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Ask HN: Management keeps assigning me IT work unrelated to my responsibilities

I’ve been working at this 100 employee company for about 2 years. I was originally hired as a Platform Engineer. In short, my responsibilities were to operate the company’s Kubernetes cluster and related tools that would be used by the engineering team. As a random example, setting up log collection to archive our pod logs for a customizable period of time.Since I’ve joined, more and more...

( Read More... | 5 comments | on HN )
Re:Terminating an employee with a bus factor of 1 on Thursday November 09, 2023 @11:33PM (#38215077)
I think this is the reason I was hired at my current company and it put me in an awkward position.

I was hired as employee #2 for a critical team at my company. For the first 3 months, my colleague and I worked closely together on everything I was doing. From production problems to day to day PR reviews, I had no one else to ask besides my colleague. We didn't even have a manager we reported to. Then suddenly I was told they didn't work at the company anymore. I was told they were still available for 2 weeks on Slack for any knowledge transfer I needed, but they would have no other access to our network, our Github, or anything else.

My advice is to avoid option 1 in the SE question (hire a replacement, then terminate). From my experience it really shook me up. I was only a few months in to the job and my only colleague was gone. I didn't have time to build trust in the company yet and I worried it would happen to me eventually too. In fact I still feel this way a year later. If you go this route you may find you lost both employees and now you have none of the knowledge you wanted to retain.

I specifically asked this question to Sales and they told me no. There probably isn't an official policy and it's up to the discretion of the people involved. In my case I had 100 MB of data on S3 that I was serving to a lot of users (250 TB - 500 TB of egress per month). This is free for me on R2 because you aren't billed for requests served from cache and we have a 100% cache hit rate. I was very up front about this to sales and they said they didn't care as long as we paid for some kind of support package. We were paying for the $20/mo plan but later elected to upgrade to the $200/mo plan. Not a bad deal since the data transfer from AWS alone was more than $20,000.

I don't want to take advantage of them and get on their abuse list since this is production. I'm happy to pay more! I just don't want to deal with negotiating an Enterprise plan. They ask you so many questions like "how many Page Rules do you want? How many Worker requests?" I just want R2. And this response confuses them too because they say "well R2 is pay-what-you-use..." I would honestly be happier with a $5000/mo "excessive R2 bandwidth" fee. But they don't seem to want to implement that.

Currents.dev has 12 pricing levels, ranging from $40/mo to $1170/mo, until you hit the "contact us" phase: https://currents.dev/#pricing

Ask HN: How do you adapt after early retirement?

I wonder how many people here have retired early and have found it hard to relate people who are still working?I have had three different jobs since the start of COVID-19 due to the ebbs and flows of the tech industry and economy. The transition to working remotely was also difficult for me, and I wanted to return to the office. That sometimes requires moving, and this is challenging when both...

( Read More... | 5 comments | on HN )

Ask HN: How much job hopping is too much?

I think the conventional wisdom is to stay at a company for at least 2 years, but I'm not sure if that is still agreed upon in this market.My job history is as follows:7 months - quit because they needed me to relocate a long distance13 months - quit because we were acquired by another company and the new leadership was toxic in my opinion5 months - contract, decided to not renew7 months -...

( Read More... | 7 comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:Reddit’s disrespectful design on Saturday June 26, 2021 @11:17AM (#27642601)
It keeps forgetting for me too. That is to say, in my mobile browser and desktop browser I opt out of the redesign in favor of the old.reddit.com design, but about once per month it'll just revert back to the redesign. I don't think my cookies are being cleared because I'll stay logged in and I've never found any other setting that flips in the same way, it is only the Redesign opt-out that does this.

I don't know how to explain why many people say "this never happens to me" and other people say "this happens frequently."

While I'm on the subject, another grey pattern the article missed is the button to opt out of the redesign on mobile. When clicking the hamburger menu there used to be a button at the bottom called (iirc) "Opt out of Redesign." The same option exists today except they've moved it into a Settings submenu and renamed it "Request desktop site" which implies it's a temporary change.

Lastly, if you search you'll find threads where people say the web pages are sometimes rendered without any opt out button. I just opened an incognito window to test this and I simply cannot find a button to revert to the old design, even when using my mobile browser's Desktop Mode. So unless a visitor knows about old.reddit.com they are forced to use the new design.

Re:Reddit’s disrespectful design on Saturday June 26, 2021 @11:07AM (#27642500)
I don't attribute any malice either. I can't remember where I read it but I heard somewhere earlier this year that Reddit was trying to fix it.
Re:Reddit’s disrespectful design on Saturday June 26, 2021 @10:53AM (#27642371)
There is also a bug with the AMP pages such that the submission dates for the threads are often wrong. For example you're searching for threads that have been posted in the last month, some of the results will say something like "7 days ago" until you click and see it is actually 5 years old.
Re:Google turned me into a serial killer on Thursday June 24, 2021 @03:31PM (#27622719)
> Suggestion: Create a new Wikipedia article with the same Name, upload your own profile photo onto it and put a Disambiguation (Programmer/Hacker) in it so that Google will associate it correctly.

That Wikipedia article would probably meet the criteria for Speedy Deletion and just causes unnecessary effort for the Wikipedia editors.

Re:The Most Dangerous Censorship on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @04:56PM (#27597100)
> If you see a friend with a new haircut, and you think it looks ugly, should you immediately just blurt out “hey, your new haircut looks awful”? Why?

My friends would expect me to say this, yes, and I have the same expectation. If everyone thought my haircut looked bad, I would want to know.

Amazon is in an interesting situation. They create the delivery routes, dispatch the drivers, and set the KPIs the drivers need to meet, but if anything bad happens they can say "The driver isn't an Amazon employee so we're not responsible." If a crash occurs you often can't figure out what the contracting company was as the trucks are often unmarked and Amazon won't help as they have plausible deniability that the truck was even performing an Amazon delivery. If a contracting company is identified with a crash it often goes out of business the next day and those records are lost.
Re:How to end up with 500k commits in your log on Monday June 21, 2021 @09:46AM (#27579106)
This is a good opportunity for me to ask something I've been wondering for a while about what is appropriate to put on a blog tied to your real identity.

The majority of this article could be seen as negative toward the author's former employer. The website is also listed on the author's CV, and knowing the author's name it is easy to find the website. Is there the possibility that this is seen as unprofessional, or that someone who was involved might read it and be upset? Maybe it is okay because the company is defunct (I assume), or because it was so long ago?

I ask because I am early in my career and I just finished a job where the majority of the things I learned were non-technical in nature. I would like to write about the lessons learned but, like this article, it would have some component of criticism about the company. Like the author, my website is on my resume and the website can be found by searching online for my name. Someone reading my resume could figure out what company I'm talking about, and some people who work there might find it. I don't live in a large tech hub in the US so it's very likely a future potential employer knows some people personally that I might have criticized vaguely (but due to process of elimination from the jobs listed on my resume wouldn't be hard to identify).

The advice I've been given from people I know is to either not have a website tied to your identity at all, or be as professional as possible if it is tied to your identity.

What do you think? If you knew this author, or it you stumbled across this article because you are thinking of hiring the author, how would you feel?

Do these bug bounty programs usually take a year from submitting the report to being approved for a bounty?
Richard Feynman in What Do You Care What Other People Think? says something similar happened with his first wife Arlene who contracted tuberculosis. If we trust his account, then it went something like this:

Arlene presented with bumps on her neck and the doctors couldn't figure it out. In his free time Feynman read medical textbooks in the Princeton library, and the first thing in the book is tuberculosis, which it describes as being "very easy to diagnose." Feynman assumes if its so easy and the doctors can't figure it out then it has to be something much rarer, something like Hodgkin's lymphoma. He asks the doctor about Hodgkin's, and the doctor admits it is a possibility.

> When she went to the county hospital, the doctor wrote the following diagnosis: “Hodgkin’s disease?” So I realized that the doctor didn’t know any more than I did about this problem.

After several months the doctors order a biopsy of her neck and pretty easily confirm it was tuberculosis. Feynman concludes that he made a huge mistake assuming they ruled out the easiest diagnosis.

Re:Rethinking Triplebyte on Thursday June 17, 2021 @07:45PM (#27545743)
Why can't you simply ask the candidate "We offer $min to $max for this position, is that acceptable?" That lets you and the candidate know whether proceeding further is a good use of time.
Re:Deutsche Bank Whistleblower Vanishes on Saturday April 24, 2021 @02:46AM (#26922788)
> tongue-in-cheek or in jest

How so? I didn't get this interpretation at all, so I'm curious what you think.

Re:Why Lichess will always be free on Friday April 23, 2021 @03:18AM (#26911971)
What I find interesting is the part at the bottom that shows how much a donation helps: a $5 donation is enough to cover the company's budget for 6 minutes. This sounds really good for a few reasons: 1) since I play Lichess for several hours a month, I feel that I'm really getting my money's worth; 2) Lichess only needs a few thousand people to contribute $5/mo to stay net positive and I feel like it's easier to convince a few thousand people in a supportive community to part ways with $5 than it is for other companies to get a million people to donate $1; 3) I remember Reddit used to show on your profile how many server minutes your Gold purchase was worth and it would display something like 200 minutes for every $5 purchase, but this is only a single server out of hundreds and doesn't account for any other expenses, so Lichess is unsurprisingly very cheap to operate in comparison.
Re:I don't know how CPUs work so I simulated one in code on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @04:35AM (#19979126)
There certainly seems to be something to it. This isn't a new phenomenon: there is a story that Archimedes around 250 BC couldn't solve a problem until he stopped working on it and took a bath. While this story may not be true, it does show that these "eureka moments" were common not just today but also thousands of years ago.

I'm not a psychologist but from what I understand, "dual process theories" state that humans have two distinct thought processes. System 1 is fast, instinctive, and unconscious; it answers questions like "2+2=?" System 2 is conscious, deep thought; it answers questions like "if 2x+3=17, x=?". System 1 is the default thought process, but it can be suppressed by system 2. I would love if anyone who knows more knows how this might be connected.

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2016) on Monday September 05, 2016 @10:49PM (#12433377)
I didn't send my resume, I emailed the question I asked above to the general inquiries email address, since there is nowhere to apply for the internship position. By the way, I'm not sure if you noticed, but your link in your post returns a 404.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2016) on Saturday September 03, 2016 @03:23PM (#12420660)
Your post says "ONSITE INTERNS", but there is no place on your website to apply for or email to inquire about the internship position. I sent an email last month and no response. Are you looking for interns?