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bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)

It means we require people to physically be located in the US, but no citizenship requirement.

bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments

We use this process to make some of the harder more nebulous decisions that require a bit of research and investigation from the entire team. While it does suffer a little from "decision by committee" we haven't ran into it as a problem in practice.

It's a great way to give people a chance to try and introduce new technology, processes, or paradigms. If they're committed they'll get the entire team excited and involved. If the team isn't interested it doesn't make it to the end of the process - and that's ok!

bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)

- Tool chain issues. Similar to the blog Nzen posted in a comment here, upgrading compilers could be a pain if breaking changes were introduced

- Poor ecosystem fit for an enterprise environment. We weren't willing to write libraries for some of the things we needed to support: DB2 access, SOAP, etc. Ended up writing C# wrapper services for a lot of that early on

- Poor library ecosystem in some cases. What felt like a good choice would be unsupported a year later

- Perhaps our own fault for committing to using Reflex for a heavyweight frontend. The team did an amazing job, but supporting GHCJS, the tooling around it, and trying to get faster dev iterations became a huge drag on the team

- Indirectly had to support it due to Reflex, but Nix. It's another rabbit hole that requires collective interest and a willingness to peel back the layers to make things work. Was another drag on the team

At the end of the day I'd say the biggest problem was cultural. I firmly believe that in order to have a successful Haskell environment, you need devs committed to the language and would label themselves "Haskellers". My team learned it and became expert engineers, but they are by no means Haskell language pros who thoroughly understand the inside outs of the language and its myriad of extensions. It's just a tool to them and they only used as much as they needed to.

bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)

The short version: The team had no problems with the language when I introduced it back in the day, but after writing over 300k+ SLOC of production code over 6 years we bumped hard into a lot of the typical ecosystem problems that tend to crop up in discussion. We still have systems we support written in it which won't be phased out for years, but no new projects will be written with the language.

If the team had been full of diligent Haskellers they'd have stuck with it, but they aren't really the type to align with a language/paradigm, and so a slow pivot into F# was decided ~2 years ago via a well documented RFC process.

I'm personally still a Haskell fan, but my hand isn't on the keyboard anymore. Not my place to make the tooling choice for them.

No one above me cares about this type of choice since we're a small backend department to internal customers. As long as the team is delivering results by the deadlines we commit to we get a lot of freedom to use whatever tooling we think makes sense.

bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)

Matanuska Telecom Association | Software Engineer - Systems Engineer | Full-Time | Alaska (UTC-9): REMOTE

MTA is an Alaskan ISP serving the southwest area of the state. The software team consists of 7 devs who support a relatively complex business enterprise environment. We're looking to add another Software Engineer and a dedicated Systems Engineer (DevOps) to our team.

As the hiring manager I want to be clear about a few things:

- This is a 70 year old enterprise telecom, not a high speed startup

- This job may interest you if you want great benefits and long-term job stability

- We have an existing environment running onsite on VMWare; the Systems role is designed to support, improve, and make adjustments to our tech stack over time

- Our core backend language is F# these days (replacing Haskell after 5+ years in production), frontend is React

- Our DevOps tooling is built around Terraform, Chef, Nomad, Vault, Concourse CI, Sensu, Prometheus, etc

- Must be authorized to work in the US

Software Engineer: https://mta.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/4/home/requisition/59...

Systems Engineer: https://mta.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/4/home/requisition/60...

bojoon 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

> The idea behind devops was to be a single team.

I assume you are pointing out that split-teams is the insane part, in which case I agree. The philosophy was supposed to define the blurred line between developers and operations, using tooling to help facilitate the shared responsibilities where sensible and make hand-off a breeze.

As you pointed out, the division existed 20 years ago, and it still exists now at many places. That lack of integration doesn't offer much improvement in relation to the past.

bojoon The New Godot Development Fund

It's ironic that I am cheering for a small open source team to get more funding in light of a $14.7B for profit company introducing what appears to be developer price gouging?

bojoon Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Blueprints are fun to work with, but the amount of time it takes to drag and drop nodes around to make the equivalent of a for loop feels incredibly unproductive. The result does look visually pleasing though!

bojoon The New Godot Development Fund

Great news! Given the Unity price changes that dropped[1] I hope we see Godot get more funding.

[1] https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat...

bojoon Maybe Rust isn’t a good tool for massively concurrent, userspace software

I think they are referring to channels, which came with the tagline "share memory by communicating."

bojoon Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

> have kids, develop increasingly esoteric personal hobbies, get into fitness/longevity

This is the route I've taken and my mental health is much better for it. I still wonder what I'm missing out on had I stayed on the treadmill, even now, but I keep telling myself the life balance far outweighs the work balance.

bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2023)

Authorization to work in the U.S. is required, but not citizenship. We can only offer remote to people located in the U.S.

bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2023)

This company is an ISP, was a telephone company once upon a time, and has a lot of underlying business systems that it takes to run it. My team writes the vendor integrations and custom software you can't buy off a shelf unique to this particular company.

A good chunk of our world is Microsoft .NET, so we have legacy C# applications lying around. Several years ago we wrote some new systems in Haskell and really enjoyed the FP experience but not the ecosystem. F# moves us closer to the business world while maintaining the FP experience we enjoy.

bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2023)

Matanuska Telecom Association | Software Engineer - Systems Engineer | Full-Time | Alaska (UTC-9): REMOTE

As the hiring manager I want to be clear about a few things:

- This is a 70 year old enterprise telecom, not a high speed startup

- This job may interest you if you want great benefits and long-term job stability

- We have an existing environment running onsite on VMWare; the Systems role is designed to support, improve, and make adjustments to our tech stack over time

- Our core backend language is F# these days (replacing Haskell after 5+ years in production), frontend is React

Software Engineer: https://mta.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/4/home/requisition/59...

Systems Engineer: https://mta.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/4/home/requisition/60...

bojoon Employees in Asia are spending most time looking busy at work, says Slack report

> They are kept on because having a lot of people underneath you in the org chart is a status symbol.

Can confirm. Worked for two Japanese mobile game companies that drove themselves out of business as they strove for headcount over production value.

bojoon NASA enters ‘home stretch’ to reach golden asteroid

I was trying to make a point about post-scarcity, but sure, let's continue to focus on capitalism I guess.

bojoon NASA enters ‘home stretch’ to reach golden asteroid

> On one hand, a single country can't just flood the market with a valuable material.

Why not? Seems like the start of the path to post-scarcity civilization. Once nothing has value and everyone has everything I'd say that's a win.

bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2023)

Sorry for the late reply: absolutely.

bojoon Going beyond ‘do you know of any open positions?’

> embellish your resume and work history. If you’ve read a tutorial on a technology, you list it.

I'm going through a huge pile of resumes for a role I have open this week and these are getting thrown out immediately. I have no interest in reading through 6 pages of bullet points with keywords bolded. It's tacky, too information dense, and doesn't call out what you are actually good at nor how you've applied it.

bojoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2023)

Matanuska Telecom Association | DevOps Engineer | Full-Time | Alaska (UTC-9): REMOTE

MTA is a rural Alaskan coop ISP. The software team consists of 8 devs who support a relatively complex business enterprise environment. This role pertains to the platform/delivery portion of the workload, including the configuration and support of Chef, Terraform, Nomad, Concourse, Consul, Vault, Sensu, and Traefik.

As the hiring manager I'll be perfectly clear about a few things:

- This is a 70 year old enterprise telecom, not a high speed startup

- Our salary range can't compete with pure software startups; I am not allowed to disclose it here unfortunately

- This job may interest you if you want great benefits and long-term stability

- We have an existing environment; the role is designed to support, improve, and make adjustments to it over time

https://mta.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/4/home/requisition/56...

bojoon Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

So, are we saying it's unethical for Google and other search engines who make money off of ad revenue to scrape sites like Twitter? Or are they paying a large sum to Twitter to do this?

bojoon New rule would give electric utilities incentives for investing in cybersecurity

No disagreements there. What's a better answer though? No one wants to do it, most non-tech people don't understand it, yet the standards and procedures need to improve to reduce the attack surface area - especially for businesses which support critical infrastructure.

bojoon New rule would give electric utilities incentives for investing in cybersecurity

Having helped implement NIST 800-171 for a small enterprise company preparing to work prime government contracts I can assure you it costs money either way.

Time and money spent working with cybersecurity professionals writing SOG/SOPs which map the business practices to the standard. Money spent buying and setting up some of the necessary equipment to handle CUI properly. Time (indirectly money) spent redoing decades old business processes to map to the new paradigm. Time (indirectly money) as the business spent time training their staff up on the components relevant to their business units.

I agree that building a culture is at the root of it, however, that culture alone isn't going to move the needle unless everything else is in place as well. Worse, you have to walk the company through the 5 phases of grief because in general people don't entirely understand what is actually going on and why it's important. "So you can get government prime contracts" is an easy answer, but doesn't erase the confusion behind all of the hand-wavy procedural work required to execute them.

bojoon Scientists unfroze rat organs and transplanted them

I assume volume is the problem. Can anyone explain what the speeds are required to freeze any particular organ safely?

bojoon Writing prettier Haskell with Unicode syntax and Vim

While I do think these look nice (appropriate even), maintaining consistency across a large team of devs is where this type of stylization breaks down. Not everyone is using the same code editor, not everyone's configuration is the same. At the end of the day it's easier to write and maintain the long-hand word versions.

bojoon Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

I'm not sure about this project specifically, but Tauri let's you farm all of your business logic out to the Rust side with straightforward function calls and keep the web view a presentation layer.

bojoon Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

Chromium or Tauri, you are still building platform specific binaries either way.

bojoon Dynamic programming in Haskell: automatic memoization

Eta reduction/expansion has nothing to do with performance. It's a form of point free programming that allows you to abstract out intermediate variables and use partial application instead.

    f x = reverse (sort x)

Becomes:

    f = reverse . sort

The compiler reaches the same conclusion either way.

Perhaps you are thinking of RULES pragmas? Which honestly you wouldn't usually reach for unless you really need to force the compiler to optimize in a particular way that is non-trivial.

bojoon Are you a late bloomer in work or love? Maybe you’re right on time

Would you say the same thing if we were talking about software startups?

bojoon John Carmack on shorter work weeks (2016)

Maybe I'm a jaded 44yo at this point, but why would you put your maximum into it unless it's your own business or you have a guaranteed payout for that effort? Not everyone works at a startup, nor are all startups successful.

Look at the big tech layoffs earlier this year - they were letting both the cruft and top tier talent go. Is it easy to say you are truly safe where you are at?

No one will remember or care about your title, your salary, or the effort you put into wherever you work. Your next employer will have no insight into any of that at all outside of your interviews; they'll measure your worth on the job unless you are a world class snowflake.

I'm not saying don't continue to learn and excel! But there's more to life than your day job. Spoken as someone who discovered way too late a proper life/work balance.