CameronBarre

Indeed, as I responded to the other mention of this, I think engagement with organic subject matter is different than the engagement that comes from asking introspective questions like this one.

That's my personal opinion right now, I could be wrong about it philosophically.

I don't think it's dumb at all, I bet it does count as an ingredient to an overall compelling post.

Ignoring a fact like posting when a large number of users are potentially active does appear detrimental to the goal.

That's an interesting position, I would expect clickbait to be more important on the normal posting format, because users are being asked to go to some external resource for reading.

I get a feeling that contentiousness works better with the normal post format that usually links to someones opinion on a subject that is obviously contentious here.

Fair point, since this question is getting engagement, but I don't think breaking the fourth wall equates with an attempt to ask a compelling question about a real subject, if that makes sense.

Must not have been tail call recursion.

I don't quite know how to express my rationale, because I know exactly what you mean as well.

There is a certain flavor of question that I characterize as an attempt to harvest ideas from users who respond.

I would agree there must be methods of poking around with a similar aim, in a more organic way.

Get amped up about the business domain.

Learn by watching and being inquisitive, but do not judge publicly.

Don't advocate for what you perceive could be better about anything the company, team, or even individual does until you understand how the current situation evolved.

You want to be seen as someone who notices real problems the business faces, rather than trivial concerns which some new hires tend to point out in a wholesome attempt to display their knowledge to the new team on day one.

Let your previously acquired experience come to be known over time through action.

They are hiring you to participate in the production process and they are expecting a burn-in period. You should identify how you can shorten that period to a minimum to begin delivering value quicker than expected for the average new hire.

Be genuine.

Good luck!

You have to believe in yourself, beyond any personal conception of career advancement or professionalism.

Unless you work in a hellish organization, most people appreciate a person who can own a mistake and then take the required action to correct it.

It's when people are completely blind sided by the consequence of a mistake that you knew about, but kept to yourself that things start to get dicey.

In the end, everyone makes mistakes. If you work on the most critical of systems where mistakes are life and death, then I pity you, but if you fall outside of the realm, just be honest about what happened with whoever it matters to.

As others have pointed out, you can help yourself by practicing risk management. If you're taking a risk, try to hedge it.

I think most importantly, don't be scared of your job.

Good luck!

Ideally I will have decoupled my income from my time, made progress on personal savings, still be working remote, still have full control over my time, still working with great people, still paying the bills, and all that.

IT predictions, no thanks!

I've considered responding to this question 3 or 4 times, but every time I try, I bump up against the nebulous spetrum of spectrums of knowledge from which we get the terms "junior" and "senior."

My early work experience was not remote, but my most significant work journey in my life has been entirely remote and it started 6 months after I graduated college.

We have to stop thinking about individual experience in absolutes.

Ultimately what matters is whether you can provide the right value at the right time for the right person or group of people.

If you're totally inexperienced, as in, you haven't participated in industry at all, then your success as a remote employee is going to depend highly on how thoughtful the hiring organization is - and I would say that still goes for more experienced people as well.

Yay Clojure! It's such a natural tool once you go all in on it.

I try not to limit myself to having a career.

So true.

Thanks for the kind works :)

Stacks of unassigned, multi-level scaffolding to fit more people in the room?

Yeah it gets way harder to wake up 'early' as the sun starts coming out later. Especially in the PNW when it's straight gray outside in the morning during those seasons.

How do you manage 3 hours at the park?

Tomato timer

Technically you don't need a degree to work as a software engineer, or a web developer. You have the option to learn some of the lower hanging fruit of our industry, generate income with your skills, and fund your schooling if you still think it's important. Any way you slice it, it's going to take you a while to reach industrial competency, it will take time to get truly oriented.

Two important aspects of university that are harder to come by in the wild:

It forces you to learn how to learn and it carves out a lot of time for you to dedicate to learning.

If your personal circumstances allow you to force those two things upon yourself (with intense discipline), that's your best bet.

Good luck!

I worked for a university.

I worked remotely half of one day without asking permission and was essentially scolded for not sending an arbitrary email request that would have been approved.

During that scolding I stated that if I really couldn't do what I thought was best for my productivity, for the good of the organization, that I would have to have a think about the environment.

My boss couldn't hold back sneering laughter when I said that.

... I had been working part time 1099 for a company for a few weeks and formed a great working relationship with the guy who hired me. The same day as the scolding I asked if there was enough work for me to come on full-time, naturally there was, and I put in my two weeks the next day.

I started out as a remote Clojure engineer and never looked back. The only other interesting part of this story is that I was a PeopleSoft developer at the university for the fun of it, my heart was obviously with more modern technology the entire time.

>You should always drive engineering excellence, but you shouldn't be driving day to day decisions/execution unless the company is very small and you are still having to play architect, coder etc. Once you have team leads and teams, you should be pulling back and setting direction and standards but not dictating implementations etc.

I'm going through this on a smaller scale and have been evolving through my responsibilities for around three years.

I started as the only engineer with total control over a next generation system for a client, then for the last year and a half I have been making the painful transition from solving problems myself to trusting others to solve them.

I've grown a small team from nothing to three highly reliable members by doing much of what you suggest and following similar themes.

My responsibilities have been partitioned among them, group methods and practices have developed between us all, and finally, there is a capable group of people to carry on and evolve my hard work, which is now becoming their hard work. One of the best parts is that they actually produce higher quality work than I do, because I create buffers from business pressure and give them longer runways, so there is more time for attention to detail.

I'm in the process of handing over my duty as team lead to one of them and I'm pushing my way into helping our CTO with product design (and essentially anything else that comes up), where I hope to leverage my understanding of our various teams and business context.

I am evolving my role for the third or forth time by now, and I am doing it out of necessity, because, every hour of my time typically goes toward controlling dozens of hours of other people's time and so without an engaging task like writing code, my days feel endless, because there isn't that much I can do at any given moment. Jumping into my teams code and working on requests directly is actually one of the more self destructive things I can get into lately.

Therefore, I find product design highly engaging, it makes the hours fly (almost as good as writing code) and am sending the message that I'm here to help at a higher level than I ever have previously - apart from growing half of the environment for three years.

I don't even want a career by the way, I'm a remote 1099 freelancer if you can believe it. We have a really interesting team composed entirely of freelancers, but we seem to stick together.

Wake up between 5:30 and 7:30, it's harder to wake up on the earlier end when the sun starts coming up later.

I might read a bit while my other half gets ready to walk to get coffee, currently reading "The Worldy Philosophers" on a first generation surface pro.

This whole time my phone is muted, laptop closed.

Now it's hopefully between 7:30 and 8:30 and I have coffee, also I've been experimenting with nicotine gum as a mental stimulant, but I'm not insane - I don't chew the gum and drink my coffee at the same time, it would ruin the coffee.

Depending on what sort of day it is I will either not work and do whatever I want, currently learning about economics, or I will work - most days I work.

If I am working I work a minimum of 5 hours and try to be done by 3PM, but as of this week I'm going to try to keep my hours around 8 on the days I'm working for at least a couple of months.

Usually I try to begin my work day with Slack notifications snoozed for the first two hours, because 90% of my responsibility is communication at the moment, so distractions are the norm for me if I don't keep them in check.

Someone else mentioned LISP, when I am writing code it's Clojure :)

One time we managed to trick our cat for about a month by using a combination of scheduling our brown noise generator to go off and scheduling some holiday lights to come on at the same time, for a noiseless alarm.

Cat would still be sleeping when we woke up and didn't remember she was supposed to be starving to death.

Trick your cat every chance you get, really.

No company at all, I'm determined to make it on my own like the contrarian I am!

We don't have the most sophisticated setup, we're on AWS so we use a fluentd daemonset to ship logs to cloudWatch.

In many respects kubernetes is just a really nice piece of marble to start with, you still have to carve your statue.

If certain tooling was built-in they would be making stack-specific subjective decisions for you, which is somewhat antithetical to the kubernetes model.

They'll make critical operational decisions for you (e.g. core competencies like scheduling work across a pool of resources), but when it comes to supporting tooling, you still have to make some decisions on your own.

For a lesser burden, there are most likely helm charts or other prepackaged log aggregation tools out there.

Hell no!

Do keep a gitops folder / repository to keep your cluster in sync with expectations, do not let adhoc edits become the norm.

Use tools like kustomize to reduce proliferation of duplicate k8s resource files.

Do make sure you are using health and liveness checks.

Definitely take care to specify resource requests and limits.

Do use annotations to control provider resources, rather than manually tweaking provider resources that are auto generated by basic k8s files with no annotations.

Aggregate your logs.

I started experimenting with nicotine gum as a non-smoker. From what I've read, the method you get your nicotine has a major effect on level of addiction. Inhalation combines a habitual act with the near instanaeous activation time to create a highly addictive behavioural habit.

I chew one 4mg piece of gum over the course of a day for mental stimulation and that's had some really nice side effects for me, such as being able to stay up later and continue on mentally engaging work.

Search for easy wins, shun refactoring, and always try to build the next thing better, rather than going backwards to retroactively "fix" working (but perhaps less than ideal) things.

I can't really advise on finding companies. I haven't had to search for one myself in a while. Like I said, I'm a freelancer, so I just go with the flow until I can find a new opportunity.

Good luck, believe in yourself more and don't worry so much about categorizing yourself!

It sounds like our worlds are different, I don't work for a FAANG, but in my world:

A junior is someone who has put time and effort into learning our programming language, but may not have previous industry experience with it. After speaking with them, I'm either convinced or not that given a reasonable burn in time they can become an independent and productive member of the team. I like to see a work history with other stacks of course.

There's really no concrete basis on which to judge what anyone is truly capable of, especially in our industry, sometimes it comes down to giving someone a fair chance and hitting the eject button if it isn't working out.

As a remote independent person who hires other remote independent people, on a contractual basis, I think I'm allowed to take more humanitarian liberties when I have hiring decisions to make, due to the structure of remote work and the qualities that independent people tend to have.

Hope that helps.

That's cool, I don't make a lot of money at the moment, but I do have nearly unlimited personal freedom working remotely.