schmookeeg

It allows me to reflect on all of the jobs that I have left without also posting some odious blog entry about it. So much missed opportunity.

Maybe it was cathartic to write, I dunno. I think if I'm at that point, I waited way too long to leave. Golden handcuffs, hey?

I think those two are colloquially synonymous to most people. Particularly those with Amazon Prime accounts :)

Because the local organic free-range kenyan pour-over place that serves me coffee in a biodegradable urn along with a kale-based "eco brownie" and some indie hip-hop playing at volume 11 doesn't have a drive-thru, obvs :)

That's one of the best pieces of writing I've read all year -- bravo. An angle I've somehow not noticed, but resonates with me.

I'm wondering where you experienced the "fairly severe limp mode" -- our REx can keep up with 75mph driving on a level highway, and will recharge the battery even at 65. Rain and hills have been able to overpower our REx, but never anything that prevented us from maintaining 55mph. Not really limping.

I grant that other climates and situations may have different experiences. We're on the west coast.

That is WAY better than my typical Chick-Fil-A order. What's further down from "trapped toddler" on the condescension scale? That's where I'll be.

Something changed at the top with costco a year or three ago. The friendliness seems gone, and replaced by some really strange/hostile policies.

I ended up in a shouting match with the tire center manager who claimed I was in a "car accident", and thus my road hazard warranty was void after I took a nail on the freeway. I was not in a car accident, I would have known -- I was there.

30 minutes of my life I'll never get back grappling with him and the store manager -- for them to try saving a $90 pro-rata credit. My tire business has been pulled out of costco after like 25 years. It's getting tough to justify the rest of the membership. It's always a shopping hellscape there, and everyone is rude/grumpy.

Well dang. All of my models in the last 6 months have lost all meaning now that this is here :D

Off to snap some pics of my catloaves, this is awesome.

My Gmail blocklist is basically a recruiter honeypot slash hatecrime since 99% of them are Indian. I have found nothing to combat it -- worse, I switched to date-coded email addresses in my CVs in 2008 (so email_mmyy@mydomain.com) (!) and I still get spam from those old addresses.

I should block those old addresses, and that was the implicit threat on my CV coversheet, but I haven't bothered to do it yet.

It seems most of the recruiters bought my Email from dice.com, since that corresponds to when I used the earliest email addy. I'd say I'm boycotting Dice in response (and I sorta am), but I don't think dice has been relevant in an age, so it's sort of a toothless oath. :D

The SMS are pernicious and awful. I usually drop a rude remark to them before reporting them as spam. Phone interruptions are 100x more focus-destroying than emails, and I have been forced to put my phone on do-not-disturb during the workday, and I hate it. I feel victimized by these shops.

I have seen a recent uptick in body-shop recruiters reaching out with low-grade jobs. Annoyingly, this recent batch seems keen to use SMS to reach me instead of traditional Email.

I have started to put feelers out for a change of scenery, but nothing is landing yet. It feels like the first dotcom bust all over again.

Using your own example, every "avg startup" engineer who is overemployed with only two gigs is matching FAANG money.

I think parent wanted a citation that Super Duty trucks are typically used for work, and not for Brodozer hooning and yelling "yew" out of the window in a sleeveless shirt and with a plug of skoal. :)

+1! -- I use Optiplexes in my homelab for client/misc/fw duty, and I have a pair of Supermicro mini servers with Xeon-D chips for slightly heavier stuff. Both bulletproof and small/innocuous/inexpensive to run.

I keep wanting to upgrade to something shiny or attempt to consolidate since my Dells are on some hilariously old chips (4th gen LTS "T" series i7s) but man they just keep chugging along, it's hard to justify.

I'm enjoying reading this, and I never paid much attention to the R1 product. "Carroot" was enough of a chuckle to merit the rest. :D

Hello from Alameda, CA. 15.5c per kwh here except for M-F 5pm-9pm, where it is 50c.

It's like crossing social credit score with a tontine!

...as one who doesn't run red lights and hates profiteering governments -- I'm not opposed :D

Hi from 47 y.o. and also not on the management track (any longer, BTDT, FT)

I only list the last 8-10 years of stuff on my CV. Not specifically to combat ageism (I keep a "full" version also -- 6 friggin pages these days) -- but mostly to acknowledge that just because I did something cool 20 years ago, doesn't mean I am current, fluent, or even looking to do that again -- so why bother? If anyone cares, they'll ask and I'll answer.

My full CV is basically buzzword bingo at this point, and is spanish fly to the body-shop recruiters who love to email, text, and call me with just the worst jobs ever. :) Keep that thing offline unless you like to stay abreast of junior QA analyst jobs in West Virginia for $27/hr.

I increasingly favor OAuth when I encounter the option, even though I resisted at first ("too many eggs in the google basket").

I am sick and tired of needing to conjure a unique 12-character password with 4 different keyset features in order to gain access to a coupon-clipping site, someone's blog about bundt cakes, or a forum discussing solar panels.

The exception is where loss of the credentials can do me real and meaningful financial harm. I have no problem managing unique, complex, and rotated passwords for these. I also expect 2FA for these at a minimum.

Everyone is doing this so terribly that I wish they'd all just farm it out. correct battery horse staple indeed. :)

The last year has really intensified how often I see this question here or on reddit or otherwhere in my online travels.

You're describing MLOps.

Why would you want to make this transition if you're not keen on the underlying math? Why not include DevOps or SRE if you're interested in code-based pipelines, deployments, and scaling? How are you going to get into things like drift detection without understanding the math?

(...hoping for an answer that isn't shouted by Rod Tidwell at Jerry Maguire -- but genuinely curious why I'm seeing this so much and trying not to make a cynical assumption :) )

I wonder how soon we'll be charging those "crackle map" exhaust hoonigans with assault on the un-thought-of children.

They really do. This has been my longest tenure at any position by far and Engineer QoL is a massive part of it. Our CTO came up through the DBA/Data/Engineering Management ranks and the empathy is solidly there.

As we grow, I'm ever watchful for our metamorphosis into a big-dumb-company, but no symptoms yet. :)

Getting my models dunked on by people who can't open MS Outlook more than 3 tries out of 5, however, have a remarkable depth and insight into their chosen domain of expertise. It's rather humbling.

Collaborating with nontechnical people is oddly my favorite part of doing MLE work right now. It wasn't the case when I did basic web/db stuff. They see me as a magician. I see them as voodoo priests and priestesses. When we get something trained up and forecasting that we both like, it's super fulfilling. I think for both sides.

Most of my modeling is healthcare related. I tease insights out of a monstrous data lake of claims, Rx, doctor notes, vital signs, diagnostic imagery, etc. What is also monstrous is how accessible this information is. HIPAA my left foot.

Since you seemed to be asking about the temporal realities, it's about 3 hours of meetings a week, probably another 3 doing task grooming/preparatory stuff, fixing some ETL problem, or doing a one-off query for the business, the rest is swimming around in the data trying to find a slight edge to forecast something that surprised us for a $million or two using our historical snapshots. It's like playing wheres waldo with math. And the waldo scene ends up being about 50TB or so in size. :D

+1! the Picos have been an absolute joy to work with, and take me back to my C coding start from.. gosh.. 38 years ago. :)

Mix in some I2C components and a few jumper wires, and you basically have my whole childhood distilled down and reborn -- legos and code.

Was this like in the outskirts of Saskatchewan? :) I can't think of a way to meaningfully blacklist engineers in the age of remote work.

I'm comfortable with a ruling of "Everyone sucks here" on this. :)

I'd be super annoyed just as the author, for the same reasons.

Private jets are required to paint 12" high registration markings on both sides of their fuselage. Owner data is public record, although often obscured by holding corporations. The data used to contain SSNs if you can imagine it.

I'm unclear what jet aviation risk we are equating to hazmat ground transport. It's not raining aluminum very often, and it's a news frenzy when it does happen.

Every time I read "private jets should X" I can only ever boil it down to envy or "because I have the right to know", which I personally don't agree with. I seldom see things like "transporting that organ to its transplant patient via light jet is so carbon intensive -- why not use passenger aircraft cargo instead?" or other more nuanced takes.

For some, I imagine the opacity is worth the frightful cost of private aviation. I don't know what it is like to have millions of fans trying to figure out where I am at every waking moment, and the very idea is horrifying. I don't think any valid purpose is served by knowing where <star du jour>'s jet takes off from or lands at, and I don't think anyone is honestly looking skyward to FL410 and worrying about an aircraft part landing on them.

From other conversations about this topic, I thought it was interesting that the congresscritter who advanced the legislation is from the Bentonville AR region -- and crafty investors have tracked Walton jets to figure out where the high-level Walmart business meetings are happening, then making inferences about upcoming stock-moving deals. I thought that was fascinating. Humans are crafty, and humans with means who want privacy will find it, despite any number of laws passed. It all feels like wasted whack-a-mole effort to me.

I love programming but have burned out on doing it for others a few times now. I once jumped to fly cargo for UPS.

I gotta say. It's nice to remember how good we have it. Doing a harder job for 1/10th of the pay refilled my empty gratitude bucket very quickly. :)

Today I gripe about waking up at 8am to do another useless standup meeting, but once in awhile, I remember waking up at 3:30am to meet the UPS jet and wait until they loaded my little Beech 99 so that I could fly through low clouds and ice so that the folks in roseburg, eugene, and la grande could get their amazon prime tchotchkes. Then waiting around in the bumblefrick motel for 6 hours for the UPS truck to return that afternoon with the unwanted returns of last week's amazon prime tchotchkes.

Yeah programming for others sucks. But it sucks less than a LOT of other things, and pays a whole lot better. Get while the gettin is good. When you want to run screaming in the other direction, may I suggest a pause, a walk, and a reflect first -- lest you kill the golden goose and never be able to get it back.

$0.02 :)

What are your thoughts on the 80,000lb semi trucks, laden with (admittedly less) volatile and explosive fuel, driving through your community without needing to publicly report telemetry and routing details?

I already won't use Amazon for things I put in my body -- the product commingling and counterfeit situations make them a non-starter for me on this. Precision and control are just not in their company DNA, so I don't want their shipped products mucking with my DNA. :)

Apple would be far higher on my list of consideration than this. I'd even say Google, for the 2 or 3 years that the product lasted.

While I do find healthcare somewhat plodding and archaic, these anecdotes remind me that it's not always a bad thing.

If they spent the time to describe all of the rare-yet-possible ways a person could die on an airliner, the thing would never leave the gate.

At some level, take their mandated-by-regulations word for it? -- these regs are written in blood, and they say to buckle your belt, not only when the sign is lighted, but also any time when seated at your seat.

Boeing has done a good job of reminding us of some non-turbulence reasons to buckle up. You might also get sucked out of an unsecured exit door plug on a 737. :) I haven't heard that one mentioned in a safety brief yet.

In the pilot circles I frequent, the joke about seatbelts is that it helps accident investigators more easily count the deceased among the wreckage. So there's some YOLO fuel for your next trip. This was a freak occurrence. It's sad and it sucks. The injuries to passengers were likely preventable -- less so the cabin crew. New word is that the fatality was a cardiac event -- no belt buckle helps anyone there.