imroot

(Former Luxottica Employee):

Luxottica owns EyeMed, which isn't VSP.

Luxottica just purchased Essilor -- so, now, one company handles the insurance, frames, and lenses...turning it into a bigger monster.

I worked for CollabNet from 2005-2010.

When I left, I bought my stock options.

I got a friendly letter in the mail a few years later telling me that the company had been restructured, and that my shares are now worthless.

If I'm getting shares as a part of equity, then I'll consider that as part of my comp package...however, if they're stock options, I generally completely disregard them: I haven't yet met a startup to change my mind.

The link goes to an employer view, not an applicant view.

Location: Miami, FL

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: ConUS Only, No DC, No Boston.

Technologies: AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Cloudformations, Python, Ruby: Traditional DevOps Architecture/Management.

Résumé/CV: https://ianwilson.org

Email: hi@ianwilson.org

The Palo Alto Fry's electronics was the first Fry's electronics that I ever stepped foot into...and I was mesmerized. They had everything that I could have ever really wanted -- oscilloscopes, meters, computer goodies, and a wide array of electronic components.

I made a "traffic light" for our cruise control (powered by the parallel port) that sat in my cube when I wasn't in the office (I worked from home 3 weeks out of the month) that stayed in that cube until I left CollabNet in 2010...

I'll never forget that first feeling that I was in my own little heaven when I stepped into that Fry's, and even after being to a few Fry's near me -- Atlanta and Indianapolis -- and seeing them in their current state, it's a little bit sad.

It makes me wish that they could still be as relevant today as they were when I first saw them, but, I understand that retail changes.

The hiring timeline for Doctors is in the months -- almost six months to a year -- because of all of the due diligence that is involved: it is sometimes more so for specialties like OB/GYN.

Even to be brought on as a "Doc in a box" type of situation, you're still looking at a minimum of 90 days.

Folks want to "move fast and break things," and "hire fast, fire faster," but those two are not conducive for doctors.

There's no option to view these on Linux -- no application and no browswer supports their NSAPI plugins.

Pawn shop owners (if they're working within the law) do not really get a say -- we upload our records to a provider who pushes transactions to a state nexus center and if they want specific information (or video) from the transactions, we'll get a visit from the state police or a fax from the local police dept.

It really depends on the location, and the items involved.

Gun sales are always audited -- by both the local law enforcement, and the ATF/TTB/DHS. Electronics are generally only audited by the local law enforcement, and if there's something specific that they're looking for, they'll look daily/send officers to the pawn shop.

I've had a break-in to my pawn shop before, and someone stole handguns and a rifle...before the ink was dry on the police report, there was someone that the law enforcement called "the gun whisperer" -- a guy from the ATF who specializes in stolen weapons from dealers -- and they had found the guy and recovered the stolen weapons in less than 72 hours.

We are required to keep descriptors (Sex, Age, Hair, Height, Eyes, body type) in our customer database: we take it a step further by taking a copy of their Driver's License/ID and a copy of their thumbprint.

Source: I own a pawnshop as one of my side businesses.

21C hotels own all of their hotels. That's the only one that I know of right now, but, I don't follow that much of the travel industry -- only the hotels that I stay in are the ones that I really look at.

The Sheets in Breezewood is one of the few Sheets in the north that have Cheerwine in the soda fountain.

That's why I always stop at Breezewood.

Remember, both Hilton and Marriott do not own any hotels these days.

Their entire mission in life is to build a set of brand standards that their hotel franchises use, and then ensure that the owners of those franchises can obtain maximum profit from the Marriott and Hilton customer base. Resort fees are just another...step down that road.

Most of the terms and conditions of the various reward programs out there (Hilton included -- I'm a Hilton Lifetime Diamond) specifically exclude resort wifi from their "benefits."

This has been happening since 1999 by the NAAPO (the same group who ran the "Big Ear"). They had a cluster of helix antennas being fed into a VA Linux Systems Hardware Cluster doing analysis on radio astronomy events:

http://www.naapo.org/Argus/docs/docsmenu.htm

I volunteered there from 2004-2008. I believe that the cluster is still active today.

It's not independent fiber links if they use the same tube to get into the building...just ask any backhoe operator.

To me, this isn't big news -- It's at the point where I turn wifi and Bluetooth off when I'm shopping.

Look at some of the filings by Kroger:

https://fccid.io/PBR-SZG3APWC/Users-Manual/Manual-3994818

They are tracking down at the bay level for some items.

This article is about 20 years too late.

Back in the late 1990's, I worked for a rural radio station -- they were in the process of moving to full automation, and was working on getting the country station in full automation: I had a background in Audio/Video Productions (and computers/electronics), so, I spent a lot of time working on the automation (old Harris Automation System, vs the rest of the cluster using AudioVault from BEI).

There was someone in the studio from 5AM Until Midnight (sometimes later if there were west coast ballgames) Monday-Friday: We'd do the news at the top and bottom of the hour (each station in the cluster got sent back to network audio at different times -- 4:15, 6:00, 6:30 after the hour, which required some really good pacing and reading skills to not let the other stations know you're pushing something back to network), cut live and recorded weather for other stations, and then answer the phone/distribute faxes/etc.

I learned a lot about RF and Broadcast engineering during this time, and it honestly was the catalyst to push me into electrical and computer engineering (admittedly, restoring a VAX/VMS with the station engineer was the biggest driver).

I can identify a "Satellite" station from a mile away. The liners sound different -- if they even match up -- the clocks at the top and the bottom of the hour are sync'ed with :30:00 and 00:00.

Sunday mornings was religious programming (the "hangover" shift), and we'd do Friday night Football for High School and Saturday/Sunday College and Professional Football games, and Basketball games during the winter months. Add in some NASCAR and Indy racing (on the country music station), and there were plenty of weeks where I had 50/60/70 hours (at 17, I thought I was financially set -- lest I know that I was completely wrong!)

To this day, the group of stations that I grew up with are still using split ownership to get past FCC rules about station clustering (but, all ran out of the same building).

...and how unbalanced it can be when one of the parties is an attorney.

I'm in a similar boat -- my educational background is hardware engineering, but, I've been a Linux nerd/SRE for the last 20 years. Ask me to test an 3x10 LED array? Can do it in my sleep, without even looking things up. Ask me to do a B-Tree? I'm pulling up documentation. Ask me to do a deployment in AWS, GCE, or Azure, and I've got the code to make the API calls without the help of boto...but ask me to do the same in VMWare, and I'm a fish out of water.

I've got a technical interview on Thursday, and they use Hackerrank for their coding platform. I'm seriously hoping that they have something that's specific to SRE tasks, because, if they ask me an algorithm question, I'm almost 100% certain I'm going to fail -- these weren't things that I studied in my EE degree, but, I've learned how to implement things from my positions over the last ten years.

I know what I'm doing, and I feel comfortable thinking and looking for solutions that aren't "inside the box" -- delivering an OS and DB upgrade to 8000+ stores via a USB Stick -- complete with a dashboard that I wrote, microservices soup to nuts (meaning: I worked with the developers to make better containers, and then wrote the ansible playbooks to deploy OpenShift in EC2) for a major hotel company, web governance/best practices for a top 5 Quick-Serve Restaurant chain. Asking me the difference between a Markov Chain and a B-Tree isn't something that I've ever needed to do...

On the other hand, when I was hiring in the Washington DC area, the number of Senior developers that I'd get from government contractors who couldn't count to 1000 by 5's in a language of their choosing really hurt my soul.

I really can't be the only person who travels internationally with a burner phone and burner laptop. I'll generally wipe them both sitting at the airport waiting for my flight home, just so that I can have the e-passport application up by the time that I land and go through customs. (Admittedly, I should just upgrade my TSA Precheck to Global Entry, but, I'm not even sure that I want to go through with that process).

The reason that the intruder didn't get access to any of Docker's financial systems is that they use Netsuite for all of that fun stuff: This screams to me (at least) that the intruder probably had access to more than what they are discussing.

I've managed a team of 30+ -- both on-shore and off-shore resources -- and I can tell you some of the things that I've liked, and some things that I hated.

I have been in consulting for a while -- and while I don't mind it, that brings in its own set of rules (with regards to non-billable time) and challenges (Fixed price contracts usually mean low salaried workers to maximize profits).

- Short team-based standups. There's no reason for your US team to meet with Offshore unless there's a blocking reason to do so.

- Bi-weekly team meetings with both groups. I tried to alternate between the On-Shore and the Off Shore's lunch period, but, regardless, one team is staying up late. Don't be a dick and make that team come in at their same time the next day if you're holding a 2AM meeting that lasts an hour.

- If you are sending important, team-wide, communications, let them know in stand up.

- I have no problem waking up early (or staying up late) to have 1:1's with my team, even if they are offshore. Keep them simple (What have been your big challenges this week? Are you blocked or do you forsee any roadblocks down the horizon? Do you have anything for me?)

Sadly, most companies that we've been in have frowned upon Slack, but, I don't have any issues in using it on a daily basis.

If your team members are burned out, isolated, depressed -- work on them. Give them time away from the project or lighter work (to a point). If they are consistently burned out and depressed, try to figure out if this is a company/project/management issue (hey -- I'm far from perfect, maybe they don't like my management style!), or, if this is something that can be resolved by a placement to a different project/team.

Encourage them to use the 'free' resources available to them -- be it cloud services, books, education, mental health, physical health, etc. The company provides those for a reason.

It took me a long time to realize that my initial management style doesn't work with everyone...so, I changed. Don't be afraid to look in the mirror and change your operating style when you think it's not working.

(edited for formatting)

Raytheon has/had a huge presence in the Santa Barbara area.

Hire in the DC area -- "Senior Engineer" is nothing more than a title that is used to justify a higher billing rate from the government...

...and they can't write code to count up in increments of five in python.

I'm in a similar boat -- my educational background is hardware engineering, but, I've been a Linux nerd/SRE for the last 20 years. I found a great position that would be perfectly in line with what I'm doing now -- specifically managing teams of SRE's for a startup in NYC that would allow me to work remotely, but, during their "technical" interview, I was asked to "humanize" a number using any language that I chose.

Knowing that ruby has a humanize gem (and python's humanize module doesn't get as granular as they wanted their example to be), I mentioned this to the interviewer, saying, "Hey -- why would I want my development team to spend an hour re-inventing the wheel when it can already be done with a code import?" -- while showing him the gem, and providing a sample code.

Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to see how I'd implement something like that...

...so, I provided my code...which was as clunky as it could be in 30 minutes -- and then was almost certain that I lost this specific position because I didn't interpret my numbers from right to left vs left to right.

Seriously -- if you've booked a hotel room in the US, there's a 50% chance you've booked it on infrastructure that I've designed and implemented from the ground up. I've led teams of 20+ SRE's around the world in a 40 billion dollar company. My references speak for themselves. The reality is that they're going to still be looking for a SRE manager position in three months, and I won't be looking anymore because I would have found something that I'm interested in (and isn't me doing a containerization of a Windows-based ERP system in 96 hours).

I have a friend who is an OB/GYN Oncologist in Indianapolis. Her hospital had IBM Watson Health on campus last year, and she mentioned to me in passing last month that they finally had kicked IBM off of their (learning) university's campus. When I asked her why, she said: "Often times, Watson would recommend courses of treatment that would be completely incorrect, if not detrimental -- or even sometimes lethal -- to the patient. It became more of a hassle than a learning tool."

There's a live feed of the Ecuadorian Embassy -- I don't remember this happening in the last few expel "scares" (for lack of a better word).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6a9fgsTfBk

Waffle House is one of my late night haunts; there's not one near my Miami Home, but, there's one near my place in Cincinnati.

I've been in a Waffle House when a Bengal player walks in with his "crew," and he paid for everyone's food (including mine), tipping the wait staff with $100 bills.

I've also been at a Waffle House with a woman who ordered a salad. Suffice to say, that relationship didn't last at all.

Good nights end at Waffle House -- when one of my friends got married, we all went to Waffle House after the reception, bride and groom included.

The idle chit-chat, the consistent menu...Texas Bacon Cheesesteak Melt sandwich with a waffle, well done and a sprite. Open all night, half the customers are always diverse and or drunk or stoned off their ass, and still manages to have fewer fist fights than a Chuck-E-Cheez.

The biggest issue that I have with google is product sustainability -- if something doesn't seem to have "Hockey stick" levels of growth and use, google kills it.

Do I want to spend $500 on yet another google branded brick?

I love Hashicorp products, however, all of their pricing behind "Contact Sales" is a major turn off.

Why?

I don't want to be the subject of a constant dripping of emails, calls, and missings from a sales person who is constant to get their numbers and puts me in their sales automation pipeline.

Give me a ballpark estimate, I can go to whomever is needed, and we can go from there: I've never ran into a case where "I don't know" how much this costs is an appropriate answer to give a manager.