This phenomenon is referred to as a "double flash":
http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2015/04/18/the-nuclear-double-fl...
802 karma · joined August 13, 2017
Lately, I've been exploring more opportunities to do freelance writing and content creation, mainly centered around engineering and DevOps.
* site: https://mikevanbuskirk.io * twitter: https://twitter.com/mikevanbus
http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2015/04/18/the-nuclear-double-fl...
Zealotry is great when you've got ample time on your hands, but some folks have work to get done and bills to pay, i.e. the authors who's books OP is stealing...
Spend a month with a tech stack of any passing complexity, even ones at $FAANGco...
We're nowhere close to solving all the hard problems.
Are they paying "Bay Area" salaries, or "Skills With The Most Obvious Correlating Signal Of Living In The Bay Area" salaries?
> Salaries WILL be the same everywhere in the world.
Does a Mercedes and a Honda Civic cost the same?
No?
Well why not? They're both cars.
They're paying for the skillsets, and for salaries to be the "same everywhere in the world", the skillsets would have to be the same, and we're not at the point where they've been commoditized to that level(which is a different discussion versus geography anyways).
I don't think companies that want to attract upper-tier engineering talent will be able to get away with it either.
Good engineers:
A) Are outnumbered by job openings non-trivially
B) Return many multiples in value of their total compensation cost
C) Are well aware of A and B from a negotiating standpoint
If I'm operating in the same market orbitals as Facebook, I see this as an instant hiring advantage. Simply tell candidates:
"Not only have we shifted towards remote-focused teams, we won't arbitrarily grade your salary based on where you or your family choose to live"
The increased costs will be a pittance compared to the potential 8-9 figure market advantage gained in 18-36 months by having consistently won hiring battles.
They do make mention of being actively engaged on SO, but this didn't at all read like a marketing piece for getting more SO users.
The key point seemed to be one I've seen echoed repeatedly elsewhere: a lot of good developers write and share a lot. It doesn't have to be Stack Overflow.
"Good" in this context I take to mean holistically good. Not just good on purely technical skills, but soft skills(particularly effective communication), organizationally dynamic, etc...
I've been exploring using AirTable as a potential back-end for read-sometimes/write-rarely data.
I generally agree with:
>"Successful DevOps practitioners don't get paid to write code or configure servers. They get paid to solve problems."
However, I'm curious how your miniseries ties this in. You're starting with what is, ostensibly, rote technical knowledge. How do you convey/teach things like:
- navigating abstract problem spaces
- owing deliverables to cross-team non-technical stakeholders
- responding to severe outages in highly complex, large-scale distributed systems
- designing operational processes to make said outages easier to deal with
Building something end-to-end is a valuable experience, even if the end result might appear outwardly "simple".
I found your blog via the aforementioned Metagame post.
Not that you need it, but I hope I offer some validation in confirming that your ideas around career moats and the "meta" of your career definitely lines up with my own anecdotal experience.
I find that in my spare moments of time to pare down my "to-read" list, your posts have been steadily bubbling their way to the top.
The most proficient, well-compensated engineers I've worked with had deep technical knowledge in their respective domains, but were reasonably well-skilled in other areas(some non-technical), and could easily spool up to basic proficiency quickly.
Learning how to learn, and apply it well, seems to be the underlying meta-skill with the most value.
> The AI will eventually be able to implement any reasonable program, as long as it gets a precise enough specification
make me less worried about the job apocalypse.
It feels to me like getting good, consistent specifications for software is incredibly hard, particularly if some unbound set of humans is meant to interact with it.
Delivering domain specifications for even simplistic "things" is incredibly hard:
I think you definitely highlighted the other side of the coin with Notion: once you're out on the edges of what it can do, there's no way to extend/change/modify.
The performance also comes to mind. Emacs will always be faster vs. an Electron app.
I think I just need to bite the bullet and take some time to really learn Emacs/org, I think after the initial learning curve the flexibility and power will really pay off.
One other question: Sometimes I'll be listening to a podcast, or reading, or will just generally have a thought or idea, and Emacs isn't easily reachable. What's the best way(IYO) to get that in to your system?
Thanks again and I'm hopeful you'll keep up the writing, it's done quite well.
What is your experience with Notion? How does it compare to org-mode, specifically your system?
I had a run at org-mode, specifically with interest in literate and pkm, and it was too painful/buggy, with the obvious rabbit hole of config. So far, Notion appears to be "good-enough", but it's slow and there is some export friction I feel could be smoothed over with org.
Sorry to hear that. I'm curious what the context was though.
At what weight did this occur? Was he a seasoned lifter? Novice?
Sous vide opens up a wider selection of cuts that can be used, which traditionally do not cook well on a grill or in a pan.
Skirt steak, for instance, which has great flavor, but is difficult to cook correctly, can be cooked perfectly in sous vide.
However, once I owned a house and had to do renovating/updating, I ultimately found it frustrating.
Some jobs are incredibly frustrating if you don't have the exact tool to make it easier.
The likelihood the angles and geometry of your home are square is, IME, near 0. Even measuring and re-measuring multiple times, I end up with a lot of wasted, mis-cut material.
YMMV, but I always found when you add up the time spent and material cost, it's nearly a wash to just pay someone else to do it.
Exactly.
Like it or not, there are implicit social contracts if you maintain OSS software.
Yes I've read the birdseed of the various licenses.
I know this will whip up the oft-suffering maintainers and developers in here. But this is the exact kind of trope that stymies wider FOSS adoption.
The artifacts of these little meltdowns are exactly the kinds of things your upper management will cite the next time you suggest using FOSS vs. whatever vendor they're about to push down your throat.
Ignoring security conventions, and then adopting a "take my ball and go home attitude" isn't a ringing endorsement for adopting FOSS, unless it's run by a large entity.
I'm not saying the author should have to endure abuse or harassment, but consistently pushing unsafe code into a web-framework, being cavalier about trivial and widely accepted coding conventions, and dismissing patches as "boring" is exactly how you end up with NPM Ecosystem v2
Not right away. My progression in tech was as follows:
* Company 1: Explicitly onsite, no existing remote paradigm
* Company 2: Explicitly onsite, no existing remote paradigm
* Company 3: Explicitly onsite, existing but ad-hoc/unofficial remote paradigm
* Company 4: Explicitly remote, with other onsite employees
* Company 5: Explicitly remote, with other onsite employees
Companies 1 & 2 had no existing remote paradigm, and there was no opportunity to negotiate for it.
Company 3 had an existing remote paradigm, but it was somewhat ad-hoc/unofficial, and dependent on varying levels of political/organizational capital(how influential/liked was your manager, and their manager etc...). I was able to prove myself and negotiate for full remote after a couple of months. Unfortunately, said political situation deteriorated and with the prospect of my contract not being renewed(or renewed exclusively onsite) I sought a different role.
Company 4 had an onsite/physical office space, but my team/role was explicitly remote, and this was an established aspect of the role throughout the interview process.
Company 5 had an onsite/physical office space, but my team/role was explicitly remote, and this was an established aspect of the role throughout the interview process.
Hopefully this is helpful. My anecdotal experience says that you might need to seize an opportunity to negotiate for remote work where it might not be a first-class paradigm, and later pivot this experience to get a 100% remote role with the established infrastructure and organizational frameworks to properly support it.
At some point, the top-tier IC positions are going to require the type of skills that are commonly associated with extroverts.
https://keavy.com/work/thriving-on-the-technical-leadership-...
>I’ve chosen to cultivate a path for myself that enables me to dig into complex technical and product problem spaces and help lead technical and strategic direction for my organization, as an engineer but not a manager.
Like it or not, if you ever want to escape the delivery trap, you're going to have to be able to effect change that cuts across multiple organizational entities in your workplace, and that's going to require selling yourself and your ideas.
>Bet on it.
Where do I collect my winnings? :)
Perfect description.
I've always been amazed by that blog post.
It reads like a textbook case of bike-shedding(seriously the number of words and engineering thought spent on it is asinine) for what ultimately amounts to faux virtue-signaling about how you're going to get paid 20% below market.
64GB of RAM in a laptop... yowza.
Anyone with more experience could probably chime in.
The net take away for me as well.
From OP:
>Unbeknownst to me, people were messing with the poor guy all night during a party
Doesn't say a whole lot of positives if OP is freely acquainted with people who willingly hurt/disturb animals.
I own multiple cats. Have a child. We foster additional cats as well. I've never seen anyone hurt by a domesticated cat(non-feral) that didn't have it coming.