The chance at making FU money is what would be worth it.
It doesn't sound too appealing if its 40-50% more total comp and 100% more work/stress and less time for myself plus random things like losing funding or startup goes bust and can't make payroll, etc.
I have no experience with any of this but thinking thru the other side, if I'm an IT helpdesk person getting an account reset/unlock request, I have no means to validate any identity paperwork anyone sends in. My response would be a curt email accd to policy and move on to the next IT ticket.
I think the legal path is your best bet unless you know someone higher up. A legal path could bypass all the offshore IT helpdesk staff (making assumptions, MSFT is a giant mega-corp).
> If you have a C-suite that makes decisions based on golf games, this advice is not for you. You have a different set of problems.
Another way to look at it is that your role isn't in the decision making circle, even if you are on a project that is supposed to help make a decision. I was in this role evaluating vendors solutions, in hindsight I can see how I conflated the involvement in the evaluation process with the decision making, those aren't the same.
Think of it like buying a car. You could be on the project to evaluate car companies, features, test drive them and document findings but just because you did all of that doesn't mean you're a decision maker and shouldn't have any emotional attachment to whatever the decision ends up being. Yes if they make a decision with bad trade-offs, like a car with a lot of issues, you may be dealing with those and it may suck but that's your role.
I think part of politics around technical decisions is recognizing if your role has any attributes of being involved with the decision making or if your input is just one of many, potentially minor, inputs.
I stop when I find a solution to the problem. Most of the time the learning happens along the way, not necessarily in the solution itself but all the things you try and iterate on your journey to the solution.
Everything changes in tech by the minute ... but also nothing changes. For web applications it has been HTML, CSS and JS for nearly 30 years. XMLHttpRequest/AJAX came out 25+ years ago. There have been many improvements along the way, like applying design patterns instead of cgi-bin directories with scripts that had a +x modifier on them in the file system. But the base technologies have not changed all that much. We still submit HTML form's with input fields to a back-end server that handles that data. We're still rendering HTML and using CSS to style it. Gone are custom UI toolkits like Flash or Java Applets. Maybe WASM is something to look into but it feels like its not mainstream to me.
If you don't want to get left behind, learn the basic building blocks at a deep level, they don't change much.
I’ve embraced that I cannot direct which topic my self-directed learning will take up and sustain (almost none of which ends up going toward tech stuff, aside from a span of some years in my teens and early 20s—and all of that was motivated by wanting to accomplish specific things with computers) and rely on assignments to motivate me for career-relevant learning.
I’ll learn whatever it takes to get the job done. Then stop, because I don’t actually care about the tech per se, most of the time, and trying to force myself to learn “just because” does nothing but make me miserable and waste time.
This isn’t even “how I approach learning as a generalist”, it’s how I became a generalist.
My interest in continuing to fiddle with stuff after the job’s done is basically zero.
My experience has been that it takes amazingly little effort to be above-median among practitioners at a lot of things. How many React developers have spent one entire hour reading through the core logic of React itself? How many people working with LLMs have read the Attention Is All You Need paper? How many people read about the disk storage layout of a database they’ve been told to use? It’s way less than half. It takes so very little to stand out.
That's funny, I often love learning for the sake of.. experimenting, building things. I just recognize that I cannot do it all and prioritize immediate needs first.
> That's funny, I often love learning for the sake of.. experimenting, building things. I just recognize that I cannot do it all and prioritize immediate needs first.
You've misunderstood, I think: if I have something I want to experiment with or build, then I can learn what I need. What I have such enormous trouble doing that I'm nearly incapable of it, is going "I should learn this so I can do something, to be determined later, with it..." and then learning. Making up projects for the sake of learning, when I don't really care about the ends, also doesn't work.
I need the goal first, then I can learn what I need.
I do also learn things just because I want to and for no real purpose, but have never been any good at directing that impulse.
I say, "you're going to need to pay a team of PhDs to work on this to maybe get a solution, eventually, or change your approach. Here's why: [evidence]"
I've never worked with or for anyone who wanted to hire the team of PhDs.
I go for "I can understand experts, but not add much to the conversation" as a benchmark for knowing enough to participate in discussions at work. Then I use that "I can solve my immediate problem" method going forward.
I concur with everything here but I would say find a solution to your problem plus a little bit more. In particular, try to find out about where the boundaries of the problem are such that this solution wouldn’t work anymore. Maybe it stops working at a certain scale, or with less behaved input, or if you need to support Chinese characters. This helps me really understand the solution, and not feel like I just have a book of incantations.
I do a lot of repairs on electronics. I stop when I understand enough of the theory of operation to get things fixed. I've worked on everything from industrial control like 480 volt 3 phase SCR packs to Cesium beam atomic clocks.
If it was interesting, I'll dive in to learn more in case I encounter something similar in the future.
A lot of the world's problems are people problems. Like the kind of problem that deals with the soft squishy bits of humans as a species - hunger, healthcare, etc. Its hard for me to imagine software solving those types of problems. Maybe software can help, but ultimately software is not going to solve them by itself.
I used to do Java about a decade ago and because it was in a corporate environment, add about 5+ years of using outdated Java on top of that. Web applications are what I do, have been doing for 25 years and I use Ruby/Rails now.
I do want to do something meaningful/professional with Go but haven't gotten around to trying it out. I also sort of feel most programming language additions aren't game changers these days. Much like smart phones, the killer feature days are over, small incremental additions are nice.
The killer feature to me is using AI for tedious tasks or syntax I don't remember and in that respect I do wonder if Java would be easier to deal with than what I remember.
There's no way getting around needing to install the patched versions of the compiler or runtime. Someone has to do it and in my opinion it should be done internally so its controlled and has verified/known sources.
I think option/bullet 2 keeps things as streamlined as possible - base standard image for java apps that apps then use as their base when they build their container images to run in k8s containers. Maybe there's a way to tag base images with major.minor so that apps just pull that image and if its cached its faster and if there was a major.minor.patch just applied and you're the first app to deploy then that app pays the penalty of waiting for the underlying base image to be rebuilt.
A volume is an interesting idea but are there possible issues for OS library dependencies like openssl, database drivers, etc. that might not be the right version for a JDK mounted on a shared volume?
It doesn't matter what knowledge based industry it is either, its always people, communication and decision making (or lack of) that makes everything take longer.
Get a committee together to decide multiple products priorities, features, designs and you could be months away from having anything defined enough to code.
I think determining whether they are or are not is very hard and full issues like bias toward english proficiency, culture and a whole bunch of stuff that could be problematic to screen for.
Thats why I phrased the question as assuming they are a foreign agent because the due dilligence one must do is probably particular to the job and company.
The evidence however seems like it will always be more or less circumstantial unless you have the time and resources to devote to a thorough background check.
If you're running android I believe you can set up a work profile with its own apps. On graphene you definitely can, with its own filesystem and everything.
I wouldn't install work programs directly on my devices without some kind of sandboxing because of cases like this.
It doesn't sound too appealing if its 40-50% more total comp and 100% more work/stress and less time for myself plus random things like losing funding or startup goes bust and can't make payroll, etc.
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