I found an IT job thanks to this blog
giuliomagnifico.blog
giuliomagnifico.blog
I believe this issue extends beyond the scope of those without CS degrees; it also affects developers who have spent time working at small startups that haven't significantly scaled. If you haven't had the opportunity to work on large-scale projects, you might lack impressive accomplishments or credentials to showcase. This issue can compound over time, leaving you stuck in positions that are less rewarding than even mediocre jobs, regardless of your true capabilities or the quality of your work.
Some people say that you can build open source projects or build products to show what you have. Balancing such efforts with a full-time job can be challenging, as these undertakings can consume most, if not all, of your free time. This creates a vicious cycle where you're continuously overextending yourself just to prove your worth. It's a demanding situation that can impact both your professional and personal life.
But at the end of the day the feedback is only so valuable, even when it comes with PRs.
Whats a large scale project and why should they be viewed as an accomplishment?
I myself have pioneered the use of some tech for use in situations where it was not thought possible, I've worked on big projects that have included the largest in the world, for employers that include being listed in the stock market.
>I believe this issue extends beyond the scope of those without CS degrees
Does that make me worth a $718,000 Google Software Engineer or a $100,000 junior coder?
What price do you place on exploiting the vagaries of law that results in new legislation being created to curtail your activities?
The founders of Google, Facebook, Microsoft & Apple all started with no university degree, but they did all end up with stock market listings and some legislation to curtail their activities.
So do University degrees limit your earning potential whilst making it easier to find a job, whilst having no university degree seems to increase your chances of getting a stock market listing and some legislation to curtail your activities.
What a topsy turvy world we live in!
The founder of Microsoft was a Harvard math major that probably could have gotten into an r1 phd program if the stuck it out for what 1 more year?
The founder of Facebook was a Harvard cs major that could graduate if the stuck it out.
Dropping out early to start your business is very different than someone who never went to school or flunked out of their freshman year.
But getting a decent education here in the UK, where you dont get beaten up by teachers, in my experience is quite difficult. I even dropped out of one schools six form to enroll in another six form, perhaps demonstrating my willingness to learn, but even one of those courses was sabotaged.
To be honest I think the mentality of the british empire was and might still be pervasive with state school education, viewed more as an institution to contain people of a certain age than a place of learning.
Perhaps that is why law is not taught to everyone at school even in a TL;DR fashion?
The founder of Facebook too
The founder of Google grew up in Academic family.
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All of them received financial support, reducing risks loosing living expenses. Risk of loosing livelyhood, significanly changes how a founder or an enegineer spends their time.
Connecting young people to networks of rich, influencial and generally experienced & smart people -- is a huge deal as well.
It improves their verbal skills, perception management, broadness their knowlege.
All of the above, can probably be easily found in many Stanford, Harvard, MIT graduates...
None of the are 'competitively obtained skills' due to 'hard work'.
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Additionally moral choices that favor lying, fudging facts and intentions -- may also be a characterstics of graduates from those types of schools... This an opinion.
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All of the above contributes to successfull financial outcomes.
None are particularly representative of person's merits compared to others...
I have trouble landing interviews at FAANGs with 15+ years as an eng. and successful acquisitions as a founder - but those don't mean anything if you don't have direct knowledge of certain tools to handle scale or experience guiding projects across departments, etc. Which makes sense for any role past junior, since part of the value you bring is experience and only some of your experience is directly applicable. Vaguely being competent doesn't really move the needle.
On the other hand, I've heard stories of people getting hired from a FAANG going to a startup and not able to shift their mindset to a "make it work" approach, so the challenge goes both ways.
But at least they get the job, so they can try to learn. Hence it doesn't go both ways.
Coming in the front door will be hard though, because recruiters and the first layer of technical interviewers will likely not have context to judge your 15+ years of experience. Look for referrals and directly talking to hiring managers. Also, read some writing from notable SV management writers like Will Larson and Camille Fournier, this will help you learn some of the shibboleths and how hiring managers think. Finally, if you don't have legit scale-up experience, look for that first. There's a range of companies with engineering teams of all sizes which can provide good stepping stones for learning as well as hireability optics.
It can be but doesn't have to be. A lot of people prefer to hire folks with some small startup experience because such people almost always better at thinking about businesses holistically. Many people who spend their entire careers at big companies can only reason about their little slice (lots of bad takes on businesses here).
A common way to make VP of engineering at big tech is the following 5 job hops:
1. Manager at big tech
2. Manager at startup -> promotion to director
3. Director at big tech
4. Director at startup -> promotion to VP
5. VP at big tech
The problem comes when someone gets too senior with relevant experience at scale. I (generally) can't hire someone with 15 years of experience who's never worked at scale. They're going to be bored out of their mind with mid-level work but simultaneously I can't actually trust them to not screw up something in senior+ roles, either technically or socially.
But you can absolutely come into an engineering role at a company with 40 engineers (40 person org charts to director at BigTech), grow into leadership of a 200+ person engineering (charts to vp) and then go back to BigTech for bigger bucks.
FAANG positions in Europe are OK-ish but not such a deal breaker to me to dedicate so much time to -useless- stuff, I'd rather build cool shit
While that is certainly possible, I don't think that is typically the case in leetcode style interviews...
If you have a dusty old blog with just a single technical post on it from 2012 which demonstrates that you know how to code, know how to write and know how to solve a technical problem... that will STILL give you a solid advantage against other candidates, at least in the early stages of the hiring process.
When hiring, the very first filter you need to apply is "can this person actually do the work". That's what FizzBuzz is about!
A blog post (or a dusty old GitHub repo) is a great way to jump past that filter.
- My posts about developing for iOS in 2008 were found by an editor at Manning and I wrote a book for them. This helped me make the transition to full time iOS development.
- My posts about extending Fogbugz and Citydesk were part of my application to Fogcreek/Trello — I can’t say it “got” me the job, but I’m sure helped me get an interview.
- I’ve been invited to speak at conferences, be a guest on podcasts, and write for Smashing based on people finding my site. It’s not a lot, but raises my profile just a bit.
I would do it anyway, but I’ve had a 30+ year career and I think my blog has been a significant factor in it.
I would worry less about new ways of doing the same thing and more about client generation/retention. Plenty of companies are willing to pay top dollar for boring technology.
What the blog did was to make it easy for the CEO to get to know you without talking to you more. And for me it was my code examples. So that works if you find a job where your ideas fit, but it can also work against you to find any other job that may expect a different mindset. Just recently I had an interview that also came about due to my reputation in the community, after I posted there that I was looking for work. But they desperately wanted to see code too, and the only thing I had to show was almost 15 years old or older, in a language that is not well known, because all my recent work was not public, and I didn't keep code from work on my personal devices. I haven't heard back from them yet.
I edited the comment, but now I am stuck between leaving the commented with capitalization to improve readability and reverting the edit in order for your response to make sense and to allow others to judge for themselves. (I'll go with keeping the edits. Anyone curious about the readability can go look for older comments of mine)
Lot of engineers I have interviewed, if feels to me they are trying to hack the interview process. In larger orgs, "cracking" the interview process might lead to long term job. But in a mid tier or start up, that's the beginning.
Ah, if only I could get paid a tech salary for being a father/gardener/artist/beer-drinker/video-game-player.
Because as much as you might love the job, there's always those days and those boring tasks
Not necessarily. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/07/10/educ...
I've had a Pi Hole running on the same microSD for 6-7 years now with only one hiccup (and that was a software thing - a fresh install got it back up and running on the same microSD). It just has a regular SD card (not a high endurance one), but the power supply came from adafruit, and it's been connected to a UPS for most of its life.
* SLC - 1 bit per electrical cell
* MLC - 2 bits per cell
* TLC - 3 bits per cell
* QLC - 4 bits per cell
They are both smaller capacity and more expensive, though.
Also, if you're using a stock distribution not intended for a Pi, you probably have quite a lot of logs/etc churning, which can be cleaned up. If you aren't doing much with the Pi except a few common services, check out DietPi.
The solution I found was these ATP micro SD cards (looks like the prices have increased like 3x though...) where the firmware is specifically designed to tolerate abuse:
https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/atp/industria...
Perhaps there are other cheaper but still robust alternatives now?
Regarding on the difficulties of the italian market, I’d like to dissent though.
Fact is, in Italy is waaaaay more simple to cheat your way to the top instead of having to go through the pains of getting a proper degree.
I know because I did it and went from a non graduated outbound call center operator to dirigential positions in highly respected fashionable industries in less than 10 years.
Point is, and with the exception of research roles o and a fistful of high consultancies, who enforce the control on graduation, most likely than not you will not be asked for proof of your studies if your jobtitle carries enough weight and if your accomplishments a friendship with the right people weights enough.
Trick is to change joq with the right frequency in the first years, participate to associations and try to be in the board, blog a lot in the right environments (and specifically there), make a lot of acquaintances and help them solve tricky situations for free, and generally speaking be as visible as possible as a tech savyy and strategist.
At the right moment, the reputation you will have accrued will be enough to receive accreditations beyond the first line of HR, and id your sponsor is notable enough no one will ask for your degree.
Once you have done that the first time, is the weight of your jobtitle and your name that propels you forward, no one willing to question your perceived authority.
Than rinse and repeat until the weight of jobtitle and name combined is unquestionable.
If you know how to behave, you will rise fast.
And good luck to trying that abroad. On a sidenote, once you earned the jobtitle this way in italy, it is easier (but still tricky) to get it abroad as well.
Once I tried to go abroad sometimes I got asked credentials (and subsequently bombed) and sometimes not, wich guaranteed me jobs in Switzerland and France.
Steer away from anglosaxon jobs though, they do enforce the control and most likely they’ll carch your bluff.
last suggestion: shoot for the highest possible pay and change job often enough to beat inflation several times over in 5 years. Above 150k/years almost no one will ask you for degrees. Only your pay and jobtitle and experience will count.
Good luck!
That surely changes my opinion
I think this is cultural.
Italian culture is hierarchical and trust is built upon relationships, you either need the authority of a good cv or a good network to reap opportunities. (This is quite common in southern europe)
Northern europeans, americans etc are more egalitarian and have a task based approach to build trust, and value ones worth accordingly.
(Of course it’s not always as black and white)
This is where I see most of the value from college or school, building up your social graph of people in your approximate industry.
Want to be successful? Connect in a meaningful way with more people. Your opportunities will multiply.
Don't know how to do that? There's an easy shortcut: publish something! Give a talk, write a blog, teach a class. Find those opportunities where you can engage with many folks at once (not just 1:1, that doesn't scale as fast).
If their motivation is “I know that this guy is good for sure, I don't have to take chances with random people who answer the job as”, it is still merit based, and they're acting in the best interest of the company. However, they could also give a job to somebody they know just to have their favor, or to get more people into the company they they could rely on in internal politics. In this case, this is not based on merit, and they're effectively defrauding the company, acting against its interest.
Personally, I've mostly encountered first type of networking in USA and Northern Europe and mostly second type elsewhere. Israel is weirdly split between Hi-Tech and everything else, following first and second type respectively.
In example: I’m using at home a RaspberryPI 4B as a Pi-Hole that is a totally waste of power, I’ve installed the same sistem in some companies with 70/80 DNS clients and all is running more than fine …but on a Raspberry PI 3B!
I think I’ve seen your blog pop up every couple of years somewhere here or back in the days reddit and always appreciated your blog posts.
Regarding the credentials... you would always find people who are dumb^W think what the certs are the measure of quality. Sometimes it's actually good, if a person asks for certs first then you know you don't want to work with that person.
NB: never send alerts directly to people.
Create a group (distribution list, alias, whatever it's called in your mail server), preferably multiple groups foreach client, eg: pasta.zara.alerts.monitoring@giuliomagnifico.com etc
That way you would see which instance generated the alert even if you didn't configured the custom alert message,
you can filter all these messages (to tag, move to folders or whatever) simply by filtering on *alerts.monitoring@,
and if for some reason you depart with the client in not so amicable ways then you can simply kill all the mails from it by a rule with $To:.
Edit: 610, not 670, sorry. It basically sits in a corner making a faint whirring sound and apart from occasional apt-get upgrades I tend to forget it exists.
Other than ECC RAM, any benefit?
The mini PC may not be as reliable, but this is not for production use.
That said even SD cards are probably fine if you're not doing a ton of writes. (And it looked like a USB drive was attached to one of the PIs in the picture. So, presumably the important data is going there.)
You're not wrong that second hand enterprise hardware would be more reliable but, honestly, I think this setup is fine for what they were trying to accomplish - especially if they already had some of the hardware laying around.
I see power input going into the Mikrotik router, then feeding D-Link USB hub with (according to the Mikrotik specs) up to 5V/500mA DC.
The USB hub sends power to both Pi’s and somehow splits the 500mA between RPi 3 (officially needing up to 5V/2.5A) and RPi 4(5V/3A). And it still somehow works?
I know all the specs are not set it stone. USB can feed more than 500mA and Pi’s can run on well under their requirement but I’m no stranger to Pi’s and I had experienced power issues due to inadequate supply before. Especially when the CPU is maxed out, like during the boot sequence.
Am I missing something here? This looks quite insane.
We need leaders with a vision, not social media influencers that follow behind whatever is trending on social media this week (aka the flavour of the week).
Once again, congratulations! :) Sorry for hijacking the celebrations with a rant.
Italian politicians are short sighted, they only care about the next election and not the nex generation.
I personally think, that a little due diligence is appropriate for titles of such blog posts, but that is only me and what I would do, if I published a blog post like that.
This maybe seems to be a weird post, especially for those who don’t live in Italy, because here in Italy there’s the common belief that the abilites of a worker, usually are less considered than the qualifies that it has. Or simply the employers don’t ask “what you are able to do?”, instead of “what are your credentials/studies”.Since Jekyll is a SSG (static site generator) how does commenting work on your blog?