nonines

I expect to get downvoted in Stack Overflow with the slightest bit of excuse but it seems that Stack Overflow gets you downvoted in every other forum you dare to mention SO without adhering to SO code of being totally right.

Issues man. Deep unresolved issues.

Anyway - like I said I'm interested in above question myself. If you find a community/forum that cares more to answer than advertising its internal psychological complexes then please share back.

Thanks.

Maybe stack overflow would be a better place to ask. Please post back a link if you do.

>> A professional’s insecurity is rooted in the inherent intangibility of knowledge work. How do you convince your client that you know something worthwhile and justify the high fees you charge? The insecurity caused by this intangibility is exacerbated by the rigorous “up or out” promotion system perpetuated by elite professional organizations, which turns your colleagues into your competitors. How do you convince your boss that you’re worth more than your closest colleague? There is no chance for a professional to rest on their laurels — or even to rest.

>> The corporate work culture survives on people's fears. If you don't play by the rules of the people in power, how will you make money, how will you feed your family, how will you contribute to society?

>> When people long for the days of the early web, the glorious idiosyncracies of personal sites and forums, they are really longing for a time and a space where people were free to communicate their own values. Now that space is owned and rented to the highest bidder. A site like LinkedIn wraps you up into a tiny, uniform package, sets you in an enormous data warehouse next to millions of other tiny people just like you, and sells the lot of you.

A lot of what he says resonates really strongly. Fact of the matter though is that we are locked in this state of affairs. Specially if you are in a not-exactly-buzzing job market. I don't know if there is a will and a way to revert ourselves back to something more than a commodity. And I don't see a way to move forward to something beyond that.

None in my team. About 3-4 in my open plan (I guess about 100 coworkers in it). Same numbers in Uni.Similar numbers to all the companies I've been so far (best one was about 80-20).

SW Dev seems to be male dominated for as long as I remember myself in it. Made a motto out of it that I hope I'm gonna pass to my kids: "steer away from any environment where the gender stats are skewed beyond 60-40. This is just not normal."

>> I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see meaningful human interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by likes and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it.

For what is worth he's not alone in this. Being "interconnected" the way he thinks he's missing feels actually being less connected than ever. In a way he sees the right picture IMHO but he thinks he misinterprets things. I guess it's his broken ego which puts these kinds of "I-must-be-wrong" filters in front of him but if he ever gets rid of them I think that his vantage point on the current techscape will be unique exactly due to him being absent of it for so long.

This looks related (smoking gun?) https://status.aspera.io/incidents/t9r03x71dxkl

>> A 3rd party network provider was advertising routes which resulted in our WW traffic becoming severely impeded.

>> Is working with recruiters actually makes sense?

Short answer: not really. Job-hunt and apply directly.

Longer answer: Most of them seem to be in the business of collecting CVs (data for sale I presume).

A few really mean work and are the ones that might be worth dealing with. I don't have a good way to tell which is which though until after ghosting.

It tends to be consistent with companies though. E.g. I got that behavior and time waste consistently from Wikimedia, Oracle, Etsy and a few startups. It's also consistent for me (I'm based in Europe) with recruiters that are based in US. I no longer respond to queries related to above companies or recruiters not based in EU but I still get the occasional time waster.

Recruiting seems to be a very unprofessional and inefficient market.

>> I don't know why people keep recommending this as a way to break into software dev

2 reasons IMHO: 1. It is a powerful albeit mostly imaginary image/story. A sort of American dream incarnated in SW. Everything is out there, open and within reach so anyone can do it and make it big. 2. A lot of the HN crowd are actually committers to high profile projects (this is the most popular hacker community after all) so they tend to judge by their own story or stories from their circle. I suspect though that the average dev is quite away from this paradigm.

Having tried a few times to just build kubernetes (by now I honestly believe that you need a server farm to do just that) I have to agree with the point you're making. The sheer magnitude and the speed that this behemoth is growing just makes me loose any incentive after a while. Not to mention that you have to actually antagonize with a lot of other noobs to get to these "good-first-issue" PR first. (Diclosure: I'm quite familiar with kube and an experienced dev).

And then there is the other thing. I'm afraid somewhere along the way we missed the point. OS is (was) about doing what you want with no strings attached. Something inside me is twitching in the thought that it has become a (difficult) way to get a nice job and that it is mostly controlled by big Co (which you are effectively begging to throw its eyes over you and your contributions). Dunno if I want to be part in this grind. I prefer doing my own stuff (and GPL them like the good old days).

My 0010 cents.

The point I think you're making is that "it depends" and I agree with it.

I've seen companies that have no funding issues building products that they know they will need to maintain in coming years and still follow a few or none of the best practices.

But I've also seen people building SW that no one can guarantee that will ever be used (and gets scrapped after a few months) spending days and weeks setting up the perfect agile CICD setup and arguing in endless pedantic discussions in code reviews.

My impression as well. I was thinking getting a career shift into pentesting (rumor has it that it's remote-friendly as well) but after a few job searches I came to see that the job market is tiny.

It's the Cambrian explosion in SW Dev tools. What amazes me though is how undead everything is. It seems that even ancient stuff is still somewhere out there waiting to be maintained. And there's a gazillion more every year adding to the pile.

Good point on the app restart. I think K8S is in some ways the equivalent of Erlang BEAM for the masses for the cloud.

Same feeling here but I came to understand that it's the enterprise and the design by committee that brings in the complexity.

K8S is developed by a multitude of very large companies. Each with their own agenta/needs. All of them have to be addressed. Thus the complexity. If you think about it they probably manage to keep the complexity to relatively low levels. Maybe because it is pushed to the rest of the ecosystem (see service meshes for example).

Being pushed by the behemoths also explains the popularity. Smaller companies and workers feel that this is a safe investment in terms of money and time familiarizing with the tech stack so they jump on. And the loop goes on.

Main business reason for all that though I think it's the need of Google et all to compete with AWS creating a cloud platform that comes to be a standard and belongs to no-one really. In this sense it is a much better, versatile and open ended openstack attempt.

Can't agree more. To this add the moving-sand landscape of an ecosystem there.

But then again it's actually the first public/popular attempt on a cloud OS. There might be a next one with better ergonomics than yamls.

thanks

Great work. I'm curious though. Why Flask and not Django? Seems like you wanted a heavyweight after all.

Excuse my naive question but how do the 2 compare? Flask == backend, Vue == frontend. Am I missing something here?

>> But yeah nobody but the 1%ers are getting jobs in this market

You mean the current and looming crisis or the IT job market in general.

>> Even busted my ass for an AWS cert -- worthless

Thought about that too but then occurred to me that I'd also need to go for a K8S one and perhaps one of the security ones and ... this never ends whilst I might land in a job where I just need to know bash and basic python. (Also these certs seem to offer little basic knowledge and a lot of shopping-list-like details.

No opportunities arose plus office-politics make my stomach turn. Perhaps it is my long stint in a Byzantine multinational that spoiled that path for me.

TBH I kind-of self sabotaged my Amazon interviews as I was terrified by what I was reading about working conditions there in Glassdoor. Half of my brain was pulling me out the whole time.

Same here. I'd love to hear more.

Yes, backend seems to be a little slower paced. With the notable exception of cloud-native platforms, especially kubernetes ecosystem where seems to be one new framework every week.

Similar experience here for wikimedia. Unbelievably unprofessional.

That was an interview for SRE role. One of the big ones.

SRE btw has come to mean "you must know everything...in order to do on-calls" but that deserves a whole post in itself.

---

I'm OK with complexities, etc. I get why they're so popular in interviews. I don't agree but I get it. They were an annoyance to review and keep in my RAM since I don't really use them in day-to-day work but I swallowed that pill.

To be fair most of the interviewers seemed to work along these lines that you describe. (That's why I managed to get quite close quite a few times - I was never big on memory so it's impossible get the details on WB).

Yet, if the string of interviews is too long (and it is) the probability of hitting a "reef" is really big. And it seems that either you get a unanimous "yes" or you fail.

That is not what I said. That is what you understood.

In any case my experience up to now is being rejected with no good reasons (at least IMO) relatively far in the game. If you are looking for reasons to reject someone it is easy to find them as you surely know.

From other sources I learned that my (older) age is working against me in this game. How much so I do not know. Thus my questions.

Thank you

Well, I'm so fed up with feeling a failure after all that effort that I'm kicking my past young self in the arse for not joining the merchant-navy when I could (too old for that now too). So - no it's not going overly well(1). Yet I have had 5 jobs up to now in IT and I got them all without any network push so that probably has given me a warped view of how things actually work.

(1) I have a job atm. It's mostly the prospects that fear me out.

I'm in Dublin but I'm looking to either move up to a FAANG (well that plan went the Titanic way) and/or relocate to Germany. My impression too is that German IT companies don't care so much about age but there are other handicaps for me there (e.g. not speaking German).

Not much age bias in Berlin IT job market? Weird. I mostly see start-ups there. That might be interesting.