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It’s not folly if you have enough to manage your current and future needs. At some point doubling your wealth won’t even move the needle on fulfillment - for almost all people. The point is of course for everyone. And in the other direction deferring fulfillment later for money now absolutely is folly when done for too long, none of us know how long we have.

Have you done the math on this? At your current expenses, you can live indefinitely on the proceeds of pretty safe investments of the 5.5mm, and still hit 10+mm by the time you are “regular” retirement age…

It’s probably too early for you to decide that you are done forever, but you could be if you want to.

You could take a break of 1-2 years and see how that goes. Call it a sabbatical on your resume if you want to go back to work after.

Oh, I wasn't meaning to suggest that all problems are solvable by throwing more resources at it, that clearly isn't the case.

But it's super common for a team to be asked to do something fundamentally outside their scope, and the asking client/boss not realizing that they are doin g it.

"Figure it out" as a useful strategy sort of assumes that both sides of the equation are clued in about this and roughly on the same page.

"I underwrote a great team, you should be able to figure this out (stop whining about it being hard)" is a fundamentally different statement than "Why can't you just do X, how hard can it be?"

It's also worth remembering that the plural of "resource" is not "team".

“Figure it out” can work well, but only if it is predated by “what resources do you need” and a reasonable solution about that.

If the “why can’t we do X” is “because we’re a team of 4 and already overburdened” there may not be any practical solutions.

I think that’s about right on focus, I brought it up more for the “modern c++” aspect…

Martin, interesting; have you had a look at https://github.com/taskflow/taskflow ?

This isn’t really true in my experience. They may be leery of hiring from outside the industry.

In the other direction, I’ve hired engineers out of aerospace into medical devices and can confirm it’s a pretty easy fit.

Except for a very narrow set of hyper-specializations, pretty much every experienced hire varies from posting, in my experience. Sometimes you need to hire one of the worldwide N top in X. You probably don’t post this. Most of the rest of the time it’s more nuanced.

This just isn't true in my experience. A really good experienced generalist can make a huge impact, and many places recognize this.

Sports, weddings, other commercial stuff, sure. "Pent up demand" doesn't mean consumer demand though, could be lots of nikon invested folks that were waiting for the first post SLR one.

"The big draw for me was that my phone wouldn't work."

There isn't really a shortage of other options with that feature (though it's shrinking); granted they mostly don't have people waiting on you.

Personally I'm a fan of "I'm on vacation, my phone is at home" though I understand that doesn't work for everyone. If there is an actual emergency, there are people who know how/where to reach me.

The CEO mentioned that helps, but there seems to be more than that going on.

Another factor is possibly pent up demand for mirrorless with all the bells and whistles.

"and not spend the extra money to try to weigh exactly who is causing the most wear and bill them separately."

To the contrary - that's a good reason to subsidize the construction of of infrastructure, but having some sort of incentive to use less damaging forms where possible makes all kind of sense. Part of the reason for the stupid-sizing of consumer vehicles in the US over the last decades is because the incentives are all messed up.

Oh, they all use version control.

It just looks like "conf_paper1.tex" "conf_paper3.tex" "conf_paper_friday.tex" "conf_paper_20240907.tex" "conf_paper_last_version.tex" "conf_paper_final.tex"

...

"conf_paper_final2.tex"

Oh, and the figures reference files on local dir structure.

And the actual, eventually published version, only exists in email back and forth with publisher for style files etc.

Part of the problem is that git is a fairly poor fit for these workflows.

I spent time getting some mathematicians working together via version control rather than email, it was a bit of a mixed bag even using something simpler (e.g. svn). Eventual we moved back to email, except the rule was email me your update as a reply to the version you edited, and I scripted something to put it all into a repo on my end to manage merges etc. Worked ok. Better than the version where we locked access for edit but people forgot to unlock and went off to a conference...

If I was doing the same now, I'd probably set up on github, give each person a branch off main, and give them scripts for "send my changes" and "update other changes" - then manage all the merges behind the scenes for anyone who didn't want to bother.

I think expecting everyone in a working group to acquire the skills to deal with merge issues properly etc. is too far if they don't do any significant software work already. In the latter case., teach them.

This addresses a nearly orthogonal issue.

why is that ironic? Many ways to increase bandwidth come at the cost of latency...

Part of what you found painful about gnucash is probably that it handles cases like this properly. Not saying it (gnucash) is perfect - far from - but a certain amount of effort is I think a side effect of having both proper accounting practice and configurable account types. Not sure you'll find something really easy that also does it well. In your case different peoples expense accounts would keep a rolling tally and help you figure out what the end of month transaction should be to even things out.

But any tech may be overkill. In a e.g. roommate situation, a paper record per month (plus receipts, if lower trust) works fine.

I've done this in gnucash, but i don't know if it would be worthwhile for just that.

Isnt' why splits exist though? I've never found that to be onerous, and I did run a small business on it for a while.

Then again I'd never trust rules to do everything right anyway, so I'm reviewing at least once to reconcile.

20 years for a hardware startup to get really going isn't unusual. One of the other reasons VC likes SAAS. Hardware startups are cash intensive and slow boils, typically.

From what i can see as an admitted outsider, payment rails are more complicated than they look, and most of the crypto partisans arguments to "replace" functionality are a mix of 'ignoring that part', or 'we don't want that part anyway' + a few API calls.

Problem is, the world consuming these things mostly seems to want those parts, and can't ignore those other parts. Which seems to explain relatively low uptake.

Sure, but there are also microcontrollers with a lot more space. This probably won’t ever usefully target the small ones, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful in the space at all.

This is how typical courses in eg physics are supposed to work. You read the material before a lecture, the lecture gets everyone on the same page and hopefully answers some or all of your questions, then you solidify by a) doing all the exercises and b) attending the tutorial and/or office hours to resolve questions you still have.

> Don't drink anything at all the rest of the year.

That doesn't really match my observations ,or NIH data https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-to...

There the majority (18 and over, and slightly under 50% of 12 and over) report consumption in the last month.

Of those, a bit under 7% report "heavy usage". You can look up the definitions, but doesn't include e.g. "usually has a beer or two with dinner".

The category you describe definitely exists, but I don't think it's anywhere close to a majority, and there are also at least a couple reasonable categories between that problematic or abusive consumption.

> If I do pay, do the authors of the paper get my money?

In general, no.

Typography aside, the frustration of this early career network engineer is palpable and understandable. The open call job situation has always been a mess, but automation and the internet growth has just made it messier.

It's worth remembering, though, many/most jobs don't come from this process. It's worth trawling jobs postings of course to see what's going on, but if that's all you are doing you'll probably have a hard time.

In tech circles, I see mostly two camps of process. One is big and/or established companies that have a bureaucratic evaluation process, the other being more "bespoke" hiring at e.g. young startups.

Navigating both processes is vastly easier if you have some sort of personal connection. It doesn't have to be a deep one, but it gets you out of the slush pile.

Any large company application with an attached internal recommendation will at least be read by someone. Any small company is more to reduce the crapshoot aspect of hiring by convincing themselves they know something more about this candidate because so-an-so's cousin's brother used to work with them.

My most effective advice to younger job seekers has been to get themselves out there in face to face settings (e.g. hardware/software meetups, conferences, etc.) and to directly contact (ideally through a colleague or common connection) companies they already know they'd like to work with... you have no idea what they are thinking internally but don't have posted on a job board.

Also, senior people in your life can often help you with contacts and recommendations, and often are more than happy to. Don't hesitate to ask if you have a good relationship.

For what it's worth, nearly all the jobs I've had in my career haven't been posted. The one that was, reached out to me with an internal recommendation. This only happens with some sort of networking, but that naturally comes with time. This post was by someone 5ish years in, if I recall correctly, and that's long enough to be effective relative to entry candidates.

A counter is: this 4 day string of 23 emails could have been a 15 min meeting.

I don’t understand the distinction you are trying for here - email is also async.