jlawer

Santos, Shell, Woodside, Super Retail Group, AACo are all large companies with massive back office operations which aren’t listed.

The fact they may have many more non-office workers doesn’t mean they don’t have large offices

Data set seems off as the sampling heavily biases to Tech, Law and consulting and away from Retail, Logistics and Primary Industries all of which are a higher proportion of the Australian workforce. Additionally companies such as Coles and Woolworths (Supermarket chains) are listed as 100% Remote, where as this is only going to be for a small proportion of their workforce.

The change is happening, and I work for an energy company where they literally do not have the office space for 100% of staff to be back in the office (currently target 50%). So the change is happening, but I don’t think its as far along as this data states. I can say from a recruitment perspective there are many candidates who want a significant pay bump to go back to 100% office.

> If people made purely rational decisions when purchasing a car, the only manufactures left would be Toyota and Honda.

Not sure if this is different regions or just dated. In Australia now, Honda is a joke. They are overpriced, offer terrible support, etc. Toyota is quality beige, overpriced but reliable, kind of like Sony TVs 15 years ago before Samsung and LG became dominate.

Just like with TVs, the Korean companies (Hyundai & Kia) are the smart money brands at least in the Australian Market.

Firstly Supply and demand of Software Engineers dictate a lot right now. In my market (East Coast of Australia) people aren't being as picky. Wages are shooting up, and they are willing to accept candidates that lack more of their desired traits. These cycles though will go through ebbs and flows and you may end up with a glut of talent and people will be picky on whatever criteria they want right about the time your entering the market (like it was for me in 2001).

Second is only a small percentage of roles are hired by Paul Graham and silicon valley as a whole. The young engineer thing is frequently looked as a positive because your more likely to have people that live an unhealthy work-life balance dedicated to the cause. Most people over 30 end up with a life they can't abandon to work 12 hours a day / 7 days a week. Larger companies tend to have processes where age doesn't come into play, and a better work/life balance (assuming you can tolerate the bureaucracy).

Third if you can use your medical domain knowledge in an SE role, that is likely a bigger perk then any age related negative.

Age is somewhat tied to role. The problem your going to have after 40 - 50 is doubts if you don't already have history with the work / technology. This is a bias against ability to learn. This can be countered with good and relevant certifications and having a broad technical knowledge. Generally when you get a role you will know some of the technologies, be familiar with a few and have to learn others. If you specialise on something in demand, people won't care about your age, they just want to knowledge. Frequently technical specialists I've worked with are 50-60 years old.

Where the negativity at older developers comes from is the requirement for developers to be constantly moving forward learning about new technologies. If your not moving forward, your falling behind. Older starters in SE often have trouble keeping up with this aspect of the industry. This is why frequently university / college education isn't very useful in the real world. The industry has moved on, and you need to learn the new stuff in your junior roles.

Finally development support roles are frequently not viewed with the same lens, and often favour more "mature" people. Testing, Project Management, BA, Sales / Presales Engineering, Support Engineering and Development management all surround the development process and will often involve dipping in to code (depending on organisation / role). You may find while you love Software Engineering, the actual coding is less interesting then the whole creation process.

More then 36% APR for anything more then a fraction of your weekly / monthly salary is likely to be crippling for most people and predatory. I can understand higher rates for very short term debts (i.e. a payday loan where the entire thing should be paid off in 1 month, but these lenders often try and have people turn over the principle into new loans).

IF someone's credit won't support a 20% interest rate then I don't think they should be leant money in the traditional sense. Either the purchase isn't required (in which case it shouldn't happen), or if its essential they should be supported by mechanisms to get people out of debt. Governments can make low value loans available to help here. In Australia, your entitled to a loan if your on benefits (centrelink) in which repayments are deducted from your welfare payments but charged no interest.

I could see it happening where I work (Large Multinational in the Energy Industry). HR are removed enough that they would back this up, yet have the authority. Teams often report by function, therefore there isn't a local manager worried about the missed deadline. Combined with the companies image as attempting to be a leader in social responsibility (at least as much as an Oil and Gas company can). I can see it happen however I don't think I could see it in any of the smaller companies I have worked for as the results of missing deadline were frequently too significant.

That being said my current employer is exactly like the one mentioned by OP here. You basically need to build credibility internally to deliver.

As someone who has worked with Apple "Enterprise" / "Business" / "Pro" products before..... I'll wait. It will start half decent, get a push to 90% of everything you need and then slowly get rewritten simplified to a level that is too basic to do any real work or just abandoned.

RHEL running with SELinux enabled has been a thing since I worked at Red Hat 12 years ago, and Amazon Linux 2 was based on a CentOS upstream that had the capability of running in that way. All certification had to happen with SELinux enabled, and any distro provided service was setup to run with full restrictions, and it was the default on for all Professional Services work.

However it became a problem once you used 3rd party software as step 1 of most install guides was to disable SELinux.

We can colonize the centre of Australia. There just isn't a reason to do so. You can see wherever they find a patch of minerals, a mining town springs up. Decades ago, there were towns all along the train lines to support the rail services, but as trains got more reliable they were no longer required. There are few advantages to being in the centre of Australia. Many of the people who live there do so because they have a connection with that land.

The average person would rather live in a crammed Sydney apartment complex then live in the middle of the Simpson desert.

Mars is new. We really don't know what will happen. There are a group of people throughout history that have "chanced it" and gone to the new world out of the hope they can build something better. You will have the same rush on Mars.

Not to mention Atlassian are moving bitbucket to be in the same cloud as their other services. They likely could have negotiated a cheaper per unit cost on their entire cloud workload, thus its possible this has generated a saving for Jira, confluence and all.

Yeah and I have written bad code, and I expect to cop a few jabs if I do something stupid and my PR manages to brake something important.

I don't have a problem with my co-workers saying I did something dumb. That's not the same as saying I am dumb.

You should be a little embarrassed if you screw up. You only get embarrassed if you care. Its part of the motivation to improve.

The CTO of Azure has no responsibility to an Amazon recruiter. While the recruiter could likely be identified if you searched hard enough, most people aren't crazy enough to care.

This is a teachable moment. Amazon shouldn't engage in these practices and should manage the people they employ so this doesn't happen.

If this was an innocent mistake, you shrug, cop a few jokes with your co-workers and deal with it. No one is going to sack you solely over an incident like this unless you've been going against a strict policy.

I don't see the harm. Either this was following Amazon's standard practices or it wasn't. This SHOULD be the subject of ridicule! No one is saying hunt the guy down and dox him over it. If this is against Amazon's standard practices and they let the recruiter go its because of THAT not because some senior person decided to share it. You can't expect secrecy if your doing a cold approach.

This is exactly the kind of incident that helps bring recruiters back to reality. Getting dozens of cold approaches about roles that are obviously not a good fit if someone spent 5 minutes researching can be infuriating (or even knew what they were recruiting for).

OpenBSD is not your typical consumer desktop OS. If you expect it to be similar to linux / windows / macOS your not going to have a good time. As a unix workstation however it has its place.

Certain things you might take for granted around hardware (The author mentions Wireless on intel AX210 and a bluetooth stack) are missing or in a poorer state then you would find on your "typical desktop" OS. Additionally there are plenty of Linux apps that will make dump assumptions that they are running on linux.

Things will generally be a lot more manual to setup rather than auto-magic. OpenBSD is focused on software correctness (security / reliability) over all other attributes (performance, features, ease of use). As part of this there are natural additional focuses on simplicity (to make it easier to be correct). Thus OpenBSD is rarely going to be the first with something that isn't security related.

If your workflow is heavily UNIX based, then OpenBSD can make an awesome Workstation OS. If you work on open source, you will have everything you need. However if you work with other people on other platforms you will see incompatibilities, such as being limited to web based versions of Collab services (discord, teams, slack).

Yeah, but with a product its more of a problem. Calling your Widget Company "Widgets Inc.". Facebook is able to call their product "Facebook Widgets".

The problem is this is direct trademark infringement. The trademark is for a business, and will have overlap with Facebook. Facebook can try and argue that the trademark is invalid, but at the end of the day if meta.company can defend the trademark, there is going to be a settlement because renaming AGAIN isn't going to be very desirable. This could cause an Apple Records vs Apple Computer case where certain businesses are restricted for facebook.

However as both history and this event shows, facebook will just plow ahead and pay the costs later. Given opportunity costs, and everything, it likely is the most economically rational move. Having so much money that they know they can cover any verdict / settlement, and having limited - no personal liability at the director level, facebook can continue to act unconscionably. The only way you will stop them acting like this is to either extend the liability to management or so oversized and unreasonable punitive damages that they actually take a step back.

I agree the cause can be made to go away overnight. However the impact of doing the wrong thing could be disastrous.

In Australia we have a housing bubble, but the problem is woven very deep. Our tax system favours property investments. Our top tax rate (45%) kicks in at extremely low levels of income compared to globally ($180,000 AUD which is around $135,000 USD). The system provides all kinds of tax deductions to investment property owners, and ways of making paper losses to offset income tax.

Much of our economic activity is banking, retail and construction. Much of which is fuelled by the churn in property with ever increasing prices. This economic cycle kept Australia out of recession until Covid hit. Now that the average house is over $500,000 AUD, we have large swaths of the younger population leveraged to their eyeballs in debt at a 2% interest rate. If housing prices fall or interest rates rise there will be a collapse, and a good chance of an extended recession we have avoided.

The best case is they slowly the market down, we have a moderate rate of inflation which allows the real value of houses to drop. At the same time reduce the tax benefits to property investment.

Unfortunately this won't happen. The political class knows that the median voter is a home owner, and its in their interests for housing prices to keep rising. They are just hoping that it can keep going until after they are finished. Totally not jaded about not being able to afford a house in my late 30s due to being wiped out in the 2008 GFC and then starting a family.

I remember plans for email credits / micro transactions back in the 90s as a “cure” for spam.

If anything it would be easier to implement today with the centralisation of email services around large providers (MS, Google, etc).

The biggest question here is does apple care about gaming enough to challenge Nvidia / AMD / ?Intel? ?

Hardware is only part of the challenge on gaming GPU performance. NVidia and AMD spend huge sums of money working with developers to have code implemented to run efficiently on their GPUs. This isn't something I would be expecting from Apple. This is a big part of the performance delta between raw performance and game performance demonstrated. NVidia and AMD invest massively in their drivers optimizing games to achieve the higher level of performance. This is not something I can easily imagine Apple doing.

Funnily enough I would think Apple would be in the perfect place to make a play at Gaming if they were willing to invest the time and money. With the inhouse silicon, app store, distribution, money and brand. Everything except the culture and people. They could create a SOC with both reasonable compute and GPU and package it up in a Game console version of the Apple TV. They would likely be able to share costs across other product ranges, leading to better margins. They have the money to help with marketing and with their brand presence, they likely wouldn't actually have to spend much to get there.

For python development pylance is one of the most important parts.

No, it says it was a lie that vaccines would stop the spread.

I see that for shorthand that the whole response wasn’t managed properly as the “spread” still happened.

I don’t think it’s a fair criticism of Biden, but it’s a rap song, which tends to encourage a bit of hyperbole.

At least the over the barrel pricing of Atlassian isn't going in a scrooge mcduck style money vault.

Yes, but without someone having responsibility on the issuing side. How long until a mistake happens and that email box goes to someone who is off for 6 months with a medical issue and the issue gets "Lost in the system". We already have plenty of places where you struggle to talk to a human who can do anything to fix the issue.

Someone should always be individually responsible / liable for something that has legal ramifications or its easy to share the blame enough that no one is really responsible and it never gets fixed.

They shouldn't be able to issue fines without someone else at least having a look at the photo and validating it. Whoever then signs off on this should be reprimanded / fired.

I completely get using technology as a productivity booster, however there needs to always be a human responsible and liable for any mistake, otherwise we end up automating incompetence.

It will be interesting to see if this is a custom SOC in the sense they took some off the shelf IP, or if they are creating a new microarchitecture.

A SOC based on existing IP is a solid investment, but nothing like the scale of investment required for a new microarchitecture.

Github was acquired for stock. Meanwhile MS shares have tripled since Oct 2018.

The .NET community largely grew up having a "source of truth" for best practice, architecture, etc. Microsoft shaped not just the language, but the culture around the language, having vast influence on how people learnt the language, the processes on how they worked and naturally used this to push MS technologies. MS tried to own the whole stack, and thus they had libraries and frameworks for much of what you would try and do with .NET.

While competing against other companies this strategy worked as MS were larger and able to have a more complete solution. This was enabled by their huge share of desktop computing with Windows. However as the shift to Web and Mobile came, the number of platforms grew (especially outside of MS controlled ones), and the centrally planned .NET experience was breaking down. MS's centrally planned competitors threw in the towel or had gone bankrupt. Java was opened, Sun was out of business and the smaller software development offerings had long since tried to incorporate open source, or had switched to growing only through milking the existing customer base.

Microsoft saw the change coming, as well as the move to the cloud, and was able to see the cost involved with competing against open source, and started their shift to open source. The foundation is their attempt to both reduce their relative investment, by having users start taking on some of the development while controlling the core of the language. Keep in mind this was the time .Net was becomming cross platform, with linux becoming a major hosting option.

Due to these origins it has lead to the foundation being in a central position in the .Net ecosystem. As such if your library is part of the foundation, its likely to be THE standard solution in the .NET space. So the advantage you get is you get to participate, and if your project joins, it becomes the de-facto standard for .NET. That credibility is likely worth a bit for consultants and definitely paints you as an expert in that field. The downside is you cede control. I am not arguing that it is worth it for most people / projects, however I can understand why people want to be involved.

No issues in itself, but would rule out my use as Australia to Europe latency is bad enough but it seems to be that hetzner how some of the higher latency routes

Depends on your role / age / situation.

When I was younger and working more junior roles and moving from role to role every year or 2 (generally headhunted) there was a use it or loose it mentality. You wouldn’t take the day off the moment you had a sniffle / didn’t feel 100%.

However once your older, have kids and are at the role for more then a few years, that sick leave is often “banked” for when the kids come down with whatever is going around the schoolyard this week

So does pure lithium

This could be a 2 edge sword.

How long until the Police departments are sued for unlicensed public performance of copyrighted music?