243 karma · joined April 20, 2015
Spotify isn't for you, its for people who want a reasonable sound played on affordable headphones, which it does the best IMO.
One takeaway I found from my experience, using a combination of linkedin and ycombinator co-founder match is just how many non-technical think you are going to be an employee. One meeting was basically 10 minutes of me pitching my idea, then 20 minutes of them asking if I was interested in contract work on an idea that was a year in with no progress. One guy was even like, "look, i need a coder, I can pay you x", not a great way to end a co-founder date.
If you are a engineer on say 70k and see a senior role at another company for 90k and expect, once promoted at your current company, to see your salary go up, you might be surprised. Some companies just take the lowest band price if the market, 77k for example and will claim that is market rate.
I have seen this many times and if the employee leaves, the company will spend months and thousands plus 10% first year salary to get a replacement and will most likely end up paying more than the original employee was on. I find this kind of process so frustrating as a hiring manager, the amount of time and effort required to go through candidates and interviews just to replace people you shouldn't be losing.
For those interested, it is a scala shop, all terraform and AWS on the backend
Communication is difficult because platform, like SWEs, are supporting people, but the support is direct, so platform often have a torrent of people asking for things. This is a problem when the SWE doesn't know what they want because they are a newbie out of university, or worse, they know what they want, but don't know how to work the insane platform mono repo that requires 9 items on a checklist to get a IAM permission added that the platform team member told them about in a support slack channel.
I think a lot of platform teams also make their own lives harder by making too many abstractions. If it is impossible for an SWE to add a new resource to the cloud without a platform engineer helping, then platform are always going to be disadvantaged.
Control is also a big issue.
Platform want all the control and believe giving control away is going to cause a disaster. In reality, SWEs want 5% control, just to do the thing they have to ask you as a platform engineer to do anyway. But maybe platform engineers like that hero complex.
There are still a lot of people who treat work seen in a higher regard than work complexity. Someone who is proactive and seen to be, pair programming, mentoring, conducting interviews etc. This can all be done remote, but there might be an advantage to going to the office.
As much as I want to believe that people will work together and both approaches can work, office types will most likely cut out remote types if it isn’t easy to get on with work. I have seen this before COVID, I can see it happening again.
When it comes to it, if you pr whole team is remote, would you feel forced into staying at home and vice versa?
I have heard this since I was a kid, in reality, it isn't true, at least not in London. I have never been refused when presenting a £50, not that I have carried them more than a dozen times. Most places that have issues taking them are small merchants who give away too many notes breaking them, so will often ask for a smaller note. When I was in New York once, I went into a CVS and bought $60 of sweets to bring home, the cashier shouted 'bill check' when i presented a $100 bill, so I guess I look more dodgey in the US.
I guess for youtube content, this is sometimes needed, but again feels like a lot of effort for limited return. The cloud is one thing, but engineering costs, support etc must eat into profits.
I think from a support point of view, this is where merch sales are actually great, everyone gets something, even if it means that people charge $70 + shipping for a hoodie with a print.
What is sad is that you see youtubers talking in code on videos, not saying words, self censoring because youtube's detection is so good, videos get demonetised instantly. This is also why most people have seen an Ad in a video for PIA or surfshark or worse, raid shadow legends.