rednum

Genuine question: What in your opinion are the differences between a great and an average band leader? I've been making music as hobby for most of my life, and band leading is a topic I think about a lot - but it seems for many musicians I meet is not even on the radar.

Kinda. In this context I mean "response SLO" - how much time you have between receiving the page and starting debugging stuff. I think it's also important to clarify; I've been on rotations with response SLO ranging from 5 through 30 minutes to unknown: literally my manager couldn't answer the question "so how fast do you expect me to react" (in hindsight, that was a pretty big red flag about how team approaches production that I missed).

Personally, I also ask more questions about on-call:

- is there a SLO?

- what is the schedule? 24h is no go for me.

- is non-business hours on-call compensated (even when there are no pages)?

In particular, I strongly believe we (as profession) should push more the employers for the last point. Being oncall during weekend means I need to seriously adjust my plans; need to have corporate devices somewhere close, etc. In particular this also means I don't fully disconnect from work if I have to carry laptop/phone with me. This kind of stress slowly accrues long term. All in all: staying alert for oncall is some sort of work. A physical security guard gets paid for keeping an eye on things even when nothing happens; it's startling that so many devs don't.

I used to really like Spotify when I first installed it long time ago, but over the years they worked really hard to make me hate them with passion. It feels like their motto is "Change for change's sake", they seem to remove and add stuff randomly, shuffle UI elements whenever they want to, etc. In the meantime, the basic functionalities regress. I had the app bug out on me countless times in weird ways; offline stuff disappearing, freezes when clicking on an album, that one time when I was listening on headphones and suddenly Spotify changed volume from minimum to max and almost gave me hearing damage, etc.

Some time ago I moved to Tidal. It's not perfect, the search is inferior, the app bugs out sometimes too; but at least they don't seem to change it that much.

Well, that's sad news. Wolt used to be the only food delivery company that had actually functional customer service. They replied swiftly, sometimes automatically even granted some promo codes when the delivery was really late. I suppose that will be gone soon.

Other companies I used ranged from "Your order never arrived? Ok, we'll refund you after some time if you jump through enough hoops" (Glovo) to non-existent: "Your order never arrived? Not our problem, talk to the restaurant. Restaurant ignores your email and calls? Well, still not our problem." (pyszne.pl, polish-only).

I liked the concept when I first saw it but honestly it's more trouble than it's worth. On my old work laptop, it would sometimes bug out and stop registering touch. That's a problem when you are in the middle of a call and you need to adjust volume because one of the speakers is too loud or too quiet.

I also don't like how it's harder to operate than physical buttons. Too many times I hit the wrong spot on the bar and for example ended up putting my laptop to sleep instead of adjusting brightness. I've also tried to configure Ableton Live to do something useful with it (maybe mute/unmute tracks or control their volumes); but with little success.

Long story short: I'm happy to see it's gone.

Perhaps he gambled on the options being worth more. I don't know about all the companies mentioned, but Sumo IPO'd last year.

Not OP, but I've met people that seemed to sort of lost their agency and ambition, because their psychedelic insight was that the universe will sort everything out on its own. Though maybe the causality is the other way round here - they were not ambitious in the first place and psychedelic insight helped rationalise that.

Also disclaimer: I'm not trying to discourage or encourage people from psychedelics. Personally I believe they should not be criminalised, but people should be cautious using them.

> to not want to appear dumb

Few production incidents are enough to change this mentality. I'd rather write more verbose but "obvious" code than "clever one liners". I feel sorry for anyone who has to understand someone's DSL on the fly when there's an outage and your business is burning through X$ per minute of downtime.

(On the other hand, you probably want to structure your production changes in the way that they are easy to roll back without understanding everything, but that's other conversation. Either way, the thought that someone may want to chase me after work because my code broke and they can't understand it is enough for me to stop being clever).

Yeah, good luck when someone with experimental temperament decides to implement some of your crucial functionality with semialgebras. (that's what happened in my previous job where we run Scala). I'm happy I didn't have to debug any customer issues around that module. Also, I didn't enjoy constant bickering with my reviewers what makes a beautiful code or not. Apparently there are five ways to do everything in Scala and I always ended up picking not the one my teammates would like the most.

> I suppose this is obvious but the traditional way of increasing prices is to lower the supply.

I've been thinking about this recently and it feels like the current culture in software engineering is to increase the supply. I see people who code and offer free coding lessons to their friends. Pre-covid there has been multiple meetups where I live in themed like "programming for no programmers" or "build your first app".

At the same time when I look at other high impact jobs, like lawyers or doctors, they seem to be keen on building moats around their profession. There are no "six week law bootcamps" that would give you useful skills or anything like that. I'm getting a feeling that engineers are unwittingly cutting the branch they sit on, but they will only realize this years from now when it's too late.

Sidenote: I really like how this stops playing sounds when I change the tabs. It'd be nice to have browser setting that does it.