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> Bankers/Academics go to the UK and make twice the money

Academics does not make more money in UK than in Germany, in fact for junior positions (PhD/Postdoc) they make less. Full professors seems to make more, but I rumors say than new professors in UK are making significantly less than their older (boomer and older) counterparts.

https://fastepo.com/comparison-of-salary-of-postdoc-in-europ... https://academicpositions.com/career-advice/professor-salari...


With academics I mean people with a phd working in the private sector, not professors ... But you are right about Germany taking proper care of public servants. My German gf makes almost double the amount of money compared to her Dutch counterparts over here.


SREs will end up the same gatekeeper reputation as traditional IT teams, and a new buzzword will need to be made to signify the "move fast and break things" cool kid energy than DevOps and SREs (still?) have.


Labels are funny.

SRE tends to be less centralized. You have devs and SRE working together. Either 1 dev team + 1 SRE team, or an N:1 setup where one SRE team supports multiple dev teams. The SRE gatekeeping is there exactly because your company has outgrown the "move fast and break things" phase, and is now in the "move fast but please don't break things" phase. The SRE team wants to support the devs with their high-velocity feature rollouts, but the SREs also know that the service is big and important, and outages / data loss / etc will cost the company money and damage the company reputation.

The SRE team is there to try and balance development velocity, reliability, and scalability without breaking the bank. Run a dev team by itself and you may not have enough expertise in reliability and scalability to make the service work the way you want--you may have a high pager load and no strategy to get out of it besides telling your devs to fix more bugs. The SRE team brings strategies and expertise to work your way out of that kind of hole if you're in it. Centralized IT slows things down and tries to get the entire company on a tech stack which is as standard as possible. Makes sense for running legacy services, but does not make sense for products with highly active development.

Sometimes what you see in rapidly growing companies is that the workload grows faster than the capacity for the company to hire skilled workers willing to do the work. This happened at some point during Facebook's growth, for example. A core responsibility of SRE teams is to provide scalability not just in terms of computational resources and capital expenditures, but in terms of human labor and operational costs. Doing this well requires working closely with the dev team and requires that the SRE team be able to make code changes or even architectural changes to the service they are supporting. This is outside the scope of centralized IT support.

You can use SRE as a buzzword but I see it as a specific role which solves a specific set of problems which are, at this point, relatively well-understood.


In this model, dev can deploy any service they like, so SRE isn’t a gate keeper.


As an continental European, first time I heard about Netherlands as a "paragon of virtue". Is this some UK/US talking point?


If you're from the US you don't think of the Netherlands as a thing pretty much at all.


There’s a subset of people who see the Netherlands as a public transport/biking perfection utopia.

No idea how true it is.


Probably just my ignorance as an American. I have vague positive associations with the Netherlands due to: bicycles, legal weed, advancements in agricultural technology and ocean control, historical contribution to the development of capitalism/merchant republic history, plain-spoken culture, and Dutch friends of mine.

They also seem very stable, and have been allies with the USA for longer than pretty much any other country.


For British people, the Dutch are seen as plain-spoken and very socially liberal. Also they were the last country to successfully invade, although with some handy PR we now call it The Glorious Revolution rather than “the time the Dutch conquered us”


And it's inspiration of plenty of media and fashion designers. I think this example goes against his conclusion.


I am a bit puzzled by these comments. "It is an inspiration for many media," sure, for historical television programs, certainly not for the everyday clothing of our times.

Let's take men's suits. They were made of heavy wool (today heavy wool is demodé, and rightly so because it is very uncomfortable), with three or four buttons (today 3-buttons are rarely seen, and rightly so, except for the 3-roll-2, which is not a "real" 3-button, 4-buttons are nowhere to be seen), the buttons were very high (the Neapolitan suit has high buttons, but much lower than the buttons on the suits of the early 1900s), and the shirts had high paper collars, which are nowhere to be seen. And the hats?

There is nothing current that recalls the clothing of those times.

The clothing in "Peaky Blinders," which is a decade older, is something like a fedora nowadays, please.


Men have a very limited wardrobe range, and most of them does not care about it. You have to look a the woman clothes.


Very interesting, I am sure that if something like this is packaged in Linux distros would become popular.


Try to set enabled=False in ~/.config/user-dirs.conf

https://www.unix.com/man-page/centos/5/user-dirs.conf/


> Is possible that Julia will replace R for a lot of use cases

R is a interactive statistical programming language that acts as a frontend for more performance languages. AFAIK interactivity is not the strongest points of Julia at the moment.


>interactivity is not the strongest points of Julia at the moment

Not sure what you mean. Julia has the exact same notebook environment (Jupyter) as R and Python. Fun fact: the “Ju” in Jupyter stands for “Julia” (the “pyt” and “r” stand for what you think).


Few people in the R world use Jupyter environment, they are generally inferior to use the Rstudio environment. This might change in the future though, VSCode and DataSpell are becoming really good. Jupyter Labs are slowly improving too.


Julia has some excellent interactive front ends.

For example, take a look at the reactive Julia notebook, Pluto.jl: https://plutojl.org/plutocon2021


I work in this space: most "cool" ML is useless, and stakeholder are very skeptical of new modelling techniques. It is a long slog of EDA and finding actionable causality. Deep learning, modern reinforcement learning... are not the best fit here.

However I have seen CV and NLP useful here and there... but it is not the bread and butter.


I had several interviews years ago and was hired for one of the companies. Much better experience on average that other job boards.


Please check my Medium post about how I use a Postgres WASM instance for my TODO web3 app in Cloudflare Workers KV for pennies a month.


One month later, "Why we stopped using <buzz word> (and why you should too)"


No go if the pennies are fiat. Has to be crypto, blockchain, blugh blag blah.

Even more points if it's a centralized blockchain like the ones a16z are funding.


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