Amasuriel

Both of these extremes to me are both just lack of actual leadership.

A real leader should absolutely value and respect the input of their team, but also know when to just say “of the options, this is what we are going with, here is the trade off we are making and why” and have the mutual respect and trust of their team to make both of those activities successful.

It’s not quite the same, many people with hearing loss only lose hearing on part of the spectrum, so it’s not just about making things louder, it’s about making the specific frequencies louder in ratio to the loudness of the noise.

Decay implies simple neglect, vs deliberate actions that make the platforms or systems worse, sometimes out of incompetence, but often because the companies objectives no longer align with the customers.

  Location: Brantford (Toronto area, Canada) UTC-5
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: C#, F#, Scala, Spark, Python, Elasticsearch, 
      Data Engineering in general, some ML, 
      Azure/Aws/Kubernetes, lots of DevOps stuff and more.
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesselancaster/
  Email: JesseLancaster@gmail.com

I'm an experienced small company CTO, though I've worked at a director level in larger organizations. I'm still super hands on, especially in the data engineering space, but with back end in general.

I have a history of building great products with small teams. For example the data platform we built at Terapeak (see my LinkedIn profile) powers much of eBay seller price analytics today.

A lot of my consulting work in the last few years is helping companies that have PMF but are struggling to scale their product or their engineering team move faster.

I good at thinking out of the box, being customer focused in terms of my product thinking and knowing when to invest in areas of code (and when not to).

My startup isn't going to make it, and I'm looking to join a company that has already nailed product market fit. Small large is okay, as long as the focus is on building value rather than meetings and politics. I would be willing to consider IC roles or management roles, I'm trying to be open to the universe about what is next.

I'm extra interested in healthcare / biotech, though I know those are usually US only for legal reasons. Also energy startups.

I'm not interested in Adtech or social media.

Anything else I'm open to.

I'm looking for 300-400k CAD depending on the role and other benefits (which is about 225-300k USD).

Not particularly good though. I did a fair bit of looking at them and tried a few on loan a couple years ago. At the time at least, you have to set up an electronic fence to set boundaries, which is very annoying if you have scattered garden beds or other obstacles it cannot bump into.

Also like Roombas (the brand, not robot vacuums in general) they have poor sensors and no real coverages algorithms, they just semi randomly roam around.

Battery life is also terrible, outdoor charging stations are harder to maintain etc.

All I’m saying is, there is a long way to go before they become defacto better than a person with a mower, they are a fair bit of work and fuss right now to set up and keep running.

I don’t think this is particularly representative, since most Canadian companies that hire outside of Canada (even in the same time zone) are doing it because they can pay less.

Pre pandemic senior roles were usually double that or more. Even government jobs (which would generally be the lowest paying) would be over 100k for a senior.

This seems like either a regional and/or phase of life difference. As a homeowner in Canada for example, I often have need to find contractors for home items for example, like I just replaced a few windows.

Most of those businesses do not operate primarily (or at all) over email or sms so leaving phone messages and receiving calls from unknown numbers is normal. Investment firms also generally need occasional contact etc.

So I guess all I’m saying (as someone who would rather use text whenever possible) is that there is still many legitimate use cases for receiving phone calls.

The tone of your comment seems to indicate you think this is obviously a bad thing?

Prescriptions would just be doctors recommendations in this case. There could still be mechanisms to softly encourage only this usage, like insurance only covering doctor prescribed drugs.

Is your concern about painkiller addiction and abuse or about people hurting themselves by taking drugs without good understanding of them or something else?

Azure has this too, you can have what they somewhat confusingly call subscriptions, which are logical units with their own billing, limits and permissions inside and organizations account.

Do a lot of people really use the UI of any of the cloud services? Most people want managed infra, which means at least cli scripts if not terraform.

Not arguing the Azure UI is amazing, but it’s low on my list of concerns personally for cloud services.

For what it’s worth there is a tabular view that has more item detail. Things like marketplace subscriptions can often appear as Other in the graph.

I’m pretty happy with azure. I’ve not used GCP but vs AWS I find permission management a lot nicer. I have yet to have a billing surprise that didn’t come down to me not reading closely enough.

What I don’t like is they sometimes lock private links (aka the ability to not have a service publically routable, only accessible on a vnet) behind premium SKUs, looking at you service bus.

People often seem to equate retirement, as in you no longer need to do things you don’t want to do just for money, to assume that those people are going to sit around all day.

People need purpose, no doubt. And while I’m sure there are people who imagine retirement as sitting on a beech with a drink all day, for lots of people FIRE just means being able to pursue the things you want without expectation that they will be lucrative.

In the 80s and 90s (when I grew up) there was still a sense that technology was capable and going to be empowering people and making lives better, healthier, more convenient. Even though in many ways this wasn’t really true at the time either, the rise of social media and digital advertising as the primary examples of “big tech” I think really changed how people internal and external to the industry think about how technology intersects our lives.

When you think about science fiction and the promises of technology and then look at what we actually got (mostly platforms to sell us things) I feel like it’s natural people are discouraged.

I agree. The whole article is pinned on the idea that infinite economic growth is not only possible, but critical. Even given that premise, it assumes that population growth is required for that.

I don’t feel like you need to be an economist or mathematician to understand that perpetual economic growth based on finite resources is no achievable.

Maybe instead of doubling down on the old model that has driven us to ecological disaster we should look for a new one.

It’s actually worse than that. I would hardly count myself among the best, but I’m certainly experienced and would absolutely love to try and fix the absolutely appalling state of health care records for example.

But besides there being no money in it, between regulatory hurdles, fragmented ecosystems and lack of incentives for individual doctors or hospitals to be good at sharing or maintaining these types of records, I could give the software away for free and still fail to gain traction.

In all of these spaces I don’t see how it progresses without government regulation and/or incentives, because the incumbents have literally no reason to improve.

I was also very pleasantly surprised by K6.

The load tests are written in JavaScript, the api is super clean. It’s command line only, but the command line output is really readable.

I’m sure it doesn’t cover all the edge cases of Jmeter, but for testing normal apis it seems pretty perfect.

I don’t know what they are like in California, but where I live in Canada developers are generally disliked because

1) They tend to build houses not communities, for example it’s rare a developer will include parks, community spaces like markets, bike lanes, plant trees, or do anything else to make the housing tracts livable

2) They don’t tend to expand infrastructure to match, so you get developers getting approved to put 10000 houses on a 1 lane each direction road, or housing going in without adequate medical service or other necessities, which puts strain on the existing community resources

3) they are constantly lobbying local government to let them build in forests, wetlands and other natural habitat, so if you care about that at all you generally have a bad view of developers

Combine all this with generally extremely poor build quality results in people viewing developers as adversaries for the most part.

Because most of the reasons modern settlement is T+2 and cross jurisdiction trading is extremely complex is about regulations in those jurisdictions and various forms of counter party risk mitigation.

Crypto currencies and equities largely avoid this by not enforcing or following many of the regulations that banks and brokerages need to follow for similar financial instruments.

So unfortunately if you understand how settlement happens today in detail, you will probably come to the conclusion that once crypto versions of these assets are regulated in an identical fashion, settlement will look much as it does today, just using a different technology to record events.

Or F# if you want a wider ecosystem, it’s based on Ocaml and has many nice functional features, but you can utilize any .net code you want

The logical conclusion is that THOSE ads don’t work, not that ads don’t work in general.

I am no fan of digital advertising, but there is a lot of variation on ad platform, targeting, ad content, ad space etc that will make a massive difference in effectiveness of the dollars spent.

I would like to point out that you also appear to be making sweeping statements.

I don’t agree with you that colocated teams have an inherent advantage, or that they require more management to be productive than a remote team on average.

I would add that sometimes there are some truly magical food experiences lurking in there if you have an open mind, and Michelin restaurants are a good place to try new things.

A few years ago I ate at the modern in New York. Most of the tasting menu was good, as you might expect, but honestly not particularly memorable.

But they had this one dish, eggs 3 ways or something like that, which was a play on a soft boiled egg with toast, but the egg yolk had caviar and some other stuff in it, and was served with this toasted sourdough…I am salivating 4 years later thinking about it. Truly one of the best things I have ever eaten, and it was something I never would have ordered from a menu.

Unfortunately like many areas of medicine (at least in Canada), sleep specialists will do a sleep study, and unless your sleep is sues fall cleanly inside a condition they can treat (cpap for apnea for example) you are on your own except for some one sized fits all advice about sleep hygiene.

If you don’t have restful sleep and don’t have apnea, and you have already tried the basics like melatonin, not using electronics before bed etc, you have few choice but to accept it or try to find your own answers.

I think the psychology of pay raises and inflation is interesting. I’ve never heard anyone when inflation was low taking about how their 20% pay raise (from moving to another company for example) was 18% over inflation. This comparison of pay raises to inflation only happens when inflation is higher THAT YEAR, which I emphasize because technology salaries as a whole are one area that has greatly outstripped inflation over the the years.

I’m not trying to dismiss or minimize people who are not happy they effectively got a negative pay adjustment this year, just commenting that the perspective on how to measure pay relative to the economy and market doesn’t seem consistent, and I think that says a lot about psychology of rewards for work.

Obviously this also has different meaning in jobs where wages have been largely stagnant for many years, and weren’t keeping up with cost of living even before large inflation.

Anyway, if you are a software engineer or other highly paid professional, it might be an good thought exercise to examine your lifetime (or some other timeframe) increases vs inflation, or look at your spending that will be actually impacted by inflation (groceries etc) and calculate the tangible impact on your life in terms of cost. Again not to say that high inflation is positive or anything, just as a way of adding context and additional perspectives that are missing if you look at this year in isolation and it wasn’t a year you got a substantial increase in pay.

I'm surprised by the negative reaction to this in some of the comment. I don't think this is an attack on modern medicine or drugs, but I think it resonates because it highlights the impersonal, 1 sized fits all approach we often encounter in modern medicine.

I suffered a spontaneous pneumothorax (collapsed lung) at the end of 2020, and it was a difficult case that ended up with me spending 5 weeks in the hospital, a major thoracic surgery and home with a chest tube for 3 more weeks.

I'm extremely grateful to modern medicine. 100 years ago I would have just lost function of the lung and probably eventually died. 30 years ago I probably would have lived, but the surgery would have involved spreading open my ribcage and my recovery would have been much longer and harder. All the pain medications are way more effective than willow bark. So yes, profoundly grateful and happy we have modern medicine.

My doctors and nurses were all generally compassionate and professional, and overall I can say my care was good.

However;

The experience really highlighted to me how mental health or consideration of the whole person is not considered in today's medical environments. Most people intuitively knows that it's harder to recover, or even avoid falling ill when your environment is oppressive, never mind recover from major trauma. The lack of plants, fresh air, art or any other kind of environmental beauty, 24/7 artificial light, never getting more than 4 hours of sleep in a stretch etc. I don't blame the hospitals given the current environment they operate in, but it's clear we focus only on the person's issues in isolation, and try to forget they are a person, and the disposition of a persons spirit and mental state can either aid or hinder healing. This is true in an outpatient sense too, and even in family medicine (at least in Canada) where quality of life issues are rarely considered important.

Anyway, this is a long winding way of saying I think we can both appreciate the advantages of modern medicine while appreciating and desiring a move towards a more wholistic view of a person's quality of life and subjective experience while dealing with health issues.

I recently started a small project on Azure for something new, but most of my experience is small companies on AWS which is similar.

If you aren’t already comfortable with K8 I wouldn’t use them, there is a learning curve there for sure and not necessary.

I wouldn’t even worry about containers at all unless you are planning on using a managed container service like elasticbeanstalk.

My CI pipeline is almost nothing, just run tests on main and dev commits. I have no deploy pipeline, I choose to actively deploy.

My deployment workflow is a powershell script since I’m on Azure, if it was AWS and I was using plain EC2 instead of a container service I would probably use ansible to avoid having to repeat commands 2-3 times when I deploy something behind a load balancer, but it would be super minimal.

DB backups are super easy to schedule with RDS or similar offerings. For rollback with database changes I would schedule downtime, let your customers know, replace your page with a maintenance banner, do upgrade, test upgrade then repoint site to your running instance.

Overall I echo what many have said, use familiar tools as much as you can, don’t worry about whether what you are doing will scale to even 2-3 people if it costs significant time. Use managed services where possible to save you time, usually the cost isn’t high vs doing it yourself.

I agree with this, my schedule was always more the same working from an office than at home: 1) same 5 restaurants to reasonably eat at, or packed lunch options that reheat well 2) same work location 3) same limited number of places to take outdoor breaks (assuming there was any at all).

I find my working hours infinitely more varied from home

I agree verticals is too simplistic, but the example of zoom is an interesting one because it still had the differentiator of being consumer focused (which brings a whole list of attributes like price sensitivity, ease of use etc) vs the incumbents that where very enterprise focused.

You still need something unique to do well usually, though that unique thing doesn’t have to be the idea or space.

No particular love for Heroku, but you can pay for multi az failover if you want it.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-ha

If you don’t pay you won’t get the feature. Given that multi az failover directly impacts their cost that seems pretty fair.

It’s certainly possible they don’t care, or they don’t know how to write good code.

Another possible reason could be that they know it’s temporary. A lot of startup code gets rewritten at least once in the first 5 years, there is some art to knowing what code might stick around and be worth the effort to do well, and what you should just bang out fast and move on.

It sounds like it’s possible you haven’t been able to have a conversation with your colleagues about their choices, which might be worth having candidly if you can find the opportunity to do so. If it is ignorance or negligence better to know and decide how you want to proceed if that makes sense.