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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • I don’t know if there are agencies focussing on this, but in general it probably comes down to the company more than the agency. Probably worth filtering for companies offering flexible hours in the description

    I would say at the moment the IT job market is incredibly competitive for candidates, so it might be even more difficult to find truly flex roles when they can so easily find 100s of people who just work regular hours.

    On your last question: I’ve been a hiring manager in 2 companies (although in the UK) for software engineers and adjacent roles (like devops, platform, QA) and I would not care whether someone needs equipment. In the big scheme of things spending $800 for a monitor, keyboard and mouse is not even a drop in the bucket for the cost of an employee. What I would want to know is how do you work in a team in your situation and what arrangement can we do where you have a good experience, but other people in the company can still count on you. E.g. if you are working on a project and an issue pops up that’s blocking others from progressing and we need you to discuss, but you’re having a bad day and not working, what are the options you can offer? Or what if you get blocked when everyone else is asleep so you can’t progress?

    I think being prepared and upfront about this in an early stage of interviewing would be ideal, it signals that you have thought about others around you and also weed out any companies who aren’t willing to make this arrangement work. That being said, as above it’s a very competitive market right now so chances are pretty slim (at least in the UK).

    Also keep in mind once you look at companies who hire from abroad, you’re now also competing with (comparably) cheap labour from developing countries, who will likely agree to much worse terms.

    Edit: one thing I forgot, you may have the option to be your own boss (depending on your skill level) and freelance on a project basis rather than on a per-day basis.


  • I get the convenience part so the staff doesn’t have to go around do it by hand, but it just seems infeasible to do it for the other examples mentioned.

    E.g. you go in, pick up item listed for $10, finish shopping in 20 mins, item now costs $15 at till… probably leave it (so now the staff has to re-shelf it) and start shopping at a place that is not trying to scam you.

    For the other example, if there are a few packs of something expiring and they reduce the price for all the items on the shelf, everyone will just take the ones which have a reasonable shelf life left leaving the expiring ones.

    Both of these just seem stupid.




  • Honestly, even if you don’t terminate SSL right until your very own app server, it’s still based on the assumption that whoever holds the root cert for your certificate is trustworthy.

    The thing that has actually scared me with CF is the way their rules work. I am not even sure what’s the verification step to get to this, but if there is a configured page rule in a different CF account for your domain that points at cloudflare (I.e. the orange cloud), you essentially can’t control your domain as long as it’s pointing at CF (I think this sentence is a bit confusing so an alternative explanation: your domain is pointing DNS at your own CF account, in your CF account you have enabled proxying for your domain, some other CF account has a page rule for your domain, that rule is now in control). The rule in some other account will control it.

    It has happened to us at work and I had to escalate with their support to get them to remove the rule from the other cloudflare account so we can get back control of our domain while using CF. Their standard response is for you to find and ask the other CF account to remove the rule for your domain.

    This is a pretty common issue with gitbook, even the gitbook CEO was surprised CF does this.


  • I wonder if this will also have a reverse tail end effect.

    Company uses AI (with devs) to produce a large amount of code -> code is in prod for a few years with incremental changes -> dev roles rotate or get further reduced over time -> company now needs to modernize and change very large legacy codebase that nobody really understands well enough to even feed it Into the AI -> now hiring more devs than before to figure out how to manage a legacy codebase 5-10x the size of what the team could realistically handle.

    Writing greenfield code is relatively easy, maintaining it over years and keeping it up to date and well understood while twisting it for all new requirements - now that’s hard.



  • That could be part of the reason, but the NHS has rapidly deteriorated over the course of the last 5ish years. It used to be pretty decent not so long ago, and our taxes didn’t exactly drop. So while most public healthcare systems get strained over time due to the aging population problem, it shouldn’t be this drastic.

    The pandemic has surely strained it, but it doesn’t feel like it’s on the path to recovery, more like circling the drain.

    The 2 more obvious things (to me) as far as the reasons go: an absolutely malicious government - who would sell us all for meat if they could - with little competition and brexit (courtesy of said government)



  • Haven’t had any experience with eweka, but this is the reason why people tend to have multiple providers from different backbones and multiple indexers - to increase your chance for completion. Weirdly, eweka does not follow DMCA, but NTD which I’ve seen regarded as slower to take down content, so in theory the experience should be better, especially on fresh content.

    Your mileage will vary greatly depending on what indexers/providers you pick and unfortunately it’s very difficult to say whether it will reach your expectations until you try different options.

    If you’re willing to spend some more on it, you could try just looking for a small and cheap block account from a different backbone to see if it helps with the missing articles, but there are no guarantees.







  • Personally, I’ve had an experienced manager and took great inspiration from him.

    A few things I fell into:

    • it was a lot faster for me (I.e. experienced senior dev with context knowledge) to finish a task than for me to assign it to someone less experienced who has to learn the context and takes 5x as long to do it, with lots of help needed from me still. This yielded me not building up my team either in experience or knowledge.
    • I assumed deadlines I got told were set in stone and my job was to meet them. This made business-y people happy. It made everyone else (including me) miserable. I had to learn to say no and push back, it very much changes between companies but most of the time I found it to be a negotiation and either the deadline could move or I had to argue to exclude things from the scope to make the deadline reasonable.
    • on the above, everything takes at least 3-5x as long as I think it takes. If things finish early, great time to give my team some slack, add in additional QA work like extending tests or repay some tech debt. Delivering something early gives a pat on the back for us but no discernible benefit to the team.
    • every time someone said “you’ll have time to write tests/repay tech debt/upskill later once X is shipped” it never came true. Those things have to be built into delivery scopes, and it’s a constant battle - if you don’t do this, nobody else will.

    I’m sure there were other things too, but these are the ones I mainly recall. Talk to your team, ask for feedback. Every team, project and company are different - you’ll have to adapt.


  • I’m not sure how to respond to this, your answers lack detail or arguments to respond to. What difference does chartered Vs private make for emissions? It’s the same types of jets, just changes who actually owns them. It also makes no difference to the entire tax subsidized argument either.

    As to “how many times”, as I said above I haven’t found a clear answer, but different sources claim between 10x and ~40x, even assuming the very low end of 10x, that’s a big difference. I assume the per passenger emission is hard to measure since the number of passengers on a plane make a big difference.

    Either way, I believe I made my points in detail several times now, and as I said your responses don’t really raise points or include much detail to further things, so I’m going to leave it here.


  • As mentioned above, airport and airlines are heavily subsidized, this includes private airports and jets. For a limo, taxes pay for the road - but everyone can drive on it, so it’d exist with or without them. Maybe a better comparison would be if she had a bus that she travelled in alone, compared to the average person that’d be equally ridiculous.

    The emissions of a limo is pretty much in line with the emissions of a family car. Most people wouldn’t have a small car and a family car for when they’re alone, so even if someone is alone on a limo, they’re probably not doing much more harm than the average person.

    A private jet’s emissions are significantly more per passenger than a commercial plane. Even if a private jet always flies at max capacity - which I’d bet rarely happens - it’ll cause significantly more emissions per person than a commercial plane (it’s difficult to link a source here as I’ve not found an exact number. The estimates I’ve found range between 10 to 43x. Even assuming just 10x that’s quite a difference)


  • Yes, an airport limits the amount of people, has a very high coverage of surveillance and a high ratio of security staff as well as an entry barrier and dedicated VIP areas. A generic place outside has none of that. Although feel free to elaborate on how an airport is worse for security than just being on a street, anywhere.

    To your second point, sure she doesn’t need to own them like nobody else does, but the issue (for me) is not primarily that she (or anyone) owns one, but that they [private jets and private airports] exist, and they’re subsidized by us as it was pointed out above. If anything, they should be priced outrageously so using them would come down last resort or emergency situations, and the money from that could help balance the cost of the “public” infrastructure. This is a failure of the government, but equally so of the rich who choose to continue using them for their luxury.


  • If that were true, there’d be a riot every time a very famous person goes outside for any reason.

    I’m sure she’d be approached and photographed and her privacy violated as much as people can get to her in a private lounge, but unless they were to advertise she is going to a certain airport at a specific time, it’s incredibly unlikely she’d be mobbed. Ironically, flying publicly would make her movements harder to follow.

    She can certainly afford to pay for 10 extra first class tickets for her staff, it’d most likely be much cheaper than owning her own jet. I’m sure the airports would also be thrilled to offer a private entrance and area for her/other famous people to be able to avoid even walking to her VIP lounge. Maybe they could help subsidize the airports instead of average people’s taxes paying for their private airports in part.