clavalle

You're barking down the wrong tree.

We're talking about the prediliction of one party in the US to bribe one group relative to another, not the other way around.

But since you asked, Democrats have well established intention of getting big donors out of the camapaign game. It's in their national platform and everything.

I'd rather politicians bribe voters than donors. Less chance of oppressive oligarchy that way.

Then again, all the stuff people put together in the past is pretty convenient.

Maybe we should consider keeping the good stuff.

Depends on the length of the contract.

Super short term contracts (measured in hours): $250/hr (though I might raise this after looking at this thread!)

Short term contracts: $200/hr

Longer term contracts: $175/hr

Retainer: $125 a month

I'm not a full-time contractor, though, so these rates are designed so that people and organizations that really need my help (and I generally have some previous relationship with) can get it if they really need it without wasting my time on unimportant projects.

I'm a generalist I design and build software and run teams that do the same (super descriptive, huh?)

I agreed with that...right up to Roe v Wade being overturned.

Privacy is going to become a very important issue very quickly as some states start to make laws that will be shockingly backward to most people. And those laws will be sticky and will require Amendment level changes to correct. To prevent an Amendment, even Repbulicans will introduce sweeping and broad privacy laws and will likely point to big tech companies as scapegoats to divert attention from their own generally unpopular activities (that play great to their base so they don't get primaried out).

Corporations are going to get swept up in the melee unless they begin to self-govern in a very real way very quickly to get ahead of this. Because every personal data player that does something can can be spun negatively will be dragged through the mud for political points from both sides.

The US codifying privacy as a Right.

Too many parties interested in exploiting the lack of privacy are making the lack of privacy laws painfully apparent.

When it changes, its going to be all at once.

Agreed. I chunk slack messaging the same way I do email. I have two channels that I'll take realtime notifications on, but if someone raises those flags without very.good.reason, they'll hear about it. I generally won't see anything on those channels more than once a month.

For special 'war room' projects I'll set up a special channel that I'll pay attention to for real time colab, but those are very unusual situations with a well defined end date.

There have been a sharp uptick in layoffs...but it seems like those folks are getting snatched up almost as soon as they're let go the market is so hungry for talent.

That's great. I knew a woman who successfully went to a top university at 16 after being homeschooled who graduated summa cum laude and got a full ride scholarship to a very good law school. She was intrensically motivated and geared toward learning. She's done very well for herself.

Her little brother tried to do as little as possible, failed out of community college, and was put in place at his father's company where he proceeded to run the best people off. His father conveniently decided to retire and sell the business to a competetor before that went on too long and the last I heard his son was still living at home trying to get his twitch streams to take off. He's not a dumb person. He probably would have done better with more structure.

A lot to unpack here but I've seen homeschooling work wonderfully and completely fail -- within the same household.

Homeschooling is not for every family, perhaps not for most families. Parents may not have the luxury of time. Teaching is a profession that requires a level of expertise in subject matter and the art of education itself that parents may not have. Kids have differing levels of intrensic motivation for learning school subjects. Some children do much better with other authority figures than their parents for some activities. Not to mention children with learning challenges that most parents are ill equipped to respond to adequetely. Not to mention the value of interacting with different people and viewpoints. And on and on.

I'm glad your familiy has found success. I've seen it work and work amazingly for some. But I've also seen it fail badly.

Schools, especially public schools, have their problems, no doubt, but if I had to place bets on which society would end up in a better place in two generations, one where everyone is homeschooled vs one where everyone goes to public school, it's no contest. Teaching done by professionals is going to win hands down.

This is a LOT to put on a PO. I hope they have help.

Googling well is an underrated skill.

Sounds a lot like what JHipster does with Yeoman generators.

I don't agree with the people saying find new friends.

I drink, but alcohol makes me feel terrible so I don't drink nearly as much or as often as many of my friends. But I still hang out with them and we still have a good time. It's not that big of a deal.

Alcohol is a quick dopamine hit and a signal that fun is about to happen. But, really, what are you doing /during/ the fun? Talking with friends. Playing games. Doing recreational activities. Eating a good meal. Taking your mind off the troubles of the day. That's the core. That's the fun.

The dopamine of the core fun is going to take a little more time to hit, that's all. You have to be patient when you do those core fun activities for that to happen. And it will.

You have to retrain yourself. Nothing more, nothing less.

To help yourself along you can pick a new trigger; a signal to yourself to get into fun mode. Pop a tic-tac. Repeat a mantra three times in your head 'work hard, play hard'. Whatever. But do it consistently and don't do anything you wouldn't do while drinking (like ruminating over work or actually getting back to work). You'll break the spell!

This is all assuming you're not an alcoholic and actually physically dependent on alcohol. (Cravings, self destructive behavior, compulsion to drink, agitation when not drinking etc) If that's the case you'll need some sort of treatment and quickly. And you will probably have to remove yourself from situations where you might relapse. I've seen alcoholism absolutely destroy people and it's not something to tackle by yourself.

I'm in a similar boat. I feel your pain.

I was an engineer and very early employee at a startup. I helped grow it from four clients to many millions in revenue and a successful exit. I nurtured a team of amazing engineers. I felt like I needed to stick around to see the product off to a good start and my team thriving at their new home. I was also excited because I hadn't worked at a large company since I was just out of college and I was interested in the unknown challenges that awaited.

Our parent company isn't quite as bureaucratic as yours sounds, but it's more bureaucratic than our original company, for sure. But they said all of the right things. More resources. More opportunities for personal and team growth. But things wouldn't change and we'd be left alone to continue our success but with more fuel and maybe a slight shift to integrating more smoothly with the rest of the company's products.

I also found myself in a leadership position, so I thought I could change what few small things I noticed as a bit inefficient in the the culture to be a bit more responsive.

Long story short: I'm looking for another growth stage startup to join. I probably should have done so right away.

First warning -- the new company was obsessed with what title I should have. The startup didn't put much weight in titles. We did what needed to be done. My official title was Director of Engineering -- mostly to make clients happy when I talked to them, but they definitely could not have that...that tier was full. I ended up a Solutions Architect and Technical Manager. Ok, cool. Similar responsibilities and team.

Second warning -- lots of leadership changes at the home office. We've had three CEOs since we've been acquired. We're just the right size to be a stepping stone for ambitious leaders. It's kind of amazing that we have CEOs step into a very complex organization selling very complex solutions and they expect to learn enough to make an impact in a month. Then they start to pursue their agenda with verve! So...they inherit the broad brushstrokes of the previous administration, add a few of their own, and the organization is off on a new adventure. Unfortunately, it's a recipe for a lot of stuff to be ignored. The previous agendas that might have been the first step in a fine program of ideas that would lead to wonderful things becomes The Agenda. Predictably, the first step isn't enough to see a whole lot of fruit so...yeah.

Third warning -- we weren't allowed to even talk about creating new products. We're an acquisition company, now. We buy winners. We don't risk creating losers. Not so fun for someone who Really Loves Creating New Things.

So...here I am envying your early clarity. Large companies are just different. I am starting to believe innovation at scale is rare, if it exists at all. If I were you, or me two years ago, I'd start looking for a better fit.

Let the MBAs run these companies through the motions of the terminal stages of the business lifecycle. I'm ready to get back to bringing new things to life. It sounds like you are, too.

If we're loosely defining a 'tech stack' as something you can build tech in and share, Jupyter Notebooks (I prefer Julia but Python is fun, too) are the most fun I've had coding cool, useful stuff that I can pass to others to use in a long, long time.

But I admit that's stretching the term probably past breaking since it's not a 'general purpose' stack.

But I'm a data person. I've built my career staying away from the UI as much as possible because I find it so frustrating and tedious. So I'm curious to see what others have to say in this thread.

You need to find other smart people in a similar place but with no skin in your game and rubber duck with them about what you're thinking about.

This has a lot of benefits: you can serve as their rubber duck and help solve their problems which feels great.

You can sanity check your thought process and conclusions. This will help assuage the doubt.

And it's a social connection which helps with anxiety.

Also, go easy on yourself. No one knows the 'right' answer. It's great to look for the best move but it's ok to make a bunch of merely really good moves, too. Allow yourself to accept the context under which your decisions are made.

Don't forget to give yourself space. You're CTO. Delegate the shit out of everything you can, even the stuff you're best at. Call it a growth opportunity for your team. But if you don't give yourself the space to make great decisions, everyone suffers. Avoid the 'busy-ness' trap at all costs. That's not your job.

Beyond just titles for pay reasons:

Principal Software Engineers are essentially the Engineer Owner of a solution or closely related set of solutions.

They're expected to know the ins and outs of the solution both at a business level ('Hey, Principal, how much would it cost and how long would it take to do 'x'?' -- Some Sales Person), and have responsibility for the solution's engineering ('Two months? Great! See you at the February demo for the users group!' -- Some Sales Person), and be able to solve the more difficult engineering issues that crop up ('The app you promised to integrate with by February only uses SOAP and consists of around 14,000 on-prem installs...I graduated after the year 2000 so I'm not sure how SOAP works, can you walk me through this 'wizdal' thing?' -- Some Senior Engineer that you asked to look into the new project).

I come from a very practical engineering math background.

I am really excited about this project because it makes it very clear how everything hangs together in a way that I haven't experienced before. The visual structure of a single definition/theorem/states is very helpful. Also, knowing how many 'levels' from the original concept I'm currently exploring while unpacking and re-packing just helps everything click into place.

Very, very cool.

Well, until you hit the philosopher layer.

Depends on what you mean by good but there are many that certain enterprises couldn't do without that well outperform competitors and employees would melt into bubbly goo if they couldn't use them anymore -- but they tend to be very custom made for either a particular enterprise or a very niche set of very similar enterprises.

It's unfortunate that all of this got politicized, but the fact is that nobody knows for sure where it came from nor does anyone know for sure where it didn't come from.

I would say it's not a waste of time to review what labs are doing all over the world since the stakes are so high.

Date your posts!

Mention versions and dependencies where possible/practical.

Show me the code!

Point to relevant source material.

You're right, poor choice of words.

Quite rational market adjustments.

However...I did end up going to another dealership that didn't do the adjustments. Since I tend to stick with vendors, especially for large ticket items, I suspect the total lifetime value the first dealership missed out on by tacking on the market adjustment (that they didn't tell us about until we asked -- it wasn't on the sticker), eclipses the extra profit they would have made on that sale, even when adjusting for the time value of money.

I was in the same boat.

I usually avoid buying new but used cars are nearly the same price as new (if you can find a dealer that hasn't done ridiculous 'market adjustments').

So we bought new. We had to buy a car that was just off the delivery truck before the dealership had it inspected. The one we'd looked at two days before was long gone and they expected the one we bought to be sold the next day.

My neighbor traded in his truck for more than he paid for it two years ago. It's bonkers.

Mechanics are about to make a killing.

Keeping money moving is the desired outcome of inflation.

Spending money isn't what keeps people in poverty.

>And only like 8 people can tell you that information 3 months after the fact.

It's like that in every large organization. But it turns out businesses are pretty good at tracking costs, no matter how complex.

Besides, the specifics of any single case don't matter all that much. The variation can be smoothed out given enough data and a few common points of comparison.

But all of this is asking the wrong question...not 'how much does this cost now?' which is hopelessly mired in historical cruft but 'how much would this cost if done efficiently?'.

I wonder if the VA has open books...if not, they should.

Stop? No. Reduce? Yes.

I find the opposite.

It is too easy to fit Really Hard Problems into one, seemingly innocuous, sentence.

The 'reasonable' requirement is a tough one to get people to agree on, especially if they don't have a firm grasp on what is possible.

For example, I've seen one sentence requirements like

"Let the user import legacy data".

Depending on the systems, that's either a one liner script or an entire industry.

Luckily there's a mechanism to entice people to give up some of their time and effort to work on things that other people find valuable.

They don't have to be passively threatened with starvation or homelessness or other unpleasantness to make that trade.