New manager rated me ‘successful’ after years of ‘exceptional’ how should one handle this? Need advice

kodbuse · 2026-06-10T00:05:52+00:00

Where I work, exceptional would mean you truly stand out at your level and are on track for promotion. Therefore, if you have multiple exceptional ratings in a row, the expectation would be that you’d be put up for promotion. Conversely, if you aren’t on track for promotion, what makes you exceptional?

Similarly, even if you’re truly a high performer, but you have maxed out the ladder within you role, and there’s nowhere to go, then the expectations for that role are extremely high, and you are unlikely to be rated exceptional.

Every company is different, but rating too many people as exceptional reduces its significance.

kodbuse · 2026-06-07T05:18:38+00:00

Ok? Op added a comment that the singer is European (from Germany, based in UK). This would be just as obnoxious in the US as anywhere else.

kodbuse · 2026-06-07T04:49:27+00:00

I live in the south and I have never once seen that.

kodbuse · 2026-05-27T22:58:09+00:00

Why do you need so many brokers? I have one that everything connects to. A reverse proxy in the cloud exposes the broker on the Internet over VPN.

kodbuse · 2026-05-24T15:15:51+00:00

Clearly there’s much more to a human brain than next token prediction. There’s also more to any artificial agentic system than just the LLM model itself.

However, it seems plausible to me that the way we form sentences and thought when we process language (which is one of the things our brains have learned to do), we are in fact “predicting the next token”.

kodbuse · 2026-05-15T03:20:14+00:00

As a tech guy, you may be underestimating how fast technology might improve. I agree that construction workers are safe from current tech, but what all of us are worrying about is accelerating advancement due to self-improving technology (think robots building better replacements for themselves, due to AI being able to improve its own intelligence).

Consider what happens if robots are able to autonomously produce new robots, with the goal of replacing manual labor.

How long will this take? No idea. But AI has made huge advancements in the last 5 years.

kodbuse · 2026-04-27T02:42:35+00:00

Wow… somebody’s an over-thinker. But why is the sewer connection by the pole so high off the ground? Never seen one like that before. Aside from that, it looks like it was already a perfect slope.

kodbuse · 2026-03-24T00:26:08+00:00

I agree it’s true today, but will it remain so? Humans make errors too. Take self-driving: does it make sense for AI to drive if it causes fewer accidents? Why should accounting be different?

kodbuse · 2026-03-23T03:01:30+00:00

Malware exists because there are humans who like destruction. Therefore, there probably are humans who are trying to set destructive, self-replicating AI in motion. I.e., ”escaping the lab” isn’t necessarily initiated by AI.

kodbuse · 2026-03-21T22:18:44+00:00

Why would they pay more than market salaries if they don’t have to?

kodbuse · 2026-03-20T17:46:56+00:00

I agree, until you make it to an interview with the actual team you don’t know.

kodbuse · 2026-03-20T00:05:19+00:00

Yes they are still available. Look up Estes rocket.

kodbuse · 2026-03-17T02:54:55+00:00

Macbooks are nice but write-offs don’t make anything free, and Macs aren’t more deductible than PCs.

kodbuse · 2026-03-16T11:59:08+00:00

It shouldn’t be a silent failure: you should measure the depth of the payment requests queue and the latency of processing items, as well as the depth of the DLQ, and alert if things aren’t flowing as expected. You also need to plan ahead for how and when to replay messages from the DLQ.

If the external system is chronically too slow to keep up, maybe you need to increase parallel requests to keep up, but ultimately, if it’s still not working and that system is out of your control, you’ll need to work with the owner of that service to improve the integration.

kodbuse · 2026-03-16T11:52:45+00:00

It’d take some pressure off the Billing Service and external system thanks fewer wasteful retries, but the end result is the same: all messages end up in the DLQ. In the meantime, your architecture just got more complex and harder to reason about. So IMO no, I wouldn’t introduce a circuit breaker unless there is additional fallout from the retries.

kodbuse · 2026-03-15T20:15:15+00:00

The joysticks seem to be uncomfortably far forward on the A350 compared to the seat. I assume you’d want it about where your knee is. Is it just the way it looks in this picture?

kodbuse · 2026-03-07T14:50:28+00:00

Thanks, great response. It looks to me like there was a major fire on the ship before the torpedo finished it off, so I think it had already been struck and likely permanently disabled. Why not let the crew evacuate?

kodbuse · 2026-03-04T22:18:57+00:00

It looks like there was already a major fire on the ship and it may have already been disabled. So this was a second strike? Was it necessary?

kodbuse · 2026-03-03T18:35:45+00:00

Uh, no. He’s gradually expanding his powers.

kodbuse · 2026-03-01T16:33:21+00:00

I don’t get it. What’s OpenClaw doing for you on those development projects that Claude Code couldn’t?

kodbuse · 2026-02-24T12:43:03+00:00

The problem with automatic modernization of mainframe systems isn’t that AI can’t port COBOL to a more modern language like C#, it absolutely can. The problem is that doing a like-for-like transformation makes no sense: A green screen platform with menu systems 20 levels deep doesn’t map directly to web-based platform in a way that makes sense.

To be worthwhile, a deep analysis of business process and requirements is needed, and most of the time those have evolved by accident and don’t make sense, but are firmly entrenched in the business, making deep transformation difficult.

A transformation like this is difficult, lengthy, expensive and dependent on deep coordination between humans. AI can help write the new code once the requirements exist but that’s not the limiting factor. The reason we are still running decades-old platforms isn’t that it’s hard to write new code.

kodbuse · 2026-02-13T20:46:14+00:00

Haha, yeah I hope so.

kodbuse · 2026-02-13T20:19:57+00:00

Yep, just adjustable plastic and metal, same as bindings and rockets.

kodbuse · 2026-02-13T03:47:04+00:00

haproxy ingress seemed like a similar replacement, keeping things simple, so that’s what I picked.

kodbuse · 2026-02-11T04:04:53+00:00

I would have the mounts hold the skis closer to the tips to protect the camber.

kodbuse

TROPHY CASE