing the code, reviewing the code, and deploying the code.
As a measly backend programmer, I only have a good mental model of a “lock”, think a sync.Mutex in Golang.
But I wanted to go deeper into the rabbit hole and understand concepts like memory ordering and how atomic operations are actually implemented using the abstractions hw provides.
Any book recommendations or exercises I could do to learn more about this. Thanks.
Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bors (https://mara.nl/atomics/) is a very good book and available for free online. It does require knowing Rust at least in a basic level, but it explains things very well.
I'd recommend "A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence, Second Edition"
- Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture 15:1 (2020)
- Vijay Nagarajan, Daniel J. Sorin, Mark D. Hill, David A. Wood
- (open access, freely available): https://doi.org/10.2200/S00962ED2V01Y201910CAC049
It’s the nature of our jobs. The artefacts we produce, code and documentation are out in the open, available freely for training LLMs.
That’s not true for highly qualified doctors, patient case histories, patient feedback that helps doctors diagnose or treat patients or for surgeons to operate on patients. All of these actions are high stakes, get it wrong and people could die, AI would never be able to replace them.
Ah right, you mean people’s banking data, medical records, and other sensitive information should be freely handled by offshored labor with no qualifications right, right.
Let’s take a look at the industry’s track record for data breaches.
Huh, would you look at that.
Also, please. Like most physicians are doing any serious thinking that can’t be informed by prescription that they regurgitate from established practice. Your run-of-the-mill physician isn’t doing independent study.
They’re reading labs and writing a script. Give me a break.
“Make me homeless, make me homeless! Please, please offshore me! I beg you!”
I “audited” CMU 15-445 in April 2026, a few months ago. I then applied to Azure Hyperscale DB team, and as my pitch to get hired I cold DM’d the hiring manager whatever I finished in the assignments (BPM, Concurrent B-tree, Transaction support etc).
With that, I was able to get the interview although I ended up failing it. My lack of experience in C++ was probably one of the main reasons. Your course helped me stand my own during the interview and even though I had zero database experience apart from finishing the course, I felt adequately prepared.
Thank you for making the course open source. As a working professional, it was helpful to be able to do the course on my own time. Suffice to say, I am a big fan of your work and thank you for introducing me (and other fellow learners) to the interesting world of Databases!
I know it’s a troll, This was no MOOC. I didn’t even get a certificate.
I saw the job opening in the careers portal and just cold DM’d the HM. As to why I DM’d, what do I have to lose ? I was already working at MSFT in a different team. The worst that could happen was that he would just ignore the message. Also, I didn’t nag the HM, it was just one DM where I summarised the things I did in the course. He then asked me to send me my resume and that was it.
I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
Reminds me of that scene in Silicon Valley, where they show the optimistic Hooli Ad which Gavin Belson labels a “tampon ad” and then proceeds to blast his entire C-suite to outcompete Pied Piper.
+1 to this. I am on Assignment 3D (dealing with log compaction in Raft). I have learnt more about Distributed Systems just by "auditing" this course.
For Paxos, I also recommend reading Paxos v Raft, Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus ? by Heidi Howard et al. It explains Multi-paxos by using the style and abstractions from the Raft paper, which makes it much more understandable. Paxos can be intimidating but this was the paper that made it click for me.
I haven’t watched the lectures yet. Reading the papers and using Claude/GPT to ask for references etc is good enough for me. I did watch a few, ones on GFS and Raft but didn’t see the ROI, lectures are too long. Reading the papers multiple times and reading blogs, references and asking Q’s to GPT is what I am doing.
Obviously for the assignments themselves, I use AI sparingly. Mostly as a sounding board when I have doubts or to know how to do something in golang, since it isn’t my primary programming language.
Note, I am not asking for solutions like “implement Append Entries RPC”, the solutions are public so AI could probably implement everything. My workflow is to implement it first, debug test failures, go through each individual test and then come up with clarifying Q’s, such as the one below,
In Raft paper by Ongaro et al, for the below condition,
If there exists an N such that N > commitIndex, a majority
of matchIndex[i] ≥ N, and log[N].term == currentTerm:
set commitIndex = N (§5.3, §5.4).
Is commitIndex changed only when we receive a successful reply for Append Entries ?
Lastly I have an AGENTS.md that prohibits GPT from giving solutions directly, that would defeat the purpose of doing the assignments. It was used in one of Stanford’s GenAI course, look it up.
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