techcode

If someone wants to get idea of how hard it can be, without leaving house ...

Playing Death Stranding comes close.

Obviously game has realtime location/map, with isometric/topographic view also available, which makes it much easier than it would be in real world - reading off a paper map and guestimating where on that map you might be.

So basically try to check map and plan the route (e.g. reach a river/canyon/house/junction and then go left) ahead, and then either don't check the map (because it shows exactly where you are), or have a screenshot of it from before you left one of drop locations.

Did you notice it started to work worse over last ~2 years?

I shared problems in another comment here - TL;DR: worked seemingly good some 3+ years ago, started being flaky before covid, and seems much worse since covid.

So even if remote area was covered with cellular network, I would not rely on location sharing to show where I am not even where I was.

At some point personal/family emergency meant that instead of "regular" 1800km of both wife and myself driving across Europe - I was about to drive that on my own, all in one go/day. And then few days later back.

To ease her mind - I turned on family/emergency location sharing in Google Maps.

Afterward we realized it's supper convinient way to avoid those "How long before you (and one of kids that either one of us would pick up) are home?" calls.

Although starting shortly before Covid the functionality seems to have taken a nose dive. Like randomly showing one of us is in different city (e.g. Amsterdam vs Rotterdam), or now during Covid often saying "Offline, along with last known location from 1h ago (which tends to be home) and what was battery level at the time".

Actually it seems like some engineer (pre covid) though of optimizing refresh time for Google Maps location sharing based on how much it changes over some recent time.

And now combination of WFH meaning it's same place for majority of the day and that TTL being high, and literally all grocery stores we go to having no cellphone signal (I mean not even SMS can make it) putting us in edge of an edge case.

Just to be sure I'm getting the question - you want to use rsync(1), and you're wondering if there's a good way to guard your code that's using/calling it from underlying changes in rsync options and output, how to read status/progress and such?

Here's an example of library that wraps rsync https://metacpan.org/pod/File::Rsync - you can provide callback functions that will be called for each line of stdout/stderr.

Granted it's in Perl - and chances are your code isn't written in Perl. So if you can't find something similar for your language of choice, and if you can't be bothered with checking out implementation in Perl and rewriting it...

I would suggest searching & checking out "Inline::" namespace (e.g.: https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Inline-Java/lib/Inline..., and there's also JS, C ...etc).

And next to those - Perlito can "Compile Perl to Java/JavaScript/Python/Ruby/Go/etc" https://github.com/fglock/Perlito. I think we had/have some Perl code running in production Hadoop/JVM.

I'd imagine that chances are high that whatever name you pick for something in one language - there would be another language in this world in which same or similar word means bad/offensive thing.

This is basically the first time I hear about any country with a bias against developers without university degree.

Sure there might be general immigration law blockers.

Though pretty much anywhere in Europe that I've checked or know about. At least in IT/Development, you can get a highly skilled migrant work visa without university degree.

And just to be sure - with "I can not afford moving to another country" is not money but family/personal reasons, right?

I'm not so sure about always "stay indoors" part - in particular in case the dams leak and half of the country is about to be under water.

I guess depends on the height of your house - though in quite a few places even rooftop might be below or close to sea level.

Perhaps msluyter was thinking of big companies that smaller ones can't match on spending power.

Either way - if you trained/grown someone to become much more valuable for other companies and still can't create enough value working for you... Then you have a different problem.

I often use the same argument against various ORMs and similar abstractions ;)

That's based on having experience working with Perl?

Exactly - though speed keeping is nice for long road-trips simply not to get foot cramps.

Anyway, I'm yet to see a video of Tesla doing emergency breaks because of highway pileup where it's not only a couple of seconds after human driver could see a row of red breaking lights in front.

In practice it just doesn't happen to the level that makes changing jobs worth it.

When it comes to base salary - sure you might get salary that's bigger than existing employees in same role. And then on first annual cycle they'll be in the same ballpark as you through combination of salary increase and annual bonus. That's because bigger companies usually look at "total compensation".

I guess if you play it right you might "inflate" pending RSUs and ask them to match it.

Though how much can you "inflate" it in the age when employeers too can go to glassdoor and check what that other company usually gives?

Based on author's name it seems we came from the same country.

I used "came" and not "come" since it just feels more appropriate considering it's two different countries countries now.

I don't think I've ever heard about "split infinitive" before.

Perhaps I did - and it's just that the "school way" of learning foreign languages always confused me.

My first foreign language was German and at this point I basically can't have a conversation using it - at best I can kind of understand what someone is saying.

Though to be fair living in The Netherlands Dutch kind of highjacked it.

The way I learned English was simply pure interest. Watching Hollywood and British movies and TV series, reading computer/programming books and other "stuff on the Internet".

Teachers were equally confused by the fact I have had problems with recognizing/naming different tenses and grammar forms - and still getting it (mostly) right just by "gut feeling".

And actually I've been able to "think in English" for a long time. So long that these days I occasionally have trouble coming up with idiomatic way to say something in my native/mother tongue (Serbian).

Read this https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33369254-the-manager-s-p...

I wish I had it 5-6 years back when I stepped up as TL (it wasn't written yet).

Actually you might as well get your team members to read it too. Unlike the title might make you think - book covers both management and tech (individual contributor) paths.

Reading through your comments/replies (e.g.: "knack for listening to customer", "generalist", "can setup machines"...etc) make me think I'll be in your shoes once I reach your age... Hence I have to ask - any advice you would give to younger self?

Should I focus on having some/one/few "unique selling propositions" - something I can say I'm expert in? And what would those be?

Anyway back to trying to give you (and other younger folks) some answers.

I've been interviewing candidates for a while. From technical phone interviews, over F2F, and now mostly so called Fit interviews.

And first time I interviewed someone with CS PhD that they have since around the time I was born - I was happy to be paired with another older colleague.

Not that I was scared/intimidated or felt inadequate. I was really worried about candidate getting impression we're a bunch of "teenagers" ;)

So actually on that point I've got nothing for anonOver60 - other than saying to others that instead of being intimidated, you should just be yourself and there is nothing to worry about.

If the candidate is good - being more experienced they'll know how to handle situation in a way that won't make you feel like 2nd class compared to them.

I second the idea of different/customized CV for different roles/positions. In fact each place/position you apply for should be it's own tuned/customized veraion of generic CV..

I can wholeheartedly recommend Amsterdam (or surrounding places).

Everyone speaks English, pay is good, and work-life balance makes a lot of difference.

Commutes are generally short, you get ~26 paid holidays per year (sick leave is separate from that)...

More "internationalization" examples of animated movies https://youtu.be/oB8Fr6Mm2zA

TL;DR: No conspiracy - it's (slightly) different movies.

At least for Cars 2 - Australian version (right at the start of video) is literally different from other English versions (around 3:30) - https://youtu.be/SaYmI7xANCg

Many other movies (and especially animated) have different versions with such tweaks so story/jokes still continue to make sense around the world.

Considering it looks like I'm the first one to point this out - it probably never crossed mind of Apple systems engineers that such things might need to be handled. And even if it did - feature probably got bumped by other things that impact bigger % of customers...

Probably because it's same group of people that defined standards like media queries and wrote "best practices" ...

Technically browser would need to report different pixel density or resolution (check what https://www.whatismyscreenresolution.com gives you) to get "desktop looking" site.

Though in reality it's one/same site - so I'm not sure how much would you get with that...

Besides the irony of mobile apps not really offering better/faster experience in most cases.

Also ironically - many companies just buy into "best practices" (hype) without actually checking conversion rate/ROI between the mobile apps, mobile site (non-responsive) and responsive.

At which point we're also probably talking about corporate politics and sinking costs - where I don't find it hard to imagine someone needs to prove investment into apps was not a mistake ...

Though everything I just said is nothing more than my impression looking from the outside.

Place where I work at www.booking.com has both mobile apps and mobile website (request desktop website functionality works). And my general industry impression is based on things I know from most of my time here being in mobile web teams.

I was something like 10 when I had my first business idea - "I'll do library/rentals for comic-books \o/"!!!

My room window was just above neon sign for video/movies rental shop (VHS stuff - where I'm from it was called "Video Klub"). And naturally I used paper, scissors & glue to make my own sign to hang from my window as of course I wanted to "tap into" people looking at VHS-shop neon sign...

And let me tell you - business was doing awesome ... Until one day an older neighbor (like a grandpa) asked my parents what's up with sign hanging from one of our windows saying "Strip Klub"?!? (context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_strip)

And in the ~25 years since then - I've had plenty of those "not the brightest idea". However over time, most of them these days are good, though almost all are either a bit too late or too early, so I didn't quite yet come up with million bucks idea...

I still keep trying - and it's the combination of knowing two things:

1) The only reason everyone can walk (that is able to physically) is because they kept trying until they did it!

2) On your death bed - only things you'll regret, are the things you wish you tried but didn't ...

Keep trying!

While most guides/books on initial setting up sshd explain the usual stuff - e.g.: allow only key auth, no root ...etc.

Changing ssh port from standard (I literally forgot, is it 22?) to something else is one of those things you pick up in the field.

Usually only once you actually had to maintain production servers. And hopefully before some of the fancy things (e.g.: port-knockers) failed and locked you out :)

Changing port is super simple to configure and yet it cuts out 99.9% of noise (if not 100%) from brute-force attempts that otherwise might make you ignore alarms ...

DROP TABLE CONSULTANTS; LTD - is from 2013 https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08768324

I've recently switched into doing "fit interviews", partially because it started to feel repetitive after 5 years (estimated 700-1000 candidates) of doing technical interviews.

For us fit interviews make sense enough that we started doing them for every candidate, instead of just for ones that passed the technical parts, and I'll try to explain ... Maybe you can see something that could be useful for you.

There's ~1000 people in our IT (and we are hiring - poke me if your interested), 50+ different nationalities, 95% of us are expats, we mostly do Perl code on BackEnd, expect everyone to have good commercial awareness (put ideas on backlog, push back on ProductOwner ...etc) and overall try to have the least bureaucracy/processes as possible.

You can write code, push and roll it out into production within 30ish minutes - with no stamp/approval required (though on call sysadmin will ask you why are you doing it at 6am on a Sunday).

IMHO quite an interesting setup for being majority part of publicly traded group (Nasdaq: PCLN).

Most often you're not interviewed by people you'll work with (interviewers are not from same team).

Fit interviewers focus/check commercial sense/awareness, motivation, flexibility regarding approaching things like tools and technology (we don't introduce new technology unless you can make a good commercial argument for it), follow up on anything raised by recruiters and technical interviewers, and also answer candidates questions.

Indeed most of reasons we would not hire someone are noticed in other parts of interview as well. Besides being the ones who answer the most questions to candidates (besides recruitment) - fit interviews tend to be helpful for cases where everyone else is on the fence.

If someone aced the tech parts - it's extremely rare fit interview is so bad we don't make an offer.

BTW - everything mentioned is my personal interpretation ...

If anyone has specific questions I'll try to answer them.

Instead of "And IMHO you're mixing cause and effect ..." I meant "And IMHO you're mixing causation and correlation ..." making final paragraph:

And IMHO you're mixing causation and correlation when you mention state-controlled economies as a cause of this. It mostly fails because (for one reason or another) country is effectively blocked from trading with the rest of the world, and doesn't have enough variety in materials/resources to be on it's own.

That's similar to how it was in 90's Yugoslavia during international sanctions.

We didn't have so much crime (definitely no violent stuff like kidnaping), and cellphone was still big grey brick Fox Mulder would pull out of his jacket ... So sharing knowledge you've found bread or milk was spreading slower.

For those asking how come farmers aren't making huge money in such cases - they still need to buy other stuff and that's equally/proportionally expensive.

In case of Yugoslavia, I think pretty much all petrol/gas was smuggled in (because international sanctions) from nearby countries.

Once you consider that mass producing food means you need to power machines (like tractor) and ultimately transport it somehow to consumers ... Imagine how many jerry cans had to be smuggled ...

And IMHO you're mixing cause and effect when you mention state-controlled economies as a cause of this. It mostly fails because (for one reason or another) country is effectively blocked from trading with the rest of the world, and doesn't have enough variety in materials/resources to be on it's own.

If you go into anything with mindset that nothing will change - it's more likely that it will not change.

And if it turns out company is so bad and reacts like you've described - then you at least know you really don't want to be working there anymore.

And when someone in the future asks you "What did you do (to improve/change situation)?" you can say "I tried! I gave it my best - specifically this and that and ..."

Maybe manager says "So it's not just me thinking that", or "I've noticed guys can be pretty hard on you at times. Since you haven't brought it up, I thought you're ok with it"...

I can think of million other things that might or might not happen.

And I know only one way to really find out - try and see. Are there other ways?

Always? Everything?

There's not even one example where they reacted in a "nice way"?

Seems you haven't told them how such thing make you feel?

Maybe it's not personality, and perhaps they don't know this stuff is bothering you...

Definitely talk to your manager, and try talking to your team as well.

Focus on observations/examples as well as how those situations make you feel.

I agree that life is too short, and IT is full of "difficult" people. Instead of running away from it, get better in dealing with them.

I'm not sure if this stuff can be interpreted like EX-YU breakup wars were not about land (and which Ethnicity/Religion/Language/etc lives on it)... Or these guys should reconsider why neither Serbia nor Croatia want that part of land... Or ...