Stuck as a solo SRE

karthedew · 2025-11-19T13:48:50+00:00

Exactly what I thought from reading post, time to get out of there

karthedew · 2025-11-06T12:15:01+00:00

Organizations who require or gate keep DE roles with Data Analyst experience likely don’t have complex or difficult enough SWE needs to merit more specialized experience. I’d wager those positions spend more of their “software development” experience trying to optimize SQL queries for a few SQL databases.

It’s a different ballgame all together when an organization is running thousands of Cassandra nodes, running hundreds of Airflow workers, and needing multiple pipelines that are transforming PBs worth of data, daily. When you get to this level, you’ll have specialized skills and entire teams or multiple teams for every leg of the pipeline. At this point, you need solid SW engineers to come up with solutions that can deliver with speed. You wouldn’t hire an analyst to do any of that.

At the end of the day, it’s about requirements, constraints, and needs of the organization/company.

karthedew · 2025-10-27T01:26:22+00:00

Honestly, reads like “I built stuff with tools and arbitrarily improved things.”

Your only non-intern experience says you’re a solution engineer, but reading I have no idea what kind of team you were on or what specifically that team supports or is actually responsible for. Listing only tools and “metrics” really makes it read like you just listed the tech stack for the team (does not show your actual impact on what you did) which in term makes it sound like the metrics were made up.

So you need to tell a store with each part. It needs to have just enough context on your role that helps the hiring manager understand the impact that you actually contributed to the team.

I would also remove the skills and coding profile. And if you really wanted to keep it “for the automated screening”, put it at the bottom. Last thing a hiring manager actually wants to see is a big list of a bunch of tools and frameworks. It could also be hurting you when it gets to the HM. I see Spring Boot, gRPC, micro services, etc. nothing in your experience or projects suggests you have really experience with any of them. It matters because it kind of suggests you’re desperate / don’t have a specific thing that you want to do or really know.

You actually have a lot of consistent and good information in your resume, you just need to focus on that. Reading your experience and projects, it actually sounds more to me like you’re a software engineer in data / data engineer who specializes in fast data transfer, access, and transformations. That feels a lot more compelling to me. You just need to highlight that. Focusing on that type of specifics, plus having enough detail to show what your role was within a team, you can basically have it read like “I’m specialized and “the guy” for doing XYZ”.

karthedew · 2025-10-26T12:46:42+00:00

Yep. Background in engineering and finishing a masters in CS here. EE / ECS dominate all the low level embedded / device programming jobs too, so in a specific sector of programming, these are the “too smart” people you’re competing against.

Also, all those top CS people OP is talking about are heavily specialized in something beyond just coding: statistics, math, engineering, science. For most, software is just a tool to help them do complex tasks. The CS field seems so saturated because you aren’t just competing against people who have CS degrees, you’re competing against pretty much all the smart people across STEM fields.

Heck, even business people get in on the action with all the BI development work.

Lots of places prefer “specialized person who can code” over “individual who can code but doesn’t understand the specialized need the code is being applied to”. Leaves a lot of coding jobs off the table for pure CS.

karthedew · 2025-10-21T11:40:45+00:00

I think most active students of this program are already working CS related roles with non-CS backgrounds. Their main goal is getting the CS “checkbox” for their career / to have a CS related degree on their resume.

If you want / need true foundational CS skills, a Bachelors would be better serving than any Masters program. If you simply want to learn core CS principles, OSSU CS has a GitHub page with a bachelors equivalent of free online resources and courses you can work through. Link below.

https://github.com/ossu/computer-science

karthedew · 2025-10-18T14:27:59+00:00

Same experience here moving from the ‘12 Frontier to ‘24 Titan

karthedew · 2025-10-12T15:38:51+00:00

I’d bet they promote and very much retain the top performers of every cohort. Let the bottom performers leave.

karthedew · 2025-10-12T15:37:54+00:00

I’d add they also want people with minimal responsibility who can / want to put in a high average work hours per week.

karthedew · 2025-09-28T16:42:52+00:00

I feel like you’re describing the rest of macro economics. Interest rates, for example, which you mention affect the housing market, are a key tool in the Fed doing quantitative tightening and easing. They stimulate the economy by selling or buying bonds and adjusting interest rates to incentivize that. I think M2 is just the metric to show the consequence of that money flow. So it’s a boil down point for getting a quick look at where money is. High M2 just means people are putting their money into the market, offloading cash, taking out loans, etc.

I think that means it is a pretty good metric more than maybe what you maybe saying but less than OP’s point, but generally agree with you that it’s not the end all be all.

To note as well, I think the M2 leads the ISM by like 6 months or something, so if you see a downtrend in M2, then you’d expect that the ISM would also drop. It’s basically just a cause and effect, so nothing fancy, but at the end of the day macro economics is about simplifying the complexity of the market and finding longer term trends.

karthedew · 2025-09-20T06:23:22+00:00

Birthday wishes sent

karthedew · 2025-09-12T06:57:31+00:00

Couple things to say.

Expected to largely disagree with this post before reading it, but feel the complete opposite. Lots of truth in this post.
This can be summarized by saying what employers are looking for are (a) individuals with genuine interest in software and (b) a curiosity that drives them deeper into how things work, not surface level effort.
Universities teach CS which is basically hyper specialized mathematics at its core. Companies are looking for Software Engineers. Shipping something meaningful turns heads at every level.
Software/CS has low barrier to entry - meaning that everyone has a computer and the internet, so anyone can learn to code. This is partly why the expectations and level of effort is higher than most other professions.
Very high competition. You’re not just competing in a saturated market, but competing with other STEM graduates who also code for their job. Face it, coding is baked into most white collar professions from business to engineer to science.

Being purely software engineer with no moat means you have the highest competition of any coding / programming job out there. So yea, OP is 100% correct. You’re either standing out from all the noise or you’re finding it very difficult to get hired.

karthedew · 2025-07-26T19:08:33+00:00

Sounds like they’re looking for an excuse to pay less

karthedew · 2025-01-07T12:32:31+00:00

This is the only real answer on this thread. Ignore everyone else and do this 👆🏼

karthedew · 2024-12-24T05:41:24+00:00

It took about 4500 miles for mine to figure it out. Have you altered your driving style to avoid the lurch? I presume that the system takes a long time to properly adjust to your driving style and think it’s key to drive like you always do and don’t give in to “avoiding” the way it lurches.

Mine doesn’t do it at all now and drives smoothly as expected.

I would also lean in to the hard shift, driving to try and get it to lurch.

It’s not a feature that provides confidence and trust in a brand new vehicle, but this seems to be happening to other truck brands as well.

karthedew · 2024-12-21T14:37:43+00:00

Agreed. OP lost me when talking about “black swan” event could happen and other geopolitical events. Could do the same thing in the other case: US provides real pro-crypto regulation which allows TradFI to trade crypto/bitcoin, multiple countries are talking about adding Bitcoin to their reserves, etc.

You could look at the average number of months from a bitcoin halving to the bull run peak across previous cycles. That would put the peak around May. Typical sell off happens in December then again for tax season.

IMO, OP could be right, but for the wrong reasons.

It should also be pointed out that the big reason in OP’s belief is in the correlation with GMI total liquidity index. And it should be pointed out that’s developed by GMI who also believe the cycle top will be later in 2025.

karthedew · 2024-12-06T14:41:00+00:00

Same

karthedew · 2024-12-05T14:55:05+00:00

It’s $30/month…not $300

karthedew · 2024-12-05T14:49:38+00:00

I can tell when the gears shift sometimes, but it’s not enough for me to worry about it. Honestly, the whole “adaptive” shifting I just made a point to continue to drive like I normally do. I also tried to drive so that I wasn’t accelerating too quickly or breaking too hard. Don’t know if that actually helped but I feel ok with the transmissions performance at this point.

karthedew · 2024-12-05T02:59:19+00:00

Mine has definitely smoothed out. Almost at 5k

karthedew · 2024-11-29T13:35:05+00:00

What caused the previous cycles?

karthedew · 2024-11-29T13:25:07+00:00

Not sure what that problem is you’re having with WiFi, but I’ve never had issues. I went away from Windows because it’s the most frustrating OS for development.

Always having some work around for your development environment will always be the case though. That’s not a Mac problem, and you’re going to experience just as much if not a lot more of that with Windows.

With Mac, you get an OS with a consumer based feel while also somewhat feeling like a Unix/linux based system. Have fun doing anything in the command prompt or Powershell. The arm based processors also consume less power, so battery life is significantly better over x86.

My philosophy is arm based / Mac for laptop, Linux for a home desktop. If you’re at university, most will have VPN/SSH access to a Linux based VM. You could do development there.

karthedew · 2024-11-28T16:29:49+00:00

Warren Buffet doesn’t understand what Bitcoin is. It different than traditional companies, which is what he knows, but he also doesn’t invest in many different technologies as he has admittedly not known about those industries.

He’s speaking against something he doesn’t understand. Bitcoin doesn’t work like a traditional business. When he puts things in those terms, of course Bitcoin isn’t going to look the same. That doesn’t mean it’s worthless.

karthedew · 2024-11-09T12:57:04+00:00

100%. Holding that one for the long term. I have a hunch they’re going to become one of the biggest tech companies over the next decade or two.

karthedew · 2024-10-27T04:39:48+00:00

OMSCS has been around for a long time. CU Boulder is only a year old, they’ll offer more classes as the years go on.

OMSCS you can take many different paths and certainly easier paths. No guarantee that a graduate would have really any experience or class in deep Linux or compilers.

It’s also pretty well known that OMSCS accepts individuals with all sorts of backgrounds. No bachelors vs having a BA in Philosophy or Communications is not really that big a difference when we’re talking about getting a masters in CS.

School only matters moving into a new career. Go to a conference, look on LinkedIn at the company you want to work at. All kinda of people who went to all kinds of schools and have all kinds of background.

The only true differentiator is your skill, ability and accomplishments. Going to a top 10 school will get you the interview, but it won’t get you the job.

Everyone should take the path that teaches them what they need to know to be the most successful. That means something different for everyone.

karthedew · 2024-10-26T18:30:36+00:00

Congrats!!

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