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Meta kind of screwed everybody here. I am at one of the hyperscalers with some insight into SDE offers. Second half of 2021 things got extremely crazy with Meta offering ridiculous salaries even for junior positions. This caused a chain reaction. Other FAANG had to increase their offers outside the normal bands to fill positions, which caused experienced folks to leave where out of frustration that new hires one level down were making more money than them. Now it appears Meta overshot and are trying to clean up their own mess.

> Misogyny?

What an extremely unkind thing to say. There was nothing in the GP to suggest this. In fact it’s entirely plausible that Apple decided to honor women’s day this way.

You must have known that accusing people of misogyny can have a impact on their livelihood in today’s hyper PC world. That makes your comment even more unkind. I think you should apologize.

> started "idolising" past scientists [..] whose primary purpose on life had become, basically, how to best kill other people

We all should be careful to judge people in history with our current set of morals. The scientists in the photo all experienced the horrors of WWII. I don’t think it requires to much mental gymnastics to have the position that the deterrence of nuclear weapons would lead to a safer world, especially in the post WWII context. Note that this is not a blanket statement against judging people in history. I just don’t think this applies to the scientists here.

> I know this is a cynic take,

It’s worse than that. This take is a trivial restatement of history, namely that whites and men had most of the power, while amplifying outrage with people already agreeing with you, not contributing to lessening the divide, and causing people like myself to self censor by replying using throwaway accounts.

And maybe you should consider the power of religion, the sense of belonging and origin it gives you, and the good it is doing to this world today (despite many missteps as well), before being so judgemental. I am saying this as someone not religious but grown up with religion.

Some religions evolve faster than others. I would hope the different faiths can come up with iterative improvements to their standard operating procedures that still meets the requirements. I believe the Jewish religion even has a concept about creatively outsmarting the religious rules as being a virtuous thing (eg women wearing wigs).

Starting services in parallel will reduce overall service start up time as well, even if services are dependent on each other, because services often do work before they connect to a dependent service. Without socket activation that is a race condition.

True. And the pressure not to do that would be extreme. So it doesn’t help the ‘I prefer not to give estimate, like Apple’ argument at all.

Good estimates are critical to plan dependent activities and setting customer expectations. If we don’t estimate then we are saying that software engineering is not an engineering discipline. You can have that view, but in my experience it does not lead to good outcomes.

If I can assume you’re an SDE for a moment, I actually agree with the part of you not providing estimates. Recently I’ve done the initial estimate for projects exclusively between SDM and PMT with no engineers involved. It has been a lot more reliable and it seems that SDEs are very happy to be absolved of this responsibility. This does require SDMs and PMTs with a good amount of experience.

Taking that quote at face value, it is shallow and needlessly binary. It’s shallow because it is a truism (paraphrasing, you cannot write bug free software). It is needlessly binary because there is such a thing as the size of your trusted computing base.

> But it's not actually booted until the service is up, so it's moot.

With per second billing, fast boot times save money and enable lower fixed capacity, further lowering cost.

Starting a daemon on first connect is essential for fast boot times of a system with multiple dependent network services. This is mostly a desktop use case though. Not sure if it can be disabled for servers.

Agreed that this line of questioning is not likely to be fruitful. The alternative of discussing the design would have my preference normally, but i am not sure that it works any better for this hyper polarized topic.

Care to elaborate? Off the bat, your comment comes across as a cynical rant due to its high use of strong words (garbage, fuck) and lack of examples. And even if you have anecdotes, to be convincing, it would have compare something like bug density to the software projects that collectively replaces. As written, your statement is unlikely to convince anyone that isn’t yet already.

If you think that systemd is an ‘enterprise framework of doom’ then you must not have worked in Java enterprise software development.

It happens but it’s not clear what you intend to say with that, so maybe just say it? I don’t think the systemd team could have imagined the success and scope of the project from day 1. Another explanation for their success is that the team was onto something, and by using proper engineering practices (work incrementally on pieces that are individually useful) became successful. Think T S Kuhn’s progressive research program.

How likely is it that the prolific systemd team and tech decision makers in Linux distributions don’t have a design instinct and came up with this ball of mud full of accidental and unneeded complexity? Have you considered that there may be teams and requirements outside your current sphere of experience?

As a DevOps, having to know a bunch of Linux and system programming is a job requirement. In the old days Unix system admins were very familiar with this also.

Weightlifting is already separated by class. As I understand it, weight alone is not enough to create a “fair” competition. A historical use of steroids changes your body composition so that you have more strength at the same weight, even if the use was years ago. From the article the implication is that the same is true for testosterone, giving male to female transitioned people a unfair advantage (as long as transition was post puberty).

How popular is Ansible these days? I used to hear more about it than I do now.

Respectfully, are you a doctor? I am not. That link is from 2007 and talks about a modified Adenovirus. There’s so much medical jargon in there that I can’t make any sense of it, let alone connect it to increased risk of strokes for an Adenovirus based COVID vaccine. I understand why vaccines can be scary but ask yourself this: is your unease based on a deep medical understanding of the subject matter, or an underbelly feeling?

At this point, AZ must really regret having gone down the road of working with Oxford to supply a Covid vaccine. They are not even making money off it at the moment. Pfizer on the other hand hit gold with their BioNTech collaboration. They are making 10+ B this year and probably even more in brand value. AZ on the other hand lost billions of brand value. Is there a morale of this story?