kator

I'm not currently billing for contract work, but when I was my formula was:

    rate = YearlyGoal / 1700

Which is to say, 2000 hours at 85% billable (leaving time for vacation).

Some years I was 105% billable but those are brutal years and I'm sure my life will be shorter for it.

Reminds me of this story: How Canadians Derailed a Train and Drove It to City Hall for Power After a Brutal Ice Storm[1]

https://www.thedrive.com/news/39378/how-canadians-derailed-a...

Use SCCS it's way more fun!

Interesting way to approach it, my approach might be less technical, when someone comes to mind randomly, I just txt them with:

  Hey, you just popped into my mind, I hope all is well with you and yours!

It's simple, lightweight, and you'd be shocked how often the other person pings back.

My completely un-scientific view is that most people think of others once in a while. Perhaps we're too busy to reach out, or the guilt of getting out of touch makes it hard to push through that resistance. I just push through it.

> pkexec is installed by default on all major Linux distributions (we exploited Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and other distributions are probably also exploitable);

I don't find it on any of the servers I manage, it appears to be installed with graphical desktop only?

I've worked for Amazon for 4 years, including stints at AWS, and even in my current role my team is involved in LSE's. I've never seen this behavior, the general culture has been find the problem, fix it, and then do root cause analysis to avoid it again.

Jeff himself has said many times in All Hands and in public "Amazon is the best place to fail". Mainly because things will break, it's not that they break that's interesting, it's what you've learned and how you can avoid that problem in the future.

When I read people complaining about "Small Images" like mentioned here where the author seems to warn against it and even proposes making sure enough "tooling" is in the container.

I'm always a bit curious why more people don't talk about using nsenter in the rare situation they need to inspect stuff in a running container?

For a production microservice container, why have a bunch of bloat in the container that increases the surface area to manage while also only actually being used in edge cases?

My first impression was "Oh, CoffeeScript for Rust".

What is the goal of this specification? Maybe I missed it in the point. Also the name might be a bit challenging considering the overall footprint and overloaded nature already of the word `analog`.

I have always focused on hiring for attitude and aptitude. If you have the attitude to learn, and the aptitude to grown your skills, then you'll do great at anything you're passionate about.

I literally hired a guy who was a part-time computer hobbyist but, a full time pool man. I told him "hey how would you like to spend 40 hours a week learning more about computers." Today he's working as a leader in his company's security group. He often thanks me for the job, and I always remind him "you did the work, all I did was give you the opportunity".

Sadly as stated in the thread linked, its hard when you have 10k applicants, to treat each as a potentially amazing member of the your team. I still try hard to look for that attitude and aptitude, and if a candidate demonstrates this in our dialog, I will do my best to find a path for them to connect with other opportunities if they're not a strong match for roles I'm filling on my teams.

What I know is we're born to this world knowing how to eat, breathe, cry, and a couple other things. The rest, all of it, we've learned on our way to this day. Just because the person in front of me didn't have the same path as me, doesn't mean they won't learn to have an incredible impact going forward. Searching for this potential and type of partnership at scale is hard. My heart wants to say it can be solved, but my calendar is an evil overlord that only allows me only so many hours a day to invest in growing my teams...

Related:

Apple - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/08/20/apple-push...

Amazon - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-updates-re...

Facebook - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/facebook-delays-return-to-of...

Just interesting to see as each company tries to sort this out.

They talk a bit about how the video is made here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EezdinoG4mka

While the nerd in me wants to agree with you, aren't all of these just great examples of deeper vertical integration?

When I started in computing most major players had their own CPU's, and over time everything converged on mostly Intel with AMD/ARM in there to mix it up. Now we see companies swinging back to the old days where each will have their own CPU's. To me its a return to vertical integration and exposes all of us to a new era of lock-in.

Strange because I started turning grey in high school, my hair was "dishwater blond". My grandmother on my father's side said she too started turning grey in school and died her hair most of her life to cover it.

Fast forward a bit, my daughter started getting grey hair around 18 years old. We had assumed when she was young it wouldn't happen because she had jet black hair, and that color most likely came from mom's family line.

It's interesting that stress can also contribute, now I wonder how much of my grey is stress induced vs genetics! These days I'm almost 98% grey with limited hair loss, my father is 70% grey with substantial hair loss, and my mom is 100% grey with a full head of hair.

When you are in a room with Solution Architects.. what do you say.. use the vernacular of your audience.

Jeff has talked about this in public, "good executives will cheat, they're busy they won't take the time to pre-read".

I have found some leaders I can do "off line" with, but in general it's because their calendar and mine just don't overlap properly for a couple weeks and I want them to give me feedback earlier.

I've been at Amazon 3 years, 6 months, and 7 days (thanks phonetool). In that time I've only seen a couple pre-read meetings, and a couple "offline review" (still in your calendar). Most of the pre-read meetings are less effective, they usually happen because of calendar pressure and the need for rapid decision on a topic.

The one thing I don't like about WFH is that we sometimes "lose" people, they come to the meeting but float off into email, chat or whatever. When I first started we'd have 20 people in a room, laptops closed, reading, you could hear a pin drop. And usually I knew it was time to start the discussion because people looked up from their doc to see if others were done. I miss these meetings because the focus was amazing. To have all these people who I really respect read my doc and give me their 100% undivided attention is awesome.

The nice thing about WFH is sometimes we spawn a bit of related topic in the chat, however it can be really hard to keep the debate going while the chat runs across a different thread but related to the overall topic.

Glad you asked, I have dyslexia, and I was very worried about writing, much less reading fast enough. In general we budget 4 mins per page, that said the meeting usually starts with a "here's the doc, please read until XXX and let us know if you're ready sooner". And then a "time check how are people doing?" and often you'll hear "I need N more minutes". And back to reading.

I was very worried about this part of the experience because of my challenges, I'm not the world's fastest reader, but over time I got comfortable just saying "I need 5 more minutes". Or I'll say "I'm on page N".

That said we do have some leaders who read incredibly fast, for them I always include some good appendices so they stay "in the room and on topic" rather than float off into their email.

Actually I have often pushed a meeting with a simple "The document is not ready".

Obviously you can get push back if you do it too often, however nobody wants to join a bad doc read meeting, they'd rather you get a bit more time to work out the issues in the doc.

Often times the issues are cross team, you need to get alignment with partner teams before you join the meeting, or if you can't you write a "hotly debated topics" section with the partner team and just go for it. There is a balance, you should not spend too much time driving for alignment, but you would be better served to come to the meeting showing both sides are talking and understand the point and counter-point.

Typically you get that feedback, in a very clear and positive way. I've never felt like someone was putting me down when my doc was not answering the questions.

The goal of a doc is not to show how smart you are. The goal is to expose the truth as "We" know it and expose it to critical feedback to dig deeper, or decide we have enough to make a decision.

I agree 100%, I'm a product leader at Amazon, and if a meeting goes off the rails we will say "let's take that offline". I even inject things from my background and end it with "let's connect offline". I've even told leaders higher up in my management chain "Let's not solution this here, we can schedule time for that if we agree on next steps". They don't mind, we're all busy, often very excited about what we're reading, and in free-flow feedback mode.

It's easy to get excited and run off topic a bit. Brining it back in actually shows a respect for everyone in the room. Not everyone in the meeting is interested in the random off the rails thread anyway, schedule a follow up and get the meeting back on track.

Funny I literally tell people when they join my team that email is the worst way to get my attention. You have a guaranteed slice of attention from me if you schedule time. If you email me you're spinning the wheel and if what you are sending me isn't that important, I'll get to it when I can.

I'm an Amazon product leader and I agree 100%, I'm already in back to back meetings all day long, emailing me a doc to read "in advance" puts all the stress on me. I'd rather you put time on my calendar and let me read quietly, and let me give you immediate feedback rather than me having to draft yet another email in reply to poorly explain my questions and/or my ideas.

I also block time in my own calendar, I have to write, a lot, and I have to work with my team on docs and other outputs. I block my calendar for those times, if you want me to read you know clearly when I have time to read with you, just grab a free slot on my calendar (in my timezone please lol). I am happy to provide the time, enjoy learning new things, enjoy sharing my thoughts, and often I can help find the right next person to read with you, or sponsor a leader to read with you.

Now all this said, I do find it a bit intense, to read "on the spot" and provide feedback, that said I will often provide feedback and suggest a follow-up meeting so I can noodle on the topic some. Meanwhile the author can spend time getting other input, improve the doc, and come back with a stronger story.

The best part for me: On-boarding!

When new people join I share major docs that were important to my team's plans, and some of them date back several years! I can share the doc with the new hire, ask them to block time for read + Q&A. It saves time getting them up to speed on our thinking, and we can discuss "so where are we on this journey" rather than spending time telling the full story for the 1,000th time.

When I joined Amazon I was an "Orator" style product manager, I would "tell the story" over and over, sometimes with some power point. And it was successful, however I feel like me and my teams are many times more successful with a strong doc process. And in the end decisions are memorialized, we don't have to go back and hash them over and over.

I was an entrepreneur for 25 years of my career, and CEO all those years. At Amazon I feel like I get the best of both worlds, the ability to innovate, invent, and the ability to do it at scale without pitching 100 VC's my next idea.

Palm Pilot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot

When Radio Shack folded I felt Fry's was clearly going to follow suit. End of an era...

I've had the reverse, people shutdown small private servers and they change their DNS to the ip of our community forums.

I think they want to "do right by the community" not realizing almost nothing works when people hit the old domain name.

Yup, but I have Dyslexia so I'm used to the transposition of the 2nd and 3rd character happening once in a while. I tend to "look away" and look back and usually can see the right thing. It's very frustrating when you get tired and are writing code, and staring at random symbols that literally don't mean anything now....

Getting Internal Server Error on push, seems github is having issues looking at the status page.

Also there is a thin line between procrastination and brutal prioritization. I often feel that procrastination ping and think to myself, is this really the next most important thing for me to do? Often times it is not, and once in a while it is. A lot of my work is creative in nature and forcing the creative process when you’re blocked is not always a good use of time. There is a balance between deadline, now and the time it comes to you with a force that screams to leave your body. The trick is understanding yourself and being honest, am I putting this off because it’s too fuzzy, not clear what the next step is etc? or is it just brutal prioritization?

Also note that I’ve changed roles quite a bit in my life and when I delete the final TODO list I look back at the things I did not get done. It’s as informative to review your accomplishments as it is your failures, but also what you never got around to doing. Often that last category will make me laugh “look at all those stupid things I thought were important”... rm -f TODO

And as I tell people all the time, the day after you die there will be more email in your inbox. If you focus on emptying your inbox your life will be empty when you leave. But your inbox will still be filling up.

In 1991 there was a very distinct job called system administrator and the really high skilled ones wrote all sorts of system administration tools in awk, Perl, Shell, and sometimes in C. This to me was 'systems programming' for the administration, deployment, automation, and management of the 'systems'.

This was in contrast to "developers" who wrote application code in numerous languages COBOL, Pascal, Fortran, BASIC, etc. And they in general, did not manage the underlying system.

Over the years I think those lines have blurred and the roles are all smashed together sometimes called devops or other terms.

This looks very interesting but I doubt large enterprises will allow it considering the online nature and the inability to secure confidential work on internally hosted systems.

Really interesting, the transitions remind me of Myst [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst