jSully24

I thought this describes many gamblers: remember the wins, quickly forget the losers, be it pull tabs, blackjack, slots, etc.

Car Play will not enable with Siri turned off (at least in my 2019 Subaru).

Agree.

It is VERY worth talking to a professional about this. It's possible to build your savings in a manner they will produce income via dividends, bonds and other methods that give you a pretty great tax advantage and you don't have to sell as many assets during retirement. This is a huge advantage overall, especially in the years the market is bad.

I am not a financial professional but rely on one to guide me.

The title is misleading, they are referring to "Retirement Savings" just counting 401k and IRA dollars only. Personally my "retirement savings" are over 60% in non-IRA or 401k dollars, and I'm retired.

Later in the article they begin to talk about overall net worth including regular savings and investments and the numbers are better but could still be problematic:

> In terms of the average retiree’s net worth, the Federal Reserve data puts it at approximately $1.2 million for those aged 65 to 74. The average net worth drops to $958,000 for those aged 75 and older.

Pick any industry and this environment we’re experiencing in “CS” is going to occur 3 or 4 times in your working years. No matter if you’re an electrician or a software developer.

Do you like building software? Based on your post I get a feeling (which may be wrong) you’re looking for the $$.

If you like it, stay with it and keep studying. It will pay off.

(Edit: my experience) I left college and started out writing COBOL. Several dot com busts later and I was lucky enough to lead several SaaS teams and have wonderful exits.

You mention not being the person making a purchasing decision, who is? Can you connect with them?

I would encourage you to put together a story that illustrates the pain being caused by this software and get with the purchasers. Not only might it help your organization figure out they need to do something different it could also show off your skills to the orgainization.

Could you collect the time you and other people are spending working on these problems? How many issues are reported to you? How many bugs you've filed and have not had fixed by the vendor? Rolling this up into a real dollar coast it's having on you and the school district users.

The idea that 5 years of experience is enough to solve most problems is crazy to me. 18 years in the industry, and I’m still very aware of things I don’t know and need to get better at. I know amazing engineers with 40 years of experience who are still learning and getting better.

Recently retired engineering manager here. Manager I all the way to VP of Engineering at several successful startups and a few big companies.

I was continually surprised that fresh and new challenges continually appeared, until I got wise enough to know there will always be something you not run into before.

Be wary of anyone who think’s they’ve seen it all.

If I go a week or so without some real exercise my anxiety starts to creep up. It does this no matter how good or bad my sleep has been over that time.

Edit typo while on my trainer. Lol

>> It's always the over-40 who are under suspicion.

Because of our (over 40s) years of watching bad policy after bad policy destroying our work places, and speaking up.

We’ve switched to only subscribing to a single service at a time. When we get several items to watch on a service and exhausted our current service, we cancel the current and restart the “new” one.

I suspect with Netflix’s recent crackdown on sharing, this will get much more common and their recent gains in membership will reverse.

They just don’t have that much good stuff coming out, nor do many of the services.

Currently really enjoying Hulu on their 1.00/month plan from Black Friday. Many many shows and movies we’d not seen.

Ah! Thank you. I’d not had this happen before.

I am a native English speaker and I’m struggling a bit as well to understand his point.

But I believe you are correct in that reducing requirements for car seats could increase the number of kids people have.

(I was not allowed to reply to your post)

Yes. But many Sr. Leaders just see a number so it must also be a metric you can use for measurement. They do not understand it’s real use.

I picture a construction company counting the total inches / centimeters each employee measured every day. Then at the end of the year firing the bottom 20% of employees measured in total units measured in the last 12 months.

We do a similar thing but call it a bug hunt.

Not only do we uncover bugs, it’s a great way to get the whole company learning about the new things coming and for the product team to get unfiltered feed back.

Seems the tweet has been deleted.

I just shared this story earlier today with my team. This was Cobol insurance claims processing system, shortly before the Y2K issues.

The claims processing system I worked on used a number system that would only go to 4 digits, it would roll over to 0 if we ever processed more than 9999 claims overnight.

Our VP would not listen to us when we said we needed to change that. He said "Claims process fine every night! There is no problem." I had left before they got to that 10,000th claim (thankfully).

That said, anyone need an old COBOL developer?

Edit: now I’m the VP of Engineering. We do work on tech debt regularly.

And they focused on fancy notebooks and pens instead of what had been an amazing and market leading piece of software.

It still hurts a little every time I think about it. I really liked that product.

Goodwill impairment: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/061715/when-and-why...

“ If the goodwill asset becomes impaired by a decline in the value of the asset below the purchase price, the company would record a goodwill impairment. This is a signal that the value of the asset has fallen below the amount that the company originally paid for it.”

5. Your superior has deep previous relationships with other higher level people in your company.

In my experience in these situations (I was always being acquired), the acquiring company is at least partially counting on cost saving from getting rid of departments like finance, marketing, sales and legal as they believe they can do that with their own teams. The acquiring company also will have their own metrics for proper sizing (employee count and spend) for engineering, support, product, etc which is likely lower than the company being acquired. But in this case VMWare is pretty mature so those metrics maybe ok Can’t say I support this, but the bean counters love it.

Edit: “ Broadcom has not returned CRN’s request for comment about the job cuts. The company, which closed its acquisition of VMware Wednesday, had previously stated it could find $250 million in synergies once it completed the deal.” Synergies is code for the redundancies I mentioned above.

I think it depends if you see them first or they see you first.

”give him 2 copies so he can read it faster”

Gold! My week is made, no matter how many deadlines I blow past.

Worse still, the bosses brought in from the outside who appear to have technical knowledge from their previous political victories at other employers. And they know someone at your company, thus they are “trusted”.

Also where it hits you. If it swims through your leg I fear you will feel it for some time.

Now if it hits you square in the chest, lights out.

I’m curious why you think that? Is there a relationship in earth temperature and this kind of solar activity?

I’m far from knowledgeable in this area but I’ve never heard of a relationship before. (ed)

New ideas getting shot down for fear of cannibalizing existing revenue.

The product that was the breakthrough is likely (somewhat) wonderful and loved (or at least used) by many and generates the bulk of your revenue. However we all know that solution that has gotten you this far has problems and there are many ideas to be able to go to the next level.

But any idea that is seen to take away from the focus of that main revenue generator will be fought unless there is VERY strong leadership. Anything "new" will impact marketing budgets, Sales incentives and revenue goals, threaten those who are working on the "legacy" project, not to mention external forces who are only interested in the bottom line revenue and EBITDA numbers for the next quarter, not the next 1, 3 and 5 years.

I've had this happen at 2 startups I've been through. Both had successful exits, but could've been more and build a much better future path for themselves.

Now trying to avoid this in my current home.

What if Apple had stopped the iPhone for fear of it cannibalizing* the iPod line of products revenue? * https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/economics/articles/ap...

I loved Evernote. And then they decided to make fancy and expensive notebooks, pens and paper and stopped working on the product itself, or so it seemed. They really lost focus. And then the price changing.

It was a wonderful product in the early 2010s.

re: "we couldn't be bothered to implement saml in-house" This is NOT nearly as simple at that statement lays it out to be.

I am also from a SaaS vendor and we are using a 3rd party to integrate to the various SSO providers our customers have. We have not tacked on any additional cost to our customers for this as we also believe this to be baseline. But I do like the approach of at least covering costs.

For us it was not a matter of "not being bothered to implement saml in-house". We carefully considered our options. However, implementing it ourselves means we must have an in house expert on SAML and understanding the various IDPs.

It also requires someone to tightly monitoring any security issues that may appear in the wild that could impact our implementation. (We do still need to keep our eyes open, but we can leverage our vendor for help here.)

Resources required to this ourselves is a minimum of at least 1 full time engineer and someone who can be their backup, we need additional testing resources, and more. Making this roll < full time will hurt you down the road.

I'd rather our people can be focused on the problems our product is built to solve for our customers and then we can work with experts in the SSO space to guide / help us in solving that problem.

On the other hand: the 3rd party we're working with likes to come back every few months with a "Oh! We didn't know you were going to do (fill in the blank), we need to add another dollar per user per month for that."

Neither approach is perfect. But I lean towards keeping our teams as focused as possible on our product.

(PS: I have been with other orgs who've done SAML in house, and it is not simple. Don't underestimate it. It hurt, and we burned a lot of resources that could of been making our product better.)

If you’re looking to discover some up and coming bands from across many genres check out https://mileofmusic.com/ a crazy good festival in northern WI (Appleton). Free outside of beer, food, and the merch you pick up to support these bands. They have a channel on Spotify of each year’s 150 artists, all doing strictly original music. (I’m one of “older ones”)