ericalexander0

As somebody who's much older than 36, who also recently landed a job. My advice is don't worry about your age. The most important thing is to get out there and try. I think you'll be surprised at how much opportunity there is, regardless of your age.

Recently left a company where equity was a substantial portion of my income. Interviewed with 6 companies who all offered equity. 2 already public and 3 with plans to IPO soon. I think all listed equity/rsu/options/etc in the job description/listing.

>a feature similar to DNS

Why not DNS? Seems to check all the boxes you're looking for.

New? There's plenty of ski areas that went defunct long ago due to a lack of snow making capability. Some due to a lack of access to water.

Many prominent Colorado ski resorts may face the same fate in the near future:

https://denvergazette.com/premium/drought-threatens-future-o...

Mass layoffs? Probably not. The last mass layoffs were the result of interest rate hikes and the end of easy money. Inflation is slowing. So should interest rate hikes.

Macro conditions don't guarantee one way or another for single companies. There's always signs of financial stress internally. Keep an eye out and you'll see them, if there.

>What I wasn’t told was that we had 70,000 hard-coded references to Sacramento

There's plenty of real world scenarios that could have taken out that data center and the Twitter engineering team would have been scrambling to fix, just the same.

I read somewhere once that v1 of chaos monkey was the Netflix CEO randomly pulling cables in a data center to prove the point that systems needed rugged designs. Not all too different.

Ah the old buts in seats is the only metric you need style of management.

“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don’t complain about illogical behavior.” – Eli Goldratt

Managers measuring the wrong thing is not exclusive to software engineering. Measuring obviously wrong things goes back decades (ie IBM paying Microsoft by the KLOC).

This phenomenon was likely first identified by Deming. His Red Bead Experiment is infamous in demonstrating.

https://deming.org/explore/red-bead-experiment/

There's a lot of good research and advice from DORA on what to measure and improve.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-...

These questions can be distilled down to: Will fill_in_the_blank jobs go away? Less demand equals less pay and less interesting problems.

AI is the second wave of software eating the world. The first wave improved knowledge sharing and mechanized business processes. That wave replaced many jobs and produced funny t+shirts like "I could replace you with a bash script".

The second AI wave will replace low hanging fruit pattern matching jobs, when there's enough data to train on. If your job is to pattern match input, then it's likely ripe for AI replacement. Think jobs with analyst in their title. Compliance Analyst. SOC Analyst.

Any job that requires critical thinking, has limited training data, or has low tolerance for failure - they're not going away anytime soon. Maybe augmented with AI tools, but not replaced. Jobs like Security Researcher or Security Incident Handler.

I highly recommend Beyond The Phoenix Project. It's less of a book and more of a podcast with John Willis and Gene Kim exploring Deming, Goldratt, and related theory.

Severance packages with claw back clauses that enforce the NDA. Break the NDA and risk paying back the severance plus legal costs. Isn't worth the risk.

Technical founders help, but it's not required. Structured goal setting, call it OKRs if you want, is the secret sauce. Can't just cargo cult it. Has to be an entire company working together towards goals. That's where the dream of DevOps happens.

Best example I can give is the lore of SpaceX's spending policy. Every purchase was authorized, if it could get the company to Mars faster. True? IDK, I wasn't there, but it's the type of clarity most companies struggle to define. There is no DevOps without that clarity.

Most DevOps is classic Sys Admin with Ansible or Terraform, from what I've seen these days. SRE is the new hotness.

You're better off doing a private bug bounty through bug crowd or hackerone.

Pentests are point in time assessments. Usually with one to two testers, with limited scopes of expertise.

Bug bounties can bring in hundreds of testers with a wide breadth of expertise that continuously test.

Meditation and/or exercise. It's very human to ruminate over a negative experience. Both meditation and exercise can help refocus your mind on more important things.

There is no one size fits all answer. It depends on the tolerance for failure in the system. If testing in production stays within the tolerance, then it's likely more efficient to test there. If not, then it's more efficient to test pre-prod.

The current system is built on low effort content farms with articles written by ghost writers who stitched together what they googled on the subject. If anything changes in the seo world, it's less ghost writer jobs. Already happening.

The current system is driven by ad revenue, but when the customers are advertisers, then the user experience sucks. Why would I want to wade through search results full of ads when OpenAI, Bard, etc can answer my question in seconds.

How does the landscape change? The cheap low effort content farm business model is dead.

Have to route your traffic through an egress point elsewhere. Really only to ways to do that: encapsulation/vpn or proxy (ie squid).

I divide the day into a list of negotiable and non-negotiable items. My schedule is then optimized for the non-negotiables.

What gets measured gets done. DORA and similar cycle time measurements are proxy metrics. They'll distort reality into managers becoming the customer, if used the wrong way. They're no substitute for structured goal setting.

What's the why behind the proposed change? Is it to meet a compliance requirement? Is it based on learning from a recent incident? Something else?

I've built security programs from the ground up at two companies and have worked in compliance/security/cyber/etc for over 16 years. I'm also a maker and an engineer. I understand how security/compliance side sees the world, and how engineers see the world.

I hate to say it, but security/compliance tends to cargo cult. They implement what's accepted by whatever compliance framework they need to achieve. PCI, FedRAMP, SOX, SOC, CIS, etc, etc.

Engineers want to break things down to components and understand why each component is required. AKA thinking from first principles.

Mixing the two is like oil and water. Security and compliance don't have in-depth explanations for why they need to do something, they just need to check a box, and they know how it's most often checked. They know "nobody got fired for buying Sophos/Windows/AD/etc". They can't explain it from first principles, nor do they want to take the risk of going outside of known solutions.

So how do you negotiate? The box they're trying to check is likely well documented. Ask to see the documentation for the requirement(s). From there you can propose alternate solutions that meet those requirements. Try to find examples of your proposal being accepted, so you don't run into the "nobody got fired for buying x".

I used to shit on js. Especially node. My opinion changed working in a 65+ team engineering org with freedom to choose languages. There was a clear pattern of js/ts/node teams shipping faster.

Means js is better than _insert_other_language_? Nope. There's always tradeoffs. The best solutions seek to manage essential tradeoffs, while ignoring irrelevant ideology.

Toyota has been betting on hydrogen fuel cell. Their argument is more or less that there's not enough lithium for 100% EV and most of the world doesn't have access to cheap/dependable electricity.

Taking a guess that it's a sales tactic. Everyone has to walk past first class, where they're already being served food and beverages in their luxury sized seats. Then past business class. Then to your peasant seat.

Maybe back to pre-war levels, but are they profitable?