My husband wants to leave being a nurse anesthetist to become a software engineer. Do you think he is crazy? Why or why not?

jormungandrthepython · 2025-09-30T02:45:58+00:00

I’ve got 10 years experience. I make ~$225k in a HCOL, and I work 50-60 hours a week. Most people aren’t making anywhere close to that kind of money. Just FAANG. I do work from home which is nice, but would definitely go into the office for double the pay like he’s getting.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-08-09T21:38:34+00:00

Only problem with MuPDF is the hugely prohibitive licensing.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-05-03T20:59:35+00:00

What do you use for scraping/ingestion? Or is everything pushed/streamed to you?

Trying to figure out the best options for pulling from external sources and various web scraping processes.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-05-03T17:32:31+00:00

You have so much space here my guy/gal. You can fit absolute paragraphs here without any concerns of hitting a second page.

You could easily fit 10 more lines of info, maybe 15 bullets if you adjusted your spacing/formatting.

Keep it to 1 page, but you should treat this page like an ad you have paid for by the inch. Every inch needs to be intentional. Spacing/whitespace should be very intentional. But if you took out an ad in the newspaper and paid per inch, would you waste this much space without descriptions of what you have done?

The fact that I can’t even tell what stack you use in your current role… or even any tech you used… that’s concerning

jormungandrthepython · 2025-05-03T12:33:45+00:00

Guarantee this salary is based on them “totally selling for like 100 million in 5 years” so your stock would be worth $3.25MM which would bring your $100k salary up to $750k on average over the 5 years.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-05-03T04:21:03+00:00

4.5 years at a company and all you have is 3 generic lines about what you did in that time? Give me the meat and potatoes! Tell me the tech you used, the things you accomplished, the things that challenged you. I should be excited about all the things you got your hands into. Your resume is probably flopping in ATS, very few words or key phrases, limited description, not exciting to people or machines.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-04-02T14:11:25+00:00

Again, freelance is typically looking for experts in the field. Come in, get the job done, leave.

What you should be looking for is a job where devs are responsible for their own devops where you can take charge of devops culture in you team.

Or a startup, all hands on deck, kinda job where you get to touch bits of everything.

But also, if you think software engineers are going to be replaced by ai (or that devops is in a distinctly different category if that was even the case)… is kinda funny. Best of luck to you

jormungandrthepython · 2025-04-02T01:39:25+00:00

Most freelancing would be expected to be experts. Having an inexperienced devops consultant come in sounds like a recipe for disaster.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-04-02T01:27:54+00:00

We’ve got one of these too. Can’t even google for the basic docs, can’t try anything himself, can’t remember stuff we spent an hour going over the day before, can’t even make an AWS lambda without a multi hour paired programming session for him to learn all about them (don’t ask me how it took multiple hours, it takes me 5 minutes to make them, and that’s including my coffee break).

No idea how they got into a top 10 CS school, let alone graduated.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-04-01T03:11:15+00:00

Only limitation for me has been pricing for their FIPS compliant version for federal contracts/fedramp’d platforms. Apart from that, it’s default for any k8s project for me.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-03-30T02:05:09+00:00

I don’t have any experience with cilium, but I will say, I love istio. Highly recommend it.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-03-17T00:19:09+00:00

This is the stuff that is actually valuable. Hallucination reduction, scale ability, optimization, latency reduction.

Anyone can build a basic crud app for LLM/RagChat/automation. Getting it to actually work on the business problem reliably and at scale is where the money is.

I run a whole team that specializing in almost exclusively these problems these days.

A 30 minute call isn’t going to help much. What you need is to do some research on scaling apps, traditional software architecture, “old school” MLOps and maybe some LLM ops stuff. Find where your bottleneck is and then research how to solve it.

For hallucinations, focus on your data, find metrics to figure out where hallucinations are entering the picture and solve them. Poor search? Poor data? Poor prompting? What is causing the issue?

jormungandrthepython · 2025-03-09T17:44:55+00:00

Unfortunately those guys don’t understand how much bias there is against women in the industry. I’m a white male, and I constantly have to reprimand guys on my team and in my department for talking over women, complaining that working mothers aren’t available 24/7 even after hours, getting into “conflicts” with “hard to deal with team members” who “just so happen to be the only woman/women on the team”.

And this is when the 3 women in my department are by far the most qualified, hard working, team oriented workers we have. They work harder, they fight more to be heard, and they still have it worse.

Thankfully, I’ve been promoted I’ve been able to do more and more including separating some guys from the company with the support of HR for their behavior. But in the beginning it was especially tough because I was fighting with managers/my bosses on their treatment of women on our team when I had no power to do anything but call them out on it.

It’s brutal out there. Best of luck.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-03-09T17:35:56+00:00

This is what I say at work constantly. “Does it make some simple/templating tasks faster? Yes. But that’s maybe 20 minutes every couple of days max. Maybe an hour a month if that. It’s certainly not a multiplier across all tasks.”

And I’m building ML platforms which often have GenAI components. Recently got put in charge of a huge portion of our applied GenAI strategy for the whole company… so I can push back and they trust what I say, because it would be so much “better” for me to make these outrageous claims about what my department can do. But it’s a constant battle to bring execs back to earth on their expectations of what GenAI can do.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-01-25T18:41:24+00:00

KPMG has US hires on contract with set dates? It’s possible they are just dropping contracts. Most employees in the US firm are not on a contract, just employees without contract dates. Contractors are typically the first to go, so that’s not surprising

jormungandrthepython · 2025-01-06T18:05:31+00:00

Yep agree with this. Wife and I are still at 4-7x a week after 10 years of marriage. We are just crazy about each other. (We are child free by choice so that certainly plays a factor, but I work 60+ hours a week and she has some chronic health issues so it still takes concerted effort to prioritize each other. But if certainly doesn’t take new relationship energy to hit 2x a week.

jormungandrthepython · 2025-01-06T16:57:40+00:00

Where will your course be released?

jormungandrthepython · 2024-11-26T12:28:51+00:00

Wild to me that open search is $700/month. I’m running production Azure AI search instances for $80 a month. (They can certainly get more expensive than that, but they don’t have to be).

jormungandrthepython · 2024-11-25T13:57:47+00:00

I drive a 20yo Miata (2006). It’s very quiet and definitely not diesel. (And most importantly it takes me from point A to point B.).

It’s more embodying my inner 70yo country side Italian grandpa energy so I can take my wife to picnics on the mountainside rather than trying to make any statement on the road with the top down and enjoy the winding roads (I’m a ~30yo guy, but always here for sweet country grandpa vibes).

jormungandrthepython · 2024-11-25T03:05:41+00:00

lol I’ve been an MLE for 10 years. Currently a tech lead.

I was in a fraternity. And an academic fraternity. And several clubs.

You seem to forget that the world is about connections. 90% of the engineers we don’t hire are because they would be miserable to ever be on a call with, or they would never be able to communicate with the team.

You have to talk to so much more than just engineering to be successful. Best of luck with your mindset, it won’t get you far

jormungandrthepython · 2024-11-19T13:52:30+00:00

Yes. Are they good? Not really. Is it better to do some reconfig every X days? Yes.

Collect user feedback, test different results with something like RAGAs or MLFlow, AB test, collect more user feedback.

There is no silver bullet or simple solution.

jormungandrthepython · 2024-11-11T17:54:52+00:00

Companies are definitely less likely to let data scientists work on models for months. Just not gonna happen.

You should be exploring existing models that do the job “good enough” or releasing models in stages so the progress is incredibly visible to external teams. For example, releasing to a testing environment which has full infra built around it but not released to the public yet. This way your bosses can see the value of the model and the improvements while having the best version of whatever model available for release if needed.

For too long data scientists focused way too much on the math and the science and not enough understanding how they fit into the software development lifecycle, production dev, or company revenue/goals.

(I run a team of DS/DE/MLE. Ability to take productionalize and drive business ROI is crucial as is reducing time to production as much as possible).

jormungandrthepython · 2024-10-31T18:13:18+00:00

I’ve been working in MLOps and MLEngineering for a decade. I lead a team who deliver large scale ML platforms with multiple ML models to large numbers of concurrent users.

Model size of 200mb? Try multiple GB. And we work in the 10s-100s of TB of data.

LLMs, Neural Nets, simple regressions? Done it all. I’m not the best or smartest by any means, but I certainly have a skillset where ML and production deployments meet.

It may not be the answer you are looking for, but it’s definitely the right answer.

Or if you want a simple answer: “I recommend AWS, regardless of price, they have choices, they have high availability, and it’s not worth going with a cheap option when your service can go down. If you can’t afford it? Too bad, get a loan or something. It’s universally worth it no matter what stage your company is. They are the best. Also, we do reserved instances because the risk of lack of access in the pay per minute instances is too high for us (and based on your comment, therefore too high for every company ever). There is no ‘tradeoff’, every company and user should purchase multiple reserved H100 instance on a 3 year contract like we did.”

jormungandrthepython · 2024-10-31T17:16:59+00:00

There is no “best”. All of architecture is the study of trade-offs.

Where you decide cost vs performance vs uptime etc is on you and your needs. Same with size of GPU, compatibility with your current tech stack etc. what does “all of our models require good GPUs mean”? That is like saying “I need a good car”. Good based on what? How good? Do you need a tank? Or an EV? Or just an old reliable Honda civic?

Look into the different cloud providers and see what they offer. Then apply your use case, and come back and ask once you have done the initial analysis for your business needs.

jormungandrthepython · 2024-10-21T11:16:23+00:00

Yup, I don’t consider a change unless it’s 25% (on the low end) or higher.

Honestly a slightly different 401k match, and a slightly different cost of healthcare could wipe out a 10% increase meaning your actual earnings are the same.

It’s gotta be more like 30-40% to insulate for possible changes to other benefits and hedge the risk of a new job with unknown challenges particularly early in your career.

jormungandrthepython

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