I did _one_ virtual meetup. After the presentation we were paired into small breakout rooms. Two of the four guys in my room just gave a quick summary of their background and said they were looking for work -- they had nothing else to say.
(a) it ruined the networking time for everyone else and (b) if I had an opening, I'd be less likely to interview them than before.
i haven't been in this particular situation, but people who don't know what to say are all to common. i am not the most sociable guy myself, but i learned to get people talking by asking lots of question, searching for common interests, or simply anything interesting about them. it is a lot of work though, and after such conversations i tend to be exhausted. the irony is that if they didn't want to talk, but get me talking instead, all they would need is to ask a few open questions and then i'd be able to fill the space.
The other participant and I had a pleasant conversation, but the dynamic was weird for the other two who basically said "give me work" without saying anything else.
Please do read a bit about history of TCP and how latency impacts the overall throughout. It's a classic thing and applies to any processing where you need results of some steps to proceed.
Do you have any practical experience with companies running as it's described in this motivational book?
Many of those books are selling well because they are well written and say exactly what reader thinks might work, but if you ask anyone else who worked with the author, the reality can be quite different.
> Do you have any practical experience with companies running as it's described in this motivational book?
I do not have experience running it at a company level, but at a team level (I have been an engineering lead in two companies for the last 6 years).
From all the books I've read (I read a lot), this is the one that was most "spot-on" about treating other humans and making them feel valued and therefore building a team with strong bonds.
> Many of those books are selling well because they are well written and say exactly what reader thinks might work, but if you ask anyone else who worked with the author, the reality can be quite different.
Absolutely agree.
In my experience I resonate most with any books when I have already, unbeknownst to me, been applying what they preach (which has been the case with Setting the table that I'm currently in the process of finishing).
I believe that it requires a lot of introspection to be able to apply new knowledge (ie, if you haven't thought about it or experienced it before reading about it)
I see this argument a lot. Then most startups use that time to create rushed half-assed features instead of spending a week on their db that'll end up saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Forever.
Startups are in the job of earning millions. If they can spend $100k on a managed DB now and just spend every braincell on getting their product right, it's a win for their investors.
That mentality is working wonders right now, isn't it?
Hundreds of dead startups because after all that unnecessary spending, they still have unnecessary buggy software that got sold to other startups that, when push comes to shove, will cut spending in those same startups that offer half-baked buggy products.
What you say is definitely what they preach. But I don't agree or see that as a good logic.
Way too many startup founders decide to build shitty products with short-sighted solutions like these, following whatever is trendy (crypto, AI, etc) because investors advise them to. Guess what: the investor doesn't care about creating a good business. He wants a unicorn. So they advise them to make all-or-nothing moves knowing it will most likely kill the startup.
It's definitely "a strategy". But I think it's short-sighted as hell.
That's the whole point of startups and VC: not spending money on safe investments that provide a 10% return, but spending large amounts of money on risky investments that provide, when averaged together (rare unicorns on top of a mound of dead startups), a 20% return. Both numbers completely arbitrary, of course.
Isn't this only the latest definition of "startup"? What exactly defines a startup? Is it growth at all costs? Is it reckless spending? Complete focus on short-term gains? Something else?
These investment rounds are only there to provide money to start. Unless the founders sign away the control of their company to investors, they are still at the helm of the ship. They can choose how they will approach growth.
We can see how the entire scene is gearing towards profitability now that the money dried up, so this growth focus is no longer the only game in town.
You can still take investments and accelerate growth without having to recklessly go all-in. But I've never taken VC money. Maybe that's baked into the contracts?
All that infra doesn’t integrate itself. Everywhere I’ve worked that had this kind of stack employed at least one if not a team of DevOps people to maintain it all, full time, the year round. Automating a database backup and testing it works takes half a day unless you’re doing something weird
Setting up a multi-az db with automatic failover, incremental backups and PiTR, automated runbooks and monitoring all that doesn't take half a day, not even with RDS.
> Automating a database backup and testing it works takes half a day unless you’re doing something weird
True story bro
I'm sure that's possible if you're storing the backup on the same server you're restoring on and everything is on top of the line nvme storage. Otherwise your backup just started to run and will need another few days to finish. And that's only if you're running single master.
You're massively underestimating the challenge to get that kind of automation done in a stable manner - and the maintenance required to keep it working over the years.
This is an oversimplification, but! Dumping postgres to a file is one command. scp the file to a different server is two commands. (Granted you need to setup ssh keys there too). I have implemented backups this way.
With sqlite you only need the scp part.
You can even push your backup file to an S3 bucket... with one command!
Honestly, this argument mystifies me.
Of course you can make it as complicated as you want to, too. I've also worked on replicating anonymized data from a production OLTP database to a data warehouse. That's a lot more work.
> Our backups to S3 apparently don’t work either: the bucket is empty
It took them a data loss incident to find this out? This is just one of the many red flags mentioned in the article, IMO this incident isn't about relying on cloud backups vs self managing it
What happened to having people trained by external trainers for what you need? That’s much cheaper than having everything externally “managed” and still having to integrate all of it. The number of services listed in TFA is just ridiculous.
I've done it before,too. For toy project, it's easy as you said. It's not once you're at scale. It's hilarious that people are down voting my comment. I guess there are a lot of juniors suffering from the dunning Kruger syndrome around right now
I worked at a place with its own colo where they ran several multi TB MySQL database servers. We did weekly backups and it could take days. Our backups were stored on external USB disks. The I/O performance was abysmal. Taking a filesystem snapshot and copying it to USB could take days. The disks would occasionally lock up and someone would have to power cycle them. Total clown show.
I would rather pay for RDS. Databases are the one thing you don't want to screw up.
The requirements evolve to match the market. At the moment there are so many people available that you don't really need to spend resources training people up.
You can do that too! It's just that you can also use checks. I don't see the problem, instant money transfers are ubiquitous and were easy for me even as a visitor in the US. The fact that bank transferts take longer doesn't really matter day to day, they just don't use them for that
