drewmassey

Oral exams are terrifying but preparing for one will be an incredible learning experience and give you a ton of confidence later.

Source: those 90 minutes I was grilled by the entire Harvard music department faculty in 2006

This is true; my father was - and my husband's parents are - all professors so I know that small town academic life (for tenured faculty) is one flavor of the American Dream.

And pursuing your dreams is important. But I've also seen pretty talented people adjunct for decades at a stretch, because they believe that some day they will get a TT job - and I've also seen those same people seemingly only taking advice from their doctoral advisors, who (in my experience) consider anything besides a TT job as "failure".

If people want to live that way, they should. But the ideology of "pursue your dreams," when it comes to employment as a tenured professor at an American University - is often used to just string along adjunct labor in the home that someday their ship will come in.

As a former music history professor who now works in tech, I think the adjunctification of American universities is one of the the worst "best-kept secrets" out there. The sheer number of blog "exposés" of adjunct teaching that I have read over the last 20 years simply boggles the mind, each one breathlessly "revealing" the same secret. Of course, they are not wrong: I personally adjuncted for years and it does not pay (example: I earned $5,000 total the year after I graduated from Harvard with a PhD).

What really mystifies me, now that I have 8 years of perspective between me and the day I resigned from my tenure-track job, is why people who think of themselves as great thinkers (or, at least, good enough thinkers to teach college) cannot escape from something of a self-constructed prison of adjunct work. Based on my limited conversations with NTT academics who considered career changes during the pandemic, there is an odd quality of stockholm syndrome where PhDs (especially in the humanities) simply cannot fathom that any other life path might be worthwhile, and hence toil away.

I’ve heard it said that it only exists as a word so that there can also be “offboarding” when people are let go. I do not have a strong opinion about this.

Oh man I've seen Hart making the rounds. The obvious privilege of being a tenured Ivy League professor aside, a few things jump out

- Yes it would be nice if drugs were decriminalized ... but they aren't ... and the supply chain for heroin causes a lot of suffering in the world.

- Shrugging and leading with "only 30% of people have addictions" is astoundingly innumerate. If there were a 30% chance of a potentially fatal outcome in almost any other context it would be a big deal.

I earned a PhD in the humanities before going into tech. I loved it, and it was a tough slog to make the pivot. I know there is a lot of advice encouraging folks to “optimize their human capital” but I spent my 20s full time making my mind a great place to live in, and OP is an inspiration for doing the same at any age.

Why don’t you just ask them? Not in a confrontational way, but like “hey what are you up to this week?” I’ve worked in orgs from 10-30,000 people and have always been able to at least get 5-15 minutes with this level of management.

I don’t remember if it was chess or tennis or something else: “The good player is always lucky.”

With all this discussion of revival of old styles in this thread it is worth noting that France saw the revival of chant itself in the 19th century, which is in many ways an echo of that enchantment with the past. The musicologist Katherine Bergeron has a great book about it

I’ve handled one of the bay psalm books. It’s very magical even if the object itself is quite humble.

If you want to get laughed out of Houghton library ask the staff to page the Gutenberg for you, as one of my friends did in their first year of grad school

I was 34 when I switched from historical musicology to professional services. It can be done! All the advice in here is great. Software skews towards being merit and results driven (at least to getting hired)... the first step is way less difficult than a lot of other careers.

I actually used a large screen for a while but have enjoyed the focus that my Mac Book Air requires. Just sublime on full screen. Also, your setup is then uniform if you travel a lot for work (as I do) so there is no context switching overhead.

“Get to know your problem so well that fixing it by writing code is a last resort”

I love this stance.

I work at a startup that is using AI to reduce emissions in industrial and data center contexts. I like the big sky approach of this post but so much savings / reduction is an execution question.

We are hiring so DM me if you would like to learn more!

Ah perhaps I have stale information then. Last I heard retail truvada will run you north of $1,500 per month in the us.

Yeah this is true. The cost of generics is so low but in the United States it remains quite expensive if you don’t have insurance.

For me the biggest surprise in the article is that there are 180,000 men in the United States on Prep. Given a back of the envelope calculation of 4.8m out gay men in America (3% of population) that means adoption is itself around 3%.

Somehow I imagined truvada was more widey adopted but perhaps it is just heavily marketed on the east coast.

After several weeks of swimming upstream on a greenfield EKS project I switched gears to GKE. The paradigm just felt way better. For large enterprises that need IAM integration on EKS I suppose that wouldn’t have been an option but GKE just feels way more paradigmatic, for obvious reasons.

Did I mention we are hiring devops engineers? If you are a kubernetes guru email me :-)

I’m a huge admirer or well crafted cli apps, they can massively boost the effectiveness of a team.

An oldie but goodie here: https://eng.localytics.com/exploring-cli-best-practices/

GramLabs | Software Engineering (DevOps) | Boston or Washington DC | Full Time

Gram Labs is a strongly capitalized AI startup with breakthrough technology that is already making a difference at some of the largest companies in the world. We are seeking someone to design and implement our long-term deployment strategy for a cutting edge platform.

This position is based in Boston or Washington DC. If remote, you must be willing to travel bi-weekly to either location. Basic relocation available.

If you are curious see the full listing you can visit https://angel.co/gram-labs/jobs

Feel free to contact me at drew@gramlabs.ai for more information about the company and this position.

I compiled a works list of the composer Virgil Thomson, who wrote two operas with texts by Stein. I don’t think it is that hard to understand the politics of certain modernist artists given their impulses towards utopia, comparative naïveté in geopolitics, and, as mentioned in other comments, the prevailing structure of feeling at the time.

Yes, it would be strange to see a poet of Stein’s stature today staking out the positions that she does, but artists such as Dalí were also doing similarly puzzling political declarations at the time. That’s not an excuse for any of them, but history does not get written (merely) for us to stand in judgement of mistakes of the past.

I actually think the author is really smart to point out boredom as an ingredient in the mix. I’m friends with a pretty successful writer who told me a couple of months ago how hard it was to get bored in the modern world, and yet, if you aren’t kind of bored, it is very hard to access the full extent of your imagination to come up with ideas that no one else would.

This. I transitioned from a (non-STEM) PhD and am now working as a "real" engineer. It is called a "practice" for a reason, you will get better with time as long as you are self-reflective about it.

One practical tip - take a look at Dan Bader's book if you are deep in Python, it has a lot of good stuff.

One philosophical tip - depending on your organization, remember that slow is fast in engineering. This is somewhat different from more academic computing environments (at least that I know of). So take the time to get it right and really deeply understand your solution.

GramLabs | Software Engineering (DevOps / Front End) | Boston or Washington DC | Full Time

Gram Labs is a strongly capitalized AI startup with breakthrough technology that is already making a difference at some of the largest companies in the world. We are seeking someone to design and implement our long-term deployment strategy for a cutting edge platform.

For the front end position, prior experience in React and Redux is required; for DevOps we are looking for someone with Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS experience. Familiarity with hybrid on-prem / cloud deployments is particularly desirable.

These positions are based in Boston or Washington DC. If remote, you must be willing to travel bi-weekly to either location. Basic relocation available.

If you are curious see the full listings at https://angel.co/gram-labs/jobs

Feel free to contact me at drew@gramlabs.ai

I don't disagree that the cost of living and FAANG brain drain will likely challenge the hegemony of Silicon Valley in the short term. What interests me is whether software engineering companies will continue to focus on geographical centers, or if the future is perhaps more distributed.

Obviously this doesn't work in other industries like hardware, biotech, etc., where physical presence is baked in to doing business.

I mean a real connection between the history of opera and programming is the conflict between opera as a courtly art (Eric Raymond’s “cathedral”) and its life as a public spectacle (“the bazaar”). There is an excellent essay by Richard Taruskin title “the history of opera from Monteverdi to Monteverdi” in his Oxford History of Western Music. Even if you aren’t a musicologist a read of the intro might reveal some analogies...

I think there is a difference between “owning stuff” and “owning assets” that this post is clouding. It is the owning of assets - that are worth more than what you paid for them - that seems to form the backbone of American entrepreneurship in the way that the author wants the owning of “stuff” to do in his setup.

There is of course value (to me) in owning a library of books - but for different reasons than, say, owning intellectual property or real estate.

- how to start a startup podcast(Altman and co)

- The lean startup

- the twenty two immutable laws of marketing.

- getting to yes

After a couple of books though I would say it really comes down to just digging in and fighting it out. It is really easy to lose yourself in the world of business self help literature.

Interesting. There is a kind of obvious conflict between cloud resources and hardware intensive applications like ML. The zeitgeist is obviously swinging.

This is statistically true, one of the curious paradoxes of PhD work is that students continually consider themselves to be an except to the statistics.

I say this as a recovering humanities academic who now works in tech; I am really grateful that my parents pushed me to have a STEM major alongside my interest in music.