Location: Northeast U.S.

Remote: yes - for the past 14 years

Willing to relocate: yes, to certain areas in the U.S.

Skills: staffing and hiring, mentoring, cross-functional team creation (cloud, engineering, analyst, testing, pmo), .Net, python, JavaScript, GIS, OCM, contracts, business development.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ram-tech

Email: in HN profile

I have 20 years experience in software engineering much of that in the geospatial energy and utility space. I currently manage a team of 18 on large technical transformation projects. I have a strong background in architecture and development but have moved to management in the past 5 years. I do staffing and hiring, client relations, Business development, skill up plans for the team, creating short-lived skunkworks projects to explore new tech, mentoring Junior developers, and generally working to make my team independent and able to operate without me. I still do code reviews and work on POCs but not a lot of development outside of that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(2010_film)

There's no way I'm going to buy 3 times the cost for the exact same experience. I don't care about free returns I want something that has no returns because it's reliable and better engineered and made. I'd much rather have 2 widgets that I never have to worry about again (or they can be repairable that's fine too) than 10 widgets, two of which I need to find a box to return them, one of which has intermittent problems that don't quite make it worth it to return OR use, one of which was cheap enough I bought on a whim but was never really going to use anyways etc.

Actually more expensive, fewer, better, things sounds great now that I've written this out. Less mental and physical clutter.

But of course most people don't see it that way and business have to earn trust around these alternative ways of thinking about our relationships with our "stuff". Slapping a "Made in the U.S." sticker on something is gonna do nothing though.

It was not intentional but my post really does read like a little story vignette that ends with a gut punch.

Not looking for sympathy so much as fellow appreciators of irony and schadenfreude but here's another kicker.

I pitched this idea to my previous company and was told there was no appetite for it. Just saw on my old company's blog that they released a "digital transformation in a box" program for mid-market clients in this space which is 90% of what I pitched to them. Bad and hilarious timing all around.

Yes, customer is a special snowflake but they still need 90% or whatever every other client in this industry needs.

Feeling increasingly like this is a fools errand.

Even though we've proved this out with tool sets strung together with duct tape and safety pins, and are therefore the most profitable group within our department, we still need to be 100% billable.

It's only because we're the most profitable group that we can pretend we're all billable while I work with two other people to bootstrap this crazy project

Edit: anyone hiring? Just found out my boss is quitting.

I compare it to driving in traffic. A lot of times I'm not in a hurry and can just stay in one lane and crawl along. Other times, I am in a hurry and I can weave in and out, getting flustered and angry and nearly crashing and still end up 4 cars ahead of where I'd have been without all that.

Interesting take, but I'm always a little hesitant to accept any anthropomorphizing of computer systems.

Isn't it always about what we can reason and extrapolate about what the computer is doing? Obviously computers have no preference so it seems like you're really saying

"XML is a poor abstraction for what it's trying to accomplish" or something like that.

Before jQuery, chrome, and web 2.0, I was building xslt driven web pages that transformed XML in an early nosql doc store into html and it worked quite beautifully and allowed us to skip a lot of schema work that we definitely were ready or knowledgeable enough to do.

EDIT: It was the perfect abstraction and tool for that job. However the application was very niche and I've never found a person or team who did anything similar (and never had the opportunity to do anything similar myself again)

Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I always just read LW and appreciated some of the fundamentals that this group seems to have ignored. Stuff like rationality has to objectively make your life and the world better or its a failed ideology.

Edit: I've been following this story for over a week because it was local news. Why is this showing up here on HN now?

    For better or worse, UNIX has won on embedded and server room.

Printshop and early computer magazines with two-three pages of examples code I would type into qbasic are the reason I'm in this career.

This is written like a Jeopardy answer. I just don't know what the question is.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Debugging old DSL vendor specific languages or code so old using, frameworks and standards long out of fashion and support, that they are half way to being a different language.

Adding support for some back ported features or patching security holes in an old client or legacy stacks.

Or at a big company we had some escrow code from a much smaller partner that we ended up becoming responsible for.

Often getting the environment setup for proper debugging is more work than anything.

But yes, it's a good test for a senior+.