benjaminwootton

Isn’t it on the decline yet?

Facebook is for boomers.

Twitter is weird and we all realised how pointless it is to spend time falling out on there.

Instagram feels a bit long in the tooth.

LinkedIn is a parody of itself.

Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media.

TikTok and YouTube shorts seem popular but aren’t really social media. It’s just time wasting junk.

All in all, social media feels like it peaked a while back.

Is this a GenAI comment responding to a GenAI comment?

I suspect it was the 6 months salary rather than any major philosophical agreement.

Some of these posts and the logic used look like a mental health issue than a negotiation.

I run my own business. I have zero motivation or incentive to help out people who own office blocks.

We have to call at 8am along with the hordes. If your call isn’t answered by 8.05am then you are out of luck. If you eventually do get through then you’ll be given an appointment with a “nurse practitioner” in a weeks time. I’ve heard about these things called GPs but haven’t personally confirmed their existence.

If this is their worst complaint about one of WPs biggest hosts then he isn’t doing too badly.

I’m not sure if he’s still involved, but the founder Jason Cohen seems very nice and down to earth. I’m sure he would turn the setting back on in 5 minutes if Matt came knocking and this is all there was to it.

WP Engines whole reason for being is that open source Wordpress is a car crash to manage. The hacks, the spam, the broken addons on upgrades are in a league of their own. They’ve probably done more to help the platform than hinder it.

The vast majority of consulting engagements work like this. Someone wants something to happen and brings in a consultant to explain why it’s a good idea to cover themselves and sell to the rest of the business.

A consultancy wouldn’t last very long if they disagree on strategy with the person signing the cheques.

I’ll need to sit down and read this properly, but I would say there is a real stench of decline in England at the moment and pretty much everyone here would agree. It’s readily apparent the new government won’t save us already.

Public services in particular: 2 weeks to see a Dr, a year for an operation, unlikely for the police to attend your call out, stagnant economy, high cost of living and low wages. And all whilst we have one of the highest tax burdens in our history.

The flip side of this is the cost. Managed cloud services make it faster to get live, but then you are left paying managed service providers for years.

I’ve always been a big cloud/managed service guy, but the costs are getting astronomical and I agree the buy vs build of the stack needs a re-evaluation.

The experience on the ground is very much one of you being price gouged. It is galling to spend so much on the booking, then sit down at a rubbish Italian chain restaurant and pay twice what you would do in the nearest town.

I don't mind spending a lot on holidays and travel, but we didn't return to Centre Parcs for this reason. It crossed the line from expensive to unreasonable.

You can do that to a degree as charitable contributions are a tax write off.

In a strong market the management and owners will have to pay more and improve conditions.

Maybe some managers will be faster to exploit things when supply/demand turns in their favour, but pretty quickly the invisible hand of the market would have readjusted anyway.

I’ve had some old Bose noise cancelling headphones for approaching 20 years which are still going well!

I’ve ended up with a few pairs and found them quite unreliable after the first year.

I have one pair where the left bud doesn’t connect until I put it back in and take it out of the case a few times.

One where one bud doesn’t charge properly.

And one with declining noise cancellation.

They are great when they work properly, but I do think quality is slightly lacking for a relatively expensive product.

These services are super expensive nowadays. By the time you add service fee, delivery fee and tips, your cold and soggy burger starts to get quite expensive.

Python in a Notebook is “REPL like” and much more modern.

And though I agree low code is important, Streamlit or Dash are a much more fully featured and open way to do that.

I agree KDB has a good development workflow, but I think the same is available in an open source stack like ClickHouse + Python + Jupyter.

I run a data consultancy with a big focus on ClickHouse. There is a lot of interest in replacing KDB with it. I’ve had probably 10 conversations with companies looking at a migration.

Tellingly, nobody has pulled the trigger on a migration yet as I think it’s a big call with all of the integrations that KDB sprouts, but it definetly feels like the spiritual successor.

I would encourage you to look at recruiters more as partners or as an unpaid sales team. They are out there speculatively busting their ass and building relationships with buyers.

I run my own business and would pay 10% commission in exchange for qualified opportunities all day long.

There was a press release on the same day talking about how Oracle, Microsoft and OpenAI have a deal for burst capacity. That may be connected.

Not everyone can but most founders I know could be earning a very high salary in industry.

I think it’s entirely reasonable for a founder to take money off the table.

The founder possibly walks away from a 6-7 figure opportunity cost working for a big corporate or FAANG. In return they take zero salary.

All of the money that begins to come in is then used to pay employees.

Maybe they raise some funds and pay themselves a below market salary for years.

A few years later they are over $1 million in opportunity cost and still owning a lottery ticket.

By this time they are a bit older, have a family, want to buy a house etc.

They are also massively wedded to the project for as long as it takes, so strapped in for the long haul.

The founder should be able de-risk at the next funding round and not continuing to roll it all for the benefit of VCs.

The same is probably true of early employees, but a lot of the factors above are dialled down. They didn’t work for zero, salary wasn’t under market by such a degree and they haven’t had such a high opportunity cost.

I haven’t heard that saying before but it certainly feels correct. I know a few successful people who don’t seem particularly bright or analytical, but keep pushing on in the misguided belief that things will work out. And sometimes they do.

People on minimum wage don’t get a chance to build savings are probably living month to month. Though it’s not an earth shattering of money it is meaningful to a lot of people.

I think there is way too much scope for bad actors in this. The employer holds all of the information and all of the cards.

I was a tier 1 significant common shareholder in my own company and saw a bunch of shenanigans. The rank and file employee with 0.00X% stock options subject to weird rules and tax doesn’t stand a chance.

From the employees perspective, have to find a massive outlier in terms of company success and then hope to not get screwed or be diluted to hell. Lottery ticket odds are the right ballpark.

You have to wonder if remote work is starting to bite developers.

10 year ago I started a business that had hundreds of engineers in London and New York.

I am now starting a new one and this time I am hiring talent from all over the world now that it is more acceptable for us and our clients.

Surely this must be a factor in people in expensive western markets?

Just because you decide to split things like this doesn’t mean it’s sexist.

I earnt a lot more than my wife did and we jointly decided she would stay at home for a few years and I would throw myself into work to cover the family income.

I would have been more than happy to switch roles if the shoe was on the other foot!

There are lots of projects who have managed to achieve this.

Streaming frameworks like Kafka Streams and Flink have incrementally updating tables in memory.

Materialize is built around the concept with a Postgres compatible API.

ClickHouse materialized views act like insert triggers which update when the base table is updated.

It definitely seems like the wise thing to do. There are enough reports of these events even if your risk of being caught up in one is low.

This is how I always worked over a 15 year developer career. I’d get in at 6 maybe take a 2 hour lunch break and then put a few more hours in until around 4pm as a standard pattern.

The vast majority of useful work I ever did was between the hours of 6-9am.