fishpen0

New laws and regulations make companies more liable for being hacked

Companies buy cyber insurance to reduce their risk if they are found liable

Cyber insurance companies force tech staff to install garbage software in order to check compliance boxes.

Garbage software breaks

Turns out everyone used the exact same brand of garbage software to check the same garbage box

People in hospitals die

When you reduce everything to a checkbox and eliminate critical thinking to apply the need to the exact situation you end up with 90% of companies running zscaler and crowdstrike

"This is just how you solve this, everyone does it this way in our industry"

Unless of course you are a small fish who just needs sso for compliance and for some reason you get to pay like you are a $5B conglomerate despite still very much preferring to just pay an advertised price and not spend a month of people's time in negotiations

HN is full of tech workers yes, faang workers no. HN is full of way more people in tech roles at non-tech and old-tech companies who don't shower them equity that only goes up than you might be aware of. I work in the meetup space and know many dozens of tech workers in Boston that are feeling the rent squeeze and will never own property here

> You can always sell your RSU immediately to get cash.

This is not true at all. My current company is privately held and has RSUs. Over the last two years there has been a single buyback and it was at a fixed closed market price and we were limited to selling 10% of our vested RSUs. Lots of startups flipped to RSUs with no plan to go public or be bought out in the last few years.

Additionally, even if your company is stable RSUs are frought with issues like what happened two orgs ago where a blackout period started and our stock went into a 30% free fall during the blackout and never recovered. We ended up getting a tender offer, the company sold to private equity and unvested shares were clawed back

Gambling vs Guarantee. I've lost options or unvested RSU 3 times to companies suddenly rolling over, getting acquired, or doing layoffs. Of the two times I've hit it and actually had them pay out, one payed out at only 1/3 of the original valuation of the equity and one only paid out for two quarters before we were acquired.

Take the pay increase vs the equity every time. Plus by changing 5 times, I diversified my equity on more companies and ensured something hit at least a little.

The dystopian future where diseases like psoriasis get you fingered for every crime within a mile radius of your home or office

There are a handful of key litmus tests that are part of the background check. If you are/were a felon, If you lie at all during the check, If you are in extreme debt, If they find public record of you being anti-american, If you fail a drug test.

These all come up during the screening interviews of your peers, family, and coworkers. I have done about a half dozen or so of these for former peers, friends, and colleagues who have moved on to do public sector or join private military companies that needed clearance.

I love me some ID.me and think every bank and financial institution should be required to use it. It goes so far beyond to do good multi-factor auth and even accounts for the un-homed and un-phoned in their multifactor. Thousands of people can't bank or use many services because they can't get a phone number, but they can use id.me at a library or other public computer with few issues just having an old offline phone running an authenticator

Edit: TIL login.gov is the new hotness

Google auth is not the only authenticator that supports TOTP. Any time a site tells you to use google authenticator you should be using a better service like 1password, bitwarden, lastpass, etc... to scan the QR code and store the TOTP code.

I'm flabbergasted every time I switch jobs and some jamook in IT or Security says we have to sue google authenticator and that other authenticators aren't allowed. Then there are constant lockout events generating tickets for those teams when people delete the app or get new phones.

Its funny how you can't work for a secure government agency if you can't get clearance, and that a primary litmus test for clearance is how much debt you are in. (AKA how easy you are to bribe). But then for huge swaths of our infrastructure we have privatized it and left it in the hands of minimum wage employees who probably have auto and student debt and can be bribed for pittances.

Funny enough this is exactly how vendor engagement goes when you are publicly traded. They can see your books more or less and charge wildly different numbers to different companies. It has nothing to do with how much you use the product or the resources you'll use and everything to do with what they think you are worth. We've had so many calls where we're like "brand new product with team of 10 wants your thing" and they come back with a high 6 figure saas contract. It's so fucking annoying that they don't have to show their prices online and can make all their customers sign pricing NDAs

Honestly this. I've moved three companies now to docker based dev for teams on python. It's better for teams who want to customize how they in particular work without inadvertently also blocking themselves from quickly contributing to another team because that team uses a totally different python management scheme. So a team can be conda-in-docker and another team can be virtualenv-in-docker and another team can be raw-python-in-docker and that one group of weirdos can be jython or whatever other sad shit they cook up.

The common interface is they all use `docker-compose up` and have their editors hooked into the containers.

For me its a jittery nightmare. I can't even play a video in vlc and still have firefox scroll smoothly on another monitor. I can turn my desktop experience into a slide show if I set the refresh rate on all three monitors to 144hz. Its silly I'm looking at choosing between having a good linux desktop experience _or_ being able to use CUDA for ML/AI stuff OR having to build a second computer so I can have a gaming computer on AMD _and_ a work node on NVIDIA

They are, so I want to smash my face in once a month or so when this boogeyman is dragged up out of hell during executive calls

We have investor pressure to use specific cloud providers. This is the Healthcare version of Walmart not letting their partners use AWS. Due to their (Amazon, Google) vertical integration slowly moving in on healthcare turf, many healthcare partners/payers/investors are adding contractual pressure to exit AWS or GCP and move to Azure specifically. Wondering how your cloud support in general looks. Your previews are all AWS-centric

Shooting yourself in the foot with marketing and branding on day one is a "made by engineers" tale as old as time.

Yeah, it makes sense for phones, since the touchscreen feel affects perception of quality. But this is literally just a gimmicky non-touch display and didn't need to be real glass

MDM is supported by the watch. My organization requires a 10 digit code for watches plus requires biometrics to be resolved on the primary device prior to the watch being able to control that device or interact with apps on that device

Even in really big companies that focus around retail or healthcare, it is really practical to shut down offices. Our medical care facilities are no longer being built out with offices in the backrooms for IT/Finance/Etc... staff. We can rent smaller spaces or do more with existing spaces by converting it into more medical facility space and run all the business and software operations via WFH. We operate in 20 states and are racing with competitors to who does this the fastest to cut costs and charge less to providers for a competitive edge

It always seemed like they were buying them for their existing vendor contracts and already done legal legwork to operate a business that was actually illegally operating in MA (where it was founded) for years while they did all the lobbying to make it less illegal. Uber was probably keeping them around as a legal patsy incase they caught flack as they rolled out their internal atlernative.

Sucks for Bostonians though, another tech-ish company gone from the downtown roster

Boston here and what we see now is the only company consistently hosting is google and exclusively for kubernetes meetups. Organizers for several meetups have communicated struggles to get anyone to host. A big part of it seems to be the bigger companies that used to host literally left Boston as a side effect of acquisitions or downsizing closing the Boston offices, leaving only buildings further out in the burbs (Burlington for example) open. A lot of the hosts that were acquired but sill in town were bought by companies like Vista Equity Partners who seem to have an outright distaste for engineering community as a whole and reject requests from their own staff to host events.

The flip side is even when a host is found, its sometimes in the burbs because that's where the bigger office space is that's still a tech space and asking people who work or live downtown to commute to a specific suburb just for a free slice of pizza and a pitch to work for a company who is RTOd and has no downtown presence gets zero interest

Kubernetes specifically is in go because google invented go and also invented Kubernetes. Their internal teams have a lot of go engineers due to the whole inventing it thing

Less performance and more security. Lots of ameteur images use a secret file or inadvertently store a secret to a layer without realizing an rm or other process in another layer doesn't actually eliminate it. If the final step of your build squashes the filesystem flat again you can remove a lot of potentially exposed metadata and secrets stored in intermediate layers

It’s a shame they have committed to never supporting Bigquery and other cloud provider services. We really need something like this at my org but there’s no compelling reason to move all of analytics off of BQ nor is there a good reason to add yet another copy layer between the apps and the analytics tools

We literally have an entire set of teams building a DAL internally and its basically a forever project while existing app engineers just keep doubling down on table federation and other stuff that breaks lineage and ownership models

If your organization uses beyondcorp for zero trust among several other Google products, they only work in Chrome. Many MDM solutions also only do hardware verification through chrome during the auth loop for gsuite and not other browsers. My current organization blocks the installation of other browsers in their jamf configuration as well, so it wouldn’t matter even if beyondcorp did work in another browser

The main issue is every startup and small business ties themselves to the gsuite apps and ultimately falls down the path of using and then requiring gsuite auth and often chrome as a whole for all work browsing. It is quintessentially the new IE. almost all my browsing during the day has to be chrome whether I like it or not and that has been true at my last 4 organizations. Three of which are multi billion dollar companies and two with tens of thousands of employees

Do these have any tax advantages to speak of like an IRA or 401k? Are they bankruptcy shielded?

Tons of organizations run vault and consul as part of their k8s ecosystem so they don't directly compete. The vault CSI driver might be the single most installed CSI driver across all the orgs I've worked for

I've worked for three companies now that went to hashicorp to buy TFE and left with a quote equal to a quarter or more of revenue and the sales rep acting like they are the second coming and obviously we are stupid for not thinking they bring that much value to our org. No org invests 1/4 of their revenue on a single tool. So we used atlantis or spacelift or hand rolled GHA scripts and saved a fortune.

We are trying to pay them and they are being so unreasonable with pricing that we can't give them our money

If they think we'll go crawling back to their 100x more expensive 6-7 figure Terraform Enterprise garbage just because we can't use spacelift anymore, then I'll show them the team of engineers we can hire for the same dollars to move the whole stack to pure pulumi or crossplane or the various CDKs

The bald faced disingenuous nature of this change here is wild. They can't compete at their pricing because their pricing is absolutely insane over what the market can bear and they refuse to accept it.

They are going out of their way to make it less expensive to stop using terraform altogether right as so many new options have entered the market