[HN Gopher] I found an IT job thanks to this blog
___________________________________________________________________
I found an IT job thanks to this blog
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 258 points
Date : 2023-07-23 06:44 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (giuliomagnifico.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (giuliomagnifico.blog)
| system2 wrote:
| Congrats. I have a few questions though. How do you plan to
| transition from hobby and consumer grade products to business
| grade products with this setup? With 24/7 operation, those
| hardware will die within a few months. Do you plan to make a
| second redundancy box just in case?
| sim7c00 wrote:
| i live in a more northen country, but still writing a small blog
| helped me too to get my first IT job. a friend gave me the tip
| for me to show i had recent relevant,activities for a job. its a
| really good tip. even if no one reads it you can put it on your
| resume just as a proof of your words. best tip i ever had. happy
| it helped you in this way and thanks for sharing!
| jayonsoftware wrote:
| Where did you find tha 19" rack unit. Never found one with 3
| Eithernet ports config.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| The unit is from rs-online ( https://us.rs-
| online.com/product/nvent-schroff/14826107/7040... ) but it
| hasn't the Ethernet ports, we drilled them into the unit
| manually.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Yesterday you are shitting on someone's home networking and today
| you learn he made it his job.
|
| Regarding the credentials... you would always find people who are
| dumb^W think what the certs are the measure of quality. Sometimes
| it's actually good, if a person asks for certs first then you
| know you don't want to work with that person.
|
| NB: never send alerts directly to people.
|
| Create a group (distribution list, alias, whatever it's called in
| your mail server), preferably multiple groups foreach client, eg:
| pasta.zara.alerts.monitoring@giuliomagnifico.com etc
|
| That way you would see which instance generated the alert even if
| you didn't configured the custom alert message,
|
| you can filter all these messages (to tag, move to folders or
| whatever) simply by filtering on *alerts.monitoring@,
|
| and if for some reason you depart with the client in not so
| amicable ways then you can simply kill all the mails from it by a
| rule with $To:.
| 404mm wrote:
| I don't understand how the SYSMI box works.
|
| I see power input going into the Mikrotik router, then feeding
| D-Link USB hub with (according to the Mikrotik specs) up to
| 5V/500mA DC.
|
| The USB hub sends power to both Pi's and somehow splits the 500mA
| between RPi 3 (officially needing up to 5V/2.5A) and RPi
| 4(5V/3A). And it still somehow works?
|
| I know all the specs are not set it stone. USB can feed more than
| 500mA and Pi's can run on well under their requirement but I'm no
| stranger to Pi's and I had experienced power issues due to
| inadequate supply before. Especially when the CPU is maxed out,
| like during the boot sequence.
|
| Am I missing something here? This looks quite insane.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| I was wondering the same but then I discovered that the
| Mikrotik is able to power both the Raspberry PIs when in full
| load for 3 days straight. I did some benchmarks, but I think
| the power output of the Mikrotik is different, more than the
| official specs.
| dharmab wrote:
| The 5V/500ma number is copied from the USB 2.0 spec; the
| Mikrotik device may be outputting more than specified by
| coincidence of the hardware used to manufactured it
| 404mm wrote:
| The original adapter for mikrotik 750 is 24V/380mA (9.12W).
| This is not a sufficient way to supply power to 3 devices, no
| matter how you dice it.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| I agree but how do you explain that it's actually working?
| Also on heavy load for days? We was asking the same, for
| that I tried to run an heavy benchmark for some days on the
| RPis. Maybe the spec of the power supply are different?
| a1o wrote:
| Hey, about the raspberry pi, I have had a bunch of problems with
| it eating the micro SD cards, like they fail in six months or an
| year tops. I had countered this for some little time by using it
| to boot and relaying to a hdd. How are you handling this? Is
| there some special micro SD card that doesn't fail as soon?
| zgluck wrote:
| I went down that rabbit hole a few years ago. Many cards don't
| tolerate sudden power loss while writes are happening.
|
| The solution I found was these ATP micro SD cards (looks like
| the prices have increased like 3x though...) where the firmware
| is specifically designed to tolerate abuse:
|
| https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/atp/industria...
|
| Perhaps there are other cheaper but still robust alternatives
| now?
| pgryko wrote:
| Standard flash disks use wear leveling - which is not normally
| present on micro SD cards. Have a look at the SD cards that are
| designed for dash cams, body cams and industrial applications
| mordae wrote:
| SanDisk used FTL (flash translation layer, wear leveling) on
| their SD cards at least way back in 2013. Single MLC block
| survived about 500 erases. FAT would kill it immediately
| otherwise.
| nfriedly wrote:
| From what I've read, the power supply can make a big difference
| here, in addition to getting quality microSD cards.
|
| I've had a Pi Hole running on the same microSD for 6-7 years
| now with only one hiccup (and that was a software thing - a
| fresh install got it back up and running on the same microSD).
| It just has a regular SD card (not a high endurance one), but
| the power supply came from adafruit, and it's been connected to
| a UPS for most of its life.
| a1o wrote:
| The good power supply is a good thing, I used old Samsung USB
| chargers, I imagine they deliver an ok quality, but perhaps
| not as much as a phone has a big battery that can work as
| "big capacitor"/filter of sorts. The UPS is a good idea too,
| I probably need one here and power going out where I live is
| something that does happen occasionally.
| stkdump wrote:
| I am running 2 Raspberry Pis 24/7 for many years. Never had a
| micro SD fail.
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| There are different types of flash storage: *
| SLC - 1 bit per electrical cell * MLC - 2 bits per cell
| * TLC - 3 bits per cell * QLC - 4 bits per cell
|
| You need SLC cards if you really want something to be long-
| lasting. You can find some at specialty places like Digikey, or
| labeled as "Industrial" in normal channels (i.e. Amazon sells
| both Kingston and Samsung 8GB industrial cards).
|
| They are both smaller capacity and more expensive, though.
|
| Also, if you're using a stock distribution not intended for a
| Pi, you probably have quite a lot of logs/etc churning, which
| can be cleaned up. If you aren't doing much with the Pi except
| a few common services, check out DietPi.
| Daril wrote:
| DietPi is an optimal choice, I agree. Especially for building
| a server.
| a1o wrote:
| Thank you so much, I didn't knew about this! Also on DietPi
| it's pretty cool and apparently it has also builds for x86 so
| I can easily play with it in a VM for experimenting! Thanks
| for this!
| FredPret wrote:
| I noticed the same for certain cards. Are you getting genuine
| SanDisk? There are lots of counterfeits out there.
| josegomezgarcia wrote:
| [flagged]
| a1o wrote:
| That's a good thing to check. I honestly don't know if the
| SanDisk micro SD cards I got are genuine - they look their
| part and have that plastic square thing that is placed inside
| the paper thing with SanDisk brand and all the numbers, but
| maybe the fake ones have caught up in their packaging. I have
| no idea how to make sure it's genuine though.
| gruez wrote:
| They make "high endurance " sd cards, typically marketed for
| dash cam use.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Try to use DietPI or RAM logs, I'm using it since years and
| years without any sd card failure.
| rubatuga wrote:
| Regarding the hardware, I would not recommend to use a raspberry
| pi, not only are they hard to get and expensive but as another
| comment states the RPi rely on SD cards which are prone to
| corruption. I think it's better to rely on second hand enterprise
| hardware if you're looking for something cheap.
| proprietario wrote:
| this is advice I hear very often, but where do you buy second
| hand enterprise hardware? I went and bought mine second hand
| from the internet but ive got no idea where to get enterprise
| stuff
| hereonout2 wrote:
| eBay? I don't know where you are in the world you are but in
| my country it's basically flooded with the stuff.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| If you're in a major city, look for salvage outlets. There
| are usually operations who recover decommissioned hardware
| from businesses, and then thrift-store style, sell it to
| hobbyists.
| taneq wrote:
| I got an old Dell PowerEdge 610 server second hand on
| gumtree.com.au (classified ads page, I guess like craigslist
| or something?) for $400. The guy selling it had bought it for
| his home theater without realising that commercial servers
| are (a) noisy as hell, and (b) useless for graphics. :P It's
| been running our half-dozen server VMs at work for the past 3
| years and it still blows my mind that you can get a server
| with 12 CPU cores and 96GB of RAM for that price.
|
| Edit: 610, not 670, sorry. It basically sits in a corner
| making a faint whirring sound and apart from occasional apt-
| get upgrades I tend to forget it exists.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Now they aren't expensive (like 6-12 months ago), one RPi -the
| one with the database- is relying on the SSD (so no issue) and
| the other is using RAM logs so the data written to the SD card
| are minimal. I'm running a Raspberry PI with an SD card and RAM
| logs since 6-7 years with the same SD without any failure.
| nfriedly wrote:
| FWIW, Raspberry Pi availability is starting to recover, and
| they do have the ability to boot off of a USB drive (including
| SSDs) or a network server these days.
|
| That said even SD cards are probably fine if you're not doing a
| ton of writes. (And it looked like a USB drive was attached to
| one of the PIs in the picture. So, presumably the important
| data is going there.)
|
| You're not wrong that second hand enterprise hardware would be
| more reliable but, honestly, I think this setup is fine for
| what they were trying to accomplish - especially if they
| already had some of the hardware laying around.
| Daril wrote:
| I have used 4 RaspberryPi (3 and 4) for a few years for various
| needs : Gitea server, Home Assistant server, Syncthing main
| repository, Borg backup repository, Wireguard VPN and network
| gateway between 2 LANs. I haven't encountered any problems with
| the SD card, if you buy the class 10 SD cards (the same you
| would use for your dashcam and security camera). One option is
| to use the F2FS file system on the card (I did this on my
| Raspberry) or, as others have suggested, use an SSD or NVMe
| drive. The main problems I encountered with the Raspberry 4
| were heat dissipation (use a metal case with direct contact to
| the CPU without a fan, this is the best option in my tests) and
| external USB 3 drives interfering with the wifi. The latter
| seems to be a known design issue. Considering all this and the
| prices, if you don't really need the Raspberry's ability to
| control external hardware via GPio, and if you want to keep the
| same network design (separate devices), there are many mini PCs
| with passive dissipation, 2 or more Nics, lots of RAM and SSD
| support, for a similar or lower price all considered ... or buy
| one or two real servers and virtualise everything with Proxmox.
| Sayrus wrote:
| Congratulations. Your articles are always a pleasure to read.
| Reading about your homelab really changes from the "Here is my
| 400 cores homelab" that often appear on HN.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Ahah thanks, yeah if you don't need 400 cores, why have them? I
| mean, sometimes you need power but if you don't need it, is
| better to have a slightly older hardware, but more reliable
| and, above all, with less consumptions/environment-bills
| impact.
|
| In example: I'm using at home a RaspberryPI 4B as a Pi-Hole
| that is a totally waste of power, I've installed the same
| sistem in some companies with 70/80 DNS clients and all is
| running more than fine ...but on a Raspberry PI 3B!
| loumf wrote:
| I've been blogging for almost 20 years. The site isn't monetized,
| I don't have many readers, and I don't get much Google traffic.
| But ...
|
| - My posts about developing for iOS in 2008 were found by an
| editor at Manning and I wrote a book for them. This helped me
| make the transition to full time iOS development.
|
| - My posts about extending Fogbugz and Citydesk were part of my
| application to Fogcreek/Trello -- I can't say it "got" me the
| job, but I'm sure helped me get an interview.
|
| - I've been invited to speak at conferences, be a guest on
| podcasts, and write for Smashing based on people finding my site.
| It's not a lot, but raises my profile just a bit.
|
| I would do it anyway, but I've had a 30+ year career and I think
| my blog has been a significant factor in it.
| ghaff wrote:
| I wrote a ton as an industry analyst as well as lots of
| articles/blogs. Absolutely was probably _the_ factor in my
| getting a long-time job. Maybe indirectly but it 's why I knew
| people at the company and they knew me.
| pknerd wrote:
| I am not surprised. On multiple occasions I was offered a
| job/project because of my blog and github.
| loteck wrote:
| Congrats! I hope everyone can see he actually found a job due to
| getting out and meeting people (in this case, he met a CEO while
| they were both cycling), who then became interested in his work
| due to the relationship he fostered.
| mottiden wrote:
| Congratulazioni! Well done :) and keep blogging!
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Grazie mille =] I hope to find the time to blogging! I must
| found it, sharing knowledge is a very important thing to help
| each others for a (little) better internet.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Grats :) nice clean blog layout, love it
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Thanks, it's what I wanted to achieve, so I'm glad I've reached
| it! By the way the blog is powered by Jekyll and theme is
| 'Jekyll Yat Theme' (https://github.com/jeffreytse/jekyll-theme-
| yat/) slightly customized.
| ayewo wrote:
| Nice blog!
|
| Since Jekyll is a SSG (static site generator) how does
| commenting work on your blog?
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Thanks, I've included the comments from Fastcomments, a
| small, nice, cheap and privacy oriented comment form:
| https://fastcomments.com/
| petercooper wrote:
| It's been over ten years now since I blogged recently, alas, but
| back in the day blogging got me a book deal and being asked to
| chair an O'Reilly conference. I recommend everyone blog about
| what they're into because it's both personally edifying, but it
| also only takes the right person reading to reach out with an
| interesting opportunity to be more than worth it.
| gbrindisi wrote:
| Congratulazioni Giulio, well deserved! I remember your home setup
| post dearly, it's been very inspiring
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Grazie mille =)
| despicablelier wrote:
| Congrats on the new job, I've read the blog and it is truly well
| deseeved.
|
| Regarding on the difficulties of the italian market, I'd like to
| dissent though.
|
| Fact is, in Italy is waaaaay more simple to cheat your way to the
| top instead of having to go through the pains of getting a proper
| degree.
|
| I know because I did it and went from a non graduated outbound
| call center operator to dirigential positions in highly respected
| fashionable industries in less than 10 years.
|
| Point is, and with the exception of research roles o and a
| fistful of high consultancies, who enforce the control on
| graduation, most likely than not you will not be asked for proof
| of your studies if your jobtitle carries enough weight and if
| your accomplishments a friendship with the right people weights
| enough.
|
| Trick is to change joq with the right frequency in the first
| years, participate to associations and try to be in the board,
| blog a lot _in the right environments_ (and specifically there),
| make a lot of acquaintances and help them solve tricky situations
| for free, and generally speaking be as visible as possible as a
| tech savyy and strategist.
|
| At the right moment, the reputation you will have accrued will be
| enough to receive accreditations beyond the first line of HR, and
| id your sponsor is notable enough no one will ask for your
| degree.
|
| Once you have done that the first time, is the weight of your
| jobtitle and your name that propels you forward, no one willing
| to question your perceived authority.
|
| Than rinse and repeat until the weight of jobtitle and name
| combined is unquestionable.
|
| If you know how to behave, you will rise fast.
|
| And good luck to trying that abroad. On a sidenote, once you
| earned the jobtitle this way in italy, it is easier (but still
| tricky) to get it abroad as well.
|
| Once I tried to go abroad sometimes I got asked credentials (and
| subsequently bombed) and sometimes not, wich guaranteed me jobs
| in Switzerland and France.
|
| Steer away from anglosaxon jobs though, they do enforce the
| control and most likely they'll carch your bluff.
|
| last suggestion: shoot for the highest possible pay and change
| job often enough to beat inflation several times over in 5 years.
| Above 150k/years almost no one will ask you for degrees. Only
| your pay and jobtitle and experience will count.
|
| Good luck!
| [deleted]
| hcks wrote:
| <<the Italian job market isn't that bad because you can cheat
| your way to the top>>
|
| That surely changes my opinion
| Daril wrote:
| Well ... I think we have many problems in these modern IT times
| ... The first is that we are drowning in new IT technologies that
| are released every day and it is impossible to keep up with them
| ... Many languages, frameworks, tools ... After 25 years in this
| field, I am very sceptical when I read a CV on LinkedIn of a
| person who is an "expert" in 10 or 20 different technologies or
| languages (it is simply impossible). On the other hand, we have
| companies looking for "gurus" in several areas with many years of
| experience... just unrealistic expectations. Apart from a limited
| minority of true geniuses, all of us mere mortals need time and
| projects and work and a lot of failures to develop expertise in
| any field. On the other hand, in the 'real' world of work, it is
| not enough just to be technically competent. You need a lot of
| other skills that are equally if not more important: willingness
| to learn, ability to evaluate technologies based on requirements
| and constraints, integrity, honesty, self-organisation,
| curiosity, ingenuity ... logic. At the end of the day, it is a
| balancing act between technology, resources, money, time
| constraints and human relations, not just writing code or knowing
| everything about one or more tools that may become obsolete in a
| week.
| ericmcer wrote:
| It does feel kinda overwhelming. You really need to run to stay
| in place, and it is more and more about setting up a brittle
| chain of config files than having deep knowledge of a single
| languages best practices.
| Daril wrote:
| Well, the worst thing in my opinion is that (often for
| ideological reasons or egocentric positions) we don't accept
| or don't want to improve the existing tools or languages, but
| we create a new one ... so we had C, C++, Object Pascal and
| now we also have Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Rust, Nim, Zig, D,
| Objective C, C#, Java, Kotlin, Haskell, Erlang, Ada, to name
| a few ... and this is the easy side ... Now there is the
| bandwagon of javascript frameworks: React, Vue, Svelte, Next,
| Nuxt and so on. It is impossible to keep up and it is also
| impossible that all these new technologies will be maintained
| in the long term. I remember the rise of Java years ago ...
| Java everywhere: Java applets on the web, Java on the
| desktop, Java as an application server and how it ended? Java
| is, in my opinion, one of the most convoluted and
| impenetrable languages ever created, but when you work alone
| as a freelancer, as in my case, you don't have the time and
| the resources to embrace and follow every new technology that
| is marketed as a revolution and the future, because at the
| end of the month you have to send the invoices to your
| clients to earn and live, and you have to have produced some
| results that work for them in the "real" world. I have used
| Drupal for a few projects in the past: the main problem?
| Every major release that broke the API backwards
| compatibility and this means you have to refactor all your
| plugins and custom code, many times without any new direct
| benefit to the end user who, of course, was not available to
| spend money because some internals change every year and, for
| him, on the surface nothing changed.
| finitestateuni wrote:
| You realize that Ada and Objective C predate Object Pascal,
| and Erlang came out in the same year as it, right?
|
| I would worry less about new ways of doing the same thing
| and more about client generation/retention. Plenty of
| companies are willing to pay top dollar for boring
| technology.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It's a squeeze on us workers because it's profitable, not
| because businesses are coordinated on healthy society
| debarshri wrote:
| I think this is how I imagine hiring to be but it is not
| scalable. You get hired for doing things you love and have
| passion for. The fire in the belly comes from passion and love
| for the craft.
|
| Lot of engineers I have interviewed, if feels to me they are
| trying to hack the interview process. In larger orgs, "cracking"
| the interview process might lead to long term job. But in a mid
| tier or start up, that's the beginning.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >You get hired for doing things you love and have passion for
|
| Ah, if only I could get paid a tech salary for being a
| father/gardener/artist/beer-drinker/video-game-player.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Professionalism is doing the thing even when you don't feel
| like doing the thing
|
| Because as much as you might love the job, there's always those
| days and those boring tasks
| heisenbit wrote:
| Degrees most certainly prove that one is able to do a
| significant amount of boring tasks. They also prove a being
| beyond minimum intelligence and skill level. Safe choice but
| often not the best.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Degrees most certainly prove that one is able to do a
| significant amount of boring tasks
|
| Not necessarily. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/vie
| ws/2023/07/10/educ...
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Yes, I totally agree with you, this method is good for
| small/medium sized company but here in Italy the majority of
| companies are small/medium, so I think that hiring based on the
| "real knowledge" should become a prevalent strategy to growth
| up. Instead we -unfortunately- have more recruitments based on
| the "I'm a friend of a friend" or "this piece of paper says
| that I'm able to do to xyz, no need to prove it".
| gbrindisi wrote:
| > the employers don't ask "what you are able to do?", instead of
| "what are your credentials/studies".
|
| I think this is cultural.
|
| Italian culture is hierarchical and trust is built upon
| relationships, you either need the authority of a good cv or a
| good network to reap opportunities. (This is quite common in
| southern europe)
|
| Northern europeans, americans etc are more egalitarian and have a
| task based approach to build trust, and value ones worth
| accordingly.
|
| (Of course it's not always as black and white)
| kwar13 wrote:
| Having worked in both Canada and USA, I feel it's the same in
| US "what you are able to do?" and Canada "what are your
| credentials/studies".
| spydum wrote:
| I think this is universal. I read the story in a different
| light: it's all about your social graph and who you know.
|
| This is where I see most of the value from college or school,
| building up your social graph of people in your approximate
| industry.
|
| Want to be successful? Connect in a meaningful way with more
| people. Your opportunities will multiply.
|
| Don't know how to do that? There's an easy shortcut: publish
| something! Give a talk, write a blog, teach a class. Find those
| opportunities where you can engage with many folks at once (not
| just 1:1, that doesn't scale as fast).
| golergka wrote:
| It depends on what motivates people from your network to give
| you an opportunity.
|
| If their motivation is "I know that this guy is good for
| sure, I don't have to take chances with random people who
| answer the job as", it is still merit based, and they're
| acting in the best interest of the company. However, they
| could also give a job to somebody they know just to have
| their favor, or to get more people into the company they they
| could rely on in internal politics. In this case, this is not
| based on merit, and they're effectively defrauding the
| company, acting against its interest.
|
| Personally, I've mostly encountered first type of networking
| in USA and Northern Europe and mostly second type elsewhere.
| Israel is weirdly split between Hi-Tech and everything else,
| following first and second type respectively.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| That title ... Can we get grammar fixes for external titles for
| better readability?
| SadTrombone wrote:
| English is not everyone's first language, and the title may not
| be perfect but it's perfectly coherent.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Sure. I am asking, whether we could get corrected titles here
| on HN for such cases.
|
| I personally think, that a little due diligence is
| appropriate for titles of such blog posts, but that is only
| me and what I would do, if I published a blog post like that.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Congrats on the new job. It's a nice looking blog, very easy to
| use on a phone and to read.
| ksec wrote:
| Congratz, I vaguely remember you used to live in HK ( may be I
| was wrong ). Keep the Blog post posting.
| usrme wrote:
| The author lives in Italy. From the first paragraph:
| This maybe seems to be a weird post, especially for those who
| don't live in Italy, because here in Italy there's the common
| belief that the abilites of a worker, usually are less
| considered than the qualifies that it has. Or simply the
| employers don't ask "what you are able to do?", instead of
| "what are your credentials/studies".
| monnow wrote:
| Congrats Giulio! Incredibly, things are changing even in Italy. I
| find saddening that the majority of the youth is either stuck in
| dead end jobs or in lowly-paying slightly career-related jobs. I
| try to push anyone I meet under 30 to just leave the country. The
| only other option is to embrace entrepreneurship, even though it
| requires one to grow a thick skin, stomach and an indestructible
| carapace. I might be wrong trying to de-populate a country of old
| farts, but everyone has the right to strive for the life they
| want to lead, or at least get to choose a job/career. One last
| note of folklore - I find Italian politics amusing: both left and
| right have been focusing on civil rights debate, without a grand
| scheme but rather a day-to-day routine of putting out fires as
| they come along (the motto being 'just kick the can down the
| road').
|
| We need leaders with a vision, not social media influencers that
| follow behind whatever is trending on social media this week (aka
| the flavour of the week).
|
| Once again, congratulations! :) Sorry for hijacking the
| celebrations with a rant.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Thanks to you for the comment, and no worries about the rant,
| as an Italian I agree with you.
|
| Italian politicians are short sighted, they only care about the
| next election and not the nex generation.
| em-bee wrote:
| Congratulations on the job. I had a similar experience where
| having a public website with published extensions for the server
| that my future employer was using helped me get a job there, but,
| I'd like to point out that in both our cases it wasn't the
| blog/website alone that helped us get the job, but a personal
| connection. In your case it was meeting that CEO on a bike, who
| then made a personal recommendation. In my case it was my general
| reputation as an active member of a community where the job was
| posted, that I applied to.
|
| What the blog did was to make it easy for the CEO to get to know
| you without talking to you more. And for me it was my code
| examples. So that works if you find a job where your ideas fit,
| but it can also work against you to find any other job that may
| expect a different mindset. Just recently I had an interview that
| also came about due to my reputation in the community, after I
| posted there that I was looking for work. But they desperately
| wanted to see code too, and the only thing I had to show was
| almost 15 years old or older, in a language that is not well
| known, because all my recent work was not public, and I didn't
| keep code from work on my personal devices. I haven't heard back
| from them yet.
| swores wrote:
| Minor feedback that you're welcome to ignore: I found reading
| your comment a little bit slower & more annoying because of
| your lack of upper case letters for sentence starts. It's an
| interesting comment so I still read to the end, and upvoted,
| but I was close to not bothering to keep going half way through
| purely because of it all being lower case. I'd suggest changing
| your habit and starting sentences with upper case letters, not
| just because it's "normal" but because it's normal for a
| reason, that reason being that people find it easier to read.
| em-bee wrote:
| I appreciate the feedback. This is a habit that I acquired
| decades ago, on the basis that it doesn't make sense to write
| words differently just because of their position or their
| meaning when there is no such difference in the spoken
| language (but there are pauses between sentences instead,
| which I didn't consider then). It is actually through reading
| HN that I started to consider readability of longer
| paragraphs. I am considering the situation. Don't know where
| I will end up.
|
| I edited the comment, but now I am stuck between leaving the
| commented with capitalization to improve readability and
| reverting the edit in order for your response to make sense
| and to allow others to judge for themselves. (I'll go with
| keeping the edits. Anyone curious about the readability can
| go look for older comments of mine)
| mcemilg wrote:
| > the employers don't ask "what you are able to do?", instead of
| "what are your credentials/studies".
|
| I believe this issue extends beyond the scope of those without CS
| degrees; it also affects developers who have spent time working
| at small startups that haven't significantly scaled. If you
| haven't had the opportunity to work on large-scale projects, you
| might lack impressive accomplishments or credentials to showcase.
| This issue can compound over time, leaving you stuck in positions
| that are less rewarding than even mediocre jobs, regardless of
| your true capabilities or the quality of your work.
|
| Some people say that you can build open source projects or build
| products to show what you have. Balancing such efforts with a
| full-time job can be challenging, as these undertakings can
| consume most, if not all, of your free time. This creates a
| vicious cycle where you're continuously overextending yourself
| just to prove your worth. It's a demanding situation that can
| impact both your professional and personal life.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Referring to the "small startup experience" not mattering - I
| would say it is almost like an alternate track as an engineer.
|
| I have trouble landing interviews at FAANGs with 15+ years as
| an eng. and successful acquisitions as a founder - but those
| don't mean anything if you don't have direct knowledge of
| certain tools to handle scale or experience guiding projects
| across departments, etc. Which makes sense for any role past
| junior, since part of the value you bring is experience and
| only some of your experience is directly applicable. Vaguely
| being competent doesn't really move the needle.
|
| On the other hand, I've heard stories of people getting hired
| from a FAANG going to a startup and not able to shift their
| mindset to a "make it work" approach, so the challenge goes
| both ways.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| It's probably like a lot of other transitions to related but
| different careers. In my experience, sometimes it works and
| sometimes it doesn't--which probably says that as a
| prospective employer (and employee) there is an additional
| risk factor.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > Referring to the "small startup experience" not mattering -
| I would say it is almost like an alternate track as an
| engineer.
|
| It can be but doesn't have to be. A lot of people _prefer_ to
| hire folks with some small startup experience because such
| people almost always better at thinking about businesses
| holistically. Many people who spend their entire careers at
| big companies can only reason about their little slice (lots
| of bad takes on businesses here).
|
| A common way to make VP of engineering at big tech is the
| following 5 job hops:
|
| 1. Manager at big tech
|
| 2. Manager at startup -> promotion to director
|
| 3. Director at big tech
|
| 4. Director at startup -> promotion to VP
|
| 5. VP at big tech
|
| The problem comes when someone gets too senior with relevant
| experience at scale. I (generally) can't hire someone with 15
| years of experience who's never worked at scale. They're
| going to be bored out of their mind with mid-level work but
| simultaneously I can't actually trust them to not screw up
| something in senior+ roles, either technically or socially.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Titles in startups really don't map meaningfully to titles
| in BigTech. You can be called a VP in a startup with 20
| people under you in the org chart. That empire size is
| equivalent to "second level manager" in a FAANG, and FAANGs
| know this. When FAANG acquires a startup with 20 people,
| MAYBE the CEO gets a nice title, but most of the startup's
| acquired employees get Senior Worker Bee titles.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I've also had the experience of failing FAANG interviews
| after being very successful at smaller scale. Since then I've
| made the leap, and I can tell you that experience in the
| 10-100 developer range is extremely valuable and can make you
| very upwardly mobile once you get a foot in the door. People
| that have spent their entire career in big corporations often
| have a lot of assumed constraints based on groupthink and the
| vagaries of whatever specific org leaf nodes they've been
| exposed to. Often they will have worked for years under
| bosses with no real clue about the actual decision making
| process and strategy behind their work. It's extremely hard
| to develop an end-to-end understanding and strategic
| viewpoint in these environments. Startups offer much more
| opportunity to learn the big picture and the strategic
| considerations behind different functions. Obviously anyone
| can claim to be doing a startup--there's a lot of the blind
| leading the blind, and people playing house--but if you find
| one with an interesting vision, a bit of traction, and good
| colleagues you can learn lessons that will translate well to
| leadership at big tech.
|
| Coming in the front door will be hard though, because
| recruiters and the first layer of technical interviewers will
| likely not have context to judge your 15+ years of
| experience. Look for referrals and directly talking to hiring
| managers. Also, read some writing from notable SV management
| writers like Will Larson and Camille Fournier, this will help
| you learn some of the shibboleths and how hiring managers
| think. Finally, if you don't have legit scale-up experience,
| look for that first. There's a range of companies with
| engineering teams of all sizes which can provide good
| stepping stones for learning as well as hireability optics.
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| > On the other hand, I've heard stories of people getting
| hired from a FAANG going to a startup and not able to shift
| their mindset to a "make it work" approach, so the challenge
| goes both ways.
|
| But at least they get the job, so they can try to learn.
| Hence it doesn't go both ways.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Not just that. Engineers get pigeonholed into tech stacks as
| well. It's almost as if companies (recruiters, really) think a
| senior engineer can't learn another programming language or
| something. They come at you with "we're looking for someone
| with strong golang experience," when there's no way to _get_
| "strong golang experience" without working someplace that uses
| it.
| szundi wrote:
| Learning takes time
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| And? There's a learning curve any time one starts a new job
| with a new code base. Do you think a senior engineer can't
| become productive in a new codebase with a new language in
| a couple of months? If so, I'm going to guess you've never
| worked with a good senior engineer.
| em-bee wrote:
| that and most FOSS projects are also not large-scale, or as a
| contributor you are only working on small patches that hardly
| qualify as large-scale experience.
| hinkley wrote:
| Or they don't see the scale, which leads to friction with
| users. You don't see how your tool gets used, leading to
| DevEx issues with the project, people asking with varying
| levels of politeness why you built things that way.
|
| But at the end of the day the feedback is only so valuable,
| even when it comes with PRs.
| irf1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| swores wrote:
| Are you actually asking a question relevant to the thread or
| just spamming a self-promotion?
|
| I ask because I don't see any reason that paid open source
| contributions wouldn't be as good as non-paid open source
| contributions when it comes to gaining/demonstrating certain
| types of dev experience (though ofc without the benefit of
| also potentially showing character traits related to being
| willing to donate time for free), so I'm struggling to
| imagine you wrote that comment actually hoping for any answer
| other than "great thanks for telling us about the thing you
| founded". Apologies if I've incorrectly jumped to a bad faith
| interpretation - if so, you could maybe be more clear in
| explaining what your question actually is; if my assumption
| was correct then I'd suggest thinking twice before using low-
| effort and low-value comments for promotion, since people
| (and in particular people who would be valuable to have using
| your service) are liable to be put off by any
| product/company/service that spams in such a way.
| Zyst wrote:
| I found the comment valuable. I might be unmotivated to
| contribute to an OS project purely for the sake of doing
| so. But throwing some money in, I might go like "Alright
| I'll tackle this".
|
| Certainly I'm at least glad a tool like that exists.
| OJFord wrote:
| The latter, look at GP's comment history, only here to
| promote Algora.
| irf1 wrote:
| > If you haven't had the opportunity to work on large-scale
| projects...
|
| open source projects/companies that pay contributors are
| oftentimes larger-scale
|
| > Balancing such efforts with a full-time job can be
| challenging, as these undertakings can consume most, if not
| all, of your free time...
|
| i'm asking whether some compensation could make
| contributing to open source less of a luxury for a lot of
| people (those with jobs but also those in the jobs market)
| and more of an accessible opportunity to publicly showcase
| your "true capabilities or the quality of your work"
| OptoContrarian wrote:
| If it did work here, what would an example of contributing
| through algora.io look like? Would this be under projects or
| experience?
| zcesur wrote:
| i just whipped a new profile page, as an
| addition/alternative to the resume:
| https://algora.io/@/rjackson
| irf1 wrote:
| it would be public contributions on your Github profile
| ayewo wrote:
| FWIW, your comment didn't seem like self-promo or spamming to
| me. In fact, I consider it to be on-topic because it plugs an
| important gap that has always existed for people that intend
| to contribute to OSS but cannot due to their immediate
| circumstances.
|
| The "bug bounty" model is already used for eliciting
| _security_ contributions from security researchers so it is a
| good thing you 've extended it to elicit general
| contributions from devs looking to contribute to OSS and be
| paid for it.
|
| BTW, there's an over-representation of TypeScript and Rust
| amongst the projects you have listed. I'm curious is this
| because you already have strong network in these communities,
| hence the over-representation or it is a consequence of
| something else?
| irf1 wrote:
| thanks for your note :) most commercial open source
| projects use Typescript/Rust, and most projects on Algora
| are COSS
| rvba wrote:
| Finance is full of people with MBAs and two left hands that
| cannot do anything on their own.
| darkclouds wrote:
| > If you haven't had the opportunity to work on large-scale
| projects, you might lack impressive accomplishments or
| credentials to showcase.
|
| Whats a large scale project and why should they be viewed as an
| accomplishment?
|
| I myself have pioneered the use of some tech for use in
| situations where it was not thought possible, I've worked on
| big projects that have included the largest in the world, for
| employers that include being listed in the stock market.
|
| >I believe this issue extends beyond the scope of those without
| CS degrees
|
| Does that make me worth a $718,000 Google Software Engineer or
| a $100,000 junior coder?
|
| What price do you place on exploiting the vagaries of law that
| results in new legislation being created to curtail your
| activities?
|
| The founders of Google, Facebook, Microsoft & Apple all started
| with no university degree, but they did all end up with stock
| market listings and some legislation to curtail their
| activities.
|
| So do University degrees limit your earning potential whilst
| making it easier to find a job, whilst having no university
| degree seems to increase your chances of getting a stock market
| listing and some legislation to curtail your activities.
|
| What a topsy turvy world we live in!
| ecshafer wrote:
| The founders of google were Stanford phd can students. I
| don't know if they go their phds or not.
|
| The founder of Microsoft was a Harvard math major that
| probably could have gotten into an r1 phd program if the
| stuck it out for what 1 more year?
|
| The founder of Facebook was a Harvard cs major that could
| graduate if the stuck it out.
|
| Dropping out early to start your business is very different
| than someone who never went to school or flunked out of their
| freshman year.
| semilattice wrote:
| The founder of Microsoft, has wealthy connected parents and
| grandparents.
|
| The founder of Facebook too
|
| The founder of Google grew up in Academic family.
|
| --
|
| All of them received financial support, reducing risks
| loosing living expenses. Risk of loosing livelyhood,
| significanly changes how a founder or an enegineer spends
| their time.
|
| Connecting young people to networks of rich, influencial
| and generally experienced & smart people -- is a huge deal
| as well.
|
| It improves their verbal skills, perception management,
| broadness their knowlege.
|
| All of the above, can probably be easily found in many
| Stanford, Harvard, MIT graduates...
|
| None of the are 'competitively obtained skills' due to
| 'hard work'.
|
| --
|
| Additionally moral choices that favor lying, fudging facts
| and intentions -- may also be a characterstics of graduates
| from those types of schools... This an opinion.
|
| ---
|
| All of the above contributes to successfull financial
| outcomes.
|
| None are particularly representative of person's merits
| compared to others...
| darkclouds wrote:
| My understanding, but maybe its fake news over here in the
| UK, is that Jobs dropped out, Zuckerberg dropped out, Gates
| dropped out, Brin and Page both dropped out. Cant comment
| on the other two MS blokes, or the other bloke who co
| founded Apple.
|
| But getting a decent education here in the UK, where you
| dont get beaten up by teachers, in my experience is quite
| difficult. I even dropped out of one schools six form to
| enroll in another six form, perhaps demonstrating my
| willingness to learn, but even one of those courses was
| sabotaged.
|
| To be honest I think the mentality of the british empire
| was and might still be pervasive with state school
| education, viewed more as an institution to contain people
| of a certain age than a place of learning.
|
| Perhaps that is why law is not taught to everyone at school
| even in a TL;DR fashion?
| ecshafer wrote:
| My larger point is there is a very big difference between
| dropping out of an elite institution just before the
| finish line because you think you have a billion dollar
| company on your hands, and just dropping out. Even if MS,
| Facebook and Google all failed Brinn, Zuckerberg, and
| Gates would still have been able to walk get a job
| probably. They didn't drop out because they failed out,
| they willingly left to pursue their ideas, and were
| otherwise top notch students.
| Daril wrote:
| Well... I recognise that these companies have made a lot of
| money, but how? I remember the day of BeOS, it was
| technically 15 years ahead and Microsoft killed it (just as
| an example), the same company that years later tried to
| kill Linux and killed Nokia. Google with their motto "Don't
| be evil" ... sure, just collect personal data in every
| possible way and sell it against your will. Yes, they have
| also done many positive things like Golang or Android for
| example, but when they see that they are losing the grip
| (and monopoly) on the project, they switch to something
| else (Flutter ... Fuchsia). The real revolution (apart from
| the Internet) of the last decades has been open source,
| without it we wouldn't have *BSD, Mariadb, PostgresQL,
| Linux, Android, dozens of languages, databases, knowledge
| sharing. and with it freedom : freedom to choose, freedom
| to learn, to collaborate with other people around the globe
| for the benifits if not all, at least many. In my opinion,
| the open source philosophy has done more for human
| evolution than all the big companies put together (and
| their money stacked in foreing countries to not pay taxes).
| sam2426679 wrote:
| Probably an unpopular, "grass is always greener" opinion, but
| this is why leetcode-style interviews can be a good thing at
| FAANG. Anyone with time and an internet connection can gain
| experience with data structures and algorithms via leetcode,
| whereas it's much harder to get hands-on experience with
| scaling real transactions-per-second on your own. And, as
| contrived as leetcode is, it does measure _something_ about
| your ability to grok how code and infra scale against time and
| space.
| tough wrote:
| How reasonable is for a non-us based developer to even try?
|
| FAANG positions in Europe are OK-ish but not such a deal
| breaker to me to dedicate so much time to -useless- stuff,
| I'd rather build cool shit
| itronitron wrote:
| The people I know (US-based developers) hired by FAANG were
| all very recently out of college, graduate school, or
| academia. Everyone else is focusing their time on diving
| deep into the technical issues they are faced with...
| itronitron wrote:
| >> as contrived as leetcode is, it does measure something
| about your ability to grok how code and infra scale against
| time and space
|
| While that is certainly possible, I don't think that is
| typically the case in leetcode style interviews...
| [deleted]
| bapo wrote:
| Congratulations on the new job!
|
| I think I've seen your blog pop up every couple of years
| somewhere here or back in the days reddit and always appreciated
| your blog posts.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Thanks! Really glad that you read and appreciate my posts,
| unfortunately I don't have always much time to write but when I
| can, and I have something to share, I try to write and post
| useful info.
| simonw wrote:
| I wrote about this a while ago:
| https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/17/standing-out/
|
| If you have a dusty old blog with just a single technical post on
| it from 2012 which demonstrates that you know how to code, know
| how to write and know how to solve a technical problem... that
| will STILL give you a solid advantage against other candidates,
| at least in the early stages of the hiring process.
|
| When hiring, the very first filter you need to apply is "can this
| person actually do the work". That's what FizzBuzz is about!
|
| A blog post (or a dusty old GitHub repo) is a great way to jump
| past that filter.
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