pkaler · HackerTrans

vor 4 Tagendiscuss

My mother worked in a factory that sewed drapes for film sets before she retired. My brother-in-law used to be an operations manager for a warehouse that rented equipment to film sets.

There is just a very long tail of services and a robust supply chain that is required for most industries to be successful.

pkaler

vor 17 Tagendiscuss

I was never a prolific blogger. I do write a LOT internally at work and I write very long messages in group chats.

With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.

pkaler

letzten Monatdiscuss

I found the accompanying blog post excellent. In my experience, systems go from a monolith to a distributed monolith to a reliable distributed system. A durable workflow engine is one of the pieces that is required to get to target state.

https://hatchet.run/blog/durable-execution

pkaler

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I'm also currently reading "On the Calculation of Volume". It is fantastic.

Meta-comment about the post. I used to read and write book reviews like this all of the time. Not anymore. ChatGPT and Claude can do a just a good of a job. Now I'm looking for what you think, a unique insight, what did you feel from a book review from a humanoid. LLMs do a fine job summarizing.

pkaler

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Yup.

Woke up at 6am. Child 1 woke up at 7am. Dropped her off at daycare at 8am. All the other children were being dropped off by their dads, too. Full day of work ahead. Dinner at 6pm. Bath at 7pm. Bedtime and story at 8pm. Usually calls with Bangalore from 9pm to midnight but it's Labour Day over there. Sleep at midnight.

Rinse. Repeat.

pkaler

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

As others have said, levels and titles are generally for compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to:

  - L1: Intern with undergrad degree
  - L2: Intern with graduate degree
  - L3: Junior
  - L4: Intermediate
  - L5: Senior
  - L6: Staff
  - L7: Senior Staff
  - L8: Principal
  - L9: Distinguished
  - L10: Fellow

Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally progresses like that. Impact and scope scales as you head up the ladder.

L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role. And people without the headroom get managed out if they can’t get to L5.

Staff+ is usually “special”. It means that people count on you to drive initiatives and you have something special other than just writing code. You are able to make product and business impact.

Distinguished and Fellow are very rare. Large FAANG companies will only have a handful of these engineers. It means you’ve made industry-wide impact like inventing map-reduce or DynamoDB or Kubernetes.

pkaler

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

SIMD and data locality. You probably want to check across three vectors simultaneously and load the coordinates next to each other.

I'm guessing here. I haven't written video games in 20 years but struct packing/alignment was super important on the Sony PSP back then.

pkaler

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

I have two Staff+ level positions open on my team. The expectation for them is to be able to work in a cloud-native (AWS/K8s/Terraform/etc), distributed systems (Kafka/SNS/SQS/Kinesis) that is mission critical because it touches people's money (fintech). And new client code gets written in modern stacks (Swift/SwiftUI, Kotlin/Compose, Typescript/React/Next.js).

If I were still an IC rather than a talking head on Zoom all-day, my role would map to somewhere between Senior Staff and Principal. I would write microservices from scratch, deploy to the cloud, operate them, and then write all of the clients (iOS/Android/Web) myself. I've been doing this for ~20 years so I have the ability to quickly pick up new languages, frameworks, platforms, technologies, etc.

The current Senior Staff/Principal engineers do projects like decomposing that old miscellaneous database from the original monolithic codebase and implement it across all domains with correct boundaries. Build libraries that all engineers on the team use. Ship V1 of that new product that is very strategically important to the company.

(Send me an email if you are a Staff+ engineer that is looking for something new!)

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