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Notorious b.s.d. posted:this seems like a really salient point to inject conway's law here's the thing though: this contributes the opposite of your point. my company is one which has exactly what you're saying is the only way to do business. informal communication, mostly in small groups in the same building. nobody writes anything down, people bother other people constantly to ask questions to the point where, if you're one of the knowledgeable people, getting anything done is a nightmare because people bother you incessantly. even if you write things down, because nobody reads anything we therefore have a code base that is tightly coupled mess of moldy spaghetti that contains multiple redundant classes for everything because nobody knows what already exists because there's no place to find out what already exists. communication between components is plagued with race conditions and everything goes to poo poo if one of the components goes offline. this is an exact copy of our communication structure I desperately want to work in full-remote company where people actually know how to properly use written, asynchronous communication instead of dragging the whole team into a room whenever anyone needs to make a decision or bothering one of the 4 people who know what they're doing constantly
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May 5, 2018 01:48
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Arcsech posted:we therefore have a code base that is tightly coupled mess of moldy spaghetti that contains multiple redundant classes for everything because nobody knows what already exists because there's no place to find out what already exists. communication between components is plagued with race conditions and everything goes to poo poo if one of the components goes offline. this is an exact copy of our communication structure yep that happens sometimes sucks, don't it? i live in SOA hell, and the robustness/responsiviness of a given service is directly proportional to how cordial your relations are with its authors/maintainers lots of effort is put into tools and documentation and poo poo and none of it counts for a hill of beans compared to getting coffee with the right developer or manager (let' face it humans are just monkeys who make cellphone and software) Arcsech posted:I desperately want to work in full-remote company where people actually know how to properly use written, asynchronous communication instead of dragging the whole team into a room whenever anyone needs to make a decision or bothering one of the 4 people who know what they're doing constantly the only way this is ever really the case is when you are working with a third party api the real hellscape is when you are a satellite office of a larger company, and the "third party API" is some half-documented bullshit from HQ and the original authors give zero fucks about you viewed through a certain lens, conway's law is a software-specific way of restating the theory of the firm: if you need tighter communication than is economic via formal means, you form a firm that enables it. otherwise, things happen between firms. Notorious b.s.d. fucked around with this message at 01:55 on May 5, 2018 |
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May 5, 2018 01:52
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My company is trying to do the whole SOA thing atm. Unfortunately, too many idiots have interpreted this as "split every third party library out into its own microservice" and well I'm not surprised it's impossible to maintain.
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May 5, 2018 02:32
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qhat posted:My company is trying to do the whole SOA thing atm. Unfortunately, too many idiots have interpreted this as "split every third party library out into its own microservice" and well I'm not surprised it's impossible to maintain. yeah we're also "soa" but it just means our monolith is broken at semi-random places into different processes that occasionally talk to each other over http the primary outcome of this is that we use up about 5x as much memory as we should
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May 5, 2018 02:58
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:process and formal communication are not free; they're not a tickbox on "we're a big boy company now" its actually Apache Kafka-esque
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May 5, 2018 03:08
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:yep that happens sometimes just because your company is dysfunctional in this particular way doesnt mean all other companies are or have to be
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May 5, 2018 03:18
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FamDav posted:just because your company is dysfunctional in this particular way doesnt mean all other companies are or have to be it’s true. every company can be dysfunctional in their own special and horrible way 
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May 5, 2018 03:34
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:this describes every successful business organization in the history of mankind. like this is the very heart of the theory of the firm when somebody asks you what your favorite flavor of ice cream is do you write several paragraphs of extremely mad text stating that no sane person could possibly disagree with whatever your answer is
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May 5, 2018 03:42
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:this describes every successful business organization in the history of mankind. like this is the very heart of the theory of the firm There's types of distances other than physical. One simple example being organisational distance: if you have to collaborate with person X from team B, how easy is that to do? Can you get their time to work on things or help you with it? Does it involve asking permissions and going through layers of management? A distributed team (or hell, even a team at opposite ends of a single city) where cross-team collaboration of that kind is simple is likely to get better dynamics than one where teams are silo'd by organisational design even if they were all in the biggest open floor plan you could imagine. An easy way to think about that is to wonder how easy it is to grab a UX, or say marketing or manufacturing person for a project that is led by software groups. Then flip it around. When they have a question, how do they do it? Do the questions even make it to the people at the sharp end of business, or are all the questions having to bubble through a couple of layers of management each way? When was the last time they talked to you? There's really a fuckton of cases where even if people are physically close, they're still distant and unavailable, or where the current team and company culture basically never encourage these interactions and possibly frowns upon them. If you have a physically colocated team where that cross-communication is still simple and encouraged even with hundreds of employees, that's great. Notorious b.s.d. posted:my company has several skyscrapers in manhattan alone. this is not cheap, and it is not accidental The emissaries are managers when you have a company whose influence structure is mainly defined by its org chart. The emissaries are going to be first-ten-employees ICs when they've been dev-centric with a rather flat org and lots of informal communications for most of their history. The emissaries are going to be generalists who are loaned from team to team or move around the company when cross-domain projects take place. The emissaries are going to be your SRE team if you have it when what you get are weird bugs where they end up having their ear to the ground for all of that. If your only emissaries are managers, then you probably have a low cross-team collaboration environment with limited horizontal mobility, or a top-down management structure that basically aims to isolate groups from each other. There's no reason for this to be the only model. quote:process and formal communication are not free; they're not a tickbox on "we're a big boy company now" Agreed. But you know, It's kind of nice to have a thing where you go into a project log and go: we considered options x and y, and the 4 devs on the team agreed to try option z instead and so we ran with it. Put it in a code comment, in a wiki, in a ticket system, in an e-mail thread, in a google doc, whatever. Maybe have a document somewhere with the list of certs and when they expire and who owns the accounts. Same for domains. Then maybe have a short doc explaining how to install and build most software so that when an intern or a new employee joins, they don't require a few days of senior dev time to set them up. You know, enable yourself not to be interrupted for basic questions. Save time by taking the time by making some info permanent. IMO that should be the bare minimum requirement for any important tech decision you embed in your tech org. If that kind of poo poo is too mind-numbing for your water-cooler fuelled team, holy poo poo what kind of debt are they leaving for the future generations of developers that will replace you? A legacy system is a system where people don't know how it works and are afraid to change it. Keeping all institutional knowledge by oral tradition and campfire-told sagas of the system is a surefire way to create legacy at breakneck pace. Notorious b.s.d. posted:inside your own loving employer you have discovered that "remote" is a weakness and source of difficulty, and you still want to try and spin this? I'm also not blaming these teams for not liking remote. It's part of the company culture, and if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. That's why, as I said, I work with satellite offices that are remote-friendly, and it's going fine. I feel like you're taking my defence of remote as an attack on on-site teams. It isn't. On-site teams work very often and it's a functional model. I still recognize the importance of face-to-face time and spend 3-5 days out of every month on-site with the current teams I work with. When I worked with 100% distributed teams, it would be 3-4 times a year instead, and for longer periods of time, possibly renting apartments and whatnot. It's a good thing. I just don't feel it needs to be 100% of the time to work. You're the one here who felt that remote teams were inherently dysfunctional and this is what I am disagreeing with. Not the fact that on-site teams work.
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May 5, 2018 03:48
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This is a fascinating discussion. I work on a team that has a sister team 8 hours away -- a true sister team, with a similar mandate and responsibilities. It's organized this way for reasonable oncall coverage, but a side effect is that we have to make a lot of remote-friendly processes anyway to enable proper collaboration. And a side effect of that is that when I arrive and stay much later than my colleagues, it's not really an issue.
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May 5, 2018 05:07
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May 5, 2018 06:40
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qhat posted:"We're looking for a developer with experience in Java/JavaScript and Nodej.s"
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May 5, 2018 15:10
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FamDav posted:its actually Apache Kafka-esque it literally is kafka is peak apache. it is the apache-est apache that ever apache'd
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May 5, 2018 16:32
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Sapozhnik posted:when somebody asks you what your favorite flavor of ice cream is do you write several paragraphs of extremely mad text stating that no sane person could possibly disagree with whatever your answer is no, but if you tried to tell me that ice cream is best purchased on a monthly subscription from overseas i would probably take issue
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May 5, 2018 16:33
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MononcQc posted:There's types of distances other than physical. One simple example being organisational distance: if you have to collaborate with person X from team B, how easy is that to do? Can you get their time to work on things or help you with it? Does it involve asking permissions and going through layers of management? i have worked at one (1) company where things were this stilted. i will never do that again. it sucked really bad and the "organisational distance" as you call it induced a lot of unwanted duplication of effort because there was no (useful) way to leverage poo poo done by a team literally 500 yards away my current employer has no such barriers. randos show up at my desk all the time. it is good and cool, and certainly the best way to make an introduction before trying to embark on a project together MononcQc posted:If your only emissaries are managers, then you probably have a low cross-team collaboration environment with limited horizontal mobility, or a top-down management structure that basically aims to isolate groups from each other. There's no reason for this to be the only model. management is never the only emissary for any project. but they are the people who are paid to work on people and communication issues full time it is literally their job to sit in meetings and try to guide the course of interactions MononcQc posted:But you know, It's kind of nice to have a thing where you go into a project log and go: we considered options x and y, and the 4 devs on the team agreed to try option z instead and so we ran with it. Put it in a code comment, in a wiki, in a ticket system, in an e-mail thread, in a google doc, whatever. Maybe have a document somewhere with the list of certs and when they expire and who owns the accounts. Same for domains. everything in this passage is pretty good, mononcqc there is a right amount of process and documentation, and that amount is more than none. and it is less than "apache" or "iso 9000 certified" MononcQc posted:I'm dumbfounded by people ITYOOL 2018 who will cross the campus for 5-10 minutes walks at -35C in Montreal winter weather to go ask a question to someone who may not even be there rather than pinging them on chat. That just sounds like an unpleasant way to lose time. these people understand something you do not it would benefit you to figure out why they are doing this, even if it never becomes part of your own professional toolset MononcQc posted:You're the one here who felt that remote teams were inherently dysfunctional and this is what I am disagreeing with. Not the fact that on-site teams work. it is not that a remote team is "dysfunctional." obviously open source projects function, and those are the worst-case scenario: fully distributed, multi-vendor, and often grumpy beardos are the primary leaders the problem is that a remote team is intrinsically less-good than a team that isn't remote. like, the exact same people. whatever dysfunction you had in person may be magnified in a distributed setup, but that has nothing to do with whether it was remote or not remote staff is something you put up with, not something you should seek out
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May 5, 2018 16:38
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let's see if i can tighten this thesis up some
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May 5, 2018 16:46
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It's pretty hard to interpret this discussion as anything other than introverts versus extroverts. The bit about in-person discussions being intrinsically valuable in a way that you can't explain has a flip side: they're intrinsically a huge unplanned interruption that demands your attention instead of asking for it. Emails and pings don't annoy anyone with reasonable system configurations because both parties have to opt-in to the interruption in order to be interrupted by it.
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May 5, 2018 18:19
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Assuming everything is 100% the same otherwise, with good culture and policies on all sides, then yeah. You do get higher bandwidth communication face-to-face. However, with a remote team you do get a much larger hiring pool, even if you stick to a single timezone, and possibly 'round the clock coverage if you're going for more time distance. You don't have nearly as much facilities to pay either (though paying for home office internet and travel fees for on-site visits is expected), but if you cheap out on that, usually that's bad no matter where or how your team works. In terms of salary though I'm paid literally less than one third what I'd be earning in the bay area, but my buying power is much higher anyway. I can personally buy a house on a few years' salary, have zero commute time or costs, and can work on interesting products without needing to uproot my family or leave friends behind. So of course I will be biased towards that stuff. But basically you could get 3 senior devs for the cost of 1 by going remote. (anecdotal data, Heroku employee happiness for those within fully on-site teams was always rated at least 10% lower than remote teams, no matter how much money the org would pour into all kinds of perks and amenities; the rest being all equal, remotes were generally paid less, were happier, and more loyal. YMMV, I haven't been on a more distributed company so I don't have other stuff to compare, and feel free to dismiss it)
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May 5, 2018 18:30
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MononcQc posted:In terms of salary though I'm paid literally less than one third what I'd be earning in the bay area, but my buying power is much higher anyway. I can personally buy a house on a few years' salary, have zero commute time or costs, and can work on interesting products without needing to uproot my family or leave friends behind. So of course I will be biased towards that stuff. But basically you could get 3 senior devs for the cost of 1 by going remote. this is pretty loving key for this particular thread most of the readers in this thread hoping for remote jobs are based in the united states, and cost of living is not substantially lower in the flyover states, despite much lower housing costs for a yosposter living in ohio, remote work is gonna be a troubling proposition. he has to compete with south american and eastern european workers, but his salary and benefits cost is going to be much closer to that of a local resource in San Francisco or New York. it's a really lovely competitive position edit: to be very clear, if you want to live in ohio, your best bet is to look for a job in ohio. if you don't like the job options in ohio, you should move. remote is an awful, awful compromise. Notorious b.s.d. fucked around with this message at 18:44 on May 5, 2018 |
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May 5, 2018 18:40
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Corla Plankun posted:It's pretty hard to interpret this discussion as anything other than introverts versus extroverts. i fuckin hate it when this comes up in techie forums the job skills that you are being paid for are associated with extroversion. you are who you are, but that doesn't change the market circumstances if people wanted to pay a weeaboo to crank out code with minimal outside interaction, they would outsource it. period. the only thing that supports your stateside salary and carrying costs is superior interaction with stakeholders. if you're not up to the task, you will be left behind
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May 5, 2018 18:43
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The correct job to search for if you're extremely introverted is a non remote job with a generous work from home policy.
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May 5, 2018 19:09
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:i fuckin hate it when this comes up in techie forums now this is something i completely agree with. after your entry level hiring and maybe your first promotion, your ability to do introverted coding tasks becomes a smaller and smaller component of your overall value as a software developer. its replaced by your ability to lead increasingly larger groups of people on projects of increasingly complexity, while growing people's skillset at the levels below you. if all you want to do is the introverted tasks then there is probably a place for you most anywhere, but you're going to hit a job level and pay cap pretty quickly. this is also why i'd say its best to work at the headquarters of your company unless they are really all-in on distributed/remote working. I'd be surprised if there is a real study on this, but my anecdata suggests that its 2-3x harder to get a promotion to a job level in a company location if nobody at that location has held that job title before, and its because you're missing out on the facetime and mentorship from the level above you.
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May 5, 2018 19:39
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Peeny Cheez posted:A couple of weeks ago I had a call with a dude who 45 minutes in dropped that I might not be a good fit because they were moving to node and I had expressed no small amount of contempt for it. sounds like a very productive conversation gently caress node
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May 5, 2018 20:17
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:it literally is kafka is extremely good op
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May 5, 2018 20:18
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to be honest, being extrovert or introvert has jackshit to do with communication skills, though there may be some corrélations because one practices more than the other by default. Afaict the big difference is whether you draw or spend energy around people, but being a poor communicator would put you in a bad position in any team. like yeah being an introvert probably makes being alone in your home office more bearable or even pleasant, but if you can’t communicate clearly you’re dead meat to an even bigger extent than local teams because nobody can force you to talk. distributed teams require overcommunication to function better, and good communication to function at all.
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May 5, 2018 20:37
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I'm feeling better and better about the MD job. I almost wonder if a lot of it had to do with "...so, shard the db? How much is the  gonna really cost vs a server over 5 years as a capital expense?" comment. I also just like loving with DBs and since I have no opportunity to do it on my own that I know of for a hobby, I'd like to dive in. I'm also someone with slow references so this should all pile up at the same time for leverage  What are things I can read up about the real cost of cloudshit vs owning a server in a rack? What about horizontal scaling (sharding your loving naturally geographically separable data because it's frigging house/mls poo poo by mls/zip/city/state/whatever) SQL and not getting all hosed up about it? How do I nicely say "1tb of data and 5000 daily users should be pretty easy to cache without cloud poo poo"? What IS good to put in the cloud? How do you nicely say "a lot of your probs are probably bad schemas" when I'm not a DBA? If in doubt nosql out seems to be a case of "spend money on your hosting and not your code" and "lol ops" but I want to have a little more information than that. I found something I'm really interested in and want to do more than just read about it, you know? I know I already asked this and got some good links but I really want to have some depth to talk about, and I might as well get some of the good with "gigantic loving key-value stores". Meh.Also if anygoon has suggestions for what to see in DC besides the usuals, since I've never been and will be falling off the turnip
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May 5, 2018 20:55
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Progressive JPEG posted:kafka is extremely good op but people who use kafka are frequently p bad
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May 5, 2018 21:46
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FamDav posted:but people who use kafka are frequently p bad
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May 5, 2018 21:47
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:this is pretty loving key for this particular thread Are you crazy? Gas costs half as much outside California. loving lunch meat is like 75% less per pound. McDonald's even has higher prices in California. The col in Silicon Valley is loving absurd compared to the Midwest. I could retire at age 40 if I could make Silicon Valley money in Wisconsin.
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May 6, 2018 00:24
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jit bull transpile posted:Are you crazy? Gas costs half as much outside California. loving lunch meat is like 75% less per pound. McDonald's even has higher prices in California. The col in Silicon Valley is loving absurd compared to the Midwest. I could retire at age 40 if I could make Silicon Valley money in Wisconsin. what let’s see 2.54/gal in St. Paul let’s look at Palo Alto.... 3.78  is there some sort of blend issue right now or something I don’t remember it being that insane
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May 6, 2018 00:31
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California's rules for gas blending are insane.
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May 6, 2018 00:39
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isn’t it similar to the rest of the country for part of the year or something?
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May 6, 2018 00:40
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probably, but don't worry because when its time to change the blend there will be articles about it in the local papers and it always seems to just make the price go up 
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May 6, 2018 00:47
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Oh also California taxes are a huge deal for someone coming from the Midwest where Republicans have been slashing taxes forever.
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May 6, 2018 00:48
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jit bull transpile posted:Oh also California taxes are a huge deal for someone coming from the Midwest where Republicans have been slashing taxes forever. - Property taxes are anchored to 1970s prices unless the house was bought/sold, in which case they get get refreshed - Cities assess new developments fees to cover the entire city's costs - When cities relying on the above stop growing they go bankrupt and hilarity ensues
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May 6, 2018 02:10
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jit bull transpile posted:I could retire at age 40 if I could make Silicon Valley money in Wisconsin. well you can't, so have fun with that
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May 6, 2018 02:29
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:well you can't, so have fun with that you can but you’d be in marketing/sales and have 50% or more travel
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May 6, 2018 02:49
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hobbesmaster posted:you can but you’d be in marketing/sales and have 50% or more travel travel is at least a more stable situation than remote consulting, professional services, sales engineering, etc all live or die by billings, not touchy-feely poo poo
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May 6, 2018 02:58
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jit bull transpile posted:Oh also California taxes are a huge deal for someone coming from the Midwest where Republicans have been slashing taxes forever. has uwisc been shut down yet?
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May 6, 2018 10:31
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MononcQc posted:I've learned more from online communities and open source projects than I have from most face-to-face interactions put together hands down. If you work in any kind of office that looks somewhat open plan, where folks have headphones to help focus and you ping them on chat or send e-mails rather than getting up and walking to their part of the office just to ask a question, congratulations, you have just replicated most of the remote experience except you commute to do it and likely are in a high cost of living area for it. Best post in thread and also you got fuckin dunked on nbsd
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May 6, 2018 13:25
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