stevetursi's comments

stevetursi | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2022)

Caesars Digital | Functional Scala / Native iOS and Android / React / Others | Remote (states below) | Full-Time

Our primary product technology tenant is that we're strategy led. That is - we're a flat org in which ICs are asked to take the strategies set my management and figure out how to implement them (Semantically, "Shape the Path.") To put it succinctly, where other organizations promise autonomy, we grant authority.

We have a high behavioral bar with new hires, asking that applicants' work history has evidence that they question the status quo, make business decisions without consulting their manager, escalate issues even when unpopular, break up empires, and raise the bar in the organization, all while earning the trust and respect of their team.

Details and open positions here: https://www.builtinnyc.com/company/caesars-digital

Reach out to stursi at caesars dot com if interested.

AZ, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, LA, MA, MD, MI, MS, MT, NC, NJ, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, SC, TX, TN, WA, and WV.

stevetursi | 4 years ago | on: MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch

pure speculation, but I reckon this is due to security concerns. the camera on a laptop is off by default, including when the laptop opens. i for one have always been a little concerned that most phones (android and ios) don't have a "camera on" indicator.

stevetursi | 4 years ago | on: FaceTime is coming to Android and Windows via the web

I agree with the arguments (usually made by Apple fans, and I don't mean that as a pejorative) that Apple is probably in their legal rights and that it makes dollars and cents business sense for them to limit iMessage to iOS as much as possible.

But it's still a shitty thing to do. I have a tremendous amount of respect for companies that do things that are contrary to business objectives because they're the right thing to do. In this case, Apple chose to do the shitty thing.

stevetursi | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2020)

William Hill US | Functional Programmer (Scala) | Jersey City, NJ, USA | ONSITE | Full Time The thing that distinguishes our team (and the reason I chose to work here) is that our CIO is a functional programming evangelist who understands that you can't just hire a team of FP enthusiasts - rather, you hire great engineers interested in being challenged and train them to become FP enthusiasts. We have a formal training program ("Scala U") that will show you basic scala syntax but its real purpose is to train people in how to become functional programmers with a combination of mentorship, pairing, classroom, exercises, and books. He's easy to talk to and super-enthusiastic, and I personally have learned a lot from him.

Here is the job description: https://www.williamhill.com/us/careers/?gh_jid=4465782002

We also have openings in devops, front end, and iOS, and other technical and non-technical roles.

Feel free to send me questions: My hackernews username at gmail.

stevetursi | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2020)

William Hill US | Functional Programmer (Scala) | Jersey City, NJ, USA | ONSITE | Full Time

The thing that distinguishes our team (and the reason I chose to work here) is that our CIO is a functional programming evangelist who understands that you can't just hire a team of FP enthusiasts - rather, you hire great engineers interested in being challenged and train them to become FP enthusiasts. We have a formal training program ("Scala U") that will show you basic scala syntax but its real purpose is to train people in how to become functional programmers with a combination of mentorship, pairing, classroom, exercises, and books. He's easy to talk to and super-enthusiastic, and I personally have learned a lot from him.

Here is the job description: https://www.williamhill.com/us/careers/?gh_jid=4465782002

We also have openings in devops, front end, and iOS, and other technical and non-technical roles.

Feel free to send me questions: My hackernews username at gmail.

stevetursi | 5 years ago | on: The Story of Hertz Going Bust

My original post makes it sound like the accenture engineers dropped the ball. That was not my intention. I wasn't personally involved, had already gone on to other things. My impression, in talking to hertz people over the subsequent years, were that the engineers were fine; it was an issue of sales overpromising and resource allocation, as well as incongruities between stakeholders, but that's second and third-hand information, so take that for what it's worth.

stevetursi | 5 years ago | on: The Story of Hertz Going Bust

Can confirm, I have many anecdotes of folks who moved and regretted it, and people who found new local jobs who were grateful. It was gut-wrenching for almost everyone.

Our department was an exception. We got to stay in NJ (they laid us all off two years later.)

stevetursi | 5 years ago | on: The Story of Hertz Going Bust

I am Hertz Alumni, 2011-2016. We had a great group of engineers and product people, many of us far too talented to be in company like what hertz turned into. We were under the leadership of an incredible division head and most of the folks in our group felt a deep sense of loyalty to her. Nearly all of us, including that division head, are gone now, mostly laid off. If you poll any random Hertz alumnus, the story you're likely to hear is "we had a great team and incompetent senior management."

To us, there is a quote in a different bloomberg article from last week [1] which strikes us as accurate. Attributed to Maryanne Keller, who is referred to in this article, it says:

> 'It’s a saga about gross mismanagement,” said Maryann Keller, a longtime auto-

> industry consultant who was on the board of Dollar Thrifty when Hertz acquired

> the company. “It could have been salvaged had he picked the right management,”

> she said, referring to Icahn.'

Icahn lost $1.6b. Thousands of us lost our jobs. But these C-suiters sailed the company to bankruptcy over five years, each of them extracting 7 or 8 figure bonuses. The CIO who laid us all off, for example, received $6.5 million compensation that year [2]. (Sidenote, the work we were doing was replaced with Accenture consultants, who couldn't handle it, screwing up so bad they ended up in court [3].)

One former colleague of mine wrote a post on LinkedIn suggesting Icahn was the unwitting victim of untenable debt situation, and while he may be correct that the debt made it difficult, Icahn can read a balance sheet and he understood the situation.

I can't speak about Marinello's performance, but I agree that the problem dates back to 2014 or even earlier. People have a widespread belief that Frissora was flying too close to the sun, driven by his aggressive personality. Despite his flaws, he had a great team of people who kept the business running, and it wasn't Frissora who fired them all. Nobody, it turns out, was a fan of him. But everyone agrees he was far better than the gang of unusually wealthy miscreants that Icahn replaced him with.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-27/icahn-fil...

[2] https://www.cio.com/article/3404205/how-much-do-cios-really-...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737070

stevetursi | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2020)

William Hill US | Functional Programmer | Jersey City, NJ, USA | ONSITE | Full Time The thing that distinguishes our team (and the reason I chose to work here) is that our CIO is a functional programming evangelist who understands that you can't just hire a team of FP enthusiasts - rather, you hire great engineers interested in being challenged and train them to become FP enthusiasts. We have a formal training program ("Scala U") that will show you basic scala syntax but its real purpose is to train people in how to become functional programmers with a combination of mentorship, pairing, classroom, exercises, and books. He's easy to talk to and super-enthusiastic, and I personally have learned a lot from him.

Here is the job description: https://www.williamhill.com/us/careers/?gh_jid=4465782002

We also have openings in devops, front end, and iOS, and other technical and non-technical roles.

Feel free to send me questions: My hackernews username at gmail.

stevetursi | 6 years ago | on: Coronavirus and Credibility

It's true, both were wrong.

It's also true that both sides presume the worst intentions when they say the other side was wrong.

I can't get over the fact, however, that only one side was (and still is) in a position to do something about it. Moreover that one side had access to better intelligence about the severity of the situation, and that one side sowed the seeds of their awful response over the past three years with the various cuts they made.

stevetursi | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2020)

William Hill US | Functional Programmer | Jersey City, NJ, USA | ONSITE | Full Time

The thing that distinguishes our team (and the reason I chose to work here) is that our CIO is a functional programming evangelist who understands that you can't just hire a team of FP enthusiasts - rather, you hire great engineers interested in being challenged and train them to become FP enthusiasts. We have a formal training program ("Scala U") that will show you basic scala syntax but its real purpose is to train people in how to become functional programmers with a combination of mentorship, pairing, classroom, exercises, and books. He's easy to talk to and super-enthusiastic, and I personally have learned a lot from him.

Here is the job description: https://www.williamhill.com/us/careers/?gh_jid=4465782002

We also have openings in devops, front end, and iOS, and other technical and non-technical roles.

Feel free to send me questions: My hackernews username at gmail.

stevetursi | 6 years ago | on: Apple acquires Dark Sky

I appreciate your effort, I really do, but you'll get a lot farther complaining on HN. Nobody is going to do anything about it here either, but at least here you'll have people that care what you think.

stevetursi | 6 years ago | on: Apple acquires Dark Sky

Apple making this exclusive to apple makes me less likely to switch to apple products. No app, including something as beloved as dark sky, is meaningful enough to get me to switch platforms, but if I had any good will towards apple it just went out the fucking window.

stevetursi | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2020)

William Hill US | Functional Programmer | Jersey City, NJ, USA | ONSITE | Full Time

The thing that distinguishes our team (and the reason I chose to work here) is that our CIO is a functional programming evangelist who understands that you can't just hire a team of FP enthusiasts - rather, you hire great engineers interested in being challenged and train them to become FP enthusiasts. We have a formal training program ("Scala U") that will show you basic scala syntax but its real purpose is to train people in how to become functional programmers with a combination of mentorship, pairing, classroom, exercises, and books. He's easy to talk to and super-enthusiastic, and I personally have learned a lot from him.

Here is the job description: https://www.williamhill.com/us/careers/?gh_jid=4465782002

We also have openings in devops, front end, and iOS, and other technical and non-technical roles.

Feel free to send me questions: My hackernews username at gmail.

stevetursi | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2020)

William Hill US | Functional Scala Engineer | Jersey City, NJ, USA | ONSITE | Full Time The thing that distinguishes our team (and the reason I chose to work here) is that our CIO is a functional programming evangelist who understands that you can't just hire a team of FP enthusiasts - rather, you hire great engineers interested in being challenged and train them to become FP enthusiasts. We have a formal training program ("Scala U") that will show you basic scala syntax but its real purpose is to train people in how to become functional programmers with a combination of mentorship, pairing, classroom, exercises, and books. He's easy to talk to and super-enthusiastic, and I personally have learned a lot from him.

Feel free to send me questions or message me if you're interested.

Job Description:

We bet we can be a great match

When we say cutting edge, we actually mean it. Here, you can work on highly reliable systems with low latency, much like the transactional systems of the best financial institutions, but… with fun included.

About us:

Working with us you’ll be at heart of the technological revolution of one the world’s most trusted betting and gaming companies. We deal with projects ranging from desktop or mobile casinos and betting sites… just to name a few. We process 500 online Sportsbook bets per second each Saturday, that’s the same as orders processed by Amazon UK, on its busiest day of the year. We deal with more than 20 million users daily. Impressed? You can be sure there are many more challenges waiting for you.

Your role in the team:

You are either already proficient in Scala and functional programming or enthusiastic about learning. Your language experience includes any of the following:

Consider applying anyway even if you don't have professional Scala or FP experience. We will seriously consider anyone who passes our technical bar, regardless of how they got there.

A bit more about us

You will become a key member of our Digital hub, which is integral to our brand and success. Whether it's working out the odds on the winners of the Kentucky Derby or the Super Bowl, our work has a direct impact on every customer who places a bet. And putting that experience front and center of everything we do has helped us become a real betting powerhouse in the UK – and now we're bringing that expertise to the US.

We're using agile principles to develop a culture where we champion autonomy, creativity, and originality so that we can keep growing. We code the platform which our odds traders use to update the prices on live events. Making sure our customers have up to the minute in-play chances right there and then. And we really do mean that our teams process 464 bets every single second. Our platforms have to reflect millions of real-time, In-Play sports events, so developing systems that are designed for low latency and high throughput is critical.

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