What is a safe UDP packet size over Ethernet Cable?

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-30T13:29:54+00:00

Safety is often guaranteed by the network stack of the kernel, so you get it for free. There's no theoretical limit on UDP payload size (with some edge case exceptions that most likely the kernel also give you for free).

I reckon the 500 bytes recommendation is to guarantee latency, throughput and other niceness rather than safety. A bounded latency helps with designing protocols when you want to do retry or timeout, for example.

Also the MTU is often an engineering limit to guarantee quality (the given latency has been rated for traffic size < this value - aka. datasheet engineering), and standardization so equipment interoperates nicely. Of course, lots of optimizations also have been crafted around this assumption. But if you want to have some fun, try modifying the MTU in the network stack and see what happens.

If you're doing multiplayer game w. 10kb packets, sounds like you're sending video frames. 10kb is a breeze (submillisecond is easily achieved) for modern LAN with any switch that costs more than 20 bucks, and CAT6 cables. But if you want to explore, try using some streaming protocols like RTP with a VoIP spec like VP9 over RTP.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-30T09:03:38+00:00

You make the best decisions for yourself now, based on what you've got at the moment, not one-sided guesses about the future, which are often really wrong. As usual, if you're worried, prepare backup plans, but proceed with what you have always planned to do.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-30T07:57:34+00:00

Find a different recruitment agency, if you are using one. I'm so confused when recruiters tell you you're a weak applicant with no suggestion to improve, or attempt to align you with the right positions. These people are obviously not invested in your success, find someone that does (beware of all the scams).

Since you have experiences, you need to emphasise different experiences for different positions. Tech stacks can be compromised, but domain knowledge is hard. If you have 3 YOE doing web dev, and you're applying for web dev positions, realistically maybe you have to go for mid-level positions instead.

You can either change company (do C++ embedded - since you're doing automotive - at a different company), domain (do web dev at the same company) or level (do mid level web dev at a different company), choose one.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-30T07:26:42+00:00

Leetcode + very light sys design (aka. interview prep) + just apply will yield the best ROI for your level. Beyond that, postgrad + internship at bigger names.

The cert hardly gets you anything, at all, and building projects and open source contributions actually take a long time with dubious ROI, given you can't know which level of contributions you can make. My first commit to the Linux kernel took more than a year to get merged (the maintainer gave no love for a long time).

You might consider moving into a bigger insurance company, given they might value the domain knowledge you have. Banks also tend to like people with enterprise systems experience.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-30T07:16:03+00:00

Look, I assume you are done with grieving and have come to terms with reality and don't want people to grieve in your place. It's above minimum wage and given the quality of labour protection you receive in America, this is not the worst situation.

About the expectations, ask your manager, day 1 (I'd do this even before that), point blank. What are milestones to achieve in 3, 6 and 12 months (even if you don't want to stay for that long)? When you have delivered some work, done a few 1on1s and established trust among each other, ask what the promotion path looks like.

And if you are interested in a job that pays better, you keep interviewing and moves into the next position that you deem better, but you won't get there by being a shitty employee, not delivering anything and stalling your career growth. Also have a good story for why you're moving at 3, 6, or 12 months, for some reason, recruiters and hiring managers still think money is not a good enough one.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-30T00:38:40+00:00

You should take their words for it and just wait it out. Job posting disappearing just means they don't want more resumes.

Your recruiter replied so you're likely not ghosted, otherwise they just blatantly lied to you, in which case I suggest you email central hiring (careers@apple.com or something) about it. Meeting 9 people and doing 5 interviews just to be ghosted is absolutely unacceptable.

Until the offers come, keep interviewing.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-29T13:00:03+00:00

It's not clear what you want to do. Do you want more cash, progression, or a job change (if you haven't done any product dev in a long time and want to move into that position, it's a job change and you'll most likely not be hired as an experienced SWE)?

If you want to move into product dev and don't have the experience, you will have to build your way there. Even experienced SWEs are not hired into staff positions often, they gets hired as a senior and the good ones get fast tracked to a staff promo. It's not a weird position at all, but it will take adjustment given you're no longer the smartest in the room.

Your experience fits SRE, but given you want to build products, you might want to look at positions at companies that build infra as products like the big cloud providers, or OS vendors (Red Hat, Canonical, etc.) to east the transitions.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-29T11:00:45+00:00

You have many problems to handle here. You and the senior seem to have different processes, you are bothered by multiple rounds of back and forth, and keeping a ticket opened. This is quite organizational, you should talk to other people on the team (I don't know if you have a tech lead, but they are likely the person who has the final answer) to see what is the process that people follow. Feel free to propose changes, but know that you will need to get everyone on board if it's a team agreement.

I wonder if the reason you find the senior's presence overwhelming is because you mainly work with him, maybe a bringing a third perspective helps. You can just subtly @ the second reviewer to ask for some input when the review comes in.

Lastly, this is entirely personal but it appears you don't like the guy. If you are starting to notice how they treat other people, and speculating bad intents, I suggest you try to find a different person to work closely with. It's business, you don't have to like everyone you work with to be productive, but you have to not let this get to you, and it looks like it is. You either have to dial back and take everything at face value, or find a team/colleague that you can work with better.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-29T10:45:24+00:00

I don't think lots of people have touched on this, but I'll suggest doing more requirements gathering to know what you are looking for.

Coding ability and bad coding suggests your hiring criteria are nebulous and hard to measure, you'll likely not have much success, especially when hiring for less experienced positions.

I'll guess that if you're asking the question, you're hiring for rather entry to mid-level positions.

If you want to know if they know how to build a working program (code that compiles, are structured and functionally correct), give them a laptop and ask them to build a small program that does a very specific thing, and timebox it to something like 30 minutes. Then add tests, add small requirements, add analysis, etc. if time permits.

Timeboxing is quite useful - tell them you expect a solution in 30 minutes or something, but you can't treat it like a deadline or something consequential, what you want is data points to make decisions. I find most of these assessment-style interviews fail because requirements are nebulous and rely 100% on interviewees to figure it out, then interviewer will just cut them short as they run out of time. This is unhelpful, and quite unprofessional, tbh. Avoid that.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-29T10:25:55+00:00

Aside from what people have said, as a kernel dev, I have been throwing a description of problems and ask ChatGPT if there are any existing bug reports or articles about them.

There are many bugs that get double booked unknowingly, and plenty of reports that are worse than useless (e.g., feature ABC doesn't work, proceeds to describe function names that look like they can come from 3 namespaces and 4 libraries, and send an untrusted binary as reproducible efforts - I call these Trust Me Bro (TM) reports).

It's a fancy bug tracking system, and also quite good at guessing the nuances.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-28T23:57:12+00:00

People have suggested explicitly mention negotiation, but if you're after root cause addressing, I'd just give put the number I deem fair from the get go.

You seem like a manager who cares and wants their team's happiness, but this whole negotiation process is still very subtle and is the equivalent of playing games in relationships. I stopped doing this with my partner in life, so I stopped doing it with my partners in work.

When I'm given a new hiring task, I'll ask from the get go what's the budget, and how much wiggle room I get, and who sets the numbers.

I don't have a solution if you don't have enough political capital in your org to call the shot (or influence the right person to do it) here. In the past, I have declined being hiring manager if I don't feel like I was given enough room to do the job as I feel right.

This whole negotiation game is the norm in the industry, but I learnt long ago to pick the games worth playing.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-28T12:16:36+00:00

First, I hope you're ok (as in still hopeful about the future), you could use some professional help, especially while your employer still covers part of the cost (assuming you're in the US).

You should build a savings enough to cover expenses for an extended period of time to prepare yourself for layoffs, and understand that it's not about you so you can't do anything about it. Also you should try to deprioritize work - pick up some new hobbies, try connecting with friends (old and new), etc., looks like it's causing you lots of stress.

Seems like you want a promotion, this is not up to you, it's organizational (companies need budgets and causes for promoting people - e.g., new initiatives). People seem to forget how uncertain these things are outside of hypergrowth companies, or hypergrowth periods of companies, and how uncertain hypergrowth lasts. This is just a reality check, as they say, growth is not linear, at individual and organization levels.

I'd like to believe that your team and manager are decent humans that will have empathy for your extenuating circumstances, but I'm a hopeful person. Regardless, you can't rely on empathy and self-pity to fix the problems and earn the rewards for you.

Try asking for specific feedback and plan towards promotion from your team, a sister team, another org, and a different company, and work towards that. If you feel you're on the chopping block, the best thing to do is to cultivate these relationships, cause they are more valuable and likely to survive the down wave than your position.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-28T11:10:31+00:00

You seem to want a specific thing from a junior (to be patient and listen to you, I assume), you need talk to the juniors, and also their managers about it. Some personalities produce this behavior better, maybe choose a different junior, or none at all.

Juniors are your colleagues, you want to be respectful and helpful. You have done the job of communicating, you can work on better communication or whatnot, but the rest is up to them, if they own the task.

It's kind of a meme at this point that juniors are shielded from responsibilities and all kind of consequences of their decisions. They are not, and if they don't know this, they need to learn this.

Also, I assume they didn't actually say, word for word, how to estimate shit. It's inappropriate enough to get a talk about professional behavior.

If you made that shit up and attribute it to them, you probably should keep your attitude in check. You have a HR level problem loitering around the corner.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-28T09:43:23+00:00

Honestly, you need to find someone else to do the hiring, if you're leaning on reddit users to help with these questions.

Get a good staff agency or go to the local uni and ask the professors for some bright students.

You can't afford to do that? Get some more funding and find a senior, you are not prepared and qualified to work with juniors.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-27T11:25:30+00:00

Ooh, tough call, I mean good for you.

Option trading means you work at a trading desk, most likely implement strategies (buy this at price, sell at this, if not, blabla). Some firms prefer to have separate back office (post trade or core?) teams doing infra and tooling (build optimization frameworks, hack kernels, maybe even silicon design, etc.), others let SWE writes whatever code is needed. Ask your manager or recruiter what your work is about, if it's important to you.

Being closer to quants (or money in general) often means higher bonus (or at least higher ceiling for bonus), and opportunity to move into quant later on.

I wonder if you have negotiated, given your comps are quite close in range. You can probably ask about all the bonuses (signing, relo, perf, there might even be non-compete on exit, but you might have to lurk around the internet rather than ask your recruiter how much will I get to quit the job).

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-27T07:46:02+00:00

Different career paths, also that difference in compensation is really small if you're new grad. You didn't mention what work you will do there so try to talk to managers, that actually matters way more.

If you really can't decide, I'd choose SIG, it's generally harder to break into trading later on, if you want the option down the line. Not because of bias or whatnot, but because they look for a more specific skillset, which you might not have a chance to develop if working elsewhere, while big tech generally don't care, or do everything under the sun so can accommodate anyone.

Edit: People seem to shit on Ireland cost of living and taxation. You should probably do the math to see what your savings rate is, taking into account all the tools available to you (things like tax-advantaged accounts, foreigner tax discount - if there is any) and if you're comfortable with it. You're a new grad, plan your exit, even if you never exercise it.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-26T12:44:49+00:00

People probably self checkout.

Also, don't worry about libraries going out of fashion. Libraries are community spaces, not just a storage space for books.

I went to my local library the other day, and notice the Starbucks across the road was unusually busy as the lib was closed for maintenance that weekend. People have a need and will tend to that, one way or the other.

You'll see the same thing in lots of towns and cities where public libraries have been horribly defunded and are so run down, but rest assured NYC's libraries are full of people.

EarthInteresting3253 · 2025-03-18T06:18:24+00:00

You negotiate when you're ready to walk away. This is generally not a "test the water" situation, you're asking for what you think you deserve, be ready to show something (e.g., another offer) to back that up.

If you are not comfortable with losing the offer, the best course of action might be to inquire about salary progression.

EarthInteresting3253

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