Right, more vendor lock-in. I don't know what companies are thinking when buying into this Azure ecosystem. It will put you at the complete control of Microsoft for all your Cloud needs. I totally get it, Microsoft has control of desktop, so why not give them the Cloud too? But Cloud is just starting, we don't know where it is going and how big it will be, does it really make sense to put all eggs in the MS basket now? On Kubernetes even? Which is supposed to be Cloud agnostic. I would be very cautious about these moves... embrace and extinguish is a good tried and tested strategy.
I think for Enterprise you should include professional services and consulting in TCO. And usually the Enterprise SaaS tools you mention are a bit cheaper on licenses, but very expensive on the consulting. It makes sense because if a tool is open source and known there is a lot more talent in the job market, if a tool is closed source it takes money just to learn it and people have to recover that investment.
But you are right, I think Dittofeed should sell their benefits to C-Suite execs, not to developers.
On your question, We welcome Seniors even few hours a week, especially if you are happy to work on architecture and documentation. Plus we are based out of Tenerife if you want to work from an office and there is a lot of surfing on the island.
I am getting a bit deeper into the food industry since I started investing in a startup that plans to produce animal feed with insects. Animal feeds are prepared with specific properties, for instance, fish feed at 60% protein. The impact of different percentages of compounds is measured closely on animal well being, growth, weight… I am quite bothered that we don’t do the same for human foods. We lighlty compare real milk with plant based milk without being honest about the completely different properties of the two. I suspect the difficult conversation we need to be having would be about proteins and how to produce them sustainabily and ethically. Many plant based vegan alternatives hide from the real problem, I think.
I have an Enterprise story on this. The low code tool I was using increased the price x10 on me after the first 3 years. The price increase was poorly managed, they looped me out and tried to talk directly to the IT leadership which was a disaster for them because they had 0 experience handling Enterprise contracts. I don’t think these low code tools are worth the trouble of dealing with their inexperienced sales people. Maybe some low code tool companies are better, but I am done with them anyways. Most of these tools promote bad coding practices like no clear split of dev and prod, no version control, no testing. I am not sure if these low code companies know what they are doing and how complex it is to maintain an enterprise app over 5/10/15 years.
interesting, in my case I need the events to be inserted in a SQL db, even the real time ones. For instance, I receive Contacts data from Hubspot in realtime, I send those contacts over to Salesforce and I store them in Postgres. Why Postgres? Because we want to keep a history of the contacts, plus we will need to have 1 source of truth for customers data to fulfill various data privacy requirements. How about Kafka for such a use case? Let's say I receive maybe 10,000 contacts per day.
We are experimenting with workers using the simple python arq library and Redis and I am yet to find a MLOps or Data Engineering use case that is not a good fit for a API+Worker on K8S. For instance, you need to manage ML artifacts? You can just offer an API endpoint so the ML models can automatically update the artifacts. You need data ingestion? You can have a worker running ingestion scripts and kick off the worker via API. We tried pub/sub and Kafka but it can be really wasteful, workers can process work for multiple streams, but Kafka cannot. But of course I wonder if I am missing something, I am not an ML engineer so probably I am?
The sensible thing to do at this point is to have a hybrid setup and being able to move load between Cloud providers and from/to on-prem. I understand this is not always practical, but it is going to be a big lever to keep costs down. A Databricks instance running on Cloud can be probably 10x of the cost of running Spark clusters on-prem. Does it make sense? Well, it depends, if you are spending 1m in Databricks charges it does, if you are spending 100k it does not. But I don't see much of these discussions in IT, I think part of the problem is that Cloud charges are hard to monitor and budget.
I think we disagree on the problem and I understand I have a strong opinion which might be wrong. But I think that kind of thinking is exactly the issue in Italy. I think if the "people" took responsibility for their actions Italy would not be in this situation. In fact, I think Italy and Italians never took responsibility for terrible stuff like Mussolini and the Holocaust, so from my perspective this is an old, old, problem.
I was reading somewhere that Poland will overtake Italy in GDP pro capita in 10-20 years. True or not Poland is doing much better than Italy already. I think it’s interesting that a country that was 50 years under a dictatorship was able to take over on a country that has not only had freedom and democracy, but also help and financial support from US and EU. Italy is not hungry for growth and it keeps consuming whatever capital is left. The ban on lab grown meat is basically that, no interest in growth or change, no interest in working for a better future, just nostalgia and protecting the “past”.
Salaries doubled in 3 years for certain IT professions pushed by the Covid online spike I assume. In my company we were hiring and we kept getting candidates with less and less experience asking for more and more money. IT salaries went up faster than inflation, at least in some European countries. I think now these layoffs are necessary for companies to bring average cost of IT employees back to normal. I did not go along with the demanding salary expectations, I lost business revenue because of it due to lack of people, but now I don't have to do any correction. Basically, we are all adults in the end, employers and employees, I think everybody knew the tech salary situation was not sustainable and some kept pushing up, some stayed more conservative.
an interesting approach, how about doing the heavy lifting in an api backend and pushing/pulling data to the sheet using a custom formula? that way you would be able to leverage the full power of a db backend
I lived 9 years in Germany, now in Poland. For me the fact that in Poland a programmer earns significantly more than a Financial Controller was an initial shock a few years ago. But now I understand the problem is with Germany’s stubborn attitude towards everything IT, IT is just considered easy and not “real engineering” and a thereby a cost to reduce. Financial Controllers pushing numbers in Excel files are adding a lot more value, apparently in ways I still don’t fully understand. Honestly, with those salaries and that culture Mercedes is probably not getting the best talent out there.
Within the data world, I am especially confused by usage-based pricing _and_ the push towards data mesh. In a data mesh you now have hundreds of data analysts in your company… all needing access (and driving consumption) to the data lake and all the tooling around it like on demand spark clusters, notebooks, lakehouses, dbts, dashboarding, catalogs, governance and so on… it gets really expensive to run what 90% of the times is good old sql. Most importantly, none of the vendors are going to help you optimize resources. You got a standard, highly predictable, BI job each Monday? Vendors will push you to use everything they got, while maybe an on prem server is all you need and it will be cheaper.
Cool take, come back to me on how well this thinking worked when you start landing Enterprise customers and you suddenly need to 10x your talent pool. You use bare metal servers? It will be a lot harder to find devops talent with k8s being a standard. You built your web app on a low code tool? It will be impossible to meet that edge case your big Enterprise client needs. Being scalable can be over thinking, or it can save you from losing customers, context matters and each startup is different.
I use mkdocs for my company and it works great. To be honest, before I trust any business process with software from a US company I think what would happen if they double or triple their price on me, which they usually do. Plus if you have any PII data I still don’t know how to make things compliant with EU regulations.
I thought the same but having worked 2 years close to CIOs I have realized their job is quite hard as it is. CIOs have to navigate hundreds of technologies and each vendor wants their cut, sometimes US startups are the worst… so choosing an old established technology still makes sense for most of IT people to manage tech and vendor risks… not a great answer, I know.
For animal feed we will start with that, but I am finding hard to imagine that clean organic waste is not being used already in some other way? Meaning, probably we need to pay for it?
I am the angel investor of a small startup trying to scale insect larvae production. The idea is to use larvae as a more eco friendly animal feed. I am still collecting numbers, but I was wondering if planting biomass to grow insect protein for humans is a good idea or not, it should be multiples better than growing crops to feed animals as a source of protein. I am just saying, dedicated biomass can mean a lot of different things, no?
mid to senior with no work experience seems quite unrealistic… work experience is not only a proxy for shipping code, but also for working well in a team, communicating well, being dependable and… so much more.
I run a small data consulting company and whenever I find an open minded data scientist or analyst I tell them to consider data and software engineering or business analytics (learning about real business problems). DA, BA and SE roles are harder to find, manage more complexity, but most importantly are closer to having an impact as they are the ones close to prod. It’s a hard pitch, especially for juniors, AI and DS are very hyped but it’s hard to guess how much they will grow (or not). My current hunch is that AI and DS will be productized in libraries and services, so the majority of companies will not need people fully dedicated to build models.
The problem here is the idea that offshore country labor arbitrage can give you ridicolous cost savings way over 50% compared to local resources. Of course this is pipe dreams and especially with remote work good people have a cost, no matter where they work. But companies like Infosys still are forced on selling with that sales pitch… so what happens? They hire mostly unqualified people. This is not a problem with Indian employees, it’s a problem of Western executives having unrealistic IT costs expectations. Want to save IT costs? Have realistic expectations on the number of digital initiatives your company can run, do less things basically, don’t try to do a lot and hire cheap labor to keep IT cost low.
You could start by adding your email address to your bio on HN. We hire freelancers in Europe for work, so maybe we could talk? We are located in Krakow and Tenerife.
You can research CDPs like Segment.io, not API only, but close. The thing with selling APIs only is that business people tend to want to pay less for things they cannot see. So I would suggest a really good API with some UI for business users, there is a lot of data that requieres manual supervision anyway.
We hire people like this in dyvenia to help train and mentor our devops employees. If you have experience and knowledge that can be a good path for a part time.
There are many things I don’t want to do… which is why I prefer to work on things I can sell at high margins. Those high margins help me hire people to do things I am not good at nor I like. But it is also a question of velocity, picking a side project that can generate money in a matter of weeks is better because it frees me up from things I don’t like faster. I worked Corporate 9 years, I understand Finance is not popular here, but eventually it’s all about good margins and predictable cash flows.
There is a space for that for sure, but when things get serious, the programming bit is 10% of the capability, domain knowledge, data expertise and SQL become more relevant. Those skills are not fulfilled with UI tools. Sometimes in fact UI tools make the skill gap bigger because new hires might know SQL, but for sure don't know your expensive proprietary tool of choice.