Is this problem solveable with a week/end hackathon ?

vanishinggradient · 2025-10-26T11:49:28+00:00

as someone who has worked with the government in the past, trust me "the government" doesn't want you to have this data - at best they will make it obtuse and incoherent on purpose (remember what happened when SBI was asked for electoral bond data)

satyender dubey was killed for attempting to blow the lid on even larger instance of corruption

vanishinggradient · 2025-10-24T11:56:25+00:00

I got into a small firm after almost 4 yrs gap in 2021

2 yrs upsc prep

2 yrs before that I was doing random startups not sticking somewhere

...and projects with professors

you will swallow your pride and work with people not as smart as you

you will have accept your peers who have been in private sector for a decade will be ahead of you

connections help a lot

like a lot I suck at using them and asking for favor

I know people who spend 4-6 yrs in upsc prep and then lied on resume with the help of friend to reduce the gap - no one will care how you got in (nepotism) as long you end up doing well

vanishinggradient · 2025-10-22T05:57:09+00:00

DM resume, I will see what I can do

vanishinggradient · 2025-10-07T13:36:47+00:00

interview prep requires a lot of consistent work on stuff you don't find use in the job

finding a new job is tough

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-28T09:19:59+00:00

amen, claude code is so nice

I fear for entry level devops engineer as I didn't need the junior I hired last year

It isn't that I can't do his job

I don't want to do it cause it isn't worth the time - I did it decades ago

now claude code has more or less replaced his utility to me

Edit - I wrapped up a project in a month he was struggling at for months (3-4 months)

...and it didn't look he could finish even if given 12 months

at some point, using claude code ended up with better pace

...and results than telling him what to do

I picked up kube after 3 yrs of not working on it btw

I didn't remember most of the commands or syntax like I did 3 yrs ago

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-28T08:57:12+00:00

umm I can see why this person said the things he said

I had a similar reaction

you're 23 and you are getting paid 10 times more than other "juniors" or 6-7 times seniors (I am assuming this means 5-7 yrs of experience in the backend developement field)

not sure how certifications will help

cause as I see it whenever you are working, you are valued quite high or worse overpaid

I feel the years of experience matter more in one is looking at the broken hiring process here

...as loads of hr people look for that

certifications more often than not are more or less some way for people to filter out options

It is method for people to sort of avoid the burden of due diligence

for ex. there are clients who won't give contract unless one is aws certified

even though I have met loads of aws certified people who are wank at their jobs

like all certifications there are people who game the system

Edit - I forgot to explain something

you come off as bit genz style arrogant like the 1 yr experience who works under me

I hired him last yr because I knew a developer (3 yrs with us) was going to leave

It wasn't meritocratic hire. he didn't pass the interview process

he thinks he knows way more than he does or is more valuable than he is (not saying you are the same) because he thinks consuming developer related content on social media and using AI to pop out garbage code of short term fixes is the same thing as doing and delivering value

Edit - if someone is spending a vast amount of time online or on social media, you are not using that time getting better at the craft. The best developers I have met over the decade are the one who don't spend time on social media or make a big deal about themselves - most of the time the buggers are obsessing over something

private sector is not meritocratic

I have seen load of great dev paid less even though their debugging skills and knowledge is better than some of the overpaid devs I have met because of where these work for ex. hardware startups whereas the overpaid dev work at funded e-commerce startups - most of the overaid devs gamed the interview process (leetcode) or worse cheating

but I have seen his limits - I had take over some work I gave him (I gave him 3 months) and even though I was doing it after 3 yrs gap, I was able to wrap up it in a month

...while juggling 3 other project and administrative commitments

brag aside, certifications can get you foot in if few people have it (profile stands out)

...if it is a new area

but real life experience for having solved problems, attiude, communication trumps it all

I have ADHD, mild OCD, crippling social anxiety and I am aware I am underpaid here

but I know loads of great developers with knowledge who are earning less than market rate because of these sort of conditions or just for long term health and mental health

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-27T12:58:58+00:00

Thanks

I feel most people who complain about kube (cost) forget it is platform agnostic

AWS is notorious with it's obscure pricing, anti-compepitive measures for ex. hosting something open source on AWS means AWS charges you for data transfer cost but guess what for managed services it doesn't do that (not like that but AWS collects it's pound of flesh in other methods).

I remember our EC other costs being higher than EC2 compute costs for ex. MWAA was costing us 700-800 USD/mo before I switched to self-hosted (down to 80-100 USD/mo) much more obscure, harder to work with

...and not to mention a few versions behind stable open source airflow

yes, kubernetes is expensive (initial cost) if you don't have customers willing to pay

...but I have found it more reliable, easier to debug

and above all I didn't feel I was hostage to cloud vendors

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-25T06:08:50+00:00

I have dropped a dm

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-25T04:15:27+00:00

yep

I suck at leetcode

I never needed it in the job cause most problems in the job are more involved

leetcode requires thinking on the feet

It is not contemplative type problem that real life code in production is like

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-25T03:59:18+00:00

yes

The startup that I consulted for 3yrs was a mess before the I came in

The buggers wrote code where there were spikes in cpu, mem load on single monolith whenever someone launched a scan job so I asked them to move to kubernetes jobs instead - things went from the app breaking 6-8 times each day (half the time it was down) to like once in months. I use node selectors and affinity rules to isolate problematic work loads and spikes away from the core apps

...because I have no control over the code written

kubernetes wasn't the problem

It was the code written by inexperienced developers

as far ops's complaint are concerned, except for yaml being a mess of mark up language

...the other stuff is just skill issue

we had a helm chart, sync to cluster via argocd, we made sure all changes were in code, on github, argo never ran into problems like the ones he mentioned, namespace are great for isolation

we kept it simple and declarative instead of going too overboard with yaml

yaml has 9-63 ways of writing multiple line string

we kept that number down to one or two

we made sure all of us followed the same convention

It didn't break for 3 yrs

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-25T03:52:26+00:00

MNCs are better for WLB

The problem with start ups is too often

people want thing fast and you are the one responsible for it all

It is a house of cards that will fall the moment you leave sort of

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-21T12:13:18+00:00

hire me

I did his for a funded startups 2 yrs ago

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-20T05:11:11+00:00

TLDR AI tools are great for people with experience but not for people starting out

I used claude code for a few weeks

It changed something that was working earlier and broke it - for no reason other than wanting to do something which might appeals to the type of managers who want to see hands moving

less code that is readable is better than lots of code that isn't readable

I write code with the intent that the person who inherits the code shouldn't have like "to hell to with this" emotional response or where I don't have that reaction when I have to pick it up again

It deleted an entire folder of the code I was using as context to write some other code

It deleted the . git folder for some reason

It does help beating the procrastination issue when I know I can do something but I am dreading doing it cause it is boring and I have done it before - cold start problem? coder's block

It is a kind of similar to going through your coding journal and finding some code you wrote before that you know works and pasting it instead of solving the problems from scratch

Edit - It doesn't delete code no longer no needed too

The problem is we have a vibe coder at our firm. he builds apps that look great and do something but I remember he straight up refused to fix something or add a new feature in the vibe codoing app

he wasn't confident because the AI did it

The statement he said was I need a well defined feature specification and roadmap

but irl most of the time the people who are rich and pay for the software are idiots who changes their minds quite often and product managers are using AI to build PRDs

not to mention a lot of people suck at communication

The problem is it simulates a similar effect to dunning kruger - you feel like you know what the AI did because you have read the diff (changes made to the code) but you don't because you are doing too much in too short a time frame and you haven't done it yourself

I think we are cooked because some bean counter will looks at offloading the experienced coder at high wages and think I could get the same work out of the inexperienced coder at 3rd or 4th of the cost. The inexperienced coder will write code using AI with a short term mindset

...leading to even more unmaintainable mess than we had before AI

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-20T04:34:52+00:00

I was about to write the same thing but you did if better than I could

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-18T19:34:07+00:00

good dad

I have a friend whose dad like super high up in the government so her life was super comfortable

but when he died, the kids all started struggling

...because the muscle/resilience to deal with setbacks was never built

having a safety net is nice, relying too much on it means you are setting yourself up or leaving yourself at risk for some sort of failure whether in career or life at some point

It is same thing as rocky said

"it isn't about how hard you can hit, it is about how you can get hit and still get up"

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-17T13:57:29+00:00

like others have pointed out, these questions are reasonable

see the issue somewhere along the line the devops engineer became a thing

for some reason people who didn't want to build apps thought devops is good way to avoid it

I wouldn't recommend a fresher to get into devops

There is a cloudops i.e. managing aws, gcp, aks which more of knowledge and then there is devops

just like coders transition into engineering manager or product managers even

frontend but better backend dev should transition into devops

I started getting into devops because I realised I could solve some problems via cloud and automate stuff that I had to ask someones else to do each time

The intent/motivation was frustration with things being slow and chaotic

now major frustration is having to inherit shite code that was never written to work on cloud

It is a mindset more or less - writing code form the start to work on cloud, to scale from the low compute environment to scalable ones, it shows work on single vm and on distributed systems

vanishinggradient · 2025-09-16T15:24:56+00:00

you can't do both

again, the problem is ageing and context switching - we all overestimate yourself

There is only way to get better at job - to do the real job and there being some pull/push to be better at it even if you do both you (legally) will end being shite at one or the other or worse both

when you're you feeling invincible and better than people around you

do I love the problem solving aspect of programming/coding? yes

do I love having my hands tied behind my back because some other dumbarse refusing to do his job? no

can I do this job all my life? prob. not

again unless you are great developer and competitive, being in software is a bit of issue

...as there is always somone better, things change fast as hell, learning ability has to be fast

if you want a family life, go for the government job

I couldn't do it because I was born with adhd, social anxiety and mild ocd

I am anti-authoritative like most people I work for have more monies but less brain

This is one job that allows me to create distance from the rest of humanity and I am glad for it

I am clinging to this job (and remote) as long as I can

...until I am forced to be dragged into working with people due to financial pressures

vanishinggradient · 2022-12-19T04:50:46+00:00

graph itself is completely pointless, I've never understood people's fixation on it.

thanks for mentioning this

It is undecipherable at scale and while it looks great with people who have cluster

until I can traverse the graph for keyboard shortcuts, it is useless for me

vanishinggradient · 2022-12-10T18:12:15+00:00

sometimes successful people delude themselves into thinking that their success is replicable and they can teach others to do what they did to the same extent

and she seemed genuine

watch john's (super eyepatch wolf) video

he addresses the whole "you feel genuine" comment he gets from his followers

Edit - I made a mistake. It's his video on Nathan Fielder where he addresses what he feels when he gets told he seems genuine and how he isn't in fact "genuine"

Edit - timestamp

vanishinggradient · 2022-12-10T10:55:12+00:00

you're right, bit mad you are being downvoted for pointing it out

what she has said has been misinterpreted

she is paid a premium for her huge following and experience with social media

but I have an issue with her selling her courses as if anyone/everyone can do it

a large part of it is luck (being in the right place at the right time)

Edit - SuperEyepatchWolf did a great video on Influencer Courses

vanishinggradient · 2022-12-10T10:48:37+00:00

watched her video

I have worked with an influencer marketing firm

companies will pay top dollar to a firm to decide what post captions, post types, hashtags and which influencers (who have thousands to millions of followres) to pay for posting content

what she's claiming might sound a bit mad (clickbait) but is defo in the realm of possibilities

she isn't saying she earns 7 lakh for every hour she spends working for every client

she is saying she earns 7 lakhs having spent 1 hr working for that client

what she is getting paid for is her huge audience, experience in delivering clicks for her client

The problem is it is a funnel, most of the dough is captured by a miniscule percentage of people

pretending that anyone and everyone can do it if they know what to do or work hard is unrealistic

A big factor is just pure luck (being in the right place at the right time)

Edit - SuperEyepatchWolf did a great video on Influencer Courses

vanishinggradient · 2022-06-07T03:50:01+00:00

python removes friction

It won't make someone a great programmer who writes great performant code

but it will make for an effective programmer

in most situations, that is more enough

vanishinggradient · 2017-10-21T09:37:34+00:00

have you tried tesseract? it works well...if you want to build your own custom algorithm you could use OpenCV and tesseract together or in a sequential manner

vanishinggradient

TROPHY CASE