pmkiwi

Very interesting read, thank you for sharing.

TIL bimestriel today thanks :) (French native speaker... shame on me!)

This is exactly my experience. I am the only one in my team working in another city and this is just ridiculous how many times I am feeling exactly these feelings (disconnected, left out, and sidelined).

I am dealing with an insane amount of issues that would have never happened if everyone was in the same office.

It really depends on the culture of the company and the team, and it appears that mine has not managed to change enough (whatever they claim).

Of course if the outbreak becomes out of control, the efficiency of contact tracing is severly lowered. But even if the % of people linked to a cluster via contact tracing is low, it still has real value. If you couple it with genomics sequencing and pool testing, contact tracing (long) chains of transmission and help (re)directing resources where the cases truly are.

I read a lot of articles about the pandemic but this one goes directly to my pile of BS...

> While there is a clear public benefit from identifying and isolating positive cases, individual patients gain little or no private benefit.

Maybe it is time to think more about the society we live in rather than always thinking "Me, myself, and I", no? This selfishness everywhere and in the US in particular keeps shocking me all the time!

Nobody never claimed that contract tracing was the only way to slow down and eventually stop this pandemic. It is one weapon among many that countries should deploy to fight it. It has, of course, its advantaged and drawbacks, and I can't agree more that concerns about privacy are real but the examples given are really bad faith such as

> it may be much harder to admit that they attended a private dinner party.

Well... if you breached lockdown restrictions, I can imagine that you feel a bit annoyed to share this information but it is not the contact tracer to judge what you have done. It happened so let's share the information to eventually avoid someone else to suffer because of you (mistake or not).

The concept of defense in depth (gruyere style!) is not only for a war or the IT world, it can be applied to fight COVID-19 too. Vaccines, quarantines, testing, contact tracing, self-isolation, masks, social distancing, reduction of risky behaviours, etc ... they all help so claiming that because this way is not perfect it is futile to use it is really silly.

> It might be useful in slowing the spread of the epidemic in areas where hospital resources are at risk of congestion.

Are they not at risk everywhere??

Finally,

> even a successful contact tracing effort leaves most of the population vulnerable to future infection by SARS-CoV-2.

I have heard this numerous time and it is an incredibly short-term view IMO... More and more papers report about long COVID for a non negligeable % of patients so I personally prefer to live in a country like NZ where we fought/fight/will fight to keep the virus out until we got vaccines/treatment rather than targetting a potential herd immunity.

Ok got it! So I guess the only way for Google to keep the best performers is to eliminate this cliff by giving RSU and/or offering a significant pay increase.

Thank you for the explanation ;)

Pardon my ignorance but what is the "4 year cliff" exactly?

Pretty much my experience as well. I suffered quite a lot from "Be ready to ship crappy products" when the projects were short (it happened quite a lot when I was doing AWS consulting).

I will also add that companies using consultants can be divided in two distinct groups:

1) The companies who know where they are doing and they are using consultants as extra hands/expertise. 2) The companies who expects consultants to (magically) fix their deep problems just because "we pay".

I have worked for both and 1) is definitely more enjoyable (as you can imagne!).

I went through the same thing in my previous work (consulting firm). Management set up monthly targets related to billing enough hours to the clients (something like 85% in average in our team of 5).

Most of the time we met the criteria even if not everyone was making the target. Usually, 4 were 100% billable while 1 was the anchor :).

One month, I spent a fair amount of time of documenting something because it was the 3rd time that the same errors were showing up so I told to my manager to decrease the target for that month. It was agreed and understood by everyone that the target could be lowered when required (leave, training, etc ...). Except that my manager refused to lower the target so I spent 3 months talking to CEO/CFO to get this bonus paid (more for my colleagues than for me) but I never managed to convince them. So the same feeling as you described kicked in in the team. People started to work only billable hours, neglecting everything else to make sure we met the target all the time.

I obviously left this company after a serious discussion with my manager. I still remember sending an ultimate email asking for the bonus on my last Friday at 4pm.

So yes, give a decent comp and say that bonuses might be paid if the company is performing well. If they are ever paid, I will take my family for a nice dinner and buy some books with them. Else than fine, my mortgage is not in danger!

Hello Chris, I wanted to say that I found your comment extremely good especially this

> I'm actually fairly good at what I do, but If I mention that, it comes across as "arrogant," despite the enormous ocean of hubris that pretty much defines today's tech scene.

Prouvé Demontré Verifié to reflect its French roots :)

Location: Auckland, NZ

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: AWS (a lot!!), Python/Groovy/Bash/Git, CI/CD tools (mainly Jenkins and AWS Code* services), Conda/Maven/Gradle, IaC (CloudFormation, CDK, Troposphere, Terraform (a bit)), Docker/ECS/Lambda/Step Functions

Résumé/CV: available upon request - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierremorvant/

Email: pierre.morvant [at] pm.me

10 year experience with almost 5 years experience with AWS (SA/DevOps pro certs and specialty ones). Started as Java developer (long time ago!) but quickly moved to DevOps as I love pipelines and workflows in general. Mainly working with Python 3/CDK today but keen to learn other languages/frameworks when using them make sense (Terraform/Ansible/Go/Typescript). Current title is Cloud DevOps architect but I do not mind coding as well.

Based in NZ, I would not mind working for Australia (West Island as we say ;)) and/or the US as the timezones are friendly if the working hours are flexible. Can also work for an EU based company but time difference (+10 at the moment) might be a problem :).

Ideally a working environment with excellent communications patterns and where people are keen to share and learn. Finally, I want to keep working with AWS technologies - ideally the serverless ones.

Is it that hard to put the world map in full rather than cutting the "edges"?

I do know that NZ is at the end of the world/beginning of heaven but a bit more respect please!