iamthepieman

Consulting Director - Energy and Utilities, software engineering management

Location: Northeast U.S.

Remote: yes - for the past 14 years

Willing to relocate: yes, to certain areas in the U.S.

Skills: staffing and hiring, mentoring, cross-functional team creation (cloud, engineering, analyst, testing, pmo), .Net, python, JavaScript, GIS, OCM, contracts, business development.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ram-tech

Email: in HN profile

I have 20 years experience in software engineering much of that in the geospatial energy and utility space. I currently manage a team of 18 on large technical transformation projects. I have a strong background in architecture and development but have moved to management in the past 5 years. I do staffing and hiring, client relations, Business development, skill up plans for the team, creating short-lived skunkworks projects to explore new tech, mentoring Junior developers, and generally working to make my team independent and able to operate without me. I still do code reviews and work on POCs but not a lot of development outside of that.

Also tried it and it could have been a lot better. If I had any type of interview with that voice (press interview, mentor interview, job interview) I would think I was being scammed, sold something, or had entered the wrong room.

My brother passed away from AML (acute myeloid leukemia) almost two years ago. His quality of life was dismal on treatment, he was constantly vomiting, mouth sores, unable to sleep but very tired, couldn't see his two young children and locked away in a hospital ward. His wife had to make a huge effort to see him consistently because she couldn't bring the kids and had to find babysitters. He made the decision to stop treatment because of that. His chances were low anyways and he pursued 'alternatives' because it was better than nothing. Even if the main benefit was to make him and his family feel like he wasn't completely giving up.

The worst part is that a lot of the alfalfa and other feedstock crops are shipped out of the country.

The film "Never Let Me Go"[0] is kind of about that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(2010_film)

Framing the whole thing around costs is the problem. Frame it around better quality, better service, buy it for life etc.

There's no way I'm going to buy 3 times the cost for the exact same experience. I don't care about free returns I want something that has no returns because it's reliable and better engineered and made. I'd much rather have 2 widgets that I never have to worry about again (or they can be repairable that's fine too) than 10 widgets, two of which I need to find a box to return them, one of which has intermittent problems that don't quite make it worth it to return OR use, one of which was cheap enough I bought on a whim but was never really going to use anyways etc.

Actually more expensive, fewer, better, things sounds great now that I've written this out. Less mental and physical clutter.

But of course most people don't see it that way and business have to earn trust around these alternative ways of thinking about our relationships with our "stuff". Slapping a "Made in the U.S." sticker on something is gonna do nothing though.

Thank you for the enthusiasm!

It was not intentional but my post really does read like a little story vignette that ends with a gut punch.

Not looking for sympathy so much as fellow appreciators of irony and schadenfreude but here's another kicker.

I pitched this idea to my previous company and was told there was no appetite for it. Just saw on my old company's blog that they released a "digital transformation in a box" program for mid-market clients in this space which is 90% of what I pitched to them. Bad and hilarious timing all around.

Creating stealth group in a huge Fortune 500 company with the blessing of my immediate boss but no other higher-ups. Trying to productize critical consulting tool sets in the utility industry so we can stop repeating ourselves for the 100th consulting engagement.

Yes, customer is a special snowflake but they still need 90% or whatever every other client in this industry needs.

Feeling increasingly like this is a fools errand.

Even though we've proved this out with tool sets strung together with duct tape and safety pins, and are therefore the most profitable group within our department, we still need to be 100% billable.

It's only because we're the most profitable group that we can pretend we're all billable while I work with two other people to bootstrap this crazy project

Edit: anyone hiring? Just found out my boss is quitting.

Or find a way that works for you, gets you jobs and keeps you from breaking your moral framework.

I compare it to driving in traffic. A lot of times I'm not in a hurry and can just stay in one lane and crawl along. Other times, I am in a hurry and I can weave in and out, getting flustered and angry and nearly crashing and still end up 4 cars ahead of where I'd have been without all that.

Depending on where you live, you get it in your water and you don't need both sources of fluoride.

XML has always seemed to be a data standard which is intended to be what computers prefer, not people

Interesting take, but I'm always a little hesitant to accept any anthropomorphizing of computer systems.

Isn't it always about what we can reason and extrapolate about what the computer is doing? Obviously computers have no preference so it seems like you're really saying

"XML is a poor abstraction for what it's trying to accomplish" or something like that.

Before jQuery, chrome, and web 2.0, I was building xslt driven web pages that transformed XML in an early nosql doc store into html and it worked quite beautifully and allowed us to skip a lot of schema work that we definitely were ready or knowledgeable enough to do.

EDIT: It was the perfect abstraction and tool for that job. However the application was very niche and I've never found a person or team who did anything similar (and never had the opportunity to do anything similar myself again)

Well made formal clothes are the most comfortable you'll wear. There is some mental discomfort for a while depending on your mindset because, at least for me, I was stuck thinking fancier clothes required fancier demeanor and attitude? Not sure I'm bailing the feeling here but it does go away eventually. I ultimately did drop the everyday formal wear though because well made stuff was expensive and Im pretty active and found myself with a lot of rips and stains on expensive clothing items.

This story happened in my backyard. The shootout was about 40 minutes from me but Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt were reported by a hotel clerk dressed in tactical gear and sporting firearms in a hotel a few blocks from me.

Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I always just read LW and appreciated some of the fundamentals that this group seems to have ignored. Stuff like rationality has to objectively make your life and the world better or its a failed ideology.

Edit: I've been following this story for over a week because it was local news. Why is this showing up here on HN now?

I first played Minecraft when Notch was posting demos as zip files on the TIGSource forums. I playtested and kept playing off and on until a little after the 1.0 release but that was still over 10 years ago. Some of the early demos also had object impermanence. You would leave a chunk and when you went back to it, it had been re-generated.

    For better or worse, UNIX has won on embedded and server room.

I had print shop as a 10-15 year old and made all my own and many of my families birthday, anniversary and Christmas cards with it. I was the "computer guy" in my household and was therefore entrusted with this duty. I also printed advertisements for lawn mowing services, jewelry my brother and I made and sold in consignment shops, lost dogs for neighbors, playbills, schedules, wedding invitations. All printed on a dot matrix printer.

Printshop and early computer magazines with two-three pages of examples code I would type into qbasic are the reason I'm in this career.

That makes total sense. I have been tempted to do this in the past. Fortunately time and resources constraints have kept it to costly sane and maintainable, performant configurations until I learned that I would never create the system I wanted and that it was probably better that I didn't anyways. I guess I've been lucky and didn't even know it.

I get the solution for this and I know what all the terms mean. But I don't understand the problem. Whether it's facetious or hyperbole or whatever, I just don't get who or what circumstances this is addressing.

This is written like a Jeopardy answer. I just don't know what the question is.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Every old telco technician had a story about dropping a wrench on a busbar or other bare piece of high powered transmission equipment and having to shut that center down, get out the heavy equipment, and cut it off because the wrench had been welded to the bus bars.

I agree. I've had this happen often enough on the job that it's not a totally made up example. And usually you'll be one of two or three people in the whole company who is able and willing.

Debugging old DSL vendor specific languages or code so old using, frameworks and standards long out of fashion and support, that they are half way to being a different language.

Adding support for some back ported features or patching security holes in an old client or legacy stacks.

Or at a big company we had some escrow code from a much smaller partner that we ended up becoming responsible for.

Often getting the environment setup for proper debugging is more work than anything.

But yes, it's a good test for a senior+.

I read this in a previous discussion of kagi.

Not going to read it again but if I recall it was more than half complaining about things not at all related to kagi search. Stuff like how they manage their finances and administration.

Sure that effects how well they can deliver search at some level but ultimately if their search is better than alternatives then I'm gonna keep paying them.

If you can afford it, please try kagi[0]. It's not a panacea. It IS a lot better than Google and has been for some time.

[0] https://kagi.com/welcome

I do not use this term to refer to myself. I respect those who do and respect the meaning behind it but am just old enough that it feels alien to me 99% of the time.

But I am SO triggered by this piece. I had that intrusive feeling you sometimes get when driving where you think, "I could just close my eyes and see what happens", "Or that clif is so close and the guardrail doesn't really extend far enough"

Only for my career. Like I should just not show up on Monday. I should get in the car and drive far away and change my name and work at a nice retail joint in a mid-sized town.

I'm going to need to sit and stare into the distance for an hour and 3.

I've had a really good scrum master. (Plenty of bad ones too). The really good one I could say something like

"I started work on this item and realized that I'm actually missing a lot of context and information in the requirements. I need your help clarifying them"

The scrum Master knew who to contact to get that information would set up a meeting, have the meeting without me if they thought they could do it or schedule it and include me so I could ask the questions I needed, Mark the ticket for me as blocked, fill out the info after the meeting and communicate the risk and reason for delay to stakeholders.

Basically I could say "There's a problem!" and the scrum Master would get it taken care of or find someone who could. Probably the most valuable person on that team.

So basically encipher was never used in the context of the web. And the web is what made encrypt popular separate from encipher. It does look like maybe encipher was possibly going to take off but encrypt stepped on its head.

What a weird article. Feels like two or three little articles under a trenchcoat.

Just this evening I finally got my old gaming PC out of the closet and back up and running. My 15 year old son helped me troubleshoot driver issues and bios errors and we got it functioning. Loaded up the old steam library and I spent about 20 minutes creating a playlist for him. Braid, Subnautica, half life 1 & 2, portal, vvvvvv, rimworld, myst, and a few more not in steam, dungeon crawl stone soup, Spelunky. These were just what I already had. All chosen for their gaminess and not their realism. Maybe half life 2 is one that was trying for realism (at the time).

Just like I require some actual book reading and not just graphic novels. I wonder if the games you played will be a sign of 'culture' at some point.

"Their a good family but they only play halo and battlefield"

Subaru still makes them. I would buy something else since I hate the anti privacy of the company and cars but it's all I can easily get

Even worse if someone else signs up somehow using your contact info. I got signed up (via email thankfully) for a political party in another country and no amount of "mark as spam", unsubscribe or replying would get me off the list. Eventually I just had to create a filter that dumps those messages in the trash.

It must be something with non-U.S. English speaking countries because I get numerous semi-spam messages in email and text for services in Australia and the U.K. casinos with account numbers or PINs, two step notifications for national car registries, banking, contractors asking about work or sending invoices. Maybe it's just English speaking countries have a lot of people named "iamthepieman"

Maybe I don't use tvs the way most people do. But the most pessimistic lifetime estimates for my use case on a 30,000 hour panel is 41 years. I don't really see a television as something to pass on to my heirs so that seems like a solved problem for non-commercial use.

I've had televisions fail but it has always been a connector or capacitor that I could replace with a sautering iron and about 46 minutes of disassembly/re-assembly

You didn't lose your entire savings if you lost your wallet, usually.