nigelk

as did the Google recruiters and HR people I spoke to before accepting the job :)

It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.

The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge.

It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.

As someone who was there start of 2007 to end of 2010, this resonated. My first two years were very different to the last two.

I lost 50 pounds in under 200 days, and then another 20 over the next year.

Here's what worked for me:

  * Calorie counting to work out baselines
  * Accept the feeling of being hungry and learn to relish it ("I'm losing weight if I'm hungry")
  * Do light weightlifting at home
  * Exercise naked in front of a mirror for positive and negative reinforcement

VP of Product

Director of Product

These titles both exist...

My interview for Google as an SRE in late 2009 consisted of well over half design questions around improvements of a system with lots of users.

One of the best series of questions I've ever gotten in an interview. We probably spent close to an hour just on one major aspect of the service.

At least part of the complication is that overseas equivalents of 401k funds that may be mandatory to contribute to are often considered to be bank accounts by the IRS.

Excellent, thanks. Hopefully we'll see tools like Cloudability support it then.

I'll check it out again, really the frustrating management aspect was the lack of org oversight over multiple projects started within your domain.

There are some great aspects to Google Compute, but I hope this change results in catch up on features needed for corporate adoption compared to AWS.

The lack of a billing API and the lack of centralized management are really painful if you're trying to adopt it across an organization.

My understanding is that they didn't do a write API due to fear of automated spam and poor S/N ratios.

It's not just that, looking through my current and past entries some of these records just aren't correct, and don't even match the data provided on LCAs etc.

Not right, but not entirely wrong either.

The process for an internal, expedited H1b transfer is significantly simpler than an H1b from scratch.

I think they're ruling out hyphenating. Cooke-Bell and Bell-Cooke.

Not sure if you're the one who changed it, but the " Trapperkeeper is a new Clojure framework [...]" title works fine and is much less misleading imho.

Your comments apply to the HN link text, not the article or headline.

Puppet Labs isn't a single language company.

What are you finding unreliable in terms of tooling for Puppet on Windows?

This is a very ordinary problem, and it's usually solved like this with Puppet:

Specify the service declaratively, and subscribe it to the package that provides the payload.

  service { 'myservice':
     ensure    => running,
     enable    => true,
     subscribe => Package['myservice'],
  }

  

Maybe it was open source software and/or he went through a simple CLA process?

Thanks for the feedback andyl.

We're thinking very much about the direction of embedding all dependencies, but we're also conscious of the needs of the Linux distros, who don't package software that way.

There is a downside to having all your apps embed their dependencies. It becomes significantly more complicated to update libraries in response to vulnerabilities and bugs.

We very much encourage people to use the package repositories we host:

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/puppetlabs_package_reposit...

Are you suggesting we should drop gem support entirely andyl?

Great news Mitch! Congratulations, and give us a yell if I can help with anything.

I'd love to see more details about this. You may not return to this comment, but nigel@puppetlabs.com would love to chat about what you're doing here.

In Australia where in many ways it felt like we were second-hand consumers of UK rave/dnb culture, the "digital" was a big part of that experience in the early 90s.

Think of all the newsgroups, mailing lists and blogs. Think hyperreal.org and the community around all that.

The music itself may not have spread digitally as we saw from the mid-90s onwards, but discussion of the music certainly did.

And here you've nicely summarized why I think I've seen so many technically-inclined philosophy grads working as sysadmins...

Totally a case of selection bias, given I'm one of those and notice them, but I've long been convinced that a love of systems creation and debugging is the common attribute between philosophers and sysadmins.

Snippets at Google had one other really useful tool when you're a large company.

You could subscribe to a keyword, and pick up any snippets that mentioned it.

As someone who was running a service that could get in the way of engineers doing their job, this was a great way to get honest, grassroots info.

This is awesome. As an ex-Googler at a startup, I've been wanting to re-implement OSS snippets for a while now. Checking it out!

I don't.

I'm one of those Australians who moved to the US to work at Google, and then left to join a startup, Puppet Labs.

There are a lot of Australians in tech in the Bay Area, particularly working in operations, and a regular topic of conversation is "what would I do if I moved back to Australia?"

I'd still probably try to start a new tech company in the US, but I feel much less strongly about that than I did a couple of years ago, and hopefully that trend continues.

I quite like the command line tooling GCE comes with. It's a much nicer user experience.

From memory this was due to LaunchServices not waiting until the home directory was completely mounted, and thus launching with default prefs.

There was a workaround I had running for a while in a large deployment in the form of a logouthook that would copy the relevant prefs to a location that LaunchServices would find it before FileVault finished mounting the home directory.

There were a lot of corporate/education deployments running "legacy" FileVault who hadn't invested in PGP WDE or other commercial options, and I bet they haven't all upgraded instantly to the new FileVault when they moved to Lion.