Hopefully all of them around Australia aren't like this, but I have heard this same view from many people independently

However the most I've seen was a new grad. He's a lovely bloke, was head of all the societies at uni, knew everyone studying CS at a very good uni. In his first year he referred all his uni friends, think he got around 15 or so successful referrals in that first year. My friend in HR processing then said it was more than her salary.

It helps that it is a good company where you'd tell little to join even with no referral, but the incentive makes you seem it that little bit more

On the plus side, Dalibor himself has been extremely helpful in answering questions and resolving minor issues with the clock (both software issues, both quickly resolved).

It is undoubtedly a hard to justify luxury item, but if on the fence you should buy it. It is more impressive in person than I imagined.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33751390

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The catch was the pressure of the environment, needing to be physically in peak shape (my uncle was an anomaly in lasting in the job until his late 40s), and the danger as he had several colleagues die on the job (worst I heard was due to the operators giving the wrong gas mix to the chamber). My uncle also definitely is a crazy man with a few screws loose, so that part checks out

There really needs to be a Spotify for journalism and similar content. I know there are some attempts (apple news for example) but they haven't cracked it yet.

The average person skips paywalls for the same reason the average person used to pirate movies. It isn't about cost, but about the most convenient means of access

We recently had an SLA request to them that was for a paltry amount, nowhere near the damage they caused, less than 0.1% of our monthly spend. It was really just to gauge their process and how supportive they would be. Despite our account manager saying they would sort it, it was denied. They agreed we were impacted, they agreed they caused it, they agreed it met the duration, but the service team used a technicality in the wording of the SLA to get out of responsibility. I won't say much more to keep things somewhat anonymous.

Our account reps were on our side and are helping us escalate a complaint through on this.

We have several ex AWS folks in my team, and they said they weren't surprised. No one at AWS admits to mistakes as it costs promotions and puts you potentially on the chopping block. That's why the request was denied, that's why support is hard to deal with, that's why the status page is never updated quickly. They do a lot of things well and can be decent to deal with provided you understand they won't own up to their faults going into things

Under cons, it says that voters have to rank all candidates on the ballot paper.

In reality you have a choice. You can either rank all, or if you are lazier you can just select your favourite candidate and then your first choice candidate's preferences will be used instead.

Also for some larger ballots (usually the senate with nearly 100 options) there is now a requirement to only rank say the top 10 or so for the ballot to count, so you don't need to number all 100.

This is one of the best features of the Australian system. If you want to do the basic effort you can just tick one box, but if you care about the ordering you can also make your preferences count if you so choose.

As an outsider looking in to American politics, I feel changing to preferential voting is the best bang for buck change to move away from extreme politics. Hopefully this catches on elsewhere.

My family stems from a group of travelling motorbike stunt riders back to the 20's. They did the wall of death and later the globe of death, and had to solve this problem in their bikes.

The family story is that we helped win the battle of Britain, as Miss Shilling read the about the idea in a motorcycle magazine that covered my families show. There is a lot of evidence on what Miss Shilling did, and that my family did the same modification to their bikes prior, but the lack of a link between the two leaves this as a half truth / half myth story

What I do:

1. Identify what triggers it.

Doctors don't know what to tell me apart from "take these pills / shots" as it is unique to every individual. However from trial and error I have found these key triggers: lack of sleep, lack of exercise, certain food choices, excessive alcohol, stress. Small slip ups on any off these are fine, but continual abuse over periods of days / weeks and it will flare up again. Nearly every flareup since I worked these things out can be traced back to a change in life patterns. Moving house, going on holidays, start of Covid (and closure of the gyms) etc. I've worked out the triggers and now I need to address them, which is easier said than done over a timespan of years.

Note for anyone who has a friend / family member with it: Initially, I tried everything under the sun with a possibility of working, and the only thing to fix things up were the drugs. Now I can manage drug free, but all those methods did sweet F-all until it was controlled with drugs (but every case is different). Send them a link to whatever method you want, and then never bring it up again. It shocked me how many people who thought they were doctors came out of the woodworks offering me crackpot theories and then were offended when either I didn't do it or it didn't work (oh you weren't strict enough, you didn't give it long enough). For everyone's sake, provide the information then shut up.

2. Address the triggers.

Food: Avoid overconsumption of dairy, wheat, sugar, alcohol (wine / beer are a lot worse than spirits, white spirits are the go to although I don't like them). A bit here and there is fine and in a normal week I'll have all of them, but it is when you are chaining days of them and they dominate your diet it becomes bad. Also avoid overeating in one sitting, as putting your stomach at max capacity seems to also be a trigger.

Sleep is obvious. Min of 8 hours, 8.5-9 daily is best

Exercise frequently, at least 3x a week. Cardio is ok, but it seems weight training helps the most. Of the list I feel this is the most infrequently mentioned by others, but has helped me a ton.

Stress: I deliberately took a job with a company that had a reputation of respecting work life balance. It is still a demanding environment, but you can choose how hard to push yourself. I try to keep to an 8 hour day but maximise how much I do in that time, and completely switch off after. I turned down a FAANG offer to work here, assuming I would be trading career / financial success for lower stress, but it has turned out better on all fronts (career, pay, stress) which was a nice bonus.

3. Plan ahead

Although I have it under control, I definitely feel like I have a lot less energy than my friends. I just feel my body using my energy reserves to constantly fight this thing and it is fatiguing, and is getting slightly worse every year. I don't want to be working when I'm 60, and have no idea if disaster will strike earlier.

Financially I'm focused on getting to a point where I can retire in around 10 years time, FIRE style. I love my work and plan to keep doing it whilst I still love it, but I need that backup plan covered. Previously I have had to take long periods off to rest up and heal, and during that time I did nothing remotely work related, didn't write a single line of code. I need to be prepared for that happening again.

Plan B is company stock options paying off which is looking more probably than not in ~4 years or so, and would make retirement more comfortable, but I'm not banking on a plan B.

4. Give up control

Control everything you can, and be indifferent to everything you can't. I wasted so much energy early on being angry about how things were, rather than using that energy to fix what I could. Easier said than done however.

5. (Bonus point) Get off the internet

Back when I was diagnosed I found various different groups online that I thought would be good to get some answers and see what other peoples experiences are like. Bad move. They are like news channels, reporting mainly the bad side of the experiences. Don't let your disease consume your life, let alone other people's experience of it.

That's all the advice I have. Bit late in the thread to be commenting, but hopefully a braindump will help someone.

The start of the response was perfectly fine and I did not feel the author took offence to it.

This works as he is a strong, opinionated, intelligent, yet empathetic person who leads the charge on our engineering standards from the front line. He and the org have realised the problems that come with this approach, so have a head of engineering and the engineering leadership board (including the CTO) that fulfill the other functions of a CTO, such as the people management, resource planning, general process and procedure.

This leads to a great situation where we have a gun of a technical hands on CTO that rallies the troops, but the other typical CTO functions aren't neglected either

Last 2.5 years I'd been sick, and one of the medications I had to take on and off was prednisone, an anti-inflammatory steroid. Although it was a temporary miracle for my problem, the long list of side effects are less "these things might happen" and more "pray that not all of these things happen". Amongst others, 2 side effects were general brain fog / headaches and poor vision.

I got my eyes tested 2 years ago when I was first on it and the prescription needed was so slight I was told not to bother and live with it. This time around I had the headaches again, and attributed it to the drug. After realising they weren't going away as much as I would expect whilst tapering off the drug, I got my eyes checked again and this time my eyesight was significantly worse than before. I should also mention that I was having a hard time reading anything illuminated at night, so I just assumed that was something that glasses wouldn't solve.

I picked up my glasses 2 hours ago, and whilst I have a bit of a headache adjusting to it, I can't believe how clear everything is. Feels like I have superpowered vision. I took a walk to the park and looked across the bay to a mass of houses and apartment buildings. Just looking at it gave me a headache because there was so much detail at such a far distance it felt like my brain was struggling to process it all at once.

Best of all, I can now use my computer again without headaches. I'd been putting off going to work until the headaches resolved, but was surprised that my distance glasses made everything on my computer perfectly sharp, despite only sitting ~1m away from a 34" monitor.

Interesting thing is that I am told that I may not need glasses once I am off prednisone, however I suspect I will as I can't recall seeing this clearly in years. Probably will just have to get the prescription changed in a few months.