Disagree. Not every startup has to be a massive success, not every founder needs to be a billionaire, and not everyone has to work like Elon Musk - you’re probably not sending rockets to Mars.
OP might be very happy with a company with no employees that makes 200k a year.
To the OP: save up for 6 months of working on your own thing, OR, launch loads of little experiment MVPs that don’t need lots of work to get _something_ out quickly.
>> capacity planning, monitoring and alerting, honing their troubleshooting skills
> This is veering into made-up-job world.
Maybe if you're running a CRUD app on a single server in your basement.
But these are definitely core engineering competencies for any system large enough to experience regular and non-preventable failure. Hardware fails. Technician error happens. A litany of natural disasters from heats wave to flooding can impact a DC or the infrastructure within hundreds of miles of a DC. Load assumptions are violated. Etc. With a large enough footprint, these sorts of things happen often enough that robust monitoring, alerting, and planning are necessary. (Hell, just building a DC requires significant capacity planning, to say nothing of keeping the thing humming along happily.)
Either you're doing this work internally or you're paying AWS/GCP/Azure to do that work for you. In many cases a mix of both. But if you're large enough to need even a small data center, this work is being done by someone.
If you don't know about it, you're either small enough to run your business from a few servers or you're paying someone else a very nice premium to abstract away the details. (Or, most commonly, both.) But if you have any amount of scale, the work is being done by someone.
Anyways, this attitude is probably spot on and is why I expect Twitter to go from "stable if unexceptional business" to "can't even stay online" to "MySpace 2.0" within 10 years.
Twitter was not profitable last quarter. It rarely has turned a profit. How does an unprofitable business qualify as “stable if unexceptional?” I should think an unprofitable cash burn as long as Twitter’s should count as highly exceptional.
Twitters revenue been growing quite well though it’s clearly spiky. Spending isn’t really a question of what developers are doing that’s all about management.
These functions are mission critical, but if you can’t show how you’ve automated / created programmatic solutions in these domains then you are probably part of the problem.
> I’m saying that “ capacity planning” shouldn’t be someone’s entire job.
Capacity planning is everywhere in the real economy. In most sectors, any reasonably sized company will have entire departments and sometimes even divisions (eg, approximately everything in management of a large construction project is capacity planning of some sort or another). One of my first consulting gigs was with a small/small-medium sized resource extraction company, which had several people whose job was essentially 100% capacity planning/forecasting for various components of solid wood product supply chain. Basically anyone who wasn't either in the executive team, in the field, or selling was spending most of their time on capacity planning.
My very first job was with the corporate office at a regional supermarket chain where demand forecasting and figuring out warehousing/storage constraints (aka capacity planning) were their entire job.
In both cases, the profitability of the entire business relied on good capacity planning, full stop. Everything else was either par or total commodity.
Taking the economy as an aggregate, it's actually a fairly rare thing for capacity planning to be totally commodified in the way that hyper-scalars have done in software. Software shops that outsource anything non-soft to the massive army of operations folks at AWS/GCP/Azure are extreme outliers, not the norm, in terms of the real economy a a whole.
Yes DevOps and shift-left and whatnot. All those things do make sense (to some extent) but:
1. When developers own these aspects of the software operation lifecycle they do not produce the same amount of "code" and "features" that an old-school developer would be expected to have.
2. Even in the most utopic DevOps heaven scenario, there are still some people who will be drawn to do more "systemy" things and some developers who will actively resist at investing time at getting good and doing operations stuff. Getting rid of these people is an option of course; good luck.
Yeah sorry. The story here is how people at Twitter must prove their worth by printing the lines of code they wrote, so I erred on the side of that angle also for the Ellison quote even if I had no reason to do so.
> This is veering into made-up-job world. These people are getting fired. All these tasks can be done by developers.
Ah, the good old Google playbook. If you read their paper about how SRE came to be, it basically says: “we noticed there was friction between developers and system administrators so we fired all our system administrators and hired developers to do their job instead.” It doesn’t really make the job disappear however. It’s just a different way of approaching it.
You’re misunderstanding me slightly. I’d put systems administrators in the same category as developers, and I think so would Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.
But if someone’s entire job is “capacity planning”, they’re getting fired.
In the UK, "the Bill" is "the old Bill", the police. "Kill the Bill" is a favoured chant by cross anarchists opposing the "Take-Away-You-Freedom bill (2023)", and/or wishing an early demise to the police.
my first thought was the movie. but if you think about it, they're talking about killing billing problems so I'd say that's where the name comes from. (if you check out their website).
a name that makes people go "hmm that's a bit odd" is actually a very efficient way to get people to remember it next time they need them.
Yes, I have. I quit my job and worked on my own project for a while.
You have to be doing something you are interested in, and have full control over, so you can rediscover what programming used to be like for you.
Take things slowly, and your capacity for work and motivation will increase over time. In the beginning you will still have days where you can’t bring yourself to work, but just allow yourself those days, and eventually you will recover.
Get a new job. You can get a contract job paying £500 a day quite easily in the UK. Do a 6 month contract, save up some runway, work on your own thing for a while, doing whatever interests you. Repeat.
This is what I've been doing since 2018. Day rates vary between 650-750. I guess I could go higher if I was putting more effort into looking but I normally pick organisations to contract for which are fun. I like working for small startups to medium sized businesses which are tech companies, and not companies with a tech department. Big companies often come with Outlook, MS Teams, JIRA, Azure, a lot of Scrum or similar BS and lots of hierarchy, meetings and politics which makes it really hard to have an impact or fun doing work. They can pay slightly more (maybe 800-1000/day) but personally I find smaller companies more satisfying. Smaller businesses don't have time for BS, so they optimise for success, use software and tools which really drive productivity. That often means MacBooks instead of Windows, AWS/GCP over Azure, Slack over Teams, Something super lightweight or just good team communication over JIRA and most importantly, development teams often get to really make an impact, drive decisions, get responsibility and own the entire software development lifecycle from planning to deploying to monitoring in true DevOps style (as opposed to sending emails to a "DevOps" team which is common in bigger companies). I enjoy myself more in these environments and for that I'm happy to sacrifice a bit of pay.
Anyhow, I am just coming back from a 5 month break and it's normal for me to take a few months off every year inbetween contracts. I never take a contract longer than 6 months, otherwise I can't take 1-2 months off at a time. Doesn't mean I never extend a contract after 6 months, but before I extend I communicate clearly that I would like to take some time off and then basically line up the continuation at the same place for when I come back.
No, I am European but live in London (Wimbledon). The rates are absolutely UK rates. I think in the US you'd get much more, but then you have to pay a lot more as well for things which we get for free here (e.g. NHS).
How to get started? My journey was what I think is quite common for a lot of contractors. First I started as a normal employee, worked in many different companies, large and small as a developer, junior, mid, senior, then with some management responsibilities. Eventually I became just really good at my job, not just programming, but also understanding how different sized businesses work, how the politics work, how hiring works, etc. and I just felt comfortable and confident that I could get into contracting.
Initially I got all my contracts via UK based agencies (the usual ones, Gravitas, OB, etc.) but then I figured out how to look for open roles directly, either by looking in the right places or through connections which I've built over the years. If you skip a recruitment agency then you can easily get the rates which I've listed, because that's what the agency takes when they tell you a rate of 500/550.
There are lots of threads on consulting/freelancers on HN, and lots of great advice. Don't go freelancing lightly, do a bit of reading first, and ideally connect with others in the same jurisdiction for tax/billing advice.
I do consulting and 100/hour (EU/US/CA, not sure for the UK) is pretty average, and 5h/day is a reasonable number of billable hours in a day, assuming not too much time is wasted on sales (and sales can be a billable discovery phase instead, if the process delivers value for the client).
OP might be very happy with a company with no employees that makes 200k a year.
To the OP: save up for 6 months of working on your own thing, OR, launch loads of little experiment MVPs that don’t need lots of work to get _something_ out quickly.