I too am disappointed that the Google redirect workaround no longer works. I recently cancelled my WSJ membership as part of an effort to minimize my monthly expenses, so now I am effectively cut off from all their news stories.
IMO it's not a big deal though, as I've turned to Bloomberg for most of my market news. My health has also improved considering that I no longer subject myself to skimming through the WSJ comments section.
I would go into finance, maybe as a CFA or some sort of investment/financial analyst. If I could go back in time and restructure my career aspirations as a teenager, I would pursue a career as a medical doctor (possibly specializing in cardiology or clinical pathology).
I don't know if this is normal, but I feel burnt out after working 6 years in the tech industry. So much so, that in my spare time I occupy myself with hobbies completely unrelated to software engineering. I enjoy reading books about finance and medicine, and have also grown an appreciation for cinema/film-making.
My side projects have definitely suffered as a result, because often times I find myself preferring to read The Economist instead.
I consider it normal to not work on side projects. How many other industries consider it normal to work 40 - 50 hours a week and then your "free" time working on other projects? Everyone I know clocks out and does something completely unrelated to their work in the off hours.
Same here - I'm actually studying to take the first actuarial exam. Not sure if it's something I want to seriously pursue, but it's fun learning the math.
You are correct, it is not NLP. But I wouldn't downplay the potential of this javascript library.
I have hundreds of digital documents that need to be sorted and archived. I am able to extract a document's text via OCR, but now have to find a way to sort/file them based off certain keywords present within the document (date, time, place, etc).
I think Knwl.js will be a perfect fit for this. So far I have only spent a couple of minutes looking through the demo and GitHub repository, but it looks like with this library I will be able to write an extension that can help detect restaurants and stores I frequently visit (which will further help me sort all those pesky paper receipts).
I will definitely start playing around with Knwl.js once I get home. Good job!
It seems, especially for major corporations, that on-call/pager duty is quickly becoming the norm for software development teams. I do agree that pager duty is a symptom of a fundamental flaw within the system/architecture. I think it would be in a company's best interest to devote time in improving the reliability and stability of their infrastructure, instead of relying on the band-aid approach that pager duty seems to be.
Regarding #8 though, when you are pressured to resolve a complex issue within a short time window, it can absolutely induce a sense of panic for those who do not handle stress well. In my opinion, I believe the remedy for this would be to have two individuals designated as on-call at a time, assuming the team is large enough.
> It seems, especially for major corporations, that on-call/pager duty is quickly becoming the norm for software development teams. I do agree that pager duty is a symptom of a fundamental flaw within the system/architecture. I think it would be in a company's best interest to devote time in improving the reliability and stability of their infrastructure, instead of relying on the band-aid approach that pager duty seems to be.
I can't see there ever being a time where there is no on-call requirement. You always need someone standing by in case of some terrible disaster that cannot be handled automatically. Better to have this a formal responsibility that never gets used, then to not have it and end up with an extended downtime because you can't contact anyone.
That being said, if you're getting paged continuously during on-call, then there's a bigger problem that needs to be resolved.
> You always need someone standing by in case of some terrible disaster that cannot be handled automatically.
If it's a really terrible disaster, a once-a-decade kind of thing where everything goes haywire and you need as many staff as possible to get online ASAP, then yes. But aren't we talking more about the kinds of "disasters" that happen once a month or so, and can be handled by a few staff (not waking up the whole team). To me that sounds more like just staffing for normal operations.
At large engineering companies this is typically handled via literally having someone standing by, i.e. formally on duty, rather than having off-duty employees be on pager duty. There'll be at least a bare-bones staff on the after-hours shift (probably not in all offices, but in some kind of 24/7 operations center), enough of a staff that reasonably foreseeable things can be handled. Of course there are some pros and cons to that from an employee perspective. On the one hand the night shift isn't that pleasant, but on the other hand your responsibilities are at least formally limited to 40 hours/wk; if you're on night shift one week, you don't come in during the day, or carry a pager during the day.
> and can be handled by a few staff (not waking up the whole team).
That's what this is though. With every setup I've seen there's a rotation of primary and secondary pagers for each team. When something breaks the primary is paged, if they don't answer within a few minutes the secondary is paged. If they need outside help they can page an individual person by name or just a team. e.g. I need help from a DBA, I page the DBA team and the primary is paged.
If you have 4-5 incidents a month this gives you a team available to handle any overnight issues without having to hire a bunch of people to twiddle their thumbs 90% of the time.
That seems pretty wasteful if emergencies are rare.
We have three people on-call on my team, and we typically have an issue at most once a month - and so far, in 95% of cases, the issue can be resolved by killing an errant ec2 instance and waiting for its replacement to spin up in 5 minutes.
It would be much more disruptive and annoying if I had to work the graveyard shift even once every two months or so; aside from shifting my sleep schedule once every two months, it would be a week where I would probably be fairly unproductive.
This seems like a very naive response. We run on hardware that's lifetime is quantified not whether it will fail, but when it will fail. You don't know when that is, or how it will fail. The node could completely go away, or degrade enough that it begins to impact performance.
We also run persistent systems across the WAN. And, unfortunately, some of these things require the state to be maintained.
You can't just design these systems to be "better". There are often things outside of your control.
Based on your response, you seem to be the type of person causing pain for those with a pager.
Also, I'm sure the company that can make the Internet work every time, all the time, will make a killing.
Pager duty is not a band-aid. It CAN be, for poorly-managed companies, but even the most conscientious and knowledgeable company in the world is going to have unexpected failures.
I have been living in Austin for roughly 4 years, but after checking the map it looks like my area may not get fiber for some years to come, as well as much of the greater Austin city limits, based off the progress I see from Google's initial Kansas rollout.
The one thing I hope that comes out of this, and the one thing I believe will benefit all Austin residents, would be the ability to negotiate for a lower monthly rate when their Internet/Cable contract renews sometime next year.
I hope that by April 2015 I have the leverage to call TWC and say: "Hey, Google fiber is offering Gigabit + TV for $130 a month, why can't my $155 monthly bill be lowered considering I pay for Internet + TV that is only 1/4 as fast?"
In April 2015, you won't be calling TWC, you'll be calling Comcast. Pretty sure they don't give a fuck about the price of a product you don't have access to - if you can't cancel your service, they don't care.
I recently bought a Kindle Paperwhite, and also noticed how easy it was to tie the Kindle to an email account upon purchase, all without verification. This seems like something Amazon definitely needs to fix.
As a former IBM'er, I believe IBM has lost their edge as a competitive company, and is now in a state of dysfunction and damage control. Bluemix, Watson, Jazz SCM, in my opinion all these initiatives are too little and too late.
In their attempt to meet the now defunct 2015 road map, IBM has axed many talented and experienced employees. You can only layoff so many individuals before it starts negatively affecting your product and talent pool.
From what I hear on the inside, STG has been cut to the core after numerous rounds of layoffs and product/division sell-offs. SWG appears to be the next target, current rumors indicate that there may be another large layoff sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
That is incorrect. IBM sold parts of its hardware business, along with employees and IP rights, to Lenovo. Years ago, IBM also sold its ThinkPad brand to Lenovo. The two companies are not exactly related to one another.
Everything with IBM it's some strange act of financial engineering.
Everyone who worked in the PC division of IBM essentially worked for Lenovo one day. They used the same people, processes, part numbers, etc for many years. Lexmark was the same story a few years earlier.
The only change was that the IBM account exec that plays golf with your CEO didn't give as shit about PCs anymore.
IMO it's not a big deal though, as I've turned to Bloomberg for most of my market news. My health has also improved considering that I no longer subject myself to skimming through the WSJ comments section.