vbordo

Not quite sure why you're getting downvoted. Might be due to your friend's unsubstantiated claim tech workers (on average) are overpaid while underdelivering. However, the core observation is reasonable. Layoffs create desperation in the labor pool which is likely to drive median tech wages down. This benefits companies opex long-term as they restart the hiring cycle over the next couple quarters. Doubtful we're seeing market-wide collusion on these layoffs but it certainly creates an institutional hiring advantage.

Because this program requires garbage collection :)

Agreed. You can also argue that inflated contract cost in a statement of work leads to artificial labor bloat on the project. This benefits the consulting firm while disadvantaging the client. The unnecessary labor can create collaboration friction and lead to technical decisions like adopting microservices despite not being necessary to fulfill the technical requirements of the project. This kind of complexity doesn't guarantee a higher quality product is delivered to the client. Instead, it's used to justify follow-on work, further extracting dollars from the client.

It's possible there's context we don't have that exponentially increases the complexity of their tech requirements and justifies the price here but I'm skeptical. Looks more like misaligned economic incentives commonly at play in engagements between consulting firms and the gov.

Hey, reach out anytime if you just want someone to chat with. Email is in my bio.

This is a misapplication of an ideological statement about abortion. Disregarding the guidance of health professionals such as wearing a mask and socially distancing means endangering other people's lives.

Individual action can lead to collective action in any community. The trick is to distribute the weight of the barbell across a group with shared goals. There's great power in this type of organizing. Movement is certainly possible.

Very cool. Have you written anything about your experience with it in prod and on side projects? I'd be interested to learn more.

Did you end up using Crystal in production?

I really like this idea. I'm unfamiliar with podcasting overhead in a marketplace model. What can you streamline to reduce episode prices?

A key difference overlooked in this perspective is that the professions you've listed don't actively probe about a candidates work outside of the hiring/talent discovery context. Their skill is judged by what they've produced that's directly relevant to the evaluation process. Comparing programmers to such a diverse array of disciplines requires a more detailed analysis.

A percentage of the software industry has a bias against programmers who don't code in their spare time because it's extremely difficult to evaluate technical talent. We lean on quality filters like number of hours spent on side projects that have sparse evidence to support their efficacy. While I'm skeptical that a general set of metrics exist we can use to perfectly evaluate technical skill across the industry, we can certainly do better.

Justin Vernon from Bon Iver strikes me as another pick for the PG of the music industry. He's an unconventional thinker, a bit of an outsider, and well-connected in the industry. This includes close ties to Kanye. Supposedly he's a fantastic collaborator too. It'd be fascinating if they partnered up to create the YC for artists.

What kind of manufacturing applications does IT manage?

I've always wondered how flight search sites develop a system for such a difficult problem with minimal API options and Google limiting access to QPX. There seems to be a lot of data fragmentation in the travel industry too. How do you automate under those constraints? Are there good alternatives to QPX?

Many hotels have some essentials available if you ask. Co-working spaces like WeWork do too if you're a member.

Any examples of startups working on self check-in? I haven't seen any.

This solves a problem I've had frequently while traveling. Very cool.

This sounds similar to what my friends in academia describe while exploring their fields. They build an impressive repository of knowledge regarding who's working on different topics/subfields over time. This may be one advantage of pursuing a PhD. Would be cool to see someone make the process of acclimating to a new field more accessible.

> Looking things up for a specific topic is not even easy in biology

How do you find info on bio topics right now?

Interesting approach. I'll give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

> "[caching/searching] is awful on any platform. It’s not clear what the bounds are for any search and only a very brief history is cached locally. Everything else has to be fetched remotely so scrolling is painful and searching glacial."

I've felt this frustration with Teams and Slack. Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it?

Thanks for your comment. We have a lot of respect for anyone working to make open-source more sustainable. Here’s more information from their pricing page (https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying)

> What is the Tidelift share?

> We don't want to lock this number down until we have more data, but can commit that the majority of subscriber fees will be paid out to lifters.

We really appreciate your support! Yes, we’ve discussed something exactly like what you’re describing here. Open-core is an important revenue stream for open-source projects. We’re carefully considering how we can support projects that best fit an open-core model. I’m curious to hear more about the challenges around that shift towards an open-core model.

Thanks for your questions. There are no project requirements to join the waitlist. Right now we’re working with maintainers of more popular projects. We’re measuring popularity in terms of users. We expect maintainers to be able to replace their current full-time salary if they want to work on their projects full-time. Some maintainers only want to allocate a percentage of their time to open-source, so the expectations for how much money they can make are different in those cases.

The primary maintainer input is getting us up to speed on their project goals, work preferences and existing communities. After we have a good understanding of their preferences, the maintainer can choose their level of involvement. Maintainers can be as involved as they like after we begin our campaign. We provide a weekly update detailing who we’ve reached out to and the status of each communication. We can provide this information on a daily basis as well.

As far as tactics, we start by collecting publicly available GitHub information related to the maintainer’s repo. This includes looking at who has engaged with projects by doing things like submitting issues, pull requests, and stars. We also use social media and any community channels the maintainer has created (Slack, Gitter, Discourse, etc.). Then we act as the maintainer’s sales team by reaching out to these leads via a variety of different channels (email, social media, phone, real-time messaging). We find the right people within an organization to discuss how the maintainer can add value to the company, and we negotiate contracts based on the custom plan we’ve developed with the maintainer.

This is a fascinating point. I absolutely agree that injecting money into software can have unintended consequences. After speaking with a lot of maintainers, one common theme is that the widespread commercial use of open-source software has already created this direct link between money and work. Maintainers experience pressure to continue developing their project to keep up with users, issues and feature requests. The more popular the project, the more value is being created on top of their software, and the higher the pressure. Because maintainers are often required to work on their projects in their spare time, working around a full-time job, it’s easy to burn out and stop working on the project altogether. We’re using this contract route as a way to make open-source sustainable for maintainers and establish clear expectations for both maintainers and companies. Setting those expectations is key to giving maintainers their ideal work scenario where they won’t have to sacrifice quality for speed.

We'll definitely check them out. Thanks for the suggestion!

My name’s Victor and I’m one of the DevFlight founders. Tony and I are here to answer any questions you have. We’re very excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with the HN community.

Got a dev.to thread here as well with some initial discussion: https://dev.to/vbordo/devs-what-tools-do-you-use-to-keep-tra...

Keybase is an awesome platform. Open-source, focused on security, and gaining traction in the messaging space. Check them out https://keybase.io/