SassyGrapefruit

My friend an I were struggling to orient a couch correctly during a move. We were struggling to fit it through a door. So we wrote an app called "Will it fit"

You took a picture of the piece of furniture side on. Then you could tap to draw a polygon over the image. The app would then rotate the polygon to find the orientation with the minimum width.

Most people just aren't cut out for it. To be a good manager you need to ....

1. Be willing to be wrong a lot and admit it

2. Show vulnerablility

3. Deal with constant setbacks and disappoinment

Most people get the reigns and are suprised to find out its actually a thing nobody wants. Like being a social worker.

He meant to say "Famously Tucker Carlson claimed that the NSA spied on him". Given that the man is a bastion of journalistic and personal credibility I can't see any reason not to believe him /s

I think my favorite part of this discussion is that most developers give this sort of process/code a mystical vibe. Like it's some sacred code built by a priesthood of the world's greatest and smartest programmers. Not accessible to mere mortals.

I encourage developers that work for me to just read the code and documentation. My advice to them is usually something along the lines of...

Think of how you would have done it as a sophomore in college completing an overdue assignment... chances are it works just like that

I don't know man. I am employed but I still get 64 recruiting emails a day. Seems like business as usual. FWIW I have never had luck with applications. The last time I was unemployed I sent out 10 or 15 and heard nothing. I reached out to a recruiter and was drowning in interviews within a week.

As for the other side, I do hiring on my team. We posted a Senior SRE on linkedin and got 30 applicants within a week. That was not our experience 2 months ago(more like 5). Maybe something has changed. I don't know I don't pay too much attention.

They are getting a bunch of negative press for rescinding job offers. This doesn't seem any better. Better would be just not hiring people you don't need and not chasing growth like an unmonitored heroin addict.

The issue is these businesses are hiring without strategy, consideration to risk, or proper forecasting. There should never be a situation within a fortune 100 business where the forecasting is so poor that offers are rescinded. I began making household budget accommodations for the macro economic situation in the first half of 2022. What was google doing at this point? How does a business spend $20-30K on the search process, send out an offer, then all the sudden realize they don't want to hire that person? What cascade of management failures is required for that to even be a possibility? How is it that these businesses don't consider the human cost of these decisions?

This sort of action is unprofessional, questionably moral, and unforgivable. I think the FANG companies were/are overrated. Why would you want to work for a business displaying this level of incompetence?

I don't know man. The attitude comes off as defeatist to me. I think most people with this outlook are engaging in self-sabotage. It's easier than putting themselves out there and risking failure.

They don't try then claim "even I did try what would it get me? making some richy richer, no thanks". Ok so what the alternative? I'm just not willing to sit around complaining. Right now I don't feel like I'm being grifted and if I did I would quit.

Corporate finance doesn't work that way. If someone sets something up that costs $500K a year and it can be done for $150K a year. $150K is the baseline thats how much it should have cost in the first place. Otherwise why wouldn't I set it up to cost $10million a year then retract to $150K then say "Oh gee I saved you millions of dollars you owe me!" We as employees have a responsibility to our organizations to ensure they are trim and healthy. It's how we grow and achieve bigger things.

I have been rewarded in the past and am confident I will rewarded in the future. The individuals that set it up kooky will be retrained to avoid that situation in the future. I feel bad for all the jaded folks they must live very depressing existences.

maybe, but I'll keep doing it anyway.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It can surprising why a business actually exists. It can be counterintuitive(i.e. the mcdonald's is actually a real estate company conundrum). Even the "Product Engineer" guy who can probably talk up a storm about the financials of what he is doing, but in a Fortune 500 business does he really understand how that rolls up to the company's strategy? Is it a side line, is the landscape in transition and this is a existential hail mary? At one point facebook made no money, then they made all their money from placement ads, last I checked they made it from video interstitials. Of their 50,000 employees how many really know the revenue breakdown and how it has changed over time

For me I hate bosses, performance reviews, meetings, etc. I'm cantankerous and angry but I have always had a knack for finding and solving major problems on my own.

From my experience if you have a track record of doing a good job working autonomously and you can demonstrate that you contribute directly to the business's financial interests people just leave you alone and if they don't there is a good chance the boss's of those people will tell them "just leave him alone". Be someone's golden goose and in most organizations you can do whatever you want.

I don't know how your company works but at mine we have a profit target associated with our annual bonus. By eliminating that waste I am helping to ensure we hit that target so I get paid. Imagine if I let it slip and we missed our target by $200,000 that would be dollars coming right out my pocket.

Maybe specifically for product engineers, but does that extend beyond the specific product that engineer is working on. Do you think a network engineer knee deep in a data center knows the margins on all the products? I don't work for a fortune 500 but our revenue scheme and capital structure are complex. I could not profess to understand it in its entirety. We receive revenue from our products, managed services and support, one-off revenue streams, channel/revenue sharing arrangements, consulting, and on and on. This is for a lowly $120 million a year business look at a F500 earning $6 billion and I think it becomes opaque pretty quickly.

I think the majority of employees in most business do not have much visibility into the financial machine that justifies their existence.

I travelled to Yellowstone National Park. I wandered into the back country office and spoke with the ranger. She was super friendly and informative. One interesting fact she shared is that Yellowstone is almost 4,000 sq. miles and receives 5 million visitors a year. 99.9% of those visitors never travel more than 50 feet from the main road. This means that most of those visitors experience less than 1/10th of 1% of the actual park.

Why do I bring this up? Because this is how most worker's experience their organization. Stay in your lane, get that promotion, best case you get your boss's job. But how did that job come to be? Who setup the training that you took? Most people can't even describe where the money in their business comes from.

It is a tremendous advantage to explore your organization fully. Visit its other offices and learn what your colleagues do and why they do it. Especially as an engineer. You can literally write your own ticket. Last year I was bored and I started to break down our cloud spend. This took me on a little detour. That detour involved a team that was following a process I could not understand. Turns out they didn't understand it either. I little reorganization yielded a $385,000/yr cost optimization. It took me just a couple days. Chances are you swim in a sea of complacency too.

>But this isn't just about cost. It's also about what kind of internet we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations.

Yep read that guys blog history and the agenda just pops right out. It's not just about cost for Basecamp its ideological. I can't help but imagine this bias leaks into the financial and operational calculations.

We had a similar situation. We had a team did not want to move to the cloud, the business forced them, so they built the system in a way that fought the cloud. Then the self fulfilling prophecy kicked into high gear. "See we told you it was a bad idea, look at all the problems we have!". The problems were created through half baked attempts to be "agnostic" to the cloud. Once we removed those elements we were able to reduce the cost of the system by over 90%. It was far cheaper than when it was running in the Colo. These folks had no interest in optimizing for cloud native execution they were already planning their move back into the Colo.

Where are the numbers and how do they calculate them? This article lists their cloud spend in detail then "waves hands" at the Datacenter costs simply saying "it will be far far less". Ok why not break it down?

I don't understand how they are going to achieve that. Does it include routers, switches, IPS's? What about the costs associated with having a physically wired network instead of a software defined network.

Also they state they are region redundant which is probably way overboard. Will they be protected if they lose their entire datacenter? Will they flop over to another geo? If not then you must consider not their current spend but their spend if they were single region. That would further eat into proposed savings.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe you can achieve cost parity in a Datacenter but you need a certain level of scale. I am skeptical that it can be done at $3 million in spend.

I would like to see some real numbers on this. I spend between $5 and $6 million a year on infrastructure. I have a physical datacenter in a Colo and two clouds AWS and Azure. I have detailed KPIs on my spend. One of the KPIs is total cost of ownership of an instance or server. My physical instances cost 3 times as much as the exact same compute in the cloud.

This is because I have to factor all the costs. This includes electricity, maintenance, incident response, networking, renting the cage, vendored software for backups, threat detection, fire suppression, equipment upgrades, licensing, alerting, and it goes on and on and on...

I'd challenge you to break down the full cost of owning a server as you see it. I bet you will miss 75% of the actual costs involved. I promise short of seizing a colo like its Nakatomi Plaza and running it at gunpoint you will never in a million years come close to the total ownership cost of cloud instance. You can't compete with the economies of scale and the caliber of the engineering.

I just don't see this. Building what I am describing can be done in days sometimes hours. Where exactly is the time and complexity? I would be willing to bet given a true greenfield(e.g. I can't use an ansible script that stole from my last job) I can build an autoscaling flask app with CI/CD and local environment on ECS twice as fast as accomplishing a lesser facsimile with a bare metal server or a VPS. If I built on a VPS I would still have concerns like backups, High Availability, DNS, Networking, etc. etc. to deal with.

I consider the latter to be far more complex.

> But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.

Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I have to look after myself? How much can I really save? $50 a month maybe less?

A long time ago when I was working a major telecomm provider I had the privilege of working with a great software mentor. He instilled in me the lesson of knowing approximately where you are going to land and not do anything now that would jeopardize that landing.

If I was a CTO at a greenfield startup. I would insist we deploy on a PaaS that supports serverless, object storage, and container orchestration. We would recognize and enforce well accepted patterns that will not impair our ability to scale later. There is plenty I can do to keep the costs low(most importantly turning things off) then when I need to scale up its as easy as turning a knob.

The problem with "don't buy things you can't afford" is that society really says "you don't deserve things you can't afford". Why is it that some brat that never worked a day in their lives can enjoy Avocado toast every day? Is it just because they won the socio economic lottery? Then on the other side a mother of two abandoned by her partner, working two jobs has to make their own toast and plan trips to the park. Sucks to suck I guess. There has to be a better way than this. This form of raw Capitalism is not fair. Generational wealth gets to criticize from a perspective of having wealth and cast judgement on those who make not have it for reasons outside their control.

Good luck with that "Free to Spend" category. It just turned into emergency fund 2.0 for me. One thing that allowed me to spend some money is the idea of diversifying my savings by purchasing assets. Rather than let Emergency fund 2.0 sit in an account as cash burning a hole in my pocket why not buy an asset. This could be an apartment, a collectible, a storage facility, etc. For me this feels like saving and spending at the same time.

When I read your postI can't help but read smart as "smart". You vacillate between holding their intelligence in esteem "but eventually I came to understand that he is so good at reading code..." and condescending "... I can only describe as being a little too smart for their own good"

Now the real question is do you believe you are right? Do you really(and I mean really deep down) think these people are smart. Do you think you have a better way? Do you wish they'd realize that what you are doing is best path forward?

I have seen this sort of conversation pattern in the past. In my case it was a younger programmer that wanted the team to take a different approach, but at the same time were struggling with the "what if I'm wrong?" dilemma. They didn't want to throw their weight behind a proposed change in direction because of insecurities and fear of rejection. What it came across as to the rest of the team was a person that didn't want to lead but at the same time was always finding fault. When confronted they would say things like "I'm not one of the smart ones ..."

If you really are not smart as they are then trust them and learn from them. If you think you have a better path and are committed then stand up and say "This is wrong and here is a better way". If you are right and they reject you then maybe its not the place. If they are able to demonstrate that you are wrong you should accept it and move on. If you are right and they agree then you are in the promised land.

please no AI is advanced enough to tackle vertical centering in CSS.

The jobs computers do today used to be done by "Human Computers". The same arguments were raised when these jobs were mechanized. It's the same cycle over and over.

AI/ML is no silver bullet. It's just another abstraction. It will create new types of jobs. Most likely coordinating/choreographing AI/ML agents in new yet to be discovered applications. It's all part of the endless march of technology. You don't realize how little you are actually capable of until you get the new set of tools that bounce you up to the next level.

Take the tools we have today and present them to some chump shoving punch cards into an early computer and watch their brain melt out of their ears. We can do things with a wristwatch they would have thought impossible. The people that will get burned are the ones that want to stand still. Always be learning.

>Use the Cloud, but don’t be too Cloudy

The number of applications I have inherited that were messes falling apart at the seams because of misguided attempts to avoid "vendor lockin" with the cloud can not be understated. There is something I find ironic about people paying to use a platform but not using it because they feel like using it too much will make them feel compelled to stay there. Its basically starving yourself so you don't get too familiar with eating regularly.

Kids this PSA is for you. Auto Scaling Groups are just fine as are all the other "Cloud Native" services. Most business partners will tell you a dollar of growth is worth 5x-10x the value of a dollar of savings. Building a huge tall computer will be cheaper but if it isn't 10x cheaper(And that is Total Cost of Ownership not the cost of the metal) and you are moving more slowly than you otherwise would its almost a certainty you are leaving money on the table.

I think git is wonderfully elegant and simple. I wish more people would take the time to sit down and understand it. It only takes maybe an hour or two.

>Even a simple merge/rebase leaves one confused.

I've never had this problem. Git always works exactly as its designed for me.

I agree I consider kubernetes to be a simplification. I have two apps running at my company the first is a forest of php files and crontabs strewn about a handful of servers. There are weird name resolution rules, shared libs, etc. Despite my best efforts its defied organization and simplification for 2.5 years.

The second is a nice, clean EKS app. Developers build containers and I bind them with configuration drop'em like they're hot right where they belong. The builds are simple. The deployments are simple. Most importantly there are clear expectations for both operations/scaling and development. This makes both groups move quickly and with little need for coordination.

Why build it when you can buy it? Right? The decision is more involved that this. The real question is...

What is the shortest route to a sustainable, defensible revenue stream?

In the 80's IBM built a super quick computer out of pieces you could buy at Radio Shack. The ultimate solution! Why incur all that upfront manufacturing cost when you can assemble it out of existing parts? They learned the answer really quickly. The lower barriers of entry meant anyone could recreate the product. And so a million clones popped up using the same parts. For a decade Apple ate their lunch by investing in a proprietary platform(which a lot people said was madness using the exact reasoning on display in this article)

SaaS is great but you have to have some sort of moat for whatever you are building. Sometimes that moat can be as simple the idiosyncrasies of your over-engineered, prematurely optimized product. I had a hand in the development of one of the major VPS players during the 2010's. There were things we could do just because of the weird decisions people had made in the past. That translated directly to competitive advantage.

Discovering that there is nothing the be discovered is a discovery.