I also charge on retainer. I set a dollar amount that makes messing with their stuff worth my time, and then they get to tell me what I'm supposed to do for them that month for those hours. If they don't talk to me, I still get paid. If they go over, then I get an extra hourly rate.
This is for a part-time gig. I charge a set amount per month up to a max number of hours worked. If I work 1 hour or 10 it doesnt matter. Usually I only work 2.5 hours a month hence the high hourly rate.
Yea, that's essential what high level technical people are. They're making decisions on generalized details with enough confidence that they details can be filled in by lower level engineers.
Yes. Perhaps I’m getting old and cynical, but “staff engineer” is an invention by companies that are no longer growing quickly enough to absorb all of their most promising employees into proper management roles. Instead of having the power of enabling continued employment, you have to “influence” others to do your work.
A promising engineer rises through the technical track by showing impact. You show impact by getting others to sign on to your vision. You request a budget. You engage with a lot of stakeholders through meetings. Sounds a lot like what we call a "people manager" but without all of the tools available to one.
Maybe a better way of framing it is people managers have too much power. In an alternate reality, "staff engineers" hire and fire and have budget signature powers, and "people managers" are more like HR-plus who manage interpersonal conflicts and deliver performance evaluations. The status quo is a remnant of how society has historically undervalued and infantilized technical workers.
Yes and no. There is a part where you're responsible for the direction of the team but the real trick is knowing when to step away and let the teams executing own it and discuss with management what metrics are needed to track success.
There is also another part where you are free to work on activities that are 12-24 months out. So, prototyping new ideas, setting up the pilots and mentoring sr. s/w engg. resources to be able to execute on them.
The little secret no one mentions is that most of the time you're not needed. If you are then you're too much in the weeds and cannot be an effective staff engineer.
>> The little secret no one mentions is that most of the time you're not needed.
That should be true of every individual.
If you mean role (i.e., "what if we had no staff engineers (or equivalents) at all?"), ye-es, but only for a time, else the company will likely be, at best, inefficient.
Every higher level role on the team, be it a staff eng, a tech lead, an EM, etc, is a multiplier role; they should behave as basically a glorified plate spinner. When the plates are all spinning they can step away and you'll never notice their absence. When the plates are wobbly, you should feel their presence more. The ideal workflow is a series of barely perceptible touches to add a little more inertia across a variety of plates.
A small correction: there is only one pitch of 5.13a (or 5.12d according to the developer of the route), and most of the pitches are much easier. Multi-pitch climbs are graded for their hardest pitch.
You can try to negotiate but the options bands are usually predetermined and approved by the board of directors. Trying to get an exception passed through can be difficult and usually only for leadership positions.
At a startup though, although there are bands, there is almost always the ability to go up from what is first offered.
I would always try to negotiate up by 50% from whatever it is. With startups, it's harder to go up by 50% on cash, but options are more fluid, and the worst they can do is say, "I can't move from X" but in a lot of cases you will probably get, "I can go up to <+25%>".
Negotiation around options is also the best thing to do if you think about it. It shows you think the company has value and that value will be higher in the future, even higher than straight base comp. Would you rather have $1000 more on your salary or $1000 more in options which could have a multiplier in the future. Cash won't. The value of cash is going down over time -- especially recently.
Not always at medium-big startups. It is fixed depending on the position.
I have worked at like 6 different companies now from 20-1400 people. Smaller companies definitely have some flexibility but its usually a cash vs equity conversation.
You should always negotiate - agree there. But you should negotiate cash specifically because the value of it goes down over time. More now is good because you need to pay rent and buy food. Additionally cash comp becomes the basis of: 401k match, bonus, some other benefits (life insurance some times) and more importanty future raises.
Nomad also doesn't have a lot of feature that are built into kubernetes, features that otherwise require other hashicorp tools. So now you have a vault cluster, a consul cluster, a nomad cluster, then hcl to manage it all, probably a terraform enterprise cluster. So what have you gained? Besides the same amount of complexities with fewer features.
I think Nomad sounds like the direction the OP blog post is proposing to move in: a set of largely independent tools which can each address some aspect of the problem kubernetes is trying to solve.
> a set of largely independent tools which can each address some aspect of the problem kubernetes is trying to solve.
But Kubernetes is already this. Sure the core is a lot bigger than something like Nomad, but the some of it is replaceable, and there are plenty of simpler alternatives to those built in.
And anyway, my point still stands. What's the point of having 20 different independent systems that address the aspects K8s is trying to solve versus one big system that addresses all the headaches? To me having 20 different systems that potentially have many fundamental differences is more complex than a single system that has the same design philosophies and good integration across the board.
Totally anecdotal, but speaking as someone with Anxiety Disorder + occasional intense panic attacks, once I started Rock climbing heavily and Trail running 2x a week, my anxiety and Panic attacks basically went away completely.
This was following years of taking 5HTP, meditating/breathing, talk therapy etc, which helped somewhat but nothing like intense exercise.
