1,984 karma · joined January 11, 2016
I had completely forgotten about the development of anti-skip. And now that you've made me remember it, I suddenly feel old.
I knew somebody (with very rich parents) who basically had a shoulder bag (read: man purse) so he could carry around his Discman (early Sony version, no anti-skip), an extra CD case or two, and an extra set of batteries. It was awful.
Compared to CDs? Definitely not! Not to mention how many people listened to homemade mixtapes and copies, which made the audio quality even worse.
Did they sound good enough that you could dance, relax, have a good time, be consoled when you were unhappy, or whatever people did with music? Absolutely.
Even when CDs did eventually come out, I far preferred a WalkMan to a Discman. I could put a Walkman in one pocket and a cassette in the other. That wasn't easy with CDs.
There's always a hypothetical edge case for some audiophiles to claim that what they hear is possible. And no matter how much blind testing, research, or engineering is done, this hypothetical edge case means that something has not been proven. It's both pointless and exhausting to discuss anything with these people because the end result is always that the possibility that an edge case exists means you can't claim something is BS.
Imagine somebody claimed that people can fly by flapping their arms. You say this is nonsense, but they said you have to prove it. So you ask 10 people to try to fly by flapping their hands and they cannot. This is not enough proof for them. So now you ask 1000 people to try it. Then the person claims maybe people in your country cannot fly this way, but in other countries they might be able to. So you go to 10 countries and ask 1000 people to try. Now the claim is that you did not test enough people who went to the gym every day and you should have asked the strongest people to fly. When nobody from this group can fly, maybe you should test the lightest people with light bones. This keeps going forever because there is always yet another edge case. Welcome to Audiophilia.
Don't worry, the crisis will not last long. Audiophiles will find a way to get over it and buy some better cables that would have revealed they were using a Digital source all along.
I don't think this is true. A long time ago I was involved in the headphone audiophile community and people were always using the shimmer of a cymbal as how they could tell the difference between MP3s and Lossless, Analog vs Digital, CD vs SACD or whatever. Then they'd do a blind test using Foobar2000 and start saying the whole blind testing methodology is flawed because surely they can hear the difference under normal listening conditions with their $1000 headphone connected to their $3000 amp using their $2000 DAC.
My favorite quote was from somebody who said "Nobody in this community cares about music. They only care about their equipment."
I think we all have qualities that are perceived as "negative" in the larger context of jobs, but if you come to terms to it and focus on the positive aspects of those qualities things might work out for the better.
You can see this a lot with people who have stayed as ICs their whole life because they simply couldn't deal with organizational BS or they didn't have the communication and social style to charm a room of business people. If you are one of these people you can make yourself miserable about how you don't have the personality for BS and everybody else is an idiot, or you can say that while your career was limited vertically, you did what you wanted to and made decent money doing it.
I think I experienced this as well, just in a different country. There was probably no email or website for a patron to check when a book was due so they stamped it. My memory of this is pretty hazy as well.
One of my small joys as a younger person was discovering a book I was looking at hadn't been checked out for a long time. Seeing a 10 year old due date stamp, or better, a book that had been in the library for a long time that had never been checked out, just gave me a small burst of joy.
About a year ago I was on the job market and multiple recruiters reached out to me with the exact same job listing, just with the company name removed. All of them claimed to have an exclusive relationship with the company and they were working directly with the hiring manager. With 5 minutes of Googling I found the original position and the company that posted it.
Do they get penalized if they present a candidate for the job and the company says "No recruiters" and they remove the candidate from their candidate pool?
Tell that to all the people in outsourcing Firms (e.g. Infosys) who end up coming to the US from India to work on COBOL Mainframes as contractors. The large companies hiring those outsourcing companies are doing that because they don't want to pay top dollar for a COBOL devs. I don't think they even want to deal with evaluating and hiring COBOL Devs.
I know somebody who was in that situation. Was paid decently, but nothing special you couldn't get from any other Dev job.
This is one of the things I like about industry jobs. Your career at a company might grow or be derailed by one person, but it's just that particular company. If it's a big company, it's just that particular org. In academia a single person can derail your entire career. As you've pointed out, sometimes it's not even malice. They just aren't interested in doing what they need to support you.
At one point my skip-level was a VP at a software company who loved to push people into doing things by saying "Think about your career. If you do things right you will be set for life." Outside of his tiny universe at that company, nobody even knew he existed. I burned some bridges with that person and some of his sycophants, but I just moved on to a different company with zero ramifications.
It's liberating to be able to just say F-it and move on.
I still have memories of wanting to tell some of my tenured professors that they needed to grow up and find bigger things to cry about. I was in my 20s, they were all 40+.
At least IME, the younger non-tenured professors were less likely to engage in this pettiness because they had, as you have pointed out, a lot more to lose.
When I think back to my thought process when I was applying for academic and research jobs after my PhD, there's one thing I remember that always keeps me from ever second guessing my decision to move to the private sector.
At least in my field, so many people in academia and research had big egos and were a-holes. Some of them were brilliant, many of them just thought they were. It was so easy to end up in a toxic mess. You know that interviewer who makes you feel small because they knew some random minutiae that you didn't know? There are plenty of those in academia and you'll be answerable to them.
I've worked for a bunch of big companies and there's less acceptance of a-holes. If nothing else, your colleagues will acknowledge they are a-holes and validate how you feel. Even if somebody is a brilliant 10X a-hole, a decent management layer will put walls around them to minimize their damage. And if you find yourself stuck working with or for an a-hole, you have more options to switch because there are more jobs.
After close to a decade of customer facing work I got tired of it and left. It's a very long story, so I'll sum it up in the major reasons why I ultimately decided to leave.
1) I grew dissatisfied with basically being in constant MVP mode. The goal of PreSales is to convince a potential customer you can do something, not to actually do it. So you never really build something that goes into production. You never have the opportunity to learn from all the mistakes you made when you see it run for a year or more. Your sense of long-term ownership and mastery is very low.
2) SEs with strong technical skills are in a weird spot. Since your career trajectory is mostly evaluated by non-technical people, most people can't recognize when you do something amazing. You're in a sales org and above your PreSales manager is usually Sales Mangers. There's limited rewards for being technical. The rewards only come from selling.
3). There's no real career path for SEs. Unless you want to do the same job for the rest of your life, you need to move out of PreSales. At every company I've worked and known about, the titles (Associate, Consultant, Senior, Principal) are largely superficial and mean nothing other than your leverage when you are hired. I've known Associate Consultants with 0 experience who were better at PreSales than Principal consultants with 15+ years of experience.
4) I got really tired of sales people. A few of them are amazing and see PreSales as a precious finite resource that you need to take care of. Most see everything and everyone as disposable as long as their needs are met. At my last SE job the sales team was a bunch of toxic a-holes who would blatantly lie to the customer and then just turn around and task PreSales and Engineering to figure out how to make it work. There was no sense of "team" at all.
As far as $$$, I think Engineering and Data Science (my field) jobs have reached the point where you are paid the same as PreSales or just a bit less. This was different in the past. The big money is in Sales, not in PreSales.
I will always value the broad exposure I got to all levels (from ICs to C-Suite) at our customers. All of it was a great experience in climbing out of the technical weeds and really understanding what the customer was trying to do and why they were trying to do it. Learning to enjoy building (by osmosis, nobody taught me) a good slide deck and presenting it is something I value highly.
I want to echo this 100x. IME experience there are two major things to consider.
At the end of the day your job as a Sales Engineer is to convince people to buy something. If you are a reasonably honest person you need to feel like the products you are selling are good. It's soul-crushing to sell a product you think is crap. Unless you are a dishonest person, then it doesn't matter. Work at a company where you believe in the product.
Some companies sell their products to the by mostly talking to the Executives and your job as an SE is to talk and sell vision. Some companies need their SEs to be much more technical and really work with customers on technical matters. Figure out kind of SE you want to be and go into the right role.
You should just find another job. I wouldn't inform customers.
I've been on the other side of this as a customer and I think you might be assuming some standard of ethics/quality at the customer side that may not exist. I'll provide an example.
A few years ago I managed a Data Science team at a large public company. The division I was in had no real marketing strategy for social media. A new CMO (for the division, not the whole company) was hired who was very fixated on marketing on Facebook. So they built a social media marketing team.
Over the next year or so they spent >$1.5 million in various proof-of-concepts and bake-offs with various companies to find a vendor who could "move the needle" on Facebook. IMHO the whole thing was a pile of nonsense and all but 1 vendor (who got eliminated fairly early) was full of crap. The vendor who won was the one who had a bunch of PowerPoints showing how their strategy on Facebook had great results - I think it was all BS.
The social media team loved it took the charts to the CMO. The CMO took it higher up and used it to talk about how they had built the right team, how they had the right vision. Everybody was patting their own backs and probably polishing their resumes so they could say how they transformed the marketing strategy at the company. Nobody wanted the truth, they just wanted to show their bosses how great they were.
4-5 years later the whole division got a massive haircut and the marketing functions got moved back the parent company. But in those 4-5 years, if you said "This is all BS" in public you were likely to get slaughtered.
Just move on. I left pretty quick after realizing nobody cared what I thought unless I agreed with all of it.
I have a similar story to yours, just with clarinet and flute. Our school (outside the USA) had mandatory lessons and practice, so there was some degree of being forced to do it.
I took some piano lessons as an adult and enjoyed it. My piano teacher told me something that really stuck with me. "People who write Adult piano books know the learner isn't going to become a professional classical musician. So they just teach you to play some fun songs and you can enjoy it. Children's music education makes kids suffer under the assumption that they are might one day take it very seriously and become classical musicians. So you perform scales endlessly, have to learn perfect form, learn instruments you don't want to learn because you need to learn the clarinet before you can learn the Sax, learn a bunch of boring classical music when you are excited by other stuff on the radio, practice like crazy for exams, etc. It completely kills their interest in music."
Actually, when I read the post I'd guessed this is what an ex Software Engineer who is now a Data Scientist would do. And looking at the author's LinkedIn confirmed it.
You have to have a software engineering background to come up with this stuff in the first place.
100% Agree.
I work for a Healthcare company (not insurance). I don't find my job satisfying or meaningful. But I feel like what I do in my job is useful to users and stakeholders. My management layer does a good job of pushing back on pointless work.
To look at this more broadly, I've worked in a bunch of different industries in consulting roles. Oil & Gas, Consumer Goods (e.g. laundry detergent),Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing, Medical Devices etc.
Arguably the most morally questionable of those was Oil & Gas. However, the most and least satisfying work I did was in Oil & Gas. When the project was useful to the users and stakeholders, I felt motivated and useful. When the projects were pointless and the users didn't care I felt useless and felt like every day was a waste of my life. The whole "Oil and Gas Industry is Evil" was always there in the air, but it never really changed my sense of fulfillment or meaning in my work.
I imagine every industry is the same way. Let's take a social media company. Some people are optimizing ads to better target new parents who feel lost and unsure. Some people are optimizing the data centers to reduce power consumption. I imagine some people would find a job doing the latter useful and a job doing the former as not only not useful, but harmful.
I don't think I can find fulfillment or meaning in any job. But I can chose a job where I feel like what I'm doing in useful, even if it's only useful in the tiny microcosm of the context of my job.
I'm not sure what boring has to do with being entrepreneurial. There are people who are so work obsessed they seem 1 dimensional. Being obsessed with work can quickly make your personality boring. One of the most boring people I know is a successful (at making money, not anywhere else in life) entrepreneur. Talking to them is like getting a highlight reel of the news. "It's hard to find good workers, health insurance premiums are too high, schools aren't teaching job skills, etc"
>I still want to be creative.
I think if your mentor had said "Don't become passive, stay creative and curious" I could have agreed with that. As you get older, have kids, get hurt in relationships etc, it's really easy to lose all your personal interests, hobbies, and just get into a rut where you basically do nothing. You give up trying or learning at your job, and your spare time is just watching TV. Having hobbies, learning stuff, that keeps you creative. Leaving a job when you have clearly reached a point where you are bored out of your mind and you have stopped learning ... having some sort of a challenge at a job keeps you creative.
I joke with people that the pace of my hobbies and personal learning is basically "How to take two years to work though a book about how to learn something in 30 days." But it's better than not getting through it at all.
Apparently Google has announced that G suite will still be free for personal use. You can keep Gmail with custom domains. You have to go into your admin account and confirm your account is for personal/family use.
If you already upgraded (like I did because I felt forced to until I could migrate to something else), there is a support path to downgrade to the G Suite free edition.
I had a 1991 Taurus SHO (manual) that did this. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the throttle assembly, but the cable would bind somewhere and it would keep the throttle open. I could never figure out where it was binding and neither could any mechanics.
I usually had to pull over to turn the car off and back on again.
The SHO accelerated very fast (at the time) so thankfully it never happened when I was facing a wall.
One challenge is that the "coolness" of projects are typically driven by the Product you sell. Do you sell a cutting edge Product doing something novel? It's harder to sell and projects are more likely to fail, but you'll probably have interesting (and maybe stressful) projects. Do you sell a Product which makes it easier for large enterprises to streamline and automate an important/high-value boring thing? Then the projects are probably going to be boring.
> Lots of opportunity to contribute back to platform teams and platform teams treating us like customers.
I've worked in a PS org and with other PS orgs. It's always amazing to me that many PS orgs get heavily siloed and nobody listens to them in a Product company. This is despite the fact that these are the people who literally see their customer pain points on a daily basis. The end result is that you feel like a 3rd class citizen in your own company.
> Does your compnay have similar problems?
Yes, and I've seen the same at multiple companies. IME turnover in PS tends to be high.
IMHO, there are two factors that make jobs at PS orgs at many Product companies boring.
1).Building with or customizing the Product tends to be repetitive and follow the same pattern. The better and more mature the product, the more you basically just follow a set of steps and not get to really be creative or go outside of a certain box.
I'll use a dashboard tool (E.g. PowerBI/Tableau/Spotfire) as an example. They are very useful products and customers love them. But from a PS standpoint, you doing the same thing over and over. As a first job, you learn a lot the first 1-2 years. But after that, you literally just repeat the same thing over and over again. It gets old very fast.
What follows is an obvious lack of skill progression and career growth. From a skill set perspective, the job titles (Associate, Consultant, Senior, Principal) can really say more about salary and less than skill. In other jobs (e.g. Software Development) there's a clear career progression. In PS, upward mobility really means to go into PS management or sales - which a lot of people don't want to to.
I imagine things are different in PS at a cloud provider like AWS since there is a much broader set of technologies and use cases to work it.
2). The second thing has to do with how projects are proposed and sold. As a PS manager, you want customers to be happy and projects to succeed. One of the best things you can do is come up with a "Solution" where you sell a certain deliverable and you understand all the requirements and effort to deliver that solution. Then you just keep selling that and build a repeatable and reliable pipeline for your services group.
The worst thing is an "exciting" greenfield project where nobody can understand how much time, effort, and people are needed. You can't plan your schedules and people resources around unpredictable projects. So those projects tend to get pushed to partners or stay in PreSales where resource planning is a little more ad-hoc. Or the company just says they can't do it.
If the best way to drive positive outcomes is to repeat the same thing over and over, then obviously the projects are going to be boring. This works out great for PS management since they can have a high utilization rate and solid pipeline for work. It's going to be a mixed bag for ICs. They get predictable work and a steady paycheck, but the work is boring.
>Managers in PS has a target "billable utilisation" they are expected to hit.
Unlike some others in this thread, I had a good experience with utilization targets and time tracking. For one of the companies I worked for, consultants had a utilization target, and then an accelerator. The targets were set well. We had a good pipeline, so it was really easy to hit the accelerator, get nice bonus, and get time to take a vacation as well. Some places set the utilization targets too high and it basically ruins the job.
We also only worked in 40 hour blocks. So if a customer had 8 hours of work, they were billed for 40 hours and the consultant basically only worked 1 day that week. This was in the contract the customer signed and they were told about it as well. The end result was that a consultant basically only worked with 1 customer a week and tracking hours was easy.
This also pushed away a lot of the PITA customers who wanted to whine about 1 hour here and there. If you want to micromanage the consultants, feel free to find a consulting company who will let you do that.
>We encourage developers to come up with side-projects, improvements, learning goals etc. and we make time for them when there is something tangible. We also come up with initatives and offer them to take these up which would also contribute to their career progression. There is some take up but not much.
At least when I was in PS, my side-projects were really a way to learn things that could get me a out of PS. There was no real value in me spending any spare time getting better at the Product(s) I was using in my job since all of that knowledge was too specialized to be useful outside of the company I was working for.
My work schedule was also very erratic. I'd have one 4 week project with a very demanding customer. Then I'd have 2 slower weeks with another customer. Then 3 busy weeks with another customer. It's hard to maintain any momentum on side-projects, learning goals, etc in that situation. So I wouldn't even start.
If I told my employer that I wanted to learn a set of skills or work on a side-project that had nothing to do with my current job, I don't know how well that would have been received.
Then you're taking a huge gamble that you are going to win the tenure track prize. Most people don't win that prize. Even if you do good work, there's plenty of stories (even on HN) of an academics career getting wrecked by one influential person.
>Plus, I imagine the work is good for an aging mind.
Yes, if you're lucky enough to sustain a research program into your 60s/70s. IME a lot of professors can't do that as younger researchers overtake them. So then your option is to take on more administrative duties, which is a lot of petty politics. Or you can just check out and ride your tenured status until retirement, which some people do - good for them, not so much for the students in their program.
As you walk that path, you've got to have a lot of faith in the future as you are constantly presented with examples of where the path you are walking on is likely to fail. I was there once and I took the hint early and left academia.
I wouldn't call them risk averse. You get paid peanuts and treated like crap for years in the hope that you'll find a research path that generates funding. It's a lot less risky to get a private sector job and make money.
As far as Elon Musk versus professors, it's a different type of risk. I knew somebody who sacrificed a lot of potential money for years of his life so he could try an contribute to research for a specific medical condition. He was brilliant and I'm sure he could have made 4X the salary in a tech job.
Honestly, when I lived in UAE I had to submit my passport to a centralized system that held the passports of people who worked in that commercial area. To this day I don't know if I had to legally give them my passport or if my employer simply encouraged me to do it and presented it to me as as if I didn't have a choice.
A few weeks ago I had to take a sick family member to the emergency room here in the US at 3AM because they vomited blood. All medical resources online said it could not wait till morning as it could be internal bleeding. They were given an X-ray, an external exam by a nurse and a doctor, and told that it was a mild adverse reaction to some common medication and to swap to something else. Nothing to worry about. Time from leaving home to back home was 75 minutes, tops. Bill was $3500. My employer only offers HDHP options so a lot of that is on me once the insurance company and hospital are done playing their stupid games.
I think all employers in UAE are required to provide health-insurance. Prior to that, everybody there legally had governmental healthcare, but that has changed as medical costs have risen private insurance has become an option.
Thankfully I have insurance and I work in tech. It hits my budget and stings, I can afford to pay it. But if I didn't have health insurance and had family in my home country who depended on me sending money every month, that bill would have wrecked my life.
I realize passports versus medical benefits is not a sensible comparison at all.
Nobody seems to write stories about how governmental treatment of migrant workers in UAE has improved a lot over the last 2 decades. There's tons of room to improve, but it has gotten better.
Confiscate is probably too extreme a word, but when I lived in UAE many employers held onto (e.g. in the office safe) their employees passports. At some point I think the government realized this could be abused, and then there was an centralized office (at least in Jebel Ali, it was different in Abu Dhabi) where your employer asked you to have them hold your passport. To get your passport you had to get a letter from your employer saying it was okay for you to get it. Or, in my case, I left my job and got it back.
Personally, I hated the fact that I had to ask my employer for my passport when I got accepted into Grad school in the US and had to tell my employer I needed it for a few days to get a visa. I never questioned the legality of it though, and according to this it's not legal for employers to force you to hand over your passport.
https://gulfnews.com/uae/find-out-if-your-employer-is-author...
But like most legal things, when you are on a work visa you are scared of anything that might harm that. So you don't challenge or ask questions. It's pretty common for people on H1B to stay at an job they hate even though changing jobs on H1B is supposed to be easy. I certainly stayed at a bad job longer than I wanted to until my green card process hit a certain point. I think legally I could have changed earlier, but the company immigration attorney certainly gaslighted me on many things, and I was just too scared to take any risks with visa stuff. It's easy for a company to exploit that fear.