AitchEmArsey

> Welcome to MS Teams...The chat platform for YOUR people, and not Those Others! lol

This is very true, and hugely problematic. As a consultant I have to use Teams with 3 separate clients right now, which means signing in to 3 different Teams tenants - Microsoft SSO does not like that at all.

I have a personal hatred for MS because of their long history of building shit like this, but I hoped that working for a different cloud provider would keep me away from that ecosystem - it was legitimately a positive benefit I perceived about this job when thinking about the move. Alas, the cancer of MS software gets everywhere by virtue of being effectively free for anyone using Office.

> Domain-Driven Design

> It's not exactly rocket-science either

I'd imagine that occasionally "rocket science" is exactly what it is!

Amazon often pitches itself as having a "writing culture", but much like the LPs and other mantras like "working backwards", this is more a case of cult-like exceptionalism than any sort of actual advantage once viewed from the inside.

I haven't seen any evidence of a company culture scaling beyond ~10 people - in a bigger group, sub-cultures and individual personalities seem to inevitably take precedence. Arguably this is even more the case at a place like Amazon where raw metrics are king - nobody cares how culturally aligned your work is as long as you are delivering the goods.

The REPL was indeed part of my issue, though having tried again in the last couple of days following this post, my impression is much more positive than on my last check (around when v1.5 was new, I think).

Also, Pluto is a marvel - seems to fix all of my complaints about Jupyter and is trivially easy to use.

Make the package management more Cargo-like and I'd probably adopt it wholesale; whenever I've tried Julia in the past the user experience of just getting started has been the off-putting part.

Bit of a straw man - nobody said anything about pushing for perfection at home, just "we can do better than this".

Also - "right there for the taking" gets to the heart of my objection as it is nowhere near true. Space is vast and delta-v is expensive - even if we get past the problem of deadly radiation outside the ionosphere, we are incredibly far from being able to make space travel anything other than an enormous sink for money and resources.

"We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because if we don't then some commie bastards will get there first."

I am all for exploration and science for the sake of science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath at this stage. We need to first explore how to live within our means on earth.

Start by assuming a spherical teapot in a vacuum...

"Their equity" is the wrong way of thinking about it - the RSU schedule is fully visible up front, and in the first 2 years low RSU grants are offset by a sign-on bonus. In my case, I was told what my target TC per year was, and that is what I've received (at minimum), just made up of a varying mix of bonus and RSUs. Saying that un-vested RSUs are "mine" is like laying claim to next year's salary before having done any of the work to earn it.

Agreed. Some UK numbers for reference:

£500/day is the absolute minimum for developer/DevOps outside London, £600/day much more common and including the cheap end for London. Senior is more often £800/day. You don't see values above that advertised, but people do obviously negotiate higher for specialist work; I have seen a mainframe developer charging £1500/day (on the low end of his range). Anything higher than that has always been a large consultancy rather than a freelancer. In my specialist niche I'd be asking for £1500/day top-end, expecting £800-1200 with negotiation depending on flexibility.

> evading blame for a disastrous project launch

Found the Timestream guy

Aren't they all?

When the GitHub purchase was happening, there was a lot of noise from both parties about how the companies would remain separate and GitHub would keep the things which make it appealing to developers; it therefore seems disingenuous to me to consider any of the positives of GitHub to be attributable to MS.

Interesting to consider - thanks.

Me and the people who have left interact with very different crowds of external stakeholders, so perhaps they were just unlucky to end up with some who are difficult to tolerate.

We are a team of white EU/US men, so I don't think discrimination is a factor in our different experiences. I do however think we are treated differently in some contexts; I am ~20 years younger than most of my team and can definitely see a tendency for people in AWS to see younger technical talent as a more useful resource, in that they are going to put up with more BS on average before quitting or burning out. I suppose that might just have become a self-fulfilling prophecy in this case.

Normal work hours, ie I could get away with 40 if I was willing to appear a bit relaxed but usually end up closer to 50. No on-call.

It is a really baffling experience - on my team in AWS we've had open roles for over 2 years; every time we pick someone up we lose someone else. The team is now smaller than it was when I joined and I know all 3 of the last people to leave have taken significant pay cuts to get out.

Despite all that, I'm pretty happy! Of course I'd leave for more money if the opportunity arose, but I think I would also be eyeing up a boomerang back to AWS to go up a level. I wish I knew why my experience has been so vastly different from the people I was on a team with, but the nature of our work meant we mostly work solo or in coordination with people on other teams, rather than grouping up with each other. As a consequence I didn't really see what was causing them to be so dissatisfied.

Your outrage about his outrage about the original outrage is basically a glorious example of Poe's Law; I both love and hate it.

If you broaden the scope of the economy beyond about 1AU, we absolutely do have a thriving fusion power industry.

This kind of nonsense is at the heart of a lot of our problems. Yes, someone producing interesting content and making it available widely should be paid for their labour and expenses. But the marginal cost of each reader is very close to zero, unlike the candy. The root cause of the disconnect is greed; where people believe the extra value massive scalability in tech offers should just accrue to them directly as a seller, trying to drive per-unit margins back up towards the money they would get from selling a newspaper.

If digital advertising was banned and good journalism could be identified by "I have to pay a small amount for this", competition would drive the costs down in a way which makes proper use of that scalability, and we would all be better off.

> eh?

> I'm a Canadian

Presented without comment.

Is there anything resembling consistency on level titles across the industry? That certainly hasn't been my experience; in my bit of AWS "staff" refers to L5 employees, ie good graduate level or lightly experienced. Below that is associate (L4), and above is senior (L6) and then principal (L7). I gather Google (and possibly others) insert a staff level between senior and principal - but for the life of me I don't understand why they would choose that label.

You're so meta, even this acronym.

I moved from a boutique operating like your second model, to a >$1B consulting firm operating the other way. While I would recommend both employers, the quality of life improvement from making the switch has been dramatic. I do miss the highs of working with a small team of very smart people who get along well, but I now place more value on long term stability.

Throwing something together based on unfamiliar components is indeed a bad move and likely to get you a bad reputation as a consultant. On the flip side, a permanent employee who wallows in analysis paralysis isn't adding any value to the company.

It all just depends on where the client culture fits on the "move fast and break things" spectrum.

They mean the costs a company would bear for you if you were a full-time employee. This includes your theoretical employment salary plus extra costs an employer pays for having that employee on their books, for example in the UK there is employers national insurance (tax), as well as other overheads like a fractional contribution to office space and software licenses.

"Won't somebody please think of the children"

It is horrifying to me that this approach of using pedophelia as a scapegoat to permanently degrade civil liberties goes largely unchallenged in the media.

Interviewing staff ("stakeholders") at a customer is always fascinating. I've seen the full range from sincere gratitude at being listened to, through to open hostility and suspicion. The latter was much worse when I was younger and worried about impressions I was making on older-but-not-very-senior people. At some point you just stop giving a shit and let them hate you if they feel threatened.