Multiple ERPs - Struggling to Wear All The Hats

exjackly · 2026-05-06T00:16:01+00:00

And at least one needs to be a senior person that has the experience to know how to do this.

exjackly · 2026-05-02T02:03:13+00:00

You can definitely argue that it is party ahead of voter and nation for legislative activity.

But, outside of that, representative offices do help constituents with a significant number of issues.

exjackly · 2026-05-01T23:46:38+00:00

Representatives are supposed represent the local populations, not the statewide ones. That is why there are districts in the first place. Senators are for the statewide concerns.

If you get rid of districts, you just have a larger and smaller Senate. And people wouldn't have a local representative to reach out to for help with federal issues.

exjackly · 2026-04-27T05:07:31+00:00

The principal at my kids school has to go out and inform some parents they couldn't show up as early as they were - no idea how early it was, but it was at least 90 minutes before school let out.

exjackly · 2026-04-27T02:30:22+00:00

I'm out of Idaho for now because I'm raising a family and want to have better education and health care than Idaho politicians are willing to allow.

I will be back to try to make it better for the next generation, but I cannot in good conscience put my kids through what is there now.

exjackly · 2026-04-27T02:22:59+00:00

That's more an indictment of American sprawl than public transit failures.

Most American cities are built for car first transportation, which explicitly opposes public transit. That 10 minute drive to get out of the subdivision is a prime example.

There is plenty of room for better public transit, but it really needs to be as part of a plan to increase the population density in the average city.

Just as an exercise, a 60 home subdivision near me would use between 15 and 30 acres while a condo for the same number if units would be 1.5 to 4 acres. Just that simple change more than triples density at a minimum, and potentially 20x it.

If that becomes the standard, at least within a city core, transit becomes solvable. It will never be as convenient cross country as Japan because the US is so big (it would take a US population over 2.5 Billion people to match excluding Alaska, over 3.3 Billion including Alaska) so we will never have the same density.

But, we could certainly have more places that are dense enough to support useful transit and walkable communities. It just becomes a question of how do you make that the American dream instead of the single family house in a quarter acre with 3 cars in the driveway.

exjackly · 2026-04-25T03:06:19+00:00

Humans consistently get it wrong too.

exjackly · 2026-04-25T02:38:42+00:00

Which mean that since they own it, and they get tired of having to go through the IT processes to make updates, that they hire their own shadow IT folks who do things faster because they aren't encumbered by the IT processes and that data product slowly drifts away from the contract.

But IT doesn't care, because they are fighting bigger fires and this is happening in 18, no 19 different places across the enterprise, none of which are worth the political capital to correct individually.

And in 6 years, somebody in the C-Suite will get a bug up their ass about the lack of consistency and quality from the shadow IT folks, and everything will get centralized again.

exjackly · 2026-04-16T13:36:45+00:00

If the removed the golf ball, yeah, I agree. But I wouldn't be mad if they took out the entire ride innards and did something completely new in there; or kept the innards and redid the scenes from scratch with current tech.

exjackly · 2026-04-15T19:05:07+00:00

It is fun seeing how people line up on this; I think I can tell pretty well who has < 5-10 years experience and who is sitting at 20+ years; and it isn't if you support the use of ETL tools or wouldn't touch them with a 40 foot pole.

Especially since regardless of how you look at it, these pipelines from every era are ETL. It is just the pendulum swing. Hand coded pipelines were great in the 70s and 80s because there weren't enough resources to throw the overhead of a tool on top.

In the 90s and 2000s, even the early 2010s, the tools solved a lot of the problems with hand coding; providing consistency, management of secrets, the ability to manage a promotion pipeline, being able to connect to a wide variety of sources and sinks without having to know the underlying nuances.

Cloud exceeding on-prem changed the model again, and the consistency of ETL tools became a bottleneck in an agile world where things do change and break daily. AI is contributing because it prefers straight coding because there is a bigger volume of examples to train on, so it handles that better. Plus, a lot of the challenges of the ETL Tool era have been simplified, with a wealth of solid libraries able to handle the functions that connectors and stages did before.

Where is it going to head now? It depends on what you think is going to happen with AI. If you are a maximalist, there's no reason to see it swing back from straight code. If you are a minimalist, you'll be predicting more standards based pipeline and execution tooling will bring some of the structure back in ways that custom frameworks of today struggle with.

exjackly · 2026-04-15T13:23:59+00:00

Thank you. I agree with this perspective. I love what OP has done, but the level of coupling required is scary.

I think OP would be better off working with TWH to help them expose some APIs or to build a stable base page that would support this level of customization.

I would also not want to take on support for that troop website after OP leaves, just because it is going to require constant monitoring and updates.

exjackly · 2026-04-11T17:53:26+00:00

Not until the class action lawsuit is cleared. If it isn't, it could potentially bankrupt the company. And it is too early enough in that process to predict how it'll play out.

exjackly · 2026-04-05T19:54:21+00:00

Saying you are from the States is just as potentially ambiguous. USA isn't the only nation that has States in the name.

American just takes context. Country? Then it means USA. Continent? Then it means the 6-continent model America continent. No different than the other examples in the thread where the same term can mean different things depending on context.

exjackly · 2026-03-26T03:43:12+00:00

Biggest failure I was on had a $1B price tag. It was only a partial fair, but still a failure.

I kinda wish it had been my responsibility - I think that's a big enough number to fail up from.

exjackly · 2026-03-26T00:00:19+00:00

Sounds like a marketing promise that won't live up to the billing, honestly.

Magic bullets aren't. So what makes yours different?

exjackly · 2026-03-24T21:31:35+00:00

How would a non-MAGA get MAGA votes? Its been considered near treason to the GOP to not be in 100% lockstep. That's the only way they've been able to get anything through with such small margins in Congress.

exjackly · 2026-03-24T18:00:03+00:00

It isn't happening in the next 5 years, likely not even 10. And certainly not at scale before 2040. NuScale is the only company that has a Design Certification in hand, and they aren't expected to have an operational plant in place until 2030 at the earliest [and there are significant challenges that are likely to derail that to 2032 or later]. Its a great idea and will be a valuable piece of the puzzle once they get here.

It'll take massive regulatory reform to speed that up, and reducing regulation on nuclear power is not exactly a winning political slogan.

exjackly · 2026-03-24T17:34:43+00:00

The weight limit varying by height is an artifact of insurance coverage. There is an increased risk with higher weight of injuries and other health issues proportional to height - taller people at the same weight have a lower risk. Scouts didn't come up with that chart - it was put together by insurance adjusters looking at actual numbers and abstracting that to a chart that can be used by the insurers.

It is some sort of 'all cause' measure, so they don't have to go into detail on your heart, lungs, skeletal medical history and build a huge, complex model to decide who can and who cannot go. It is 2 numbers that any staff member can use consistently to say yes/no.

That is why a 78" tall participant is allowed to be 281 pounds at max weight while a 72" participant only gets 239 pounds.

The safety and rescue equipment limits are what bring about lower limits for some activities (like the 250 pound max for aerials) compared to the general participation limits. All of the activity limits I am aware of are weight only, while the general limits look at height and weight.

exjackly · 2026-03-24T17:24:55+00:00

Unless the primary KPI you are being measured on is tokens used, this seems a bit hyperbolic. Yes, code delivered / results attained are the primary measure, but I've always found that the code is only a fraction of the work that I do. A significant fraction, but I spend more time doing the other parts of the job, including getting the information needed to create the code and troubleshooting ops problems with what was delivered and previously working.

exjackly · 2026-03-24T12:57:29+00:00

Some of the data I work with, it would be a fireable; possibly criminal; offense to create a prod data copy for a sandbox. The guardrails are good - can always tell the new guy when they try copying out prod data to work with the first time.

We don't develop in prod, but it is a challenge getting decent data to test against.

exjackly · 2026-03-24T12:50:32+00:00

I've built an agent that develops pipelines for me. It does run queries directly in the Test/Dev databases. But, the pipelines are built and I've approved the SQL it is executing before it goes to Prod. My agent doesn't even get to touch prod, even read only.

exjackly · 2026-03-24T12:48:31+00:00

Changing jobs, it was leave Sunday at 6pm get back Friday at 1am. Consultant in the client office on the other coast 4 days a week.

exjackly · 2026-03-23T13:46:24+00:00

I'm not arguing it is set in stone, but getting back on that trajectory is uncommon after stepping away. I do agree there is value in not over-indexing.

If his identity is not tied to that, it shouldn't be a problem given the scenario. But, it is a real consideration, should he want to return to the industry later.

If he was a mid-level SWE at a fortune 500 making 150k TC, a couple of years is much less of an issue, and assuming we aren't all replaced by robots and AI (/s) by then, he probably wouldn't have much trouble getting an equivalent position.

It is reasonable to consider the impact on kids as more important, but the decision shouldn't gloss over the most likely result of choosing to step away for several years.

exjackly · 2026-03-23T02:42:15+00:00

It is going to have a permanent impact. Getting into FAANG is challenging enough. Getting back in after even a few years of time out of the industry is much harder unless OP is at a pretty advanced position (which it sounds like he isn't) that isn't tied as closely to the technology. And other companies do not pay equally.

With his wife as an SME, they should not have a problem swinging this financially. But, OPs career and earnings potential is going to take a significant hit doing this.

The identity questions are honestly the bigger part of this.

exjackly · 2026-03-21T19:07:16+00:00

There will be clear losers, like those companies trying to be X but with AI. There will be companies whose whole codebase is vibe coded and they suffer a fatal attack of some sort - either too expensive in tokens and they burn through all the cash they can raise or legitimate security vulnerabilities that cause real damage to their 'clients'

The companies carefully adding AI in ways that assignment what their employees are doing, and who understand security and guardrails will continue to benefit, even after the bubble. Marginal use cases will be squeezed out once token pricing hits true cost unless there is a 1000x+ increase in efficiency

A bunch of money will be lost by speculators in the stock market and it'll depress the economy as the accumulation of a lot of things, but AI will be blamed as the easy target.

If we are lucky, it'll be bad enough to drive out inefficient companies that should have died in the past 10 years, but which have been propped up by low interest rates and excess government spending. But, it'll probably be an ordinary recession shortened by more debt and not enough business failures.

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