I have an old metal break in the garage I have been meaning to make a laptop chassis out of copper or brass. I think it would be dope to have a unique looking steam-punkish designed laptop
> Would you prefer to hit a "Check for Notifications" button or would you prefer to just get a notification. The latter option has a million times better UX.
I would a love a button for every action. Particularly for things like check for notifications. The current problem is that someone else believes they know what a better UX is, any by better they mean better for the company for whatever reason.
> Nearly every aspect of game development is challenging and transferrable
I think thats if you dive into engine development alongside game development.
What I have found is a lot of newer game developers don't know the fundamentals because unity just takes care of it. Instead of spending time learning about data structures and the complexity of building a large interconnected codebase they memorise the unity api and learn how to make 'free floating' scripts that don't have to solve the hard problems.
I used to prioritise game developers when hiring for my corporate job. But I am finding this is less of marker of a good developer. Game development is still hard because it requires a huge amount of knowledge across many disciplines. Games programming has become significantly easier since the rise of unity and unreal.
You can see a correlation between healthy and unhealthy games in their icons.
Ungealthy games are mostly high quality 'renders' for lack of a better term. The healthy games have a much less attention grabbing 'lower quality' icon.
I used to work for a government organisation and it was the same. Once I got disillusioned with what I was doing I would put in bare minimum effort which was, show up for standup every day, filibuster a bit then checkout. I was still one of the highest out-putters in the department.
> Being masterfully either technically, socially, or politically have a lot to do with it too, it seems.
I don't think you need to be a master to get more money. What I have noticed as a hiring manager/tech lead is candidates/team members fall into either asking for more money or not.
I have guys on my team who if they asked for money I could easily add 20 - 50k to their salary. But they don't, they also don't shop themselves about. They're low risk of jumping ship and if they do, I can offer them a huge amount to stay or with the savings I have made over the years I can replace them at market rates, suffer the disruption of introducing a new team member and still be ahead.
I luckily learnt early on the best thing to do for your career is just ask for more money. Every 6 months I ask for a pay rise. I don't always get it and if I don't I ask 'what do I need to do get more money'. Your boss should be able to tell you what you need to do to justify another 10 - 20k to your salary
> My experience on the acquirer side is that startup engineers like to just build stuff and deploy it
This has been my experience exactly. Automation has a high upfront cost where that payoff is in the long term. As a startup the priority is on income now. Not cost saving that pays off over the next year.
As a former middle manager I completely agree with this. It can be a very difficult role. I called it the the A-symmetry of knowledge. As a tech person on tools you have such a small view of the company at large and all of the other issues that are going on. Most of which you as a manager cannot/should not share with your team.
I have had tech leads come to me with solid solutions for their little slice of the world except it would be detrimental to another team or project that you can't talk about yet.
So you have to delicately tip to about your tech team with out upsetting them. Which is difficult because they largely see you as useless middle management. All this while doing the dance with the senior managers/execs justifying why your team deserves bonuses and pay rises, or taking their half baked ideas and 180 flips in directions and trying to calm them and figure out what problem it is they actually want solved.
your self reward mechanism changes, as well as the problems youre solving in your 20s are generally new problems to you.
Once you have been coding for 10+, 20+ years you'll come to realise that there is a repeating set of problems you're solving. I haven't seen a truely new problem in a long time. Granted the predominate code I write is for corporate web apps.
But starting out in my 20s everything was new and fun. The reward for solving a thing, or shipping a feature felt great. Now its just one of many features I have shipped that are all more or less the same.
Also another big factor I think is I am significantly more productive now than when I was in my 20s. I would have had to work 80+ hours back then to keep up with myself now
The QLD ones suffer the same issue. I imagine not as bad. But anecdotally the plain paper codes scan as fast as you want. The laminated ones you have to move the camera about to make sure there is no glare interfering with the image
> Most people don't care, some people care but won't do anything about it, and some people think that "If i'm not doing anything wrong I have nothing to worry about". Most Australians trust the government will do the right thing.
I think that is because of media portraying these laws as a positive thing. Almost exactly the line you're talking about. I'm pretty sure I have heard politicians saying exactly: "If i'm not doing anything wrong I have nothing to worry about"
Its a sad but true fact that 99% of Australians (probably rest of the western world) only gets their ongoing education (beyond high school/bachelors in a specific industry) from the mainstream media. And we have close enough to dictator level of media diversity pushing a single narrative. Its not wonder people dont care about their privacy being eroded.
Even though people may not be engaged in politics mandatory voting is important. It reduces extremist politics and the constant need to be increasingly divisive. It forces regression to the mean.
In non mandatory voting systems the politicians need to motivate people to the polls. The default of the population is apathy so to generate action you appeal to the extremes who are the most likely to act. The more people you can make act the more you can get to vote for you.
But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.
I'd like this to be honest (from an infrastructure point of view). If the time is known for an influx of traffic I can prepare for that.
I currently look after a system which gets random spikes of traffic thats critical to serve. Which means I more or less need to run a huge amount of redundant servers 24 hours a day incase there is a spike at 2am.
We have horizontal scaling but our traffic has little lead time.