Susan Fowler, a physicist and software engineer, writes about her time at Uber, learning physics, site reliability, and tech workplace practices.
HN links it as the author's personal site and for her physics learning list, which one commenter calls useless for people actually trying to learn.
First up, I am no expert, but I have traveled this road for a while so I'll share a bit.
I see Susskind's theoretical minimum is plugged here. Good. That is a fantastic place to start. Start at the beginning. Skip nothing.
Leverage what you know against what you don't. You remember how to find an extremum of a function from Cal 1? The first order necessary condition for an extreme point is that the derivative of the function be zero. Remember that when you get to (deterministic) optimization and a gradient needs to be zero. Next with a constrained optimization you will see the reformulation of an objective function and constraints into one functional by using new variables (Lagrange "multipliers") so that when the gradient of this new functional is zero, not only are you somewhere in the intersection of the constraints and the objective, but you also meet the first order conditions necessary for an extremum to be found. (Second order sufficiency conditions (SOSC) are needed to show that you aren't instead at an inflection point but we are moving fast and breaking things)
Hmm, I didn't say that very well, but there is much intuition to be found in optimization problems. This will serve you well in physics.
Calculus of variations: Nail down cold how to derive the Euler Lagrange Equations for a functional. Hint, Apply the FONC (first order necessary conditions for an extremum) to the functional (now the Action) in question. See Lanczos "Calculus of Variations"…
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber
For those that didn't google her. The first hit I got was a blog post about her sexual harassment at Uber.
After reporting the incident:
"I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn't seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company's best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option". I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn't want to ruin his career over his "first offense")."
As always, this is written by someone who admits to never having learned to reason abstractly about algebraic objects, because it is hard.
Quoting from the OP:
> The traditional arithmetic I learned in the early grades made sense to me because I could relate it back to real-world things. Later, when I was learning how to design, finding the area of a circle proved essential to practical tasks such as sizing hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders. I could do trigonometry by visualizing, for example, the cables on a suspension bridge. But algebra: no.
For a different perspective, I recommend reading instead Susan Rigetti (nee Fowler)'s posts about overcoming challenges to learn Math and Physics. She says she had to solve what felt like "millions of exercises" to become familiar with many abstract concepts, until they finally clicked for her and she was able to reason about them. In her words: "Solving problems is the only way to understand mathematics. There's no way around it."
https://www.susanrigetti.com/math
https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2016/8/26/from-the-fledgling-physicist-archives-if-susan-can-learn-physics-so-can-you
I'm sorry, Im pretty sure the evidence is clear [1] This is just one example. "A top Uber executive, who obtained the medical records of a customer who was a rape victim, has been fired"
> according to the media...
Who else besides the media should we listen to?.. the employees? Like this one? " As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go" [2]
[1] https://www.vox.com/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-india-assault-rape-medical-records
[2] https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber
The sexism I see in her post: Upon joining, her manager sexually propositioned her; a subsequent manager sabotaged her performance reviews and attempts at transferring to keep a woman on his team; they gave leather jackets to SREs as a gift, but would only get jackets made for men (I think this is what you refer to as "the shirts"); she recalls many emails that she does not describe; HR claims she is the problem in all of her claims; she was threatened with firing over her claims of sexual harassment, and they backed off when she pointed out that was illegal.
Those are the instances. What that tells me is that it was a deeply sexist system.
See: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber
>Boldly expect acceptance, and my experience has been -- you will receive it.
Thank you for your 2 anecdotes! Perhaps since Susan Fowler [0] followed your advice and did not achieve results, you will give her anecdote the same argumentative weight you give yours.
But there is a troubling trend I want to oppose. People seem to argue that getting vindictively angry and fighting for your rights is wrong, and that its better to sit back and let others like you be oppressed. Fortunately, someone else has written on the subject far more eloquently than I have. [1]
[0] https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber
[1] https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html