We're using tons of Hetzner nodes that are under constant heavy load (~100% CPU usage for ~12 hrs/day), never had problems. I know this is anecdotal, just logging it here.
"But what you must know is that WSL has a lot of problems when compared to a full Linux OS. Because WSL is basically a virtual machine of Linux running on Windows, it will be a lot slower and memory-consuming"
UK has that (called the HSCN). I don't think it's a good thing. Couple of years ago you had to pay hundreds of dollars for a a TLS certificate because there were only a couple of 'approved' certificate providers. It also provides a false sense of security and provides an excuse to bad security policies. The bandwidth is low and expensive.
It’s not sure it’s quite the same, HSCN does provide border connectivity to Internet as well as a peering exchange. Sjunet on the other hand is an entirely private network with no border connectivity. I have dealt with both.
I don't agree fully. If some idea looks really good but implementations tend to be very problematic then the idea is likely presented incompletely or inaccurately, because it carries some hidden/non-apparent risk.
Some good-looking ideas almost always result in beneficial implementations, some good-looking ideas almost always result in bad implementations.
If all implementations of a "good" idea are bad then that's a strong indication that the "good" idea might have some significant flaws.
If the "good" idea has some bad implementations as well as some good implementations (like the swedish network example?) then perhaps you shouldn't dismiss the "good" idea so quickly
Sure, let's get to concrete things. What is a separate physical network worth, availability wise? Kind of hard to answer. It depends on the threat model. Even geography.
In this case though the two things are closely intertwined. The reason we all use the internet is because it is the most fit-for-purpose network for moving bits around between intranets. If there was a substantially more effective way to do it then it'd be cheaper or better and we'd all migrate to it over time. Countless businesses at all levels of the abstraction stack labour to make the internet cheaper and more convenient (CDNs are unbelievable, I say!).
So people choosing to create a new network are, with high confidence, going to end up with networks that are substantially worse at moving bits around cost effectively than the internet. The reality that they are inconvenient and expensive is built in once the deliberate choice is made to avoid the internet. It might be worth the cost, but the cost comes with the idea.
HSCN was said to be imperfect. It is inherent in the idea of building something like HSCN that sometimes the implementation is just bad in some aspects. actionfromafar's objection to that (idea independent from implementation) is invalid, because inherent in the idea of building something like HSCN rather than just using the internet is that implementations will suffer from relative imperfect. The fact there are relative imperfections is baked in to the idea.
Using Latin words isn’t a suitable substitute for critical thought. You aren’t applying any here. There’s a clear difference between these two scenarios. The argument with communism tends to hinge on the assertion that there’s been no good real-world implementation of communism. Here, OP is asserting that an implementation is good. That’s yet to be refuted based on the actual characteristics of the implantation. You’re at the very least being tone deaf.
The same argument was against seat belts in cars and bicycle/motorcycle hemlets. IMHO this arguments is rarely good. False sense of security should not be addressed by removing protection.
> provides an excuse to bad security policies
It should not be used as an excuse but bad policies in air-gaped network is less bad than bad policies in the Interned connected one. I doubt policies will be quickly improve as soon as you connect to the Internet.
That's a (highly predictable) implementation problem of HSCN, not a problem with the idea. These complaints boil down to the same old thing: stupidly written law setting a (potentially) good policy up for failure.
You never ever swap cables between PSUs. It's not a Dell thing - you must use the cables that ship with the PSU. Many people have fried their mainboard like you.
You're talking about something different. In the early 2000s, before modular PSU cables, Dell used non-standard PSU power connector wiring arrangements. The 20-pin mobo power plug coming out of the PSU was wired differently than the ATX standard at the time, and swapping hardware could fry a motherboard.
Yeah, I wasn't "swapping" PSU cables; the cable was part of the PSU. I replaced a Dell PSU with a standard one, and <smoke!> No more motherboard.
Manufacturers who pull this type of incompatibility shit risk their reputation. I never went near anything with a Dell label again until last year, when I bought a second-hand laptop (I don't attempt laptop upgrades and repairs).
We have decided not to use anything that can't run any any computer. It's really possible to have large scale systems ROAC, if you pay attention to avoid proprietary cloud tech lock-in.
Many people misunderstand this. Just saying 'no' and being firm won't make you successful, it's not a very useful. Saying 'no' while convincing others that 'no' is actually the best strategy is a great skill.
It's always a compromise. With Android you can get actually good typing experience in non-English languages, voice typing in non-English, proper desktop view in browsers and really good call quality or better PWM in some cases.
It depends on what is important for you. iOS is not a panacea either.
By they way, with Android, just use Samsung. Despite the duplicated apps it's just a better experience.
I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical.
The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.
And yes, value yourself, absolutely. And your job is not your family or your identity, and manage risk, and there are bad bosses and bad company cultures. But it's not uniform.
But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
Even at big, bureaucratic companies like big investment banks, if you're at a certain level (not that high), eventually you'll mostly be taken care of. Not everyone and not always, but e.g. if you're an ED at an investment bank, you can have a job for life, maybe not at your current place forever, but the industry will take care of you. Similarly if you've been at dunno, Mercedes for 15 years and you're not the bottom 20 percent in terms of performance, then it's kinda guaranteed that you'll have a job in the auto industry forever.
People who have been let go from Google today can have an extremely lucrative job forever in the industry.
I don't think this necessarily holds in the world of remote work. At least for me, relationships are very surface level. Almost no friendly banter, limited 2 second "How was your weekend?" before meetings that no one cares about. Its hard to be friends with little black boxes and white text on a screen.
This is compounded when 75% of the team is made up of consultants.
I do agree though that its pretty awful but the thought of moving my family to a big city, doubling my cost of living and having to commute is also pretty bad. I live in a not tech city and would have to move to get a comparable salary at an in person job.
Me and one of my employees are going through almost identical and seriously difficult personal times. Our company and the people within it have really rallied around us, providing personal and professional support in ways I could never have imagined.
I have said that while other companies I have worked within would be sympathetic, they definitely would not have been empathetic; however, at my current company, EVERYONE from the CEO to interns have been so very empathetic, helpful, and thoughtful.
We are all remote and have been since the pandemic. These are people who are reaching out regularly, coming to visit, offering support in whatever way possible, and being genuinely good human beings. It's simply a work culture when you don't have this, but you CAN find it.
Don't lose hope. Good companies and great people within them are there, remote or not.
Unicorns exist but in the job search it’s a crap shoot to find one. Nearly impossible to identify in an interview setting and likely only through world of mouth.
Impossible to diagnose during an interview… because it depends on you as well. Caring is a transient thing, I’ve had crap employees, and now we have an awesome “soldered” team, which every previous employee could have created… but didn’t.
I’m not saying you have total control over it… but it depends on how people interact.
I've said it many times both here and in "real life" - teams filled with any sizable proportion of consults (15-20% and up I would say) are one of the clearest, brightest red flags you could see.
I've seen first-hand organizations shift from 100% employed teams to being majority consultants, and the majority of those consultants on 1-2 year contracts then leaving. Code quality goes to absolute shit. The name of the game is spending the first half of your contract not getting fired and the second half looking for the next contract. Zero documentation. Refusing to do turnover meetings. Not showing up for the last day/week of the contract because their next contract wanted them to start earlier so they didn't care if they got paid for this one or not. Most egregiously someone just brought in their next contract's laptop into our office with over a month left on their contract.
None of this happens with employees. Sure you'll occasionally have someone quit with minimal or no notice but that's the exception. We had to basically assume that any time we got in the last month of the contract was a bonus. Consultants work for their recruiting firm, not for your org, and they behave accordingly.
Very much agree.
I am working with probably 40 consultants on a team of 80.
The absolute lack of pride in their work is pushing me to my breaking point.
I will know if I am going to leave in a couple weeks, 2 things need to happen for me to stay; I get promoted this month and half the consultants leave. If both don't happen I think I am gone.
I think change in the remote work world is that we can no longer take these casual relationships for granted, or assume that they will just come into being. In this new world, we have to be intentional about building them.
Whereas in an office environment, we'd naturally run into folks at the proverbial water cooler, and slowly develop more of a relationship with some folks — and similarly for camaraderie with the folks sitting around you — that just doesn't exist in remote.
In my experience, it is still possible to build these kinds of relationships, though. But it requires actively building them. It requires intentional effort, which doesn't come naturally to many of us, and especially so since many of us have not been used to having to do that, having come from office settings pretty recently. I was able to build meaningful friendships with remote colleagues, some of which have lasted beyond my time at the company, by intentionally making the time to ask and care about their lives outside of work, by setting up recurring 1:1s to just chat, etc. This can sometimes feel like it's "wasted time" that's taken away from your work, but I believe it's really important in order to feel better about where you're working and who you're working with, feel less like a cog in a machine, and as a result (at least for me) end up doing better work.
I wonder if, as the tech world becomes more accustomed to remote work, we'll eventually get better at this as an industry. My hope is that it'll get easier, or at least more natural as a result.
This has long been true to some degree when you work with people scattered around the world. But it's a legit concern that, overall, we're probably developing much shallower relationships with the people we work with compared to when we were together in-person more of the time. Doubtless there are people who prefer just tuning out co-workers as much as possible. But it's reasonable to ask how it will affect many companies in the longer run when many co-worker relationships are very surface compared to pre-COVID.
I get this, but I will admit to missing the camaraderie I got from working in person with people. I miss grabbing lunch with someone or a drink after work. But thats in the past now, and a job is just a place I exchange life hours for dollars now.
> Its hard to be friends with little black boxes and white text on a screen.
I think after a point, it is up to us to create the culture we want to see in a team. Someone has to start sharing more things, start talking about more things so others will feel like the same. Have a pizza session after every few successful sprints. Share puzzles and other things regularly so people have more things to talk about. It is easy to feel detached when everyone only uses a group channel, but a lot of meaningful connections happen when you do talk 1-1 in private.
I mean I have worked at places where no one even exchanged email ids when they are about to leave the company, and lurked in online places where people whom I have never even met employed me immediately when i mentioned that my day job company was going bankrupt.
This is just unrealistic. When layoffs happens, whole departments can get cut. They don’t differentiate performers.
Likewise, there is a huge bias in hiring against older developers. Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment.
Be ready to retire by 50, because anything else is both risky and improbable.
Being ready to retire at 50 would be a good thing, but getting laid off in your 40's is not a death sentence. I'm 63 now, still working as an engineer, and I was laid off in my 40's, twice. In addition to the emergency fund, another great way to build some security is to keep learning new stuff. In my experience the older engineers who get into trouble are the ones who try to rest on what they know and inhabit a niche they've built for themselves. In our business knowledge evaporates and niches crumble.
The last three companies I've worked for prefer hiring older workers. Well, they're not looking for age -- they're looking for very refined skills and experience -- but those thing are highly correlated with age.
If knowledge evaporates, maybe it wasn’t useful knowledge after all. Likewise, if a niche disappears, it wasn’t a good niche. Good long term strategy in terms of developing your career technically comes down to identifying knowledge and niches that aren’t going away any time soon. A person can have more or less insight when it comes to this.
This got me thinking, I'm wondering how this will interact with the fact that technologically, we're getting increasingly better abstractions. So there's less pressure to learn what happens physically, the way that folks like Wozniak had to.
Is low-level expertise going to continue to skew older? Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?
Unlikely. Some people really just are better at low level than high level (and vice versa.) Further, I would say anyone who started after say... '97 never needed to have that layer, and '87 may be true too. The true pressure hasn't existed in over 25 years and yet we still have low level expertise because embedded will continue to be a use case.
The most powerful abstractions are typically not free. The rate of performance improvement from improvements in hardware has slowed down and might continue slowing down. Thus, the pressure to learn what happens behind various abstractions might actually increase, if advantageous performance improvements can primarily be obtained by peeling back the layers of abstraction at the cost of some development efficiency, since you can't just wait a couple of years for hardware to develop to a point where it can handle your inefficient abstraction anymore.
> Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?
AI product dev hat on for this comment. My take is AI will continue to give solid first drafts, and expertise, creativity, and curiosity are required to take it the rest of the way. Maybe, just maybe, we get beyond the GPT architecture and embed a reasonable state of the world for wider use cases similar to a CoPilot.
We are getting more abstractions, not necessarily better ones. I much prefer working with people who figure out how things work under abstractions rather than relying on them blindly.
How about the general decline of cognitive ability with age? I'm in my late 30s, starting to feel fatigue in dealing with nasty little problems on a daily basis. I can say whether an approach is good or bad, but actually coding the stuff with all the modern ephemeral frameworks and libraries is becoming increasingly uncomfortable. I would want to afford to do "recreational programming" on greenfield projects, unbound by time and business requirements, but it is a luxury.
50 year old here. You replace reflex intelligence with applying wisdom.
I'm a very senior IC in a FAANG and almost my whole job is going around and sharing 30+ years of wisdom with people on everything from "dealing with people" to architecture to pull request reviews.
FAANG jobs and organisational structures are not the norm across the world. The ratio between "people fixing stuff" and "old wisemen" is heavily skewed towards the former.
No doubt on the latter. I write a lot of "wisdom based code" to "fix stuff." Ideally before it needs fixing. :)
Also, while I'm at FAANG now, I'm there because I was previously at a startup that was acquired by said FAANG, and if anything, there is even MORE of a need for this sort of wisdom intelligence in a startup. :)
Good for you, but you are in a privileged position. Over here in grim Eastern Europe and outside a capital, your best chance is to find a remote job that doesn't actually suck and has longer-term prospects. Climbing to a managerial position means controlling people and being in touch with other managers posting bullshit on LinkedIn. Nobody will hire you to just write "wisdom-based" proof of concepts or whatever.
Sounds like you could be having health problems or just depression. You might mention this to your doctor at your next check up. What you describing doesn’t sound like normal aging for someone in their 30s.
> How about the general decline of cognitive ability with age?
I don't think there is an inevitable general decline of cognitive abilities with age, or the effect isn't strong enough to matter. At least, I haven't really seen them.
What I have seen is older people who are just tired of the constant personal improvement that any career needs to continue to flourish. People often find their niche and just want to stay there. That's a different thing entirely, though.
> How about the general decline of cognitive ability with age?
This is a real issue at say 85, not at 45. You almost certainly aren't quite as quick as you were when you were 25, but on the other hand you typically know a lot more and the experience probably means you actually make far fewer errors overall...
I can't speak for being let go past 40, but every place I've worked (including a startup) have had IC developers over 40, and all but one over 50, working there.
>Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)
If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle, then going back to 250k a year lifestyle might feel like a "death sentence", at which point you will hear the world's smallest violin playing for you.
Hance why you shouldn't keep extending your lifestyle proportionally with your paycheck growth, and learn to stay humble and frugal and not spend to 'keep up with the Joneses'.
Unless you're in the same league with John Carmack or Andrej Karpathy where top companies are begging at your feet, you should treat jobs with very large TCs more like short therm lottery wins rather than cashflows guaranteed to last, since there's a high chance you're not that special as you think, and that there's probably others out there who can and are willing to do your work better and for cheaper when the crunch comes and the layoff axe starts to swing towards those non-exec workers responsible for company's biggest paycheck expenses. Those who've lived thorugh the 2008 days will know and remeber what I'm talking about.
For anyone making this kind of money at an early age, don't spend it... invest it.
If you're actually making $1.2 million a year, invest at least $500k/yr.
Then if you need to take a pay cut later, hopefully the dividends from your investment accounts brings your total income close to where it once was.
Also if you're reading this wondering if people actually make this amount of money coding... the answer is no, with the exception of an incredibly small percentage of people. Expecting $800k comp is not realistic for 98% of people.
This is good advice. But it's worth pointing out that by default many of these people are heavily invested in GOOG. And those that aren't are probably heavily invested in market instruments propped up by the GOOG price.
So, mumble mumble, something about diversifying.
I'm sure the layoffs are likely to lead to a short-term bump because the markets will interpret it as Google adulting. But if they're signalling that they're afraid of AI eating their market share, then you probably want to be proactive about that.
Well, yeah I agree. But I think most people do by default. That's really the idea of vesting... to align employee interests with the interests of the company.
If you've built up a 1.2M / year lifestyle on a 1.2M / year income you've made some terrible mistakes, I doubt some internet advice is going to solve that.
>If you've built up a 1.2M / year lifestyle on a 1.2M / year income you've made some terrible mistakes
You'd be surprised by people's poor spending habbits. Aquitances of mine when they got their first SV job out of college at Facebook, they immediately bought brand new Porsche 911's.
One of the pieces of career advice I've given my kids is: when your pay goes up, be very cautious about changing your lifestyle to match it. Going up that ladder is easy -- going back down is painful.
Ideally, your standard of living should cost you a fraction of what your income is.
I was making $x in 2020 as a CRUD developer in Georgia.
I got a job at Amazon and was making $x+$100K
I was Amazoned last year from a remote position. By then, I had paid off debt, downsized from my big house in the burbs to a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida and could easily live off of $x- $30K even though I’m making around $50K more than I was making 3 years ago.
Guess how much I stressed when Amazon started Amazoning?
To be a 50 year old engineer you would have had to start your career in the 90s. There weren't 10% of the number of SWE in the 90s as now. That's why you see the profession skew so young. I have seen no evidence of older engineers having trouble finding work.
My career went in to the toilet in my 40s, and it has never really recovered. However, I'm an introvert and on the spectrum, so I lack good networking skills and never moved up the career ladder.
Even so, among my circle of friends there is a consensus that many of us were struggling around age 50, and now I am 60. The only jobs I've had in the last 5 years have been contracts. My current gig, I haven't seen a raise in 3 years, despite 20% inflation. I've been told that the company I work for has a freeze on raises, so I will have to start job hunting...
In the rest of the industry, not many software workers make enough to realistically retire by 50, anyway. Not without living like monks their entire lives. (recall: you need a lot more money to retire at 50 than at 65) And older workers mostly do OK in the rest of the industry, at least until age 60 or so.
The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here.
Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable.
But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well.
Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.
>Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern.
Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability?
Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home to psuh ads to people, like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those "un-cool" kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners. If you're a 10x dev you'll find top paying jobs no matter your age.
This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like, where if a company doesn't offer FAANG TC then it's automatically unlivable.
Hell, if AI makes my medicore coding skills redundant, as I'm not a 10X dev, I can always go into trades. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, you name it, are making bank now as there's a shortage of trades and the labor market is overcrowded with all kinds of BS consultants and "laptop workers", as per the last south park episode which I recommend you watch.
There are a lot of decent programming jobs anywhere in the world too, we might not be FAANG but jobs are decent enough to raise a family and build a house.
> The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here.
Must retire? No, of course not.
I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots.
For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct.
But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me.
Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.
There absolutely is ageism, but it's not as widespread as many younger devs seem to think. It also tends to be concentrated in a particular segment of our industry. Big picture, there isn't enough ageism to lose sleep about it.
Within the AI bubble, I think there is lots of ageism, but in real world mission-critical i.e. "serious stuff" there is plenty of jobs for experienced engineers.
Well no, I clearly wasn't saying there is no ageism at all. I was taking issue with the comment regarding developers having to leave tech over 50 years old.
Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...
People who think this way are blinded by their own worldview. A large number of the best engineers aren't in the business to become wealthy, and they don't leave the industry if they become wealthy.
The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.
Perhaps in the hyper inflated SV economy, but in the rest of the world you don't get to retire until you've reached the normal retirement age (minus a few years perhaps), and that makes it quite natural to see newly employed software engineers who are in their mid or even late 50s. I've worked with plenty of them.
I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.
Once you get into late 50s/60s, I know quite a few people in tech at that point who have had reasonably well-paying jobs (though certainly not top-level FAANG salaries) who have presumably managed their finances well who are pretty much ready to wind down at that point--whether forced or otherwise. They mostly haven't classically retired but they're working part-time on often IT-adjacent types of projects.
That's why I said "in many parts of the US". There are certainly places in the US where someone can live quite comfortably on $100K. There are other parts where it would be quite difficult and where it would be almost impossible to own a home on that income.
Simply not being "homeless and hungry" is also not synonymous with "living comfortably". In many US cities, $100K is not enough to have much financial security and without owning a home it is more difficult to have much personal autonomy.
And you still haven’t listed a metropolitan area - and I’m being pedantic because you may not be able to live in Manhattan or downtown Seattle - for $100K?
And if you talk to the people who strongly identify with the MAGA movement, their main concerns are guns, illegal immigration, “persecution because of their Christian beliefs”, and for some strange reason - Disney.
People who know me and one of my friends calls us the “odd couple”. I’m a Black mostly agnostic bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig who works in tech (including a stint in BigTech), my friend is a White former military high school dropout who is an evangelical Christian, gun loving and rural, who rails against those “illegals”.
But he attends a predominantly Black church and has been married to a deaf Vietnamese woman for two decades who he loves dearly.
I also use to live in a famous “sun down” town in Georgia made famous by Oprah. I’m often in conversations with modern “conservatives”. I don’t argue, I just listen.
This would be a 66% pay cut for me. As in, it would take 3 years of that pay to match one of my current year’s pay. Investing aggressively and retiring at 50 seems like a smarter option.
> Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment.
This just isn't true as a broad statement, although I don't doubt it's true for some parts of the industry. Big picture, though, older engineers are no less employable than younger ones. In the right company, experienced engineers are valued more highly, even.
I got my first job in BigTech at 46 - working at AWS in Professional Services
When I got Amazoned last year, I had three offers within three weeks.
One of those offers was from a former coworker who is now a director at a well known public company. It would have paid about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs at AWS. I didn’t want the stress.
The other offer was for a “staff architect” position at the company that acquired the company I worked for before going to AWS.
The third and the offer I did take was a for a senior full time position at a consulting company that should lead to staff position as we grow the AWS specialty that I know inside out from working with the team.
Unless I’m completely misreading the market - and I seriously doubt I am - there is no reason that if I cared to I couldn’t increase my total compensation by 30-40% inflation adjusted over the next few years
> Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence.
That's just not true. In my mid (ugh, getting to be late) 50s and I've been laid off in most of the downturns since the dot-com bust, including this recent one. Getting a new job at comparable compensation has rarely been a big problem. I suppose if you let your skills get rusty or work on a VERY specialized tech stack and don't want to do something else, then sure, you'll have problems.
But in this market, I'd rather be a grizzled veteran with demonstrable skills in a variety of areas than a new grad.
You're never going to make as much again after 40: based on what metrics? Ageism is illegal in the US, and if this is true for you, you probably did not cultivate the type of software engineering skillset that scales well as you advance up the career ladder.
I have talked to literally hundreds of people in my life who have suffered through illegal workplace discrimination and I've honestly never met a single one who prosecuted a discrimination case successfully. Things are only illegal if you can prove them, and most managers don't go around yelling "holy shit I hate old people".
Agreed, but highly doubt the effect is nearly as dramatic as claimed. If the effect is to the extent that engineers in their 40s can never make the money they made in their 30s, that would be trivial to prove. Even a big corp would have significant trouble defending such a statistic.
Legality just isn’t a concern when it comes to big companies. I am convinced that if someone looks at history from far away in the future, they will compress feudalism and industrial capitalism together.
These companies have a big influence on what is legal or what is a priority for governments.
Serfs being bound to the land, and power being directly held by those who provided military service are pretty stark differences between Feudalism and Capitalism. Not even Marx equated the two systems.
Yeah, but parent is saying if you zoom out. We don't know what will come next; it could be dramatically different. Nobody saw industrialization and its attendant social order coming.
> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
I found this to be a very obvious reality in the companies in which I worked. And not in the sense of "poor me, nobody loves me": on the contrary, I found that I was more indifferent than expected even toward the departure of colleagues with whom I had a good relationship.
For example, in the current group of about 40 people in which I work, two directors who had moved up the ladder, were quite well-liked, and had a long tenure with the company, left to work for other companies. Their colleagues, including me, forgot about them within 2 weeks at most.
Another colleague was forced to retire after 40 years with the company: a month before his (forced and unexpected) retirement, he sat down with me to explain what he intended to do in the company over the next 3 years. But he was forced to retire and disappeared from people's minds within a few days.
Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.
> Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.
I think this is just normal human self-regulation. Extreme example, but people are mostly OK and functional a month after their mother passes away. If the best and most critical person in my team would leave today then I would focus on filling the gap, etc. and I would not think of them very much after a few days, but this doesn't mean that all that they're a fully fungible cog.
> and I would not think of them very much after a few days
To me, it sounds like the definition of a fungible cog, where "fully" depends on whether a replacement with the same skills can be hired. One is expected to be functional at some point after losing their mother, but the mother's name and role in the org/family is unlikely to be forgotten, even after decades.
Agreed. So much in life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you look at your employer as an exploitative user of your life, then that is what you will get out of it. You will continually feel raw about things that happen, imputing mal intent where there is none. If you imagine upper management as sinister mustache-twirling villains, you are going to despise everything they say and do, regardless of its merit.
There are for sure exceptions, but I think most people would be very surprised at how little control the decision makers at the top actually have. They have a duty to make the best decisions for the company, and most of the time that is not ambiguous. The real difference I believe comes in how they handle it. Companies that provide generous severance, for example, are deserving of gratitude.
No doubt, it can really hurt when you have busted your ass and put your blood and sweat into a company, and they discard you. Many people tend to identify themselves with their employment, which I think lent very well to the idea of it being a family, but it won't be helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from their identity with the company, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's very natural, in fact. Humans are group-based animals that look for group associations and identify with them. Yes, it is great for people to use families and friends for that, but the reality is not everyone has that option.
A much healthier approach in my opinion is to find a good balance. Understand how the system works. When you see the sausage being made, and try to empathize and put yourself in the decision makers position, it can help take the sting off and give you a more realistic outlook on life.
The worst thing you can do for your mental health and life satisfaction, is embrace bitterness. You don't need buy into a delusion that things are great, that you are loved for you, or that the company is a big family, but you also don't need to buy into a delusion that the company and upper management are just evil heartless people figuring out how best to use and abuse you before tossing you out the door when they are finished with you. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Try to find that truth.
> I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical.
> The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.
> ...
> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
That's true, but the problem is the psychopathic organization exploits those relationships ruthlessly. It will use well-meaning people to lean on those relationships to get more out of employees, but then turn around and shit on them when it suits the org.
Corporations can be and (and usually are) psychopaths, even if they're made exclusively from well-adjusted, interpersonally-kind people. The whole is different from its parts.
There's quite a bit of interest; e.g. ex-colleagues of mine have spent lots of effort on refining the 'chemoton' model. I think it's a fascinating subject.
"The basic assumption of the model is that life should fundamentally and essentially have three properties: metabolism, self-replication, and a bilipid membrane.[3] The metabolic and replication functions together form an autocatalytic subsystem necessary for the basic functions of life, and a membrane encloses this subsystem to separate it from the surrounding environment. Therefore, any system having such properties may be regarded as alive, and it will be subjected to natural selection and contain a self-sustaining cellular information."
