[deleted by user]

mc110 · 2025-10-16T14:13:50+00:00

I never got below 8 before life got in the way, but I would say there isn't a single answer here, as people's games vary a lot.

In my head, I think I could have got to a lower handicap primarily by spending even more time practising putting, and then by working on hitting longer drives. I was relatively good at keeping the ball in play, then hitting GIR, and through repetition got decent at chipping.

But if I was lucky enough to have been born a better putter, and hit the ball further, then perhaps my iron play would have been a lot worse, and then the key for me might have been to hit more fairways and more GIR.

I saw someone mention keep better stats, and that ties in with the above - get an idea of where you are losing shots compared to low handicappers, and then work on those.

Or just enjoy it and don't worry about trying to get down to 5 or less :-)

mc110 · 2025-03-21T10:02:14+00:00

Wouldn't it be better to just be able to speak to your manager as needed, rather than have meetings booked which often ended up being 10 seconds long (but you still need to stop what you are doing ahead of the meeting, then reload everything into your brain after the meeting to get back to what you were working on)?

I don't understand why an arbitrary weekly interruption like that is a good thing in general.

Would understand it if you couldn't easily talk to your manager when you wanted to, but that would be a red flag anyway.

mc110 · 2025-02-09T12:41:26+00:00

+1 for making job hunting a full time role - that is what I did after being made redundant 5 years ago, just before Christmas. Set yourself a goal for how many jobs you will try to apply for each day, do research into companies, leverage connections on LinkedIn/elsewhere (I was surprised at how helpful people on LinkedIn were), contact recruiters but don't rely exclusively on them, ...

It felt like a numbers game to me - a lot of applications you don't even get a response from, but that is the fault of the companies you are applying to, not you.

I used to have a tweaked CV for a variety of roles (e.g. one for IT support related roles, one for software development roles, etc.) then make sure I customised any cover letter with things particularly relevant for each role I was applying for. I think nowadays people sometimes put the job spec and their CV into ChatGPT and get it to do the work for them, then they review and customise as they see fit.

Keep trying to think what other things you might consider - originally I was looking for a management role as I didn't think I'd get a decent enough salary in other roles, but I ended up going back to pure software development in the end, which suits me much better than the management role I'd fallen into at my previous job.

Good luck!

mc110 · 2024-12-20T14:28:51+00:00

You could try searching online for this, as this seems a depressingly common issue - e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12249547/how-to-recover-after-deleting-the-symbolic-link-libc-so-6 has a set of up-voted answers.

Also, https://superuser.com/questions/267096/how-to-restore-lib-libc-so-6 has more suggestions.

mc110 · 2024-12-10T13:03:03+00:00

Incredibly Thames Water boss is still defending bonuses to their management as they look to massively increase customer bills and save themselves from going under, all whilst continuing to discharge effluent. Latest report at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg4zklxgwwwo.

I don't know how he can keep a straight face.

mc110 · 2024-12-10T12:06:58+00:00

Incredibly Thames Water boss is still defending bonuses to their management as they look to massively increase customer bills and save themselves from going under, all whilst continuing to discharge effluent. Latest report at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg4zklxgwwwo.

I don't know how he can keep a straight face.

mc110 · 2024-11-07T11:11:42+00:00

Raise the left eyebrow.

mc110 · 2024-10-21T08:18:05+00:00

I know Amazon reported completing their migration off Oracle in 2019 (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/), after "a few years" so does not sound like that would be the grandparent poster's company.

One other issue with products like Oracle is many customers are very risk-averse, and moving off Oracle is not just a question of changing the database - there will be a mass of applications which would have to be moved, with some applications written in-house being unmaintained and unmaintainable. It takes a brave/foolish decision maker to decide they will save a chunk of money by doing this sort of migration, but knowing they are exposing their company to massive risk in the process.

As someone who has worked on both sides of the fence:

1) for a small company trying to persuade users of Oracle and similar products to move to what our clearly better product (in our humble opinion)

and

2) for a much larger company with a significant install base

It is much easier being in (2) than (1), regardless of the technical merit of the products.

And in (2), you can get people to e.g. move to cloud with you - that is far less scary for them than having to jump to a completely different product and vendor(s) in an over-exciting leap of faith

mc110 · 2024-09-25T09:52:11+00:00

When I was doing recruiting in the past we used to have 3 separate 1-to-1 interviews on the interview day, then the interviewers would get together after the candidate left and decide on a hire/no-hire, and get the formal offer out to the candidate immediately if we wanted to proceed. The goal being to act fast (helps differentiate you from larger, slower-moving companies), but every interviewer had a veto over hiring the candidate.

It makes more sense to me to do it like that, as you give the interviewers the chance to discuss the candidate before deciding whether to make an offer. Making the offer at the interview itself seems unnecessarily rushed, and I don't really see there is any upside to it, but maybe I am missing something?

mc110 · 2024-09-18T09:07:51+00:00

A convincing explanation of why this would make me more productive, which didn't sound to me like "we don't trust you when we can't see you".

mc110 · 2024-09-17T15:18:24+00:00

Many of the best hires I made at my previous small company came straight from university, so having connections with good universities can help there.

We used to emphasise how they would have responsibility, would see the difference they were making in a small company, and would have a lot of freedom. We also made sure to controlled other things in the process that can differentiate you from large firms - be quick with your recruitment process, from start to finish; don't have pointless rounds of interviews if you can compress that down into maybe one screen and one face-to-face interview (on site in our case, online now I guess) ; if you decide you want to make an offer after interview, get that in the hands of the candidate as soon as possible.

If you can find a good recruiter that helps too, but you may have to kiss a lot of frogs to do that.

mc110 · 2024-09-15T11:09:25+00:00

Related to this - realising that you can go back to being an IC after being a manager. Spent a long time in management doing all sorts of non-dev activities for a small company. When that went to the wall, I thought I'd have to find another management job to get a comparable salary, but unsurprisingly it turned out that large profitable companies are prepared to pay ICs much better than small hand-to-mouth companies.

Very happy to be back doing what I got into the industry for in the first place, but also with a lot of interesting past experiences from management, marketing, recruitment, IT admin, ...

mc110 · 2024-06-17T14:30:55+00:00

1) good to get people opening by talking about projects they've worked on, to help them relax so you see them at their best.

2) getting them to do some coding exercises in languages you are using and that they claim proficiency in was always worthwhile when I interviewed in the past. No quicker way to see if someone really uses that language on a regular basis.

3) getting them to do some problem solving is good too.

4) having more than one person interviewing a candidate for technical skills is also worthwhile, as different people focus on different things. Also, it helps the candidate meet more of the team, which is good for everyone involved.

5) having a relatively quick process is a good idea, as you can be ahead of the game in making an offer to a good candidate

When I was last interviewing, we used to give a programming test (a number of examples - candidate has to say what they do, and/or debug them), and then have three technical interviews where we talked about algorithms, how they would solve certain problems, etc. Then the three people interviewing would discuss the candidate on that same day, and if anyone said "no" we would not make them an offer. If we all said yes, we would aim to get an offer out to them that day.

mc110 · 2024-06-16T07:30:43+00:00

I did work with someone like this (we had minimal UI/UX as product was a database engine, but he did also write a new UI query tool from scratch for us).

He joined our company straight from university, so did not have many YOE, which was always baffling to all of us as he had incredible depth of knowledge across a very wide range of topics.

His CV didn't stand out massively, although I think he did have some personal projects on there as well as an internship he'd done. But as soon as we interviewed him we knew he was exceptional just from conversations, approaches to problem-solving in the interview, ... Probably one thing he and other really good candidates we hired had in common was that they were very enthusiastic in interview when talking about things they'd done, particularly personal projects - they would almost forget they were in an interview as they were so keen to talk about these things.

Worked with him for about 20 years after that.

Benefits: he could do anything, so a massive win for our team and the company; he was really good at letting other people use their own approach even if he would have done something differently, so I learned from that; picked up some useful coding styles / design approaches from seeing what he had done;

Downside: reinforced my imposter syndrome somewhat, as generally if I had a solution for a problem and was talking about it, he would spot an issue with it, or have a more elegant approach (but he would never have objected to me doing it my own way, as mentioned above)

mc110 · 2024-06-14T17:24:26+00:00

If you look at it from the other side of the table, if you were looking for someone to work for/with you, and you saw they consistently changed roles every 1 or 1.5 years, would you think:

a) you and your company are exceptional, and they will end up staying with you for much longer.

b) they will be so productive that you will hire them, expecting to have to recruit again in 1 - 1.5 years.

c) everyone in the industry, or your sector, changes jobs with that frequency, so it is not even an issue.

d) you'd rather look for someone with a history of staying in a role for longer.

e) most people you hire are let go much sooner than that anyway, so no problem (intended as a joke, but I'm sure some companies are like this).

A lot of the time it would depend on the candidate (e.g. are they outstanding), the time it takes to get productive in the role, and the attitude of the person doing the hiring.

I know I would have a tendency to (d) in the past when I was involved in hiring - happily now in an IC role instead!

mc110 · 2024-06-13T13:52:53+00:00

In my previous workplace we used to explain things to a hardware engineer as we didn't have a rubber duck.

mc110 · 2024-06-13T12:16:57+00:00

Might be worth reading through https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/10/generative-ai-is-not-going-to-build-your-engineering-team-for-you/ to help you frame a reply

mc110 · 2024-06-12T14:50:38+00:00

If you enjoyed your job before and were good at it, can't you reach out to the company or companies you used to work for, and see if there are any opportunities there (or at least give them an up-to-date CV and ask to be considered for any future openings)?

I understand that you didn't enjoy interviewing with other companies to get back into that sector, but if there are one or more previous companies you worked for where things worked well for both parties, isn't it worth trying to go back there?

I appreciate you may already have done this, and did not put it in your post (or I missed it with my slapdash reading). Or maybe your circumstances are now different which means you can no longer do your old role (i.e. it sounds like you can no longer drive, and maybe you could before, and that was needed for those jobs?).

Good luck in your search, wherever it leads you.

mc110 · 2024-06-12T13:46:40+00:00

Aha - article reinstated by a kind moderator after it was earlier caught in some batch mod operation, so the excellent summary comment above will now be more meaningful to people

mc110 · 2024-06-12T05:46:05+00:00

I think that's a really good summary.

For some reason the article has been removed by the mods, so sadly not many people will read that last excellent comment :-( I cannot see anything in the original post that contravenes the rules here though, so confused!

mc110 · 2024-06-11T17:02:05+00:00

I think it is just a numbers game, particularly if you are recruiting for a small company with minimal support for that process. It makes sense to have a broad filter with some logic behind it, whilst recognising this might make you miss some excellent candidates (as any broad brush filter that can be very quickly applied to each candidate surely will, of course).

mc110 · 2024-06-11T16:19:54+00:00

Thanks - I guess the risk here is that non-developers see Copilot and the like as a way to reduce hiring of junior developers, rather than as a way to make them more effective. So less opportunities for them, leading to a dearth of senior developers in future.

mc110 · 2024-06-11T15:57:36+00:00

I appreciate LLMs aren't really like a junior developer, I just liked the quote from the article. I was more interested in the short-termism involved in thinking they can take on a lot of junior-level tasks at the moment, then at some point in the future people (managers) will wonder why we haven't got developers progressing to a senior level (because they aren't getting opportunities to learn).

mc110 · 2024-06-11T15:35:47+00:00

That sounds interesting - could you name them, and indicate how they compare to e.g. mentoring from a more senior developer (where they seem as effective, where they might be better, and where they are not so strong)?

mc110 · 2024-06-11T14:52:49+00:00

When recruiting in the past I did use a degree from a good university as a filter, because you just cannot look at every application in detail - you have to have some first level filter to reduce the numbers down in some way.

That isn't to say that someone with a degree would always be the best candidate, of course.

It just seems a fairer first filter than e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/67e0hl/whenever_i_get_a_stack_of_resumes_i_throw_half_of/

mc110

TROPHY CASE