742 karma · joined February 4, 2022
If you want to make a red label with white letters on it that is named Awesome Cola, then you should absolutely be allowed to do that. If Coca Cola can’t protect their business by making the best product then they can frankly fuck right off. This is the European mindset at least, consumers owe nothing to corporations.
Maybe it’s just me, but the article started out by saying that unemployed 30 year old men are increasingly likely to be living with their parents… Isn’t it sort of obvious why those men aren’t going to have an easy time finding a romantic partner? And really, is that really their biggest headline worthy issue?
I guessed it worked though. I mean, it sure had me sign in to see if the article was interesting, but it’s not. It has no solutions and it outlines a problem that have seen an increasing amount of awareness (at least in Scandinavia) for 20 years now. We’re still searching for the answer by the way.
I would normally advice you to go with what you feel is right for you, but right now, I’m personally going to be riding out the next few years as safe as possible. I think the world economy is in for its bumpiest ride in our lifetime. So unless the thing you plan on selling thrives in a market with a broken global supply chain, war in Europe, real climate impact, food shortages, political unrest and recession (and some things will thrive, they always do) then being a startup the next few years will probably be more of a challenge than it’s been for the past few decades.
I have a windows running Lenovo t14 for work, and it’s a decent enough laptop but it’s sort of like the stone ages compared to my personal MacBook. It has a terrible mousepad, it’s bulky, it runs out of battery after a two hours even though its factory new (developer specs in non-tech enterprise), the screen isn’t very nice and it’s actually more expensive.
I ask because I kind of want to get out of the closed ecosystem. Not so much because I dislike Apple but because I figure that with the way things are going for big American tech companies I’ll likely dislike them sooner or later. But I’ve never found a Linux (or windows) laptop that came close to the daily usage of a MacBook Air. Obviously I’m not in need of a powerhouse or a computer, weight, battery life and a good mousepad is my primary requirements, but yeah.
I’m Danish and I’ve been involved with hiring a few people and the best thing you can do to prepare here is to be yourself and be honest. Not brutally, but we don’t like people who don’t know how to fail because everyone fails and if you can’t own up to it when you do then you’re a liability on any team. For us it’s typically a lot more about finding the person we think will be the best fit into the team rather than who is the better technical candidate. Because the truth is that unless you’re searching for a phd level research position then chances are that you could randomly hire any of your candidates that are good enough to interview and get someone who is “good enough” technically, but since the most expensive mistake a manager can make in our line of work is to hire the wrong person, we try to find the one we think will be the best fit. Often this involves HR personality tests, which again aren’t really tests as much as they are tools to get applicants to open up and talk about themselves in a controlled environment.
That being said, practice helps. It’s one thing to think you know yourself and your technical background. It’s a completely different thing to sit in a high pressure situation and talk about it. At my previous job I gave presentations on public sector digitalisation, when I gave my first one I practiced the whole thing word for word for three days straight and I still gave a presentation that one I could pull out of my ass right now if it was on a subject I know about. Because practicing talking about things makes you mind blowingly better at it. Job interviews are exactly the same way, and since we are going down anecdotal road, I passed the first and then got into the second for an absolute dream job straight out of university, and I bombed it completely because I got so intimidated by a room full of 8 people who were all much better than me and because I hadn’t tried it before. I honestly still interview a few times every five years to keep up with the skills of applying for jobs and if you want to work in Europe I can only recommend that you get some practice in before you apply for that real job.
On a side note, I would never waste my time at a Danish company that has you doing technical tests if you have education and experience enough that they should trust you actually know what your CV and application tells them. Not so much because technical tests can’t be good, but because I’ve been in the business for a few decades and the Danish companies that run those tests underpay and overwork their SWEs immensely.
In Danish digitalisation we’ve basically gone the route or having JavaScript (really Typescript) fronts for basically everything and I’ve yet to personally hear anyone working in that area complain about chrome becoming the dominant browser. And why would they? Frameworks like react, angular and vue make the underlying “OS” as you call it unimportant for the most part. Especially now that IE6 is almost dead. And if you do have certain needs that needs to control the environment you can always go the electron route.
You sound like you’re not a fan of JavaScript, which is perfectly fair, but why would you go on a crusade for it? There are enough development jobs around that can keep you working with exactly the language you prefer and never care about any other languages.
Recently I have been getting a lot of advertisements for guns. I’m Danish and I don’t have a hunting license which means I can’t legally buy guns. This is just one example, others have provoked me so much I’ve actually gone into my advertisement settings to block the sender forever. If that’s the best they can come up with, with all my data, then they can frankly just fuck right off. Especially because it wouldn’t be hard for them to “target” the blood bowl advertisement without tracking my every move considering it’s the only reason I have social media accounts outside of HN and LinkedIn.
What is really interesting to me, however, is that I don’t notice much of a difference in the advertisements on Google and DuckDuckGo, one knows more about my life than I do and the other simply goes “well he searched for blood bowl, maybe I’ll show him some blood bowl advertisements”. In fact I’m only on DuckDuckGo because the Google SEO bullshit has made the front page of Google results useless for almost all of my searches.
From a developer resource perspective, however, you use react native because it lets you share developers across platforms. Similar to how you might use nodejs on the backend for the exact same reason. If you’re splitting your developer resources anyway, I would frankly just go native mobile department.
Lets say I want to write a typescript microservice and deploy it to azure as a serverless functions app. I’ll fork our bare metal nodejs project for azure functions, which is essentially the standard azure cli “create nodejs function -typescript -docker” (this isn’t correct syntax but you get it) with the linting and ts-compiling rules we use on all our projects (and an updated image version in the docker file as mentioned). While I build things and run them locally, I don’t use docker, it’s not until I actually want to deploy to azure and setup the release pipeline and trigger it that docker comes into play, but those DevOps steps (also streamlined) aren’t really docker heavy as they simply use the dockerfile that was mostly provided by Microsoft.
I can certainly build and run my micro service as a docker container locally, but I don’t need to. In fact the only times I did was when it failed to build during the azure pipeline but it turned out to be the azure container registry access controls every single time that happened, so these days I almost never “use” docker. In fact I use it so rarely I almost always have to Google command lines.
I know people use docker in many different ways, and that many use things like docker compose, but my point is that you can deploy everything you build with docker and never actually have to care much about docker itself. So maybe you should ask yourself if you really need to learn docker good before you spend too much time on it.
Yes, and it’s also competing with Estonia at being the best in the world.
One of the things that burned me out was actually the poor decision making, from my technical point of view mind you. I’ll simplify what I mean by a made up example of a platform selection process. Your organisation needs a headless CMS, your external consultants tells you this, your tech staff tells you this and even your friends from competitors that you network with privately tell you this. The issue is that your company strategy is to rely as little on internal IT resources as possible, and any available headless CMS (because you can’t outhouse the data) requires technical talent. So what do you do? Well, you pick something else, like Wordpress, the Microsoft powerplatform or similar, and you do fine. The solution is shit technically, but it also works good enough while achieving its primary strategic goal within your organisation.
Public sector digitalisation is that, except a billion times more complicated and with the added bonus of having changing political leadership. For a few years we had a designated minister in Sophie Løhde, who setup a branch of the digitalisation ministry to build a cross sector national enterprise architecture inspired by the one they run in the municipalities (KL) called rammearkitekturen. The group had an extreme amount of talent and improved on the 20 years of KL work so much it was like the whole thing went from the stoneage to the spaceage in less than a year. Then Sophie Lødhe got a different job, the task force was disbanded and everything related to governance went back to the municipalities (KL and KOMBIT) whom through out the process had suffered from an extreme inability to kill their darlings.
I mean, that’s just a glimpse of it, but you don’t have to work with other European countries for very long until you relive just how awesome digitalisation is in Denmark by comparison. Part of my current job is dealing with the fact that FTP is still a very common data transfer channel in Germany and France, and I didn’t miss that S in SFTP, because that’s something even massive tech companies that shall remain unnamed hadn’t heard about until I asked them why it wasn’t encrypted.
I’ve seen the same sort of thing in the private sector. Once you zoom out enough to understand decisions from the perspective they are being taken from, they very often make perfect sense. That doesn’t mean those very same decisions aren’t a load of bollocks from a lot of perspectives, but they are rarely just “fake it till you make it” sort of deals.
I think this author suffers from childhood delusion in that the author still thinks adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true. There is a lot to be said about figuring things out a long the way, but it’s not like people don’t know what they are doing, because we learn, we adapt and we very often plan ahead. I mean, the author even sort of contradicts the title or the article in the discussion on whether to do more SEO, YouTube, and/or, networking because that is already knowing a lot, just not everything.
A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it. From everything to their careers to raising their children, and I think it’s very easy to see when someone actually doesn’t know, because often they are either drowning, looking for help or both, or, alternatively never even beginning on the thing they want.
This is not to say that I disagree with you, but being adaptable is more important than being just skilled. A lot of those typists eventually became secretaries and then spread further out to different parts of organisations, and a lot of them are still there. It’s only the people who don’t adapt who get left behind, and I’d like to point out here that I’m not a fan of that term. As I am Scandinavian that is probably of little surprise to people, but I think society has a responsibility to keep people useful so long that we require them to work until they are 73+.
Anyway, how we’ve done it is by setting up a pipeline, that builds and deploys a docker container of a repository to a deployment a lot on a cloud application/function/whatever you call them if it passes the build phase. Then depending on whether or not the deployment passes the criteria set up for it, it either automatically swaps deployment slots with the production slot or waits for manual confirmation to do so. On anything that is allowed a reload, we don’t swap deployment slots but instead redeploy, typically with minimal downtime.
The reason it’s annoying is because it takes a lot of time to set up for each pipeline, and when you need to be able to swap deployment slots with now downtime you also need to handle things like build processes taking global variables or clients needing to be told to reload parts or them.
I’m not sure kubernetes is the answer for us, but we’re certainly going to look for a way to make the whole process smarter as it sometimes takes up more time to setup the pipeline and deployment environment than building the service that needs to be deployed.
Then someone died and the outraged public demanded regulation.
I think the author simultaneously gets and misses this with this article. The Sri Lanka example is really a perfect example of what happens when the consequences in a monetary system stop being enforced and how it drives people to lose trust in that system. You could maybe build a cryptocurrency with enough regulation and enough force of consequences that you could replace other financial systems, but at that point it would simply be a more globalised version of our current banking system.
I think trust is easier understood with the “smart” contracts in the form of how we deal with landownership around the world. In countries with stable low-corruption governments you don’t need “smart” contracts because you can trust the system to uphold your rights, but, in countries with a high level of instability or corruption you can’t use your “smart” contract because nobody is going to enforce your right.
Please note that I don’t mean to say your anecdotal experiences can’t be interesting, just that they can’t be used as science until you do the work to actually prove that they aren’t just your experiences.
Which are sort of effective ways of “outsourcing” the UI development on projects where you don’t have the funds (or the talent) to make a great UI.
I’m not sure if it constitutes as a red flag, but you can always take a look to see if the repo “starring” goes both ways, or/and ask about it.
What I do mind is the failed men who run around pretending to be manlier than they are by stealing our culture and turning it into something hateful. I know I sort of look the part of Hitlers secret fantasy, being a tall Scandinavian with undercuts and a moustache, but I’m really not right wing and it bothers me when I’m associated with hateful assholes because they’ve appropriated my cultural heritage.
It’s the way the world is, like I said, and I think you’ll have as much hope of removing the horns from the helmets that you will trying to make the broader international society understand that Viking is something you did not something you were.
Well, let’s just say that while you’re completely correct, I don’t think we should wait for our countries to become less Kafkan, which is why I’m a fan of simply banning the automated decision making. Maybe if you hurt the bureaucracy where it matters (cost) we might actually get some officials who deal with the root cause of the issues.
I spent a decade in the public sector digitalisation of Denmark, a country that competes with Estonia about having the most digitalisation in the world.
I fully believe we should legislate against automated processes taking decisive actions.
It’s inefficient, but what I experienced in regards to laws is that they are way more messy than anyone working in digitalisation seem to realise. We build a system that let employees report their business-related driving, in Denmark you get a tax-reduction when you drive in your own car for work purposes, and the laws covering it is basically an A4 page of tax-law that seems sort of clear. You have 3 set of taxation rates that you get to deduct from, they are meant to be used for different types of work related driving. Simple, right?
Well, it turned out that in 9 different municipalities there was 9 different ways to interpret that A4 page of law text, and, more than a 100 different union agreements on how to extend or alter the tax law for certain groups of workers.
As hilarious as it was to sit through meetings with different sets of tax people from different municipalities getting into heated arguments about who was break the law, it was also sort of eye opening for me at the time. Because we made this as an OSS project where we bought the development that we project managed. My role was part of the project management team as a code-reviewer/specifier of sorts, and all our estimates simply went out the window when we realised we really had to build all those different ways of interpreting the law, as well as making room for future alterations. In the end, it didn’t extend the project that much, I think we still delivered it on schedule but it was a very different product with lots and lots of setup required, because the different municipalities needed to be capable of deciding which rules were turned on for which groups of workers, as well as control over how the approval system was handled by everything from tax lawyers going through every submission to secretaries to RPA robots simply clicking accept on everything.
The system wasn’t related to decision making automation that couldn’t be easily undone by humans, because it was still a relatively simple system. But if that sort of complexity is what you get from some of the simplest legislation we have, then imagine what it would look like for laws covering thousands of A4 pages of text.
Think of it from the management perspective. It’s not about the soda, it’s about the “we’re giving this middle manager $1million a year to pay for his/her employees now, and we sort of don’t know what we get in return”. In startups nobody has time to think about that sort of thing, you simply do what’s necessary to get stuff done, and, the amounts are smaller. As size grows, so does the perceived need for bean counters.
I say perceived because I’ve never personally experienced a company who didn’t go that road, so I can’t say what would happen if you continued to trust all your employees and middle managers rather than start monitoring and structuring them, but I do know that a lot of the business intelligence and documentation systems that I have seen showed little actual value once they got disrupted by covid and everyone working from home.
You can’t even say that it doesn’t work, because it’s how every major company operates. On the flip-side, it’s not like Coca Cola has really invented anything of worth for like a 100 years. So while bean counters are financially good for investors, they are probably pretty terrible at running our society, because it’s the engineers that actually build things and the founders who come up with the saleable ideas.
Anyway, if my career has taught me anything it’s to do your thing. Being part of the transition from startup to enterprise can be a lot of fun as well, so long as you know that you can’t really fight the MBA types and win.
That’s the “cog in the machine” part of the story, the other side is what you can do as that cog. If you posses a skill set that is in demand, you can actually get away with a lot of things in this world. Why people don’t do this is beyond me, especially for IT staff. Of course it’s not easy to find the remote job you want, but in my anecdotal experience I have met so many people who were so much smarter than me who got much fewer benefits. I’ve even heard people defend their low pay, using their bosses talking points. Like, what?
I’m not an asshole, I’m not hard to work with but I do have ADHD which is crippling for me when it comes to working on things I dislike for long periods. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve always asked to get things my way, but it’s not beyond me how lucky I am to be in a profession where we always have a couple or job openings available.
Supply chain security is immensely important, and I encourage you not to learn about it the hard way like I did. Which somewhat ironically happened in the .Net ecosystem when one of our trusted Nuget packages got hacked many years ago. Now, I could be mistaken and I hope I am, but I suspect that if you ask a Java, a JS and a C# developer if they trust their ecosystem, then only one of them is likely to say yes.
So no, there won’t be some great revelation in the JS community. The best you can hope for with stories like these is that fewer developers feel like imposters when they realise that GitHub stores plaintext security assets in their logs.
So you are sort of right, that our leadership trade away privacy. Similar to how they secretly allowed America to house Nuclear weapons at the Thule base doing the Cold War, and, how we typically participate in American lead wars in some form or another, as well as a range of other things.
You call it naive, but it’s quite frankly the reality of being a tiny western country. In a sense you can think of many European countries as you would vassal states to the Roman Empire. It’s obviously more complicated than that, and the comparison is a little daft, but in essence you dance when America tells you to Dance. What happened with Trump wasn’t America electing emperor Nero or Caligula, and then sort of doing business as usual, it was a sign that America might not keep on trucking.
I think there are two sides to this, as you yourself point out, but I also think the concern over data sovereignty is a valid one. Just imagine what would have happened if Russia had relied as heavy on Azure and AWS as the Danish public sector. Now I’m not suggesting that we in Denmark are going to elect a dictator and invade Sweden, but as far as national sovereignty goes, you sort of have to consider a world where we would do something that insane.
Then there is the issue of the wider internet moving from a fun playground for geeks to becoming as much a part of our daily lives as crossing the street. Most countries have laws prohibiting you from crossing the street in your birthday suit, even very liberal countries like Denmark don’t allow that. It would be admirable, but perhaps a bit naive, to think the internet would not be affected by legalisation as it’s importance and influence grew. I think the fact that remains as free as it is, is mainly because the current western leadership is quite old. I don’t expect the coming generations of politicians to be as lenient toward the advertising industry that the previous ones have been. What the EU has done and is doing so far is only the beginning, we will se far more legislation on our rights in the future and I wouldn’t expect major advertising companies like Google and Facebook to have much of a future unless they adapt quicker than they are currently doing.
With legislation, however, comes complexity and sometimes side effects as you point out. We have a filter to guard against piracy and property rights in Denmark. As so many other countries, and while it was original intended to block the pirate bay, child protection NGOs lobbied and eventually got sites containing child pornography included in the filter. I’m in no way advocating that this was wrong, but maybe it should have been two desperate filters as stealing Independence Day and Coyote Ugly is hardly the same crime as abusing children. Because what followed was that other NGOs and political interest groups added more and more things to the filter. Leaving it a mixed box of things, most of which should very likely be banned, but I think you sort of get my point in that nobody really knows what can or cannot be added to it because it quickly stopped being a “anti-pirate” or “anti-child-abuse” filter and became a “anything the political majority agrees is bad filter”. Or a very good example of exactly what happens when legislators get involved. There are side-effects, but I don’t think you should fault the NYT for also mixing up things in something that is really far more complex, than what I have outlined here.
I think data sovereignty, privacy and censorship in general are interesting subjects that I hope established media will take more of an interesting so that we can have a proper public discourse about it that involves non-techies and non-technocrats.