RowanH

2017 through to around 2020/21 was insane worldwide .. All the big co's soaked up the talent, then that sucked the air out of the market worldwide. We were getting people outside of the US headhunted from the US, which had constant ripple effects. Now it seems the rebalancing is definitely taking hold and times are a lot tougher for devs world wide.

Trying to hire in 2020-21 was impossible. You would get people between interviews get massive offers (days/week apart). 50/50 whether even after accepting the offer they'd actually turn up... If you saw someone that had a decent shot at coding you needed to hire right then and there. Reddit/HN was absolutely filled with devs making hay while the sun was shining job hopping and say things like 'if you're not getting a 30% payrise...'

Now the credit crunch has just switched the tap off. I'm about to contract out a small bit of work via one of the freelancer sites and I'm going to be very interested to see what it's like getting freelancers now....

Ran a small software dev shop (~100 staff) inheriting windows. My god, never again... The amount of lost productivity was insane. Soon as went out to start my SaaS company, back to Mac, without a shadow of a doubt. I might actually reboot once every few months on Mac whereas my IT manager at the windows shop suggested as a solution to some problems shutting down everytime people were finished for the day !

The windows shop was non stop hardware, software issues. Laptops (whichever brand) are absolute junk with very short lifespans. Blue screens...

New Zealand is locked out. (Normally we get first dibs on things being a small test market)

New Zealander checking in - our February (summer) is insane if you're close to certain types of bush. Deafening. Not sure if it was in the article (paywalled) but the little mofos can get up to 100db. There's a good couple of weeks I avoid the bush for sure.

I was listening to a YouTube ( I think it was 60 minutes of all things ) where volcanologists are burying them deep down in icelandic volcanoes to help detect when volcanoes might blow. Sensing the underground magma movement..

I'm using AI for training videos for my startup. Never going back to voice actors outside of primary marketing videos. tThe sheer convenience of write/listen/tweak cycle on scripts is insane. In minutes you can do a voiceover which would have have taken hours + days delay prior.

Sure the final result sounds slighty robotic. 99% of people wouldn't care, and you can get more training videos done, faster for a fraction of the cost.

[Edit] And I'll add the difference from 6 months ago is noticeable to today. I imagine every 6 months we can just re-download updated voiceovers and every 6 months will sound just slightly more polished..

Sorry can't tell ya as only bought the one set, so nothing to compare against...

You're welcome. Fleur is awesome to deal with there. I think the ones I got were the custom fit j2's.

Probably a little bit worse on descent. It's all about noise levels - constant drone and screaming babies.

Lotus 7 styled machine. Has a supercharged honda k20a, the exhaust exit is drivers side....

Sorry for the late reply - Pacific Ears (you get the impressions done at Bay Audiology)

We've got a greyhound cross... about 80% of the speed, 300% of the endurance of an OG Grey. Still is absolutely done for the day after his morning hour at the beach. Doesn't spark back up until about 8hrs later.

This is what's used a lot in motorsport as race cars are insanely loud. Mine was pumping out north of 120db at one point at a 1m static noise test at 4500rpm (went to 7600rpm... and you sit less than 1m from the exhaust..)

I had full impressions done with custom in-ear monitors and I've never been happier. Makes plane flights absolutely tolerable too.

In-ear monitors vs sleeved (like eytomtic slip-ons) are much better practically day to day as the wires exit flush with the bottom of your earlobes (needed for getting helmets on and off) which means beanies, sleeping on a plane etc you can rest the side of your head on something without wires/end of the monitor.

Around $700NZD / $300USD done here in NZ.

Well the article did start off talking on a world stage....

Every town and city across the planet is be different, some more amenable, some less so. We have ebikes and it replaces over summer some car trips, it's not a wholesale replacement for cars and (I personally) think they shouldn't be touted as that - that's fighting a loosing battle!

In the town I'm in ~55'000 people, there's a big uptake of ebikes particularly summer it's just mad. E.g. going to the market, or a cafe, or pub... so I would hazard a guess that the replacement journeys in summer time drop traffic 5%, maybe 10%.

I've lived in Toronto which probably fairly similar to a number of US cities and that would have been amazing to get around on ebike (outside of winter time).

Some of the latest stuff in the Klipper eco system is mind bendingly awesome. I had a partially built Voron from 3 years ago that I got out of the cupboard a few weeks ago, CAN-Bus print heads, Beacon Eddy-current bed levelling system (that's just insane..), print head acceleration measurement. You can see over the past few years it's been doing what open-source sharing of ideas/code/files has lead to some incredible stuff.

It really seems like Prusa should have done something with Octoprint than trying to reinvent the wheel on their own.

Now Octoprint is left in this shrinking space between Prusa/Bambu and Voron type printers. Bambu from what I can see is the best "click and go option" (albeit going against the open source ethos to a degree) then you go into Voron realm and you're definitely using the Klipper stack there.

When I'd gotten back into it I thought "am I really going to do put this all together, why not go an XL". 3 hours of YouTube videos later it was "no way.. sticking with Voron and going all in..."

Ran a dev team in NZ (which had some brutal lockdowns). I would say it was about 1 in 20 wanted to be at the office. Even to the point of almost twisting our arms on lockdowns to be back in the office. That leaves 19 out of 20 on varying states of happiness being at home. On balance obviously most people prefer to WFH.

The ones that didn't : - Lonely - Impossible home environment to work in (noise/kids/distractions/lack of good physical environment)

I reckon it would probably even out in the long term to about 9 out of 10 preferring to WFH.

[edit - should I add I left ~18 months later to start my own SaaS and love WFH, can't imagine ever paying rent on an office again]

I'm from NZ which has logical addressing. Trying to find some random business on some random shed, down some random lane in the middle of nowhere in the UK can be quite the challenge - post codes don't help and "turn left at the white post, go down the lane till you get to a crow that's staring south, then drive up past the.... " directions are terrible. What3Words has been great for finding those places that use it... easier than writing down a GPS co-ordinate.

Our boy requires an hour run/walk/run/zoomie/get treats from other humans at the beach every morning. Gaurenteed every day it's a "oh man not sure I feel like it". Get back from the beach "right, cracking morning, top of the world, lets on with some code".

Took 9 years for my other half to convince me to get a dog, now I'm a fully committed dog person.

"Global South" that's a new one :) There's quite a lot of countries in the Southern Hemisphere ...

[From a NZ perspective] Except you don't live in a bubble. Fire fighters, ambulance staff, doctors, nurses etc have to pick you up in pieces and (hopefully) put you back together. The PTSD alone from horrific accidents must be hell on first responders. Can't imagine if we went back to the dark ages and had no seat belts with the cars/speeds we do today.

So yeah on a closed area with no consequence (i.e. no one to rescue you) sure go for your life. But on a public road where people have no option but to rescue you if you fly through the windshield....

The taxpayers have to pay for your care. So it seems like a fair trade-off, if you're going use public roads, wear a seat belt.

I jointly ran a window and door software company (I was responsible for product/dev). You wouldn’t believe the amount of staff that joined “how hard can windows be?” Consistently and without fail 3 months later “what the _____! I never knew!”

And that’s just one component of a building.

Buildings are not simple things…

Well that caused a certain amount of WTF this morning and head scratching. Thanks for posting this.

+background/foreground services. Our product does tonnes of photo/video uploads and iOS is a user nightmare by comparison. Android - kick off a service and happy user!

But that said the Android constantly-changing API's, device compatibility/fragmentation is a bit of a nightmare.

Founded by a Kiwi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab

[Edit not sure what it's got to do with Jacinda though..]

I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked but this week looking at some display ads, in Googles audience builder there’s literally an “upload email of who you want to target” feature. Made my skin crawl. Can’t tell me that’s not abused to the ends of the earth and back - some marketing interns will just go nuts, GDPR be damned

Thanks !!!

The G-Seat as part of my sim-rig. 9 AC Servos, borderline dangerous, beast of a simulator. The G-Seat I decided to do better than commercial offerings (had tried "the best" and it was pretty average). CNC brake folded aluminium seat with moveable flaps controlled by AC Servos - had to 'de tune' as they were literally at rib-breaking speed initially. About a year worth of development designed and prototype in Fusion 360, through to this :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STnnqonpcAU

And another vid at max rpm on the servos...

https://youtu.be/eMZC0ekEXQ8?t=39

Worst mistake I've ever made was implementing logic in the db - made for horrible debugging. It was only a few small bits of logic, but man, the amount of gotchas years later not realising something was there.. certainly I think you either have to all/most of your logic in the DB or none. Definitely not a sprinkling..

Ditto - I think it's also human testing in my case (or randomised automated testing). We have a commenting feature, sometimes I see comments sometimes not.. I think I've always seen api requests come through.

Just wish it was a whole load faster... when you find a critical issue and want to get it out the door quickly, super frustrating to be waiting !

You realise this is fearmongering on AI right? It's literally trying to find anything that AI might be connected with as "bad" to paint AI in a negative light. I'm sure you can/are hiding behind "well readers can draw their own conclusions".

But in this day and age you just need 4 seconds to look at a page of headlines, numbers, and a conclusion will be drawn.

I'd hardly conclude that email as an "incident". There's incidents every day of people using technology and screwing up - we don't have a "Reply-AllIncidents.com"

I'm all for highlighting and examing real, scary, tangible problems with AI. But it feels like you've got the bar way too low here.