Customer support needs to handle edge cases. They are not documented because the company does not even know they are problems yet. Many companies win and lose here. Customers that bother going to customer support are often loyal and have valid concerns or insights. Use this information to win!
In my career a few customers that bothered enough to contact customer support helped us find hardware problems that slipped through at the factory and that caused problems for thousands.
Customer support can also feedback frustrations back to dev teams allowing them to build products that feel polished even when it could be labeled as not-a-bug.
My point being: There is a huge signal in customer support. Don’t just waste it by slapping AI on it.
Understand the business thoroughly to know what value you create. Transition within that framework, where in this organization and with what tools can I provide more value?
If you take a moral stand against LLMs understand that your relative value will decrease.
However, with 10 YoE you should be able to quickly evaluate code and ideas proposed by LLMs for correctness and fit into your code-base. In this way you are in a better spot than junior devs.
Limit complexity. LLMs sure allows complexity to get out of control, especially when people stop caring and just wants to get things out of their hands quickly.
If you really were to transition somewhere else it has to be to something you really feel the urge to do because it gives you a real sense of joy or fascination. Something you can’t resist dabbling with already today. From your message I can tell it is not embedded or AI.
If it really is fully open-source please make that more visible on your landing page.
It is a huge deal if I can start investigating and deploying such a solution as a techie right away, compared to having to go through all the internal hoops for a software purchase.
When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale.
Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work is gone.
My guess is they will continue to lose the most valuable employees unless they replace management with some internally well-respected staff that understands their customers well.
Apple generally tries to erase info about acquisitions from their official company story, they want it to look like internal Apple innovation.
When it comes to CPUs they bought P.A. Semi back in 2008 and got a lot of smart people with decades of relevant experience that were doing cutting-edge stuff at the time.
This was immensely important to be able to deliver current Apple CPUs.
You are misrepresenting this slightly in my opinion.
Yes, we have strong laws around alcohol sales in Sweden that try to limit damage to society from excessive alcohol consumption while bringing in tax that can be used for state services instead of going to corporations.
However!
We have a well-run state monopoly (Systembolaget) that sells alcoholic beverages at reasonably good prices, with a wide selection and friendly knowledgeable staff. You don’t need BankID to shop at any of their physical stores which are spread all across the country. If they think you might be under 20 you will need to show physical ID, passport is fine.
Any restaurant or bar that sells alcohol will happily sell to you, unless you are underage.
Low-grade alcoholic beverages (<=3.5%), including many beers, can be bought in any grocery store.
I met Christian at a conference in Lund back in 2005 as I was doing my master thesis within the constraint programming area. He came across as both very knowledgeable and very kind and caring. RIP Christian.
> social rights are nothing more than obligations on the rest of us
I don’t agree here. It is not a zero sum game, everyone can win with social rights.
I have read some Bertrand Russel, albeit many years ago now, and from what I remember he certainly did not argue against social rights, on the contrary.
Do you have a reference to work by Bertrand Russel that argues for your point?
When I feel my anxiety gets too much space in my brain these are some things that work for me:
- Sim racing with my Moza setup
- Trail running
- Mountainbike riding on not too easy terrain
All these activities does the same thing, forces my brain to focus here and now and take time-critical micro-decisions.
Other activities that puts me in the same frame of mind would probably work too. For example climbing worked for me when I did that, and even working through a large set of pretty easy maths exercises worked while I was more focused on maths in my life.
In between the most focused parts of these activities I often gain deeper insights and feel grounded.
baybal2: All your submissions and comments on HN are ”dead” and not visible to users unless they enable “showdead” in the settings. Either way no one can reply to you.
I recognize your nick from good thoughtful discussions from a few years back. My guess HN admins made your account “dead” because of the high number of posts with support for Ukraine.
Maybe in some horrible organisations they do immediately disqualify you, but working with people that have gaps is often interesting and fulfilling.
Also, whatever you learned about life in the gaps can be very useful to your employer!
Maybe those gap-experiences make it easier to build relationships with coworkers and customers? Or gave you the confidence in life to reach out when a coworker is having a rough time personally? Or allows you to dare side-step hierarchy and get stuff that is important to customers done instead of getting bogged-down in endless meetings? Or allows you to bring a healthy culture of work-life balance to your employer?
All these things could have a big positive financial impact on the business.
I would include gaps on your CV and highlight what you learned or enjoyed during this time of your life.
Finally, if you tick the tech-checkboxes, recruiters probably unconsciously prioritize candidates that have an interesting life-story to talk about. I would rather talk about your gaps that all human beings can relate to, rather than about some random tech I'm not really all that familiar with.
You are free to work for companies without a CBA in Sweden, such as most companies under 20 employees.
However I have seen way too many of my developer peers fall for this ”CBA bad” plot. The result is often bad total compensation where e.g. pensions is not nearly as good as with a CBA. There are of course exceptions, but you really have to do your homework.
If you want higher compensation in Sweden you probably want to be a standout performer early in your career. Then once you’ve built a good network you can pivot to running your own consultancy business and charge good rates.
It is also not impossible to get local employment at a company with presence in the US and eventually transfer there and get that high US tech salary. (But you might be in for a surprise what the cost of living actually is in the US, especially if you need healthcare or daycare and education for any kids.)
Finally tech salaries can be pretty good in Sweden if you provide good value to your employer, can argue for that, and is ready to jump ship every now and then.
What I believe keeps salaries low at some workplaces in Sweden is our reluctance to talk and compare our compensation with our peers. There are many devs here that provide good value yet does not know their market rate.
cURL is one of the most used C libs and is an example of good quality C code. If you follow the style used there, see e.g. https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/lib/dynhds.h (and associated dynhds.c) you will be good.
Looking at the source of some of the old game-engines from the era that have since been released as open-source can also be helpful, like https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM.
In both cases notice how simple and elegant a lot of the code is. There is already enough complexity inherent in the problem they are solving, and that is where the focus should be.
Any IDE with a working language server to make it easy to jump around and refactor should work fine. Limitations might be due to the C language itself?
Error handling on such a fixed platform does not need to be super-advanced. You should always be within the confines of the system so there shouldn't be much that can go wrong. If stuff goes wrong anyway just being able call a function Fatal("FooBar failed with code 34") when unexpected stuff happens and have it log somewhere to be able to dig around should be enough. You never need to be able to recover and retry.
That said, consider statically allocating global buffers for most stuff and avoid using the heap as much as possible. This will give you deterministic memory usage, no overhead, and simple code.
Good luck working within the confines of the PSOne! Many hackers have pulled the hair from their head on that platform ;)
In my career a few customers that bothered enough to contact customer support helped us find hardware problems that slipped through at the factory and that caused problems for thousands.
Customer support can also feedback frustrations back to dev teams allowing them to build products that feel polished even when it could be labeled as not-a-bug.
My point being: There is a huge signal in customer support. Don’t just waste it by slapping AI on it.