theshadowknows

I just wish my thousand dollar “not a computer” could keep three tabs open in safari without reloading them all every time I switch to check a text message.

I’ve been a very heavy iPad user for over a year now. I keep telling myself things will get better. And you’re right, Apple doesn’t owe me. But I wish they’d just hear what people are asking for.

I spend so much time drawing diagrams that I’ve stopped trying to make them pretty and now I just try to make them meaningful and accurate. So for in-code docs ASCIIFlow is great. I still struggle trying to find an architectural diagram tool that’s not junk. We use Rational and it’s fine. But I’d like something nicer and with a more 3D view.

I'm going through this same thing this very month. I personally am responsible for architecting and building a complex data store, data pipelines, and interface. This is to be used for complex targeting based on rapidly changing data.

I am doing it by myself. I'm the architect and I'm the engineer. I'm drafting the design and building it. And I did it. By myself. Inside of a month.

At the same time, another team is working on the same thing. Dozens of people on the team. Architects and engineers and a couple of data scientists. They took three months to get their first design out and it failed during testing. Their estimate to next iteration is two more months.

My design passed all the tests but one in the first trial and I fixed the remaining bugs inside of a week.

There's a good chance that the other team is going to have their product pushed into production ahead of mine, which will negate the need for mine so my code will get pushed to some archive server and sit there gathering dust.

Same goes for the azure work that I'm doing. Again alone and without any support vs our internal IT apparatus who has infinite money and can spin up temp teams with the push of a button.

And 'round and 'round it goes.

Extra points for using 'boondoggles' in a sentence :)

At my previous job I didn't experience the internal conflict thing as much, we were lucky in that regard. But I did experience the "doing nothing for a while" thing. Within a couple of weeks my boss and his boss both left the company and it took forever to find replacements. Our team finished up our work that original boss had assigned and then...we were told to just keep doing what we were doing...which for the most part was playing call of duty on our company machines all day...

At my current job there is a ton of internal competition and near constant reorganization. This very week my team was rolled into a new organization, and we're working as hard as we can to out position another team so that we don't get rolled under them (or replaced by them). We've positioned architects strategically and work well outside the chain of command to socialize our roadmaps and designs. We every so slightly bend policy where we can. Anything to gain an edge on "the competition" (who are vastly more well funded but who service a considerably smaller section of the enterprise). It's extremely stressful and not productive and absolutely not why I joined this company two years ago. So I'm interviewing at our actual competition. I've spoken with their HR and the person I'll report to already (if I get an offer). Next week I have three more panels and then hopefully I'll know something soon. If it works out I'm going to knowledge dump to my team, tell them to update their linkedin and GitHub, and then I'm going to burn off my PTO and drop my two weeks.

Automation is fun because when you make one mistake you actually make it millions of times inside of a few seconds :) been there!

And more importantly, make money for themselves and not for the city/state etc.

First thing I thought of was “wow that would make boxing matches way more interesting.”

Man what did these guys say!

I like to think our policies would prevent this. Like you can’t just get an access token from support. And you have to know your employee network ID to even call support in the first place. And no one can arbitrarily spin up a VM (well, I say no one..no one that I work with including the guys who always need them). But I’m sure there’s one smooth talking person out there that could talk themselves into access if they tried and got to the right overworked and underpaid support person.

I don’t disagree that airlines should -be allowed- to do charge more. I sort of don’t think they should do it. But in the US anyway, hey that’s the free market…if they try it and the market doesn’t like it then they’ll stop (bc people will fly other airlines…unless there’s collusion between the big airlines but that wouldn’t ever happen in America right…)

But I also think it should be a two way street. If we have a strong tail wind we should get a little bonus. If passengers fail to look into weather forecasts and there’s a strong head wind well tough we get charged extra. That kind of thing.

I worry that leadership will decide that, since lots of people are working remotely anyway, they can hire agencies for less than FTEs and cut costs even further.

Fun! I thought it was going to be like this one http://doc.sikuli.org/

Who says they’re joking. They didn’t say they’d kill a human. Maybe they’d kill a goat.

I’ve been working outside on my deck the past few weeks and it’s been glorious. It’s a little cooler sometimes than I’d like but it’s not frigid (I live in Connecticut).

I’m fairly content with my situation :)

What I mean by old is that I don’t “get” a lot of the newer fads these days. Particularly around the social space. Instagram, Snapchat, tik-tok and the newer voice based services just seem so intrusive and crazy to me. And snap and tik-tok are almost seizure inducing with the amount of content just screaming at you.

It’s just not -for- me. And I get that. But I don’t get it :)

That and as someone else said I do wake up with the occasional creaky back. And I’m noticing more and more gray in my beard every few weeks :)

We will let the application bots and the application scanner bots fight for dominance

Oh it’s not meant to be exact :) just sort of a way to think about applications as a big numbers game.

I don’t have this issue with social media because I don’t really participate all that much. Occasionally one of you guys gets on my case but hey HN are a rowdy sort so I take my punches :)

In terms of job interviews I can see where it would get hard for people. The best advice I ever got for that is to expect one call back for every hundred applications, one interview for every hundred call backs, and maybe one offer for every hundred interviews. If you expect that sort of ratio then it stops feeling personal and just feels like a numbers game.

Because it lets adult men watch young scantily clad boys and girls jump around for free. That’s the sick part to me. These kids (and they are kids) are basically soft core porn for pedophiles. And Nike and Amazon subsidize it.

Man. When I was 18 I was overweight and already balding. I worked at a gas station. Once a hooker spit on me because I wouldn’t let her steal some ice cream. I cut my foot once on broken glass in the dumpster because part of my job was tamping it down with my feet (it cut through my shoe).

Would I have traded it to be an influencer if I could have? Shit yeah in a heartbeat. But unfortunately for me no one wanted to watch me gyrate. (That’s unfair, some people probably would have).

That said. Now I’m a fully bald old man (I just turned 36). I’m not as overweight anymore though I could prob lose a couple of pounds. Blood pressure is good, though.

Would I want to be an influencer? Jet set around the world and stay in lavish hotels for free? Have companies throw products at me? Have thousands or millions of people knowing my every move? Have to give a shit if there’s a stain on my shirt? Hell no.

I want to sit here on my porch with my dog and my wife and do my work. Then at the end of the day I want to turn it off and set it aside. Maybe we’ll go hiking.

I know it sounds glamorous and maybe it’s appealing to some people. But man it’s not for me.

Sure. But you won’t always be young and you may not always be healthy.

You’re right - they do expect that. Regardless of the availability of information, and I agree there is a wealth of it available, companies should work a little harder on explaining this. It’s a new problem for most people.

When the batteries in a remote control, clock, or even a car go bad then it’s trivial to change them. So while this problem has existed for as long as battery powered devices have the difference is that no one noticed. Now you can’t change the battery yourself. So it becomes a much bigger burden to understand “oh, the max ability of my battery to charge has degraded.” It’s just a new piece of knowledge for lots of people.

This one reminds me of the Apple “battery-gate” issue. I’m not going to pick sides or anything but I agree that both Apple and Tesla should have been considerably more clear in their messaging to customers.

My wife and I got married at 21. We went to college. Had a small apartment. I worked overnight at a gas station and she worked at a retailer in the mall. Our rent was $500 a month USD. And we almost never had the cash when rent was due so we always had late fees. The power got cut off consistently. We couldn’t afford cell phones. Our college was paid for entirely by student loans because we couldn’t afford it otherwise.

It was embarrassing. Dehumanizing in a lot of ways. We bought old books that many times didn’t even have the material we needed for our courses and our grades suffered. We both did poorly.

Both our families were poor and would offer help if we asked but we rarely did since they didn’t really have much either.

After we graduated we both went to grad school. It was a little bit better because we both had graduate assistant jobs. So we each had two jobs and things were a little less lean. Until the car broke down. That set us back.

After grad school my wife got a job as a university instructor. I got a job working in marketing. Things were better for a little while. Until my wife got sick. Turns out she has an autoimmune disease that is rare and difficult to manage. We didn’t know that for a while.

Nightly trips to the emergency room. Doctor visits. Specialists. MRIs. CAT scans. Blood tests. More specialists. Oncologists. “You might have brain cancer.”

That was a decade ago.

It was so hard. Every single day we were just trying to make it to the next day in one piece. We moved to a new house that didn’t smell like urine because we could afford it. Until she just couldn’t work anymore.

Our rent was $700 a month. We were trying to build savings. Our $2500 a month student loans and stacks of medical bills made it hard. We ate cheap food but we ate. Our phones only got cut off sometimes. I got a job offer in Europe. We were going to take it. Until her dad got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

We stayed. He died. She had a short term mental break down. The engine in our car blew up. $4000. The flooding started. We went to sleep every night hearing rats in our walls. Our dog died. Our cat died. We couldn’t do anything about it. We wanted to give up. Every second of every day was a struggle. Until I got a new job.

My base salary is $165,000 usd. I get 20% performance bonuses. I have amazing health insurance for both of us. I have a vibrant and rapidly growing retirement account. We moved from the south east to the north east.

My wife has good doctors now. A whole fucking medical team. She’s doing good. More good days than bad days. And the bad days aren’t as bad. And the seizures have stopped. And she doesn’t wake up screaming. We toasted fucking marshmallows on our porch last night and we go on hikes and visit antique stores and see nice things we like and sometimes we even get greedy and buy something just because we can.

We’re rich now. We buy food we like. We have savings. We have investments. We bought a new car and paid it off. The old car had to be towed away when we moved and the scrap yard guy gave us $200 for it.

Every single time we see a couch on the side of the road. Every single time we see a help wanted ad. And every single time we spend a dime. We both get anxious. Maybe not. Maybe next time. Maybe I need to call them. Maybe what if but what do we do if how why when we shouldn’t.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. And it’s not something I’d wish on anyone. And we weren’t even that poor. We never were homeless. We came close some times.

Being poor is awful. And its effects last a long time event after you think you made it out. Our credit is shit. We’re fixing it but it’s a slow process. We can barely get qualified for any type of loan. Home ownership is out of the question for a few more years. And I’m glad the car is paid off. That’s one less monthly bill.

Ok my wife just got into gardening this week...this is great timing and a cool resource.

I used to work for a fairly small retailer in the southeast and the head dba was old school. We had multiple offsite backups of every major system, on-site backups, and frequently ran drills on restore procedures. He was generally disliked by most folks in management and he always said he didn’t mind because one day they’d be happy all the backups were there.

And then some construction crew did something to a water pipe and flooded half our building. And the amount of ass kissing that fell on that man was something to behold. He and his team had us up and running again inside of a couple of days. Minimal down time and minimal negative impact to the business.

I’m in the minority on this one, I’m sure. But the subscription apps don’t bother me at all. I don’t even know how many I have..I don’t need to since the App Store manages it for me. I know that I pay for Concepts, Halide, and Overcast. But I don’t know what else. I don’t even know how much those apps cost..but I like using them and I want them to keep working well. Which means the developers need to be able to earn a living. Besides, what’s the use buying a phone that costs two thousand dollars if I can’t splurge here and there and drop a few bucks on an app that I like?

I have three social media accounts: this one, one for Twitter which is fully blank, and one for micro.blog.

The only reason I even have the Twitter account is because sometimes people link to tweets and I got tired of not being able to see them. But not enough to make an account and actually use it.

I really enjoy micro.blog. I have...five people that I talk to regularly and maybe a few dozen that I follow. It’s been a great way to have a little social media circle without going crazy on Twitter or Reddit.

I actually do have a Facebook account. But it’s only so that you can use messenger which for some reason is the only messenger app that my brother will use.

That’s a great point. And it brings up a question I’ve never had before :)

What would it take for the Bitcoin blockchain to atrophy enough so as to be unusable?