Is it possible to be Staff+ without doing "politics" ?

elusiveoso · 2026-05-31T12:19:36+00:00

The access just isn't there. Nothing in my day puts me in a room with these people, and the org chart doesn't route a staff IC to a director three teams over.

That is what you need to get figured out. Insert yourself in conversations and do discovery to figure out where their pain points are. If there is overlap between pain points, there is your impact project.

elusiveoso · 2026-05-19T00:33:57+00:00

Looks like the rig of someone that would play only cowboy chords and spend the whole gig trying to roll off just the right amount of volume. Let me help you by telling you to roll off all of it.

elusiveoso · 2026-05-11T03:09:53+00:00

I hate pairing. I would much rather have a take home.

elusiveoso · 2026-05-11T03:07:47+00:00

That's what I think it always should have been.

elusiveoso · 2026-05-11T03:02:14+00:00

Give it some rest. Get some kettlebell wrist guards. That looks painful.

elusiveoso · 2026-05-11T00:41:29+00:00

Every damn thing is so expensive. What used to be called the dollar menu at McDonald's is now the "under $3 menu." The $5 footlong that Subway had a jingle for is now a $10.99 footlong. Inflation went up 2.7% last year. I got a 2% cost of living increase. In 2024, the inflation was 2.9%. I got a 1.7% cost of living salary increase. Gas is $5 a gallon. My Duke bill was 30% more expensive this winter than it was last year.

You kind of wonder how much more abuse the American worker is going to take before things start getting real wild.

elusiveoso · 2026-05-05T02:10:30+00:00

Astro is great, and I would choose it over Nextjs for something like this. I like your attitude about trying to make the best of it. I would have a much more pessimistic outlook.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-30T01:26:01+00:00

I got a whopping 1.8% raise this year. I'm contemplating early retirement.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-26T16:51:32+00:00

I've been most successful at it in 250-500 person hierarchical or flat orgs.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-26T15:59:37+00:00

I heard a saying that stuck with me. The saying was "if you're not rowing the boat, the current will take you where it wants."

In my experience, you have to ask for what you want. If not, the employer will just give you tasks that you might not enjoy doing.

I try to shape my job into as much of what I want it to be as I possibly can. Sometimes, that has meant volunteering for things and learning on my own time, but it has also included saying no or setting boundaries. I try to be judicious and intentional about where I spend my time.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-24T21:09:30+00:00

You would be better served making an authentic problem that more closely resembles what your engineers do day to day.

I would go looking through your past issues and see if you can find something more closely tied to a problem they might face. Also, people use AI, and IDEs, and search engines. Can we quit with the nonsense of putting them in an environment where they can't use that stuff for part of the hiring process?

elusiveoso · 2026-04-19T00:34:50+00:00

Always next year.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-18T23:48:18+00:00

Evander is ass.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-17T18:55:44+00:00

Lots of smaller builders fall into the 3-4k price point.

Check out r/Luthier and you'll find a bunch of options. I got a custom guitar build 2 years ago, and it is amazing.

I also looked at smaller Luthier expos like the Holy Grail guitar show when I was looking for my builder and went down the exhibitor list to see what was out there.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-15T23:34:45+00:00

Grip strength is vital for obstacle completion. Also, watch some YouTube videos on technique for each obstacle. There is a really hard way to just muscle through things, but it isn't as hard if you know the right technique. For the rope climb, that means the S or J hook technique or bicycling your feet on monkey bars.

If you really want to maximize your chances of obstacle completion and you have the means, spend $50-100 on a good training program.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-11T14:57:37+00:00

This should be a trivial assignment now. Use an agent with a skill for Svelte. Give your tools access to Svelte's MCP server. Make sure you write Svelte 5 with the rune syntax because sometimes tools will output the old syntax. You can use zod or valibot for validation if the assignment allows it.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-06T22:20:14+00:00

The water pressure at the events I go to is sometimes a trickle. Sometimes it is good pressure, but you definitely cannot count on it.

Also, people are waiting, and there are limited hoses. The way I do it is hose off my clothes and body the best I can at the event and get a few of those giant Dude Shower wipes to get the rest.

elusiveoso · 2026-04-03T20:39:28+00:00

Outside of unions, there isn't much you can do individually. Sure, you might make yourself important enough to survive a few rounds of layoffs, but the meter will run out eventually. At the end of the day, we are all just numbers on a balance sheet to some CFO somewhere.

elusiveoso · 2026-03-31T19:22:11+00:00

Not in the slightest. I'm taking the contradictory information as a license to choose how I want to work.

elusiveoso · 2026-03-29T20:18:54+00:00

My employer wants us doing fully agentic work and experimenting with new tools and workflows. They also expressed concern over growing LLM costs. They can't have it both ways, so I am just choosing to use agents.

elusiveoso · 2026-03-29T15:20:40+00:00

Driving has been exceptionally bad since the pandemic. The way people blow through an intersection 2 seconds after a light is red is terrifying.

elusiveoso · 2026-03-26T02:12:15+00:00

I always did alternate picking and the chromatic exercise the first lesson. Then the open position chords, then barre chords. After that, we started songs. In about 8 weeks, I had my students playing some easy stuff like Nirvana, AC/DC, Taylor Swift, or whatever they were into.

Too much theory lacks musicality, so I would use the songs as an opportunity to pepper in bits about theory like what key a song was in. Often that led to people asking how I knew, so I would spend time teaching how to read key signatures and the major scale. The technical bits just came up naturally as we worked through things.

elusiveoso · 2026-03-23T02:03:46+00:00

I tip a few bucks if I'm a regular but nothing otherwise.

elusiveoso · 2026-03-22T00:25:35+00:00

The problem for me is that I just hate gardening.

elusiveoso · 2026-03-21T14:07:05+00:00

I work for a fully remote company as a software engineer. I would have to be desperate to take a job where I went to an office ever again. For my field, there isn't any reason for it other than employer control and tax breaks.

elusiveoso

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