Somebody needs to think about this stuff...
I was becoming anxious and getting worked up about an upcoming dental appointment.
“Is there anything I can do to calm you down?” my wife asked.
“Not that I can think of. I just have to be an adult about this.” I replied.
“What would your Mother say to you in this situation to help you cope?”
I pondered that for a couple of seconds and replied “Calm down or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”
I miss her so much. My Mother. Not my wife.
Installed a new garbage disposal under our kitchen sink when the (exceptionally) old disposal developed a hairline crack and leaked all over the inside of our kitchen cabinet. Thanks to my brother-in-law for helping with that and showing me how easy it actually is, though I didn’t get the full experience because even though I held the light at every possible angle, not once did he raise his voice about how I was holding the flashlight wrong.
Every five minutes of being under the sink I constantly reminded myself “yah know, software development ain’t that bad and it pays better…”
But having worked on various parts of the plumbing in our condo over the past decade I have come to realise that household plumbing is a lot like the difference between back-end and front-end software development. As long as you don’t peek behind the cabinet door, or open the access panel, you won’t realise just what a mess the pipework is, or how grungy it gets. I guess we could use the metaphor of the crap that washes down the sink for technical debt.
In the past 14 days I have received 90 recruiter messages.
Only three mentioned a salary, two of which were below market rate and equivalent to a 30% to 50% pay cut.
Only one, Madelyn Rainey whom I totally owe a follow-up email too, actually read my profile. Somebody who is totally worth knowing.
Of the 90 messages received, 67 were for junior to mid-level roles (1 to 4 years of experience), or front-end web development roles.
Of the 87 messages that did not have a slary range, after I enquired about compensation with succinct: “What’s the compensation range for this role?”
74 didn’t respond at all when I asked about compensation range. I was “ghosted” as they like to say.
10 asked me what I was looking for. Evaded and answered with a question. And then still didn’t respond when I asked again.
3 responded with a compensation range that was… a 20% to 50% pay cut.
In that same time frame we’ve interviewed five candidates for open vacancies and don’t have enough hours in the day right now to interview more.
Today is “tired and frustrated man with kitchen greasy hands shouts angrily at incorrectly shaped cloud” day.
Correct me if I am wrong but I don’t believe that Samsung makes a “Samsung Galaxy Microwave.”
Which if that is the case, let’s talk about how completely shite Google search has become.
Microwave seems to be stuck. Huh. Pretty sure I loosened all visible bolts. In which case, I am missing something, so let’s debug the problem. Let’s see what the installation instructions say and that will give me a clue as to overlooked mounting bolts.
“Galaxy Microwave Installation Instructions” I googled.
Well I obviously fucking meant Samsung Galaxy tablets so here’s two pages of SERPs on how to fix the WiFi connectivity on your tablet.
“Galaxy Microwave Installation Instructions -samsung -tablet” I googled.
No! You’re wrong! Here’s how you update your Android OS on your Galaxy tablet!
Three pages of results, only one link was relevant, and for a different model microwave. Mostly spam results that want me to download their driver installer fixer for Windows — I’m on Linux which automatically makes me a better person than you.
Incognito browser. Even worse results.
Decide to randomly try Microsoft’s “Here are the exotic birds of Paraguay whilst searching for hotels in Chicago” Bing, and boom first link, “Galaxy Microwave Installation Instructions” PDF in all its glory.
Should have just searched the Sears parts website directly. And maybe it is time I re-evaluate my search engine habits.
I love the twisted, vitriolic narrative, and I especially like the hot-under-the-collar headlines of these articles.
All the headlines are taken from “respected” thought leader magazines or business websites such as Forbes, Inc, FastCompany, ChiefExecutive, HRExectuive, and there are thousands of these headlines, and the increase in them the past year has been like watching the hockey-stick on a unicorn.
All the words keyed up to make you (the reader) feel like “our” (the company) “employees” are the problem, the competing companies are stealing “our” valuable resources, we are in a war for “our” talent. We must “win” at all costs. We’re gonna try everything!!1!
It’s not us (the company).
Oh no.
We treat our valuable people fairly!
Lookit at how fair we’re being by generously trying to figure out how to get them to stay.
We’re like a family here!
But how dare “our” resources consider going with the money, or a less toxic environment, or realising there is more to life than being chained to a desk for 40+ years to only end up with a broken mind, or chained to a physical job for 40+ years only to end up with a broken body.
Our employees love us!
Newsflash: Employees, not people, not individuals, not a person, “employees”, humans who work for money to be able to live, are like cats, they “love” whoever feeds them the most and don’t treat them bad.
I think the pendulum swung a little too far the wrong way in the past four decades. And it is interesting to now watch those that got promoted and worked for a decade or two in such a system to now realise that the pendulum has swung a little further the other way. But you didn’t notice, because you were too happy with the status quo.
It’s like watching an abuser wake up one day only to find that the victim has an ex-Marine big brother with impulse control issues.
I don’t like lists.
Written lists.
Lists written out to try and impart knowledge and information to the reader.
I do like being able to dip in to things, in an exploratory, unconnected fashion, Wikipedia for instance. But lists, especially in modern SEO writing for the web, have turned in to some bastardized version of useful information. I automatically hate you and your entire family lineage if you have a barely related animated GIF for each bullet point.
My usual train of thought is “a list that isn’t a list”, e.g. https://justinlloyd.li/blog/3d-printer-purchase/ for a 3D printer purchase or my three year long train of thought on prime number research at https://justinlloyd.li/blog/prime-number/. This list that isn’t a list train of thought automatically makes me better than you and I will also silently judge you at the next cocktail party we find ourselves at. There may even be quiet, barely audible seething involved.
On a side note, when I am writing a lengthy article, I usually assemble a list of bullet points first, the outline, and then convert the bullet points into prose, and then re-order the prose, then edit the prose so that it flows. Hundreds of published articles. There isn’t a modern software development trade or software industry magazine I haven’t gotten a published article in to, in some form. And my article always starts as an outline of the subject I wish to talk about.
A list.
One brief thought per line.
Typed up in OneNote with any kind of spell check switched off, or a basic text editor such as Sublime, with no formatting or styling or care for grammar or punctuation or spelling. No annoying squiggly red lines to distract me from my train of thought. Short cut keys to move things around.
But I think lists, as a published medium, are a terrible, terrible travesty of the modern web, because they are so abused.
And bullet pointed lists in a presentation, I consider those kinds of things to be used by people who don’t understand the subject, to teach people even less knowledgable about the subject, everything that they know. Which ain’t much. Again, silent judging at cocktail parties that because I am better than you.
I made a post here, about what happens when services to smart devics get cut.
And I don’t like what I said. So I removed the post.
Maybe when these terrible times are behind us, and I have a bit of perspective on the situation, and I have more clarity on my thoughts, I will take a second attempt at it.
Job requires three years of experience in a technology? But you only have two and a half years?
You get to “an advanced age” you are in your fifties, or you are in your sixties, or you are in your seventies.
I don’t have 40+ years of experience in software development that has left hundreds of scars. I have “20+ yrs of competent technical mentorship, leading teams to succes.”
When you are between your twenties and your forties, you are “I am
When you are in your teens, you are exceptionally particular at being considered a very specific age, and you are almost “the next year older” even if that is 9 months away. “You’re commiting code to github using that framework, young lady?” “I can write in whatever programming language I want Dad! I am almost 17!”
When you are under 10 years old, months matter; “oh yeah, well I’m six years and ten months old, so I’m older than you, so you have to do what I say and I say we’re using brainfuck!”
The same kind of thinking should be applied to your C.V.
2 yrs and 2 months? = “I have two years and two months of experience in this technology, but it feels like forever.”
2 yrs and 4 months? = “I have two and a half years of experience in this technology, but it feels like forever.”
2 yrs and 6 months? = “I have almost three years of experience in this technology, but it feels like forever.”
2 yrs and 8 months? = “I have three years of experience in this technology, but it feels like forever.”
20 yrs of experience in a technology? = “I’ve forgotten more about that than you will ever know. It seems like only yesterday I was wringing the oil from the dinosaurs to power the generator that would let me feed punch cards in to the computer.”
The primary rule of salesmanship is to never give the prospect a chance to say “no” before you’ve talked to them in person.
You ask me for a stupid laundry list of technologies with numbers of years in each technology and I can get very creative in my book keeping.
Why don’t I drive a Tesla or other vehicle with fancy sensors and situational awareness that will warn me of stopped vehicles ahead, or pedestrians in the road, or cars backing out of parking spots?
I don’t need one. I have a spouse in the passenger seat that will not only point them out to me constantly but also perform a sharp intake of breath as an early warning system before anything could possibly happen.
“Oh it’s not you I don’t trust, it’s the other drivers on the road.” she said to me today.
Uh huh, sure. Nice save.
I’ve run in to a lot of people that opine “I don’t know what to write!” My problem is, I don’t have enough time to write all I want.
How do I come up with stuff to write about?
I either trawl through my notebooks for pieces I can use about personal projects I am working on, e.g. buying a 3D printer or constructing a cabinet in the workshop or prime number theory.
Or I scroll through social media until I find something that makes me annoyed that makes me want to shake my fist at a random passing cloud, or someone asks, again on social media, a thoughtful question, and then I form an opinion on either of those two subjects, and then I write about that.
And for every one post on my public journal, I probably have five or six more pieces in my private notebooks that probably shouldn’t ever see the light of day.
Today I made notes on Anchor Hocking storage containers, a math problem, some computer vision research, storage in my workshop, how to write journal entries, rubbermaid container storage options, and the car maintenance schedule.
Read social media. Get annoyed or answer a question. Write a journal entry.
That’s it. That’s my entire method.
Walgreens (a US-based drugstore/convenience store) replaces refrigerator doors with video screens.
I just want Haagen Dazs ice cream. But I cannot see which freezer it is actually in until the ad stops, then it states it is in this particular freezer. But it isn’t because they ran out and an employee hasn’t restocked. I don’t need “education” on how to appreciate being advertised too, I need my fucking ice cream. This shift makes an onerous part of life materially worse.
I am sure the next update will have the doors on the freezer lock until the ad has finished playing all the way through, and the ad will stop playing if you look away in distraction.
Also, the gas will stop pumping if you don’t look at ad on the screen on the pump at the gas station and you must also verbally engage with the ad when it asks a question otherwise it stops pumping. If you answer enthusiastically it will waive the $2 surcharge because you had the audacity to use a debit card.
I am so glad I am getting old and will die soon so I don’t have to live in this dystopian hellhole the new generation are creating for us.
“We’re losing out to on-line retail! Quick! We need to figure out other revenue sources that don’t entail selling anything to the consumer! While we’re at it, let’s make our in-store experience worse!”
You think that’s bad? Check out the hellscape that is the MTA in NYC where the THC ad covers 95% of the screen. Where the ad is so big the useful information is clipped off.
Yay! I can suck on my cannabis vape whilst I stand dangerously close to the edge of the platform waiting for the uptown train contemplating the future of our world.
This one was vandalized. Not sure if it was in response to the utility of the screen or just general protest.
Idiocracy was not meant to be a “how to” manual…
Footnote: How to confuse looters – All the video displays on the front of cabinets and vending machines switch to pictures of low value Kraft cheese single slices, hiding the higher value products inside the cabinets when the store closes for the evening.
I like my code completion tools that helpfully suggest a nearby variable name to use, or the parameters of a function I am calling.
But…
I tried out three of those artificial intelligence code completion tools…
And they’re about what I expected.
I guess they serve their purpose if your kung-fu is weak sauce or you’re a junior programmer cranking out boiler plate code all day long for yet another mobile crypto wallet CRUD app, something that your manager should have just outsourced to someone on Craigslist or Fiverr for 25 bucks an hour.
I guess these tools are supposed to get better as they watch you work and analyze your code base, but I don’t have time to wait for a brain-dead, mentally retarded “programmer’s helper” to get up to speed and still have a lower IQ than my cat.
The code completion is distracting, like pair programming with someone who wants to helpfully suggest things that don’t actually solve the problem. “Oh, thank you for suggesting code to iterate over the array I just declared, I guess that saved me the trouble of putting in the curly braces myself.”
It’s like having a workshop assistant that moves your tools around. The assistant thinks you might need the push stick to move the stock through the blade of the table saw, and so he puts it on the far side of the blade, so you have to reach over to get it, and you have to glance away from the spinning blade because the push stick isn’t where it is meant to be, where you would naturally reach for it. And no matter how many times you tell him not to do that, he continues to do it.
I always look at these tools and think “Okay, what are we doing here other than wasting my fucking time?” They are the programmer’s equivalent of a website’s chat bot, except with curly brackets and indentation.
All of the code completion tools state “We won’t siphon off your code to our servers, we pinky promise!”
Right.
Except the preferences/settings on many are “stored in the cloud” and you have a metric fuckton of telemetry to track everything I do via the plugin.
Of course I would trust any plugin that immediately stops working the moment you block it from the internet. FFS.
AI code completion is yet another over-promise, under-deliver developer tool category.
I guess we wait for these code completion tool companies to get bought by someone like Atlassian where they announce that “well ackshually we have been siphoning off your code for the past few years, if you send in a form, signed in triplicate, we’ll delete all of your code from our servers in 90 days. oops! data breach!”
The summary of the article from Fortune’s website: “Goldman Sachs’s CEO demands employees RTO. Only half of them show up.”
This was my last company, in June/July ’21, just before Delta smacked us upside the head.
Execs say “Everybody RTO! No exceptions!” even if you were hired in to a permanent remote role, which I was.
More than half of the people (all software developers) refused throughout a few different teams. Within days HR fired the refusers for… well, refusal. I am sure there were negotiations, cajoling and conversations that happened behind closed doors that I was not a party too, even as team lead. We went from a team of 60+ developers and about a dozen managers, to a team of four develoeprs and a dozen managers.
My director came to me and asked “You’re sticking around, right?”
“For as long as I can.” I replied.
I quit four weeks later, at the tail end of August, after landing a different job.
He knew I was interviewing. But what could he do? Convince me to stick around in a hot market when being paid below market rate? Without a raise in 18 months after being told that all raises were frozen across the board for the duration of the pandemic? After the company posted record breaking profits for the past six quarters? After everybody at director level and above got bonuses and raises for outstanding company performance? And then change the rules of being hired remotely?
After the company let the software developers go, and the few remaining developers bailed out shortly afterwards, then the company had a round of lay-offs of managers and directors because… there’s nobody to manage and you cannot pay below market-rate — below market-rate even for Summer of ’21 before hiring of software developers went thermonuclear — and also enforce RTO in a HCOL area in the middle of a pandemic just as the market for hiring of software developers is heating up.
I have been thinking of starting a video series where it is a bunch of old farts from the industry (games industry, natch) sitting around bitching about software development, project management and creative nonsense they’ve dealt with over the years.
“Drive-time radio” for creatives and developers with no other agenda than telling old war stories and riffing on past glories.
Couple of cameras, a few good microphones, some backdrop green screens, and we’re in business.
We could call it “Gassy Old Geezers.”
The market for software developers right now is super hot. But what I am noticing is that a lot of companies are struggling to grasp the reality that you cannot hire developers for the same amount of money that I was making 23 years ago as a senior developer in the games industry, an industry which is notorious for underpaying people.
I read the complaints on a few private CTO/HR/recruiter forums about the difficulty of hiring and the compensation required to get someone interested.
And I sit and think “Am I missing something here?”
Why would you believe you could hire a Senior Developer, Lead Developer or Principle Developer for $100K to $120K in California of all places?!?
Even the higher compensation at $150K to $160K is admitting that compensation on offer has not kept up with a 4% inflation rate for the past 23 years.
I got pinged today on LinkedIn. The job requires a laundry list of qualifcations and duties that should really be covered by three separate positions, has full-time on-site in an open office, no possibility of work-from-home, and is in the range of $140K (not including bonus) for a Senior/Lead AI/ML developer.
All I can say is “HAHAHAHA! Good luck on that.”
Meta, Google and Apple are going to Thanos snap your competent staff away from you as soon they find them.
Right, it’s Monday.
I’ve got my favourite mug with the picture of a cat on it.
Nothing’s on fire.
Time to slurp coffee, kick arse and write code.
https://soundcloud.com/justinrlloyd/ip-piracy
P.S. It’s a “C shanty.” Geddit? “C shanty!” No? Anyone?
Let’s just say that people who state this are those that don’t know me very well.
“Oh, you’d make a great dad” people tell me.
No.
No I wouldn’t.
I’d make a lousy father. I don’t like sharing my toys and I am pretty sure I’d hide all my chocolate bars from my kids.
I reflect on the terrible things I did to my own father’s tools in his workshop. I was like the gremlin that made tools and parts disappear off the bench when you weren’t looking and when they did reappear, they were never in the place you’d expect them.
Over the years I’ve figured out that the world neatly divides in to two groups. Those who are parents or want to be parents, and those that aren’t and don’t ever want to be.
“No, I cannot just ‘close it back up in the packaging.'”
People, parents usually, get quite vitriolic when I state that children of any age are unwelcome in my home, and unsupervised children even less so.
I have a nervous tic whenever a hint of children showing up surfaces ever since “The Great LEGO Unboxing of ’05”
For those that aren’t parents, I don’t need to explain it. And for those that are parents, I probably cannot ever explain it.
I love the hustle, but I don’t enjoy the grind.
Five months of relentless pace, dialed up to 11, where you’re doing 50 to 60 hours of ground-breaking software development work a week.
And then a month of “let’s double that” trying to wrangle a sub-project.
Followed by a week that just wouldn’t quit, where on Tuesday, at lunchtime, you realize you’ve already worked 40 hours. Where even the weekend doesn’t give you respite. And you and a colleague went through 60+ espresso shots in one 36 hour period.
And you haven’t done laundry in six weeks.
And you’ve ate more takeout food in five days of March than you did in all of February.
And you’ve ate more takeout food in February and March than you did in all of 2021 and 2020 combined.
Where every meal is takeout.
And you’re eating a burger and fries and a milkshake at 1AM in the morning and it appears normal.
And you’ve been awake since 7AM.
And you haven’t showered in five days.
And it was considered humourous by people that you fell asleep for a half-hour in a chair at work the moment you could stop. Or you fell asleep at the dining table eating leftover takeout, alone, with your family on the other end of the phone call wondering where you went.
When you normally sleep 4AM to 9AM and consider that “fully rested” but it got squeezed to 4AM to 7AM so you can get people on the phone, or chase emails, or texts.
And you’re still staring down a very long tunnel of what’s left to do to get across the finish line. And you know there’s another finish line right after that one. Just as close. Just as high pressure. And another one right after that.
Life’s short. I love interesting problems. The hustle is interesting. The grind is not. “Work hard. Play hard.” implies there’s time left over for play.
I don’t know where I am going with this. But I know I am not heading in the direction I want to be going. Time to step back. Time to re-evaluate.
This is one of those times where you say “What a week huh?” as you pour yourself a drink and your colleague says “But Captain, it’s only Wednesday.”
Monday: Meetings. Meetings. Meetings. Meetings.
Tuesday: Meetings. Running around for materials. Building props in the workshop.
Wednesday: 18 hours building props in an unventilated workshop in 90F weather.
Thursday: 16 hour day, 14 of them on set until midnight.
Friday: “So could you do a 6AM early morning call to catch up?”
Stress levels somewhat lowered today, which is surprising for a Monday, thanks to Jeffery “Jeff” Buchanan and Kenton DeSanti for their amazing ability to step up and get shit done.
I mean, I am still 12 espressos in by 3:30PM in the afternoon, but overall, I’m not bouncing off the walls and contemplating slapping an earlier version of me from 30 days ago for saying “yes” to a crisis project.
Here’s to a productive week, and maybe a few less takeout meals and a few more showers.
Two hours in and third coffee of the day because this week has been fueled by nothing but caffeine and stress.
I know when work is on top of me because this week I have ate takeout for four separate meals. I rarely order takeout food.
“Is the East coast (NYC primarily) becoming the new Silicon Valley?”
Always wanted to write a newspaper headline where the answer is a default “no.”
Okay, let’s lay some groundwork.
NYC has always had a healthy start-up ecosystem. And a lot of the fintech start-ups get their start in NYC natch. Because… well, because Wall St! Gravitational centers.
You want to be in technology? Silicon Valley!
You want to be in advertising? Madison Avenue!
You want to be in films? Hollywood!
You want to be in musicals? Broadway!
You want to marry your cousin where it’s socially acceptable? A… nyway, I digress.
Gravitational centers. NYC has always called to the FinTechs.
They call it the “The Great Resignation”, if you listen to narrative spun by those with an agenda. They call it also “The Great Migration”, if you listen to those with an axe to grind about California.
But here is a data point that doesn’t have an agenda driven by anything other than the need to hire software developers at funded start-ups and unicorns alike, US companies, basing themselves in NYC, and not just FinTech companies, that are hiring either in the US or the UK. With some hiring in Canada. There appears to be some bias against Canucks.
This is a subtle trend appearing on some job openings. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t paying attention.
English is the primary language of communication in the company. Lower wages in the UK. An untapped pool of educated software developers craving to get their paws on some of that sweet, sweet American lucre. No H1B visa applications. Only five hours time zone difference, which is not much worse than between NYC and SF.
And it is happening because of remote first tech companies. Outsourcing rarely saves costs, and for the most part, just makes for a worse product, especially in innovative tech areas. And it doesn’t matter where you outsource too.
Putting aside cultural and language differences, outsourcing brings a different incentive to the playing field that centers around things like “don’t piss off the client, just give them exactly what they want!” Outsourced companies (the vendor) become “people pleasers” in an abusive relationship with a sociopathic entity (the client). Every time. You’re lying to yourself if you deny that.
But if you just pull in employees, from regions that are culturally and liguinstically similar to yours, where, just because they speak English, you don’t have to explain what a snowman is, you can recruit from both regions.
The interesting thing I actually notice is that the compensation on offer is egalitarian. Same base money remuneration on both sides of the Atlantic. And the US company offering secondary benefits to US employees as the UK employees get by a matter of law.
I am not sure how long this trend line will continue, or whether the benefits and remuneration will skew inappropriately once less enlightened companies get in the mix. But it is an interesting data point.
There’s really four tiers of companies that hire software engineers:
1. Tech companies with global reach where engineers generate revenue
2. Tech start-ups that have limited funds
3. Non-tech companies (local & global) where engineers are considered a cost center
4. Local tech companies that are regionally limited
And we rarely, if ever, have a conversation about the differences between these types of companies, and how they structure compensation and the types of engineers they try to hire.
There is stratification in tech hiring, just like there was stratification in game development companies in the ’80s and ’90s. Similar but different.
I think this is a brewing crisis for many companies, and I think will start leading to a lot of dissatisfaction amongst employees. We’re already witnessing it here at the start of 2022, but what we’re seeing is just the tip, of the tip, of the iceberg.
I don’t know what the solution is, or how this is all going to play out, but I can make some pretty good guesses, and I am going to say, it isn’t going to be pretty for some companies, tech and non-tech that rely on tech, and immigration patterns both domestic and international.
The next few years in hiring are going to be extremely interesting.
I joined a company on a short-term contract, “for a month or two”, to help out a friend and solve a few problems. Which became a four year engagement.
I became “the go to guy” for anything and everything related to a particular project, and the DevOps for that project, and eventually the DevOps+CI/CD guy company wide. But I also had to work on an assigned project as Lead Programmer, but never got any other programmer assigned to work with me.
I shipped two company critical products by myself, front-end, iOS & Android mobile app and backend infrastructure. I made significant contributions in the form of code to other teams, I ensured the company wide build-systems kept humming along and was 24/7 on-call DevOps for two years straight with no backup. At one point I literally had five separate managers that I reported directly too that each had their own competing needs.
Every couple of months I had a conversation with a higher up, and every couple of months I was told “there’s no budget, it’s difficult to hire, you do it so well, and we don’t trust anybody else to do it, and nobody else wants to do it.”
There was no promotion, no prospect of advancing, didn’t receive a single pay increase in four years, “but you’re so well paid already, there’s just not the budget for that this year, we see you as more of a cost center than a profit center.” And every time I was ready to quit, a few “friends” at the company talked me down off the ledge, who I later learned were being prompted to do that by upper management. It was a classic abusive relationship. I realize that now. And I fell for it.
When I started to have issues with shipping a product as both the Lead Programmer (mobile apps, fron-end, admin interface, backend infrastructure and API) and also be project manager and interface directly with a demanding client, including doing on-call 24/7 DevOps with no backup, and wrangling the company-wide CI/CD system, the project I was building, that should have been a five person team in reality, I was assigned a “tough manager” to set me straight and get me back on track. This was literally the conversation I had when the manager sat me down in a conference room, “I’m here to make sure you do what you need. I’m giving you some tough love. And I’m going to ride your arse until I see improvement.” Now this manager was not the project manager, he was specifically assigned to manage my output, and after a month he went back to the execs and said “Justin isn’t the problem.”
This manager put up signs at the end of the cubicle row that said “If you need to speak with Justin, talk to X first.” And people would ignore the posted signs, ignore that I had headphones on, and still interrupt me, and then my Manager and whoever was interrupting would get into an argument, right at my desk, over how urgent their request was. I eventually got moved out of that area to a “quieter area” near the IT guy, which unfortunately meant then people would come by his desk and have loud conversations about an IT issue, and when the IT guy wasn’t around, would interrupt me to ask if I knew about how to solve problem X on their computer.
When the stress is so bad, and I have an outburst where I am screaming at my tech director to go fuck himself in the middle of the hallway, and they still won’t fire me, an outburst I am not proud of and would never ordinarily do (I’m kind of a Mr Rogers & Ted Lasso until you hit the wrong button), you kind of get the idea of how indispensable they viewed my position. The outburst was over five people having a meeting directly at my desk, that didn’t actually involve me, that was very loud and racous, and when I repeatedly and politely asked them to move their meeting elsewhere I was informed that I need to be more understanding and empathetic towards people’s needs.
Coronavirus came along, everbody gets to WFH, which gives me breathing room to think, I start looking for a new position, the company hits a financial tough spot and decides they can do without me, which is like a great weight that lifted from my shoulders. I took three months off and built a few side-projects and was so much more productive than I had ever been in the past four years. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-months-side-projects-ju…
I was still getting messages and urgent emails from people at the company four to six months later, on an almost daily basis regarding the DevOps and CI/CD pipeline. Everything had been documented, nobody wanted to read, it was easier to send me an email even though I no longer worked at the company.
I used to love being “the go to guy” but I’ve since learned, “don’t ever be indispensable.”
Unfortunately, the indispensability part is starting to repeat.
I’m Forrest Gump, y’all.
People ask me why I like Forrest Gump. We can both agree, it is a film that has its flaws.
And in the 90’s, when it was released, I couldn’t really articulate precisely why I liked the film. “How can you like something like that?!?” scoffed my boss at the time who had just previously asked what recent films I had enjoyed. Something about Forrest Gump tickled my brain in just the right way.
Maybe I saw a little bit of me there. But I knew it felt that it was more than that.
But I came to realize, after a few years, the film is about a regular, not too bright, not particularly privileged young man, who went about life doing the things he found interesting, open to whatever adventures came his way, if he had the available time to dedicate to that adventure, and somehow, it all worked out. And even later on, when he did have privilege and money, Forrest continued to do precisely whatever he wanted, that precise thing that made him happy. Which begat him even more opportunity.
Forrest didn’t wait around for life to find him, but he also didn’t aggressively pursue opportunity either. Life just happened, and he made himself open to it, in a quotable line, whenever opportunity presented itself, you heard “Okay.” And a new adventure began again.
And what I have found, is that a lot of people are chasing here, there, and everywhere, looking for adventure, but when one shows up, they wonder “what’s in it for me?” or state, very proudly, “there’s no money in that, where’s the profit? How will it make money!?!”
Oftentimes, when at a networking meetup people ask me, “so what is it you do?” my default response for many years has been “Whatever the fuck I want to. Somehow it makes money. And everyone goes home happy.” And the profanity catches them off guard, but then we get in to a conversation about what “doing whatever I want to” actually means. Which is frequently followed by “how do I do that?”
I’ve never worked a day in my life. Every day I get to play. And people pay generously for me to sit down and play. Sure, there have been days where it’s tough, and sure, there have been days when it hasn’t been fun, and sure, there have been days when the pay wasn’t so great. But those few bad days passed, and I’ve had far more fun days than bad days. And if those bad days continue due to a toxic environment, I go find a different place to play, where I will be valued, and where I will be happy.
You couldn’t pay me enough to work on a shitty project in a toxic environment. And I won’t even give a single person the time of day, but I’ll give all my life’s work away for free to millions. I’ve made value for myself, which in turn has created value for other people too. Too many people work very hard making value for others and not keeping any for themselves. And then they look around, at the end of their long life, why am I not rich? Why am I not successful?
What I have done is precisely what makes me happy, every day. Every. Day. From the moment I wake. Until the moment I sleep. And somehow it has all sort of worked out.
I’m Forrest Gump, y’all.
When you buy a piece of equipment so robust and reliable that you forget what the maintenance was since the last time you did it.
I bought a Konica Minolta document center many years ago. It is a tank. Takes more floor space than our dining table. Swallows 3 entire boxes of printer paper (30 reams, 15,000+ sheets) and still asks for more. Holds 1,200+ self-seal envelopes and that weird legal paper we use for printing posters. Costs $1,200 to fill with ink. Hopper fed scanner, faxes, big internal hard drive, collates, staples, binds, puts on those spiral things you find on fancy office reports, creates heavy duty see-through covers, trifolds letters ready to stuff in envelopes, saddlestitches A5 and A4 booklets, you get the idea…
I’ve forgotten the last time we emptied the waste toner box. I cannot even tell you the procedure. I have to read up on it every time. We’re talking years.
I am currently stood in front of the printer, boxes (not reams, boxes) of paper next to me, reading instructions I wrote 8 years ago on how to load paper trays and in what order to load.
I’ve dealt with a lot of printers thru the years. Have generally & universally hated them. As I stand here I think, sure, loading this with paper is kinda annoying (mostly because of the sweat I am working up hauling three boxes of paper up the stairs), and sure, I am cursing my blessings, but why can’t more equipment be like this?
Why is my life made complicated by devices (not this printer) demanding my attention by tending to & even propping up their fragile existence on a semi-regular basis?
We’ve long been forcing consumers in to this cycle of obsolescence, even with big household purchases such as white goods, e.g. refrigerator, oven, dishwasher. This mindset of “good enough for a few years” seems to pervading all aspects of our lives now.
Phones, yes, sure. But why? Simply for the new shiny?
But refigerators? Yep. 3 to 5 years and replace it. We’ve got an old Frigidaire model, it’s still trucking after 23 years.
Ovens? Obsolete when the WiFi standards change on some. Our GE dual oven is finally ready to be replaced. After 37 years. Though I can still purchase all the parts for it if I have a mind too. A friend’s oven, a fancy model installed less than five years ago, with wifi and bluetooth and smart features, they don’t make even make some of the parts that recently broke on it. Want it fixed? Buy a new oven.
We recently bought a countertop oven, only one on the market with a five-year warranty. All other manufacturers had limited one-year warranties. Limited one-year warranty? Your product is so shit you won’t even stand by it after twelve months?
I bought a water filter almost four years ago. It has a ten year comprehensive warranty. Only thing I have done since owning it was wipe it clean, change the water filter, once, and reset it when a brown out occured.
Maybe I’m just getting old. I think we might be “manufacturing” a problem for our future selves.
“Oh, inflation isn’t that bad!”
I’ve got 19 years of records, of every item I’ve ever spent on groceries, every gallon of gas I’ve ever pumped in to what car, every killowatt consumed by appliances, insurance coverage, how much takeout food we’ve consumed, and a variety of other data points, and whilst my lifestyle has no doubt grown in the intervening two decades since I started tracking, and whilst I am also only a single household, our monthly household budget has gone from $5,700-ish in November 2019 to almost $8,000/month in February of 2022.
I can tell you how much I spent on milk in any given month in any given year for the past two decades, in what store the milk was purchased, how much was purchased, what day it was purchased on, and in what city it was purchased. And I can pull that data for every grocery item, every clothing item, every light bulb, and every set of guitar strings.
That’s a span of merely two years, yet our monthly expenditure has risen 38% in that time. We’re travelling less, we’re buying less non-edible household items, we’re driving less, we’re eating out less, and yet still our expenditure increases unabashedly at an unprecedented rate.
I cannot imagine what effect this is having on those families in a less privileged position, but when someone tells me that only just these past few months has inflation begun to rise rapidly my only comment is “Pull the other one mate, it’s got bells on.”
I quickly needed to make a stand up, bar top poster for a Dr Who convention my wife is a part of. Beverage de jeur was something called an “ood job.” I was the one that named the drink, which totally explains the terrible pun.
P.S. Dirty lens = fuzzy photo.
A wake up call for an upcoming invasion of your privacy.
The new generation of VR headsets integrate eye tracking, for the benefit of foveated rendering, which permits the graphics to be higher resolution and more realistic directly where the user is looking, and lower resolution and more coarse at the periphery of the user’s vision.
It also permits higher resolution displays to be used in the VR headset, with so many pixels that the current generation of display protocols, e.g. DisplayPort 1.4, could not drive the video displays at the high frame rates, e.g. 120hz, that VR requires.
The problem is, we’re putting eye tracking cameras in our VR headsets.
With eye tracking, we can make a highly accurate biometric imprint of your eye.
All that eye tracking data and biometric data will end up on a server somewhere.
Facebook/Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple are implementing these changes in their current roadmaps.
You don’t think the various three letter agencies all around the world, in America, China, Russia and so forth, aren’t going to demand that data?
All of a sudden, an entire generation of users have their iris biometric data captured and stored. Forever.
And much like before, the world will collectively shrug, not care, and then it will be too late.
My take on negotiating, and yes, you should always negotiate.
You’ve probably heard this one before: “First one to state a number loses.”
No, the first one to accept the number loses. Let’s put aside the psychology of anchoring for the time being and just focus on numbers.
When someone reaches out to me with a “golden opportunity” my default response is “What’s the compensation range for this position?”
If the compensation is too low, or they try to sell me on the intangible benefits, or back load the compensation with deferred stock/bonuses, or the compensation range is spread too wide, that’s the start of the negotiation. I haven’t even interviewed yet.
If they respond with “what are you looking for?” I respond with “My base compensation is currently $X.”
Occasionally they’ll follow up with “Yeah, we could match that.” Or even worse “We could get close to that.”
*bzzzt*
Wrong!
I’m not looking to make a move just for you to match my current compensation. You have to get above it. I’ve already got a number in mind that can open the conversation.
It’s your job now to say the right combination of words that’ll pique my interest. “Get close to that” is not the magic combination of words.
My default position is “No” and I realise that is a privilege that many don’t have. But the negotiation before I even interview has already started, the negotiation is for you to come up with enough reasons for me to say “Yes.”
Companies employ people who are very strong negotiators who do that sort of thing a dozen times a day, and they have more information than I do about compensation, and they often subscribe to the “sunk cost fallacy” that a candidate, having passed the interviews will more readily say “Yes.”
Sorry, but no, I’ve bought too much shit at fleamarkets over the years that filled me with instant regret that I’ve gotten awful immune to sunk cost thinking.
Again, I realise this is a huge privilege that many don’t enjoy. But if you are willing to say “No” at any point in the negotiation process, for the tiniest detail, you have the strongest negotiating position in the room, then you can just hash out the details until you are willing to say “Yes.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t work for me, I’m going to take a rain check.” And then stonewall. People hate silence. And they hate being rejected. Those are your strongest and simplest to execute negotiation tools you have if you are bad at negotiating.
1. Rejection
2. Silence
3. “No”
Headline: “Meta might consider leaving Europe due to restrictive practices”
Actual truthful headline after reading article: “Meta/Facebook may leave Europe due to inability to exfiltrate European citizen’s personal data.”
Or said another way…
Cynical headline after stripping away the PR: “Large American company with major privacy issues that runs counter to European privacy laws and has studiously avoided paying its fair share of taxes for the past decade in Europe, threatens to leave Europe if Europe won’t change privacy laws specifically for company.”
There’s the door.
That’s your arse.
Probably best if one doesn’t hit the other on the way out.
Classic abuse situation if you think about it. I think I dated someone like that once.
This is a minor humblebrag, but also a bit of an egoboost for me: When your CEO lets you know that the highly regarded recruitment company made a recommendation to “poach this guy and get him in your company” and it turns out “this guy” is actually you.
Waiting to see if a random recruiter sends us any of our own C.V.s.
On another note, we’re hiring for senior positions!
Looking for a Linux firmware/device driver/embedded systems programmer, a ML/AI computer vision developer, a 3D engine game programmer, and an Unreal game programmer.
Bonus point! We don’t leetcode!
If you are trying to hire senior and lead software developers in a hot market, and find unique skillsets, and your interview loop lasts a month, and the candidate is still being given “exploratory chats” and still has no idea what their compensation is, of course you’re going to find it hard to hire.
Most developers aren’t looking, and those that are, if they’re any good, will have multiple offers and the windows of opportunity to execute on those active offers are rapidly closing for them. Candidates aren’t going to wait around on the off chance that you come through.
I still don’t understand this with companies complaining they cannot hire good developers. You’re squandering opportunities.
Dealing with recruiters and “talent managers” right now who are trying to insert unnecessary delays and hurdles in an already broken process.
I was asked once (more than once) “What’s the most difficult math you’ve ever used on a project?” This was asked by a young programmer worried they would need extensive math to follow a career in software development.
I rarely if ever run in to “difficult math” or “difficult algorithms” on project’s for clients and companies unless I am doing robotics or computer vision work. And difficulty is probably subjective.
Most of the time obscure/difficult math & algorithms crop up on my own personal projects. And on CRUD apps, no matter the platform, rarely get more complicated than the most basic calculations, e.g. adding lists of numbers together, averaging numbers, and so forth.
Math, for work, most of the time:
Quaternions, 2D vectors, 3D vectors, euler angles, basic matrix operations, basic algebra, basic trig, colour space conversions, time series calculations.
Math, for work, some of the time:
Calc and obscure stuff I always have to read up on due to it being something to do with reconstructing a 3D scene or figuring out something weird in AR or VR with predictive rendering or foveated rendering or other weird display nonsense. Robotics is usually calc and linear algebra, though wrapped in a library most of the time, due to inverse kinematics or figuring out intersections, and to re-emphasize, wrapped in a library I didn’t write.
I would say most of my job, when it comes to math, is knowing that a calculation or method or algorithm exists rather than knowing how it works or being able to do the deep math behind it or describe precisely what it does in detail.
Now, it is useful to have a deep understanding of the math or algorithm or data structure, but most of the time, my memory fails me on exactly how it works or how it is implemented because I haven’t had to do that “by hand” for 20+ years, and I just invoke the library function. Most math code I write these days is gluing this bit of math to that bit of math.
I spent the first two weeks of January solving a math problem and writing code, which at final check in was a total of 12 lines of code, and two of those were logging statements. I then went back and optimized the code which removed three lines.
Math, algorithms, data structures for personal projects:
Reassembly of fragmented pieces of paper. Solving a rubik’s cube and inferring the other faces. Scrabble computer vision solver. Jigsaw puzzle computer vision solver. LEGO piece finder computer vision solver. Virtual video production assistant. Word search. Prime number theory. All of these used obscure bits of math, algorithms and data structures I had to read up on every single time, though I had a general idea of what I was looking for.
And most of the time, the math, data structures and algorithms aren’t actually that hard. It’s just being willing to read around the subject, in the literature rather than vacuous blog posts, about what solutions are out there, what’s been tried before, and keep deeply thinking about the subject and making extensive notes about your thoughts, and keep thinking about it usually long after most developers would have given up.
And the best way to keep thinking about: Take a shower, go for a long walk in nature, touch grass, and do anything and everything you can to keep distractions, e.g. your phone, far away from you.
A while back I was interviewing for a new position.
“What got you in to gaming?” asked one of the people on the Zoom call.
“Well years ago,” my eyes staring off in to the middle distance, “when the world was simpler, and I was much, much younger I used to take apart old electronic toys, back before CPUs were cheap and common, and I learned to build new games out of pure logic circuits.”
“How old were you?” asked one of the interviewers.
“9, going on 10.” I responded
The interviewer looked a little skeptical “That doesn’t sound plausible.”
I smiled that forced, tight lip smile that I have, that people that know me have come to understand to mean “fuck you. This conversation is over.”
“And then I got into traditional game programming on 8-bit home computers…”
“So not real game development then” someone interjected.
“… before moving to console dev, and I also whiled away a few years of my misspent youth designing board games and playing D&D.”
“I hate D&D, it is such a waste…”
*click*
_Justin has left the Zoom meeting_
Three strikes, I’m out. Life’s too short.
Of note, no paraphrasing or recalling from memory needed. I record all my meetings, and I let the people on the other end know that it is being recorded so I can refer back to notes later on.
Oh won’t you sign my NDA,
I need this signed by yesterday.
Sign it here, and sign it there,
Don’t read through, don’t you dare.
Oh won’t you sign my NDA,
I need this signed without delay.
Stop reading all through and through,
Just sign it! Just sign it!
I’d happily sign, if I were you.
You understand technogibberel computerese,
But this is learned jumbly-mumbly legalese.
You’re just a programmer, you can read it all but you won’t understand,
Here’s a bronze rubbed rubber slippery stamp, hold it so and slam down your hand.
Oh just strike that confounding confuddling confusing clause,
Slam it with my bronze rubbed rubber slippery stamp without pause
Stop glancing across clauses in every page,
I can barely contain my roiling rage.
You won’t sign? You won’t complete?
We’ll simply strike that non-compete.
Hurry, Hurry the day grows late,
Just ignore that part, that’s boiler plate.
Don’t worry about what all 12 pages say,
Just accept my standard NDA.
And now you mention a rate I have to beat?
It will be your loss if our minds can’t meet.
I’m willing to adjust a small term or two,
Because I would never hoodwink you.
And finally, now the signing is complete,
Down here by the door on Market St.
Here are four languid liarbirds that lounge on a line,
Those four larking liarbirds that begged for my time,
Oh but sadly I didn’t listen…
I turned my feet forward, and kept my nose in the air,
I stepped out on Market St and met a man there.
He said…
Ignore those languid liarbirds that lounge on a line
Sign this NDA now, and give me your time.
I just need a programmer, a coder, a hacker,
a mathematical tough nut to crack cracker,.
I need a digital deducer of differential difficulties that exhibits double-deference to the dereference of a POO’s covariance,
And willingly wrangles contravariant marshalled functors with multiple weak inheritance.
My hypothetical hard programming puzzler needs expertise in eleventeen new technologies,
A minimum of twelve years in each at least I seek,
An unfungible, unflappable, unfinaglible coding beast.
My rare rockstar of ruby-esque artistry,
Is also a notable ninja of npm pedantry,
Steeped in learning deep and theoretical,
And during interview waxed about Big O notation hypothetical.
Who sat and stared at leetcode hards tasked with the best optimization,
And after twenty minutes came to reach the only realization,
That to improve upon the algorithm was a research thesis dissertation.
I sold you on the promise of work from the latest research journals ripped,
But it’s just another CRUD app, with CSS and HTML and legacy Javascript,
You answered lengthy questions about lambdas, inversions and Closures,
to support containers at web scale of all our active users totaling threes or fours.
I outsourced to a region that only spoke a language based on Slavic,
And our DevOps cannot read the error messages and now that’s catastrophic.
We’re funded by DAOs, DAPs, ICOs, and IPOs for capital,
Investor oversight we found incomprehensibly incompatible.
But let us step back and see what we have compiled and built,
It’s just a shity WordPress website of long nights made of manipulation, misplaced loyalty and deceptive guilt.
And now you see me for who I am,
Just another shady, serial businessman,
I stand to make millions, and you might get some,
For every ten bucks in cash I take, you might get you five, fifty, zero or none.
But I will dazzle you with usurious prattle and unpreferred deferred stock options,
A new-fangled investment vehicle that messes with your worldly assumptions,
A ponzi scheme dressed up in code that helps my tax deductions.
And long before that vesting period of one year and four,
You’ll tire of the toxicity and head right for the Market St door,
With a bright future ahead and a failed start-up behind,
Fresh with a crisp new certificated bootcamp in hand.
And next when you step out, on Market Street,
A bespangled-eyed entrepreneur you will surely meet,
A hustler who woos you with weasley words,
And finally, you listen to those four lounging liarbirds,
“Fuck.”
“You.”
“Pay.”
“Me.”
The guitar strings I normally pay $7 a set for, are currently being scalped on eBay for $35 a set. Sold out everywhere else.
Let’s do a little school math exercise.
Justin has one dog. To be a good citizen, Justin picks up after his dog.
Environmentally conscious, Justin purchases bio-degradable waste bags. The bio-degradable waste bags break down after precisely two years. They literally disintegrate in to small, unusable pieces.
Justin purchases large packs of dog waste bags. Justin found a good deal on 1,000 bio-degradable, environmentally safe waste bags.
Justin’s dog, unless she is feeling unwell, does her business about once a day, and so the bags are used at an average rate of 1.2 bags per day.
How many days will it be before Justin, on a dark winter’s night, at 4AM, tired, and bleary eyed, walking a dog with extreme diarrhea, inadvertently picks up something he didn’t want to touch due to a bio-degradable bag breaking down? Show your work.
What did you do this past two weeks Justin?
Wrote 12 lines of code. Three of which I deleted. Two of the remaining lines are print statements.
Some of the hardest math code I have written all year.
Thank #@!$ that’s behind me.
Changing the world, one line of code at a time.
Oh the guffaws we have when a “talent sourcer” at a company tells you that a software developer that can write assembly language and program FPGAs is not worth as much as a JavaScript programmer because the low-level developer is using “simpler” technologies and therefore only “worth” $55 an hour.
And if you cannot understand why people don’t want to quit their stable job and come and work for you for a less than 2% bump in salary, you’re borderline delusional.
Bonus points for then going on to tell me that it is impossible to hire in this market but caught yourself just shy of saying “and nobody wants to work anymore.”
Years ago I lived in a duplex in Santa Cruz and paid an astronomical amount of money for my electricity each month. Far more than I ever paid when living in Los Angeles. This went on for around eight months before I finally decided to figure out what was pulling so much power.
I systematically went around my house unplugging everything, watching the speed of the meter as I unplugged each heavy duty appliance, but that meter kept on spinning like no tomorrow.
Eventually I had unplugged everything all at once, and yet the meter kept on spinning. So then I said, fine, circuit breakers, let’s start shutting parts of it down until I figure this out.
Didn’t take more than a few minutes before the neighbour to come ask if my power was out too. And that’s when I talked to the utility company.
In our Los Angeles condo, our electricity bill is around $350 to $400 (summer peak with AC) per month. Yet for the past three months our consumption has steadily risen, with no change in our habits or installed equipment, with our largest bill ever, and largest consumption ever, to date being over $650 for the month, for two month’s straight. And a circuit breaker that suspiciously keeps tripping.
I’m not saying “neighbours” but tonight I’m flipping circuit breakers.
I have figured out how to make a lot of money from an NFT that is, from a legal standpoint, questionable.
“That sounds shady as fuck” my attorney clearly stated after finishing off the bottle of wine at the steak restaurant, “but it would actually work.”
Which means it is really no different to the ponzi schemes run by the rest of the cryptobros I run into these days.
Now, I just need an unwitting patsy and we are good to go.
Oh, on an unrelated note, hit me up if you want to mint some new NFTs…
Delusional US company attempting to hire a US-based “part-time software developer” on an hourly rate of $30 without benefits. Up to 39.5 hours per week of work. At that point your LinkedIn talent hiring outreach is simply spam.
At the woodworking store, browsing for a new finish nailer.
On the box: “Small parts. Not suitable for children under 3 years of age.”
I mean, I know there’s a labour shortage and places are willing to hire people still in school, but are we going that young now? Does the income scale with the age? Does the child know not to load 15 degree offset brads in to a zero degree nailer like I did that one time?
Reading through the manual: “Do not use underwater. Do not use to light gas ovens. Do not use to clean out electronic devices.” And this wasn’t just generic safety warnings. They had little line art drawings of the finish nailer being used to do these tasks with a big X drawn through them.
Okay, I hadn’t really thought of these as viable usages for a finish nailer, but that does give me some ideas…
But mostly, I want to know what situations arose that called for the manufacturer to put such warnings on their finish nailer.
So what’s up with airline food…?
Every amateur comic goes through that phase, “so what’s with airline food…?”
Here’s my thought about airline food.
Every flight longer than two hours, every passenger in every seat should get a hearty meal high in carbs.
Delivered promptly.
Nicely presented.
As soon as it is safe for the crew to move about the cabin.
The absolute best tasting, carb loaded meal you have had in months. A meal so good you specifically seek out that airline to fly on. Meals that remind you of home. But loaded with carbs.
And then the flight crew enjoys a quiet, uneventful trip and everyone wakes up at their destination, refreshed and ready for their meeting or the start of their vacation.
When you have the best marketing idea, then realise it will cost you $80,000 to buy the three domain names that you want…