If I remember correctly, the visa free travel (esta) asks about arrests as part of the information. Even if you were never charged, never trialled, declared innocent at trial. I would imagine that this would include a uk police caution as well. For all matters, even if under uk law, these are minor and spent (no longer needed to be declared within the uk).
Just mention the UK, but I am sure that other countries have thier own procedures but the US wants all the details for thier own examination.
There was recently a crisis in older publicly constructed buildings in the UK that were built [0].The aerated concrete had a limited lifespan especially if it was damaged and had contact with water.
Lots of people looking for compensation and claiming mis-representation.
The UK crisis involved steel reinforced AAC beams that were used (of all places) to support roofs of schools. UK turned out to be a rainy place, the rain infused into the cellular structure and corroded the steel, with disastrous consequences.
It's a very particular use case of a very particular product, not relevant to the wide majority of AAC uses around the world, which is largely non-structural and not reinforced, or subjected to moderate compressive loads, such as lateral walls for 1-2 stories buildings in non-seismic areas.
The risks were understood (by engineers) and this usage was given a "shelf life". Unfortunately, those risks were put into the "Oh we'll forget about it" or "We'll wait until it looks a bit shifty" categories.
However as any fule (engineer) kno, reinforced and especially pre-stressed conc members will fail in quite a dramatic fashion. Unless you notice rust dribbling out then you can end up with anything from the roof failing to the roof exploding. I don't think anyone was daft enough to pre-stress these things.
I don't know how much money was saved but it was a really stupid application and basically ended up punting far greater costs due to remediation down the road.
While it might technically be true, that surely does not absolve the engineers who did this crap.
There is a general social expectation that new buildings should be structurally sound for a duration on the order of a century. So, if you deliver something that has a mean time before catastrophic failure around 30 years, you also need to account and set up the institutions that will handle the failure, the same way nuclear companies are required to set aside money for their decommissioning. You need to have periodic inspections for signs of early failure etc. and this whole circus needs to be disclosed and priced into your tender.
In reality, this entire fiasco was a dirty and cheapest way to satisfy the contract, ye old "good enough for government work" as evidenced by the fact no substantial number of private buildings of the same period are having this problem.
The maintenance provision was snuck into - or bribed into - some mountain of legalese, but the fuckers knew exactly that they were putting children in harm's way.
Do you if there has been any work how lasers affect other animals and insects?
Am I being catastrophically pessimistic to think that in addition to swatting insects as it moves forward, the cars lidar is blinding insects in a several hundred meter path ?
I’m very optimistic about automated cars being better than most humans but wonder about side effects.
If we have automated anti-mosquito vehicles just roaming around, the world would be a better place. There might be some second order effects from removing mosquitoes that we haven't predicted, but fuck mosquitoes.
Unfortunately not all insects are mosquitoes, and one reason we have many fewer birds in (e.g.) the UK than when I was young, is the decline of insect life.
My dilemma as a student in Glasgow (a long time) at the start of term when I had some money, Fish supper or deep fried Pizza & chips. With the mandatory bottle of Irn Bru.
Delicious but excessive consumption would certainly reduce your life expectancy.
I would really like to send this article out to all the developers in my small company (only 120+ people, about 40 dev & test) but the political path has been chosen and the new shiny tech has people entranced.
What we do (physics simulation software) doesn’t need all the complexity (in my option as a long time software developer & tester) and software engineering knowledge that splitting stuff into micro services require.
Only have as much complexity as you absolutely need, the old saying “Keep it simple, stupid” still has a lot of truth.
But the path is set, so I’ll just do my best as an individual contributor for the company and the clients who I work with.
If you have workloads with different shapes, microservices make sense.
If not, do the monolith thing as long as you can.
But if you're processing jobs that need hand off to a GPU, just carve out a service for it. Stop lamenting over microservices.
If you've got 100+ engineers and different teams own different things, try microservices. Otherwise, maybe keep doing the monolith.
If your microservice is as thin as leftpad.js and hosts only one RPC call, maybe don't do that. But if you need to carve out a thumbnailing service or authC/authZ service, that's a good boundary.
There is no "one size fits all" prescription here.
>> Microservices make sense in very specific scenarios where distinct business capabilities need independent scaling and deployment. For example, payment processing (security-critical, rarely updated) differs fundamentally from recommendation engine (memory-intensive, constantly A/B tested). These components have different scaling patterns, deployment cycles, and risk profiles, which justify separate services.
I wonder, at which point is a service getting called microservice? The team-sized service advocated by the usual argument does not sound that "micro" to me - but is most of the times the right size.
The definitional size I've read and heard is that you team could (with the benefit of hindsight) be able to reimplement a microservice in 2 weeks. That sounds fairly extreme but a month seems within reason to me.
The other key difference between microservices and other architectures is that each microservice should do its primary function (temporarily) without hard dependencies, which basically means having a copy of the data that's needed. Service Oriented Architecture doesn't have this as one of its properties which is why I think of it as a mildly distributed monolith. "Distributed monolith" is the worst thing you could call a set of microservices--all the pain without the gains.
Google played a role in popularizing the microservice approach.
When I was at Google, a microservice would often be worked on with teams of 10-30 people and take a few years to implement. A small team of 4-5 people could get a service started, but it would often take additional headcount to productionize the service and go to market.
I have a feeling people overestimate how small microservices are and underestimate how big monorepos are. About 9 times out of ten when I see something called a monorepo it's for a single project as opposed to a repo that spans multiple projects. I think the same is true of microservices. Many things that Amazon or Google considers microservices might be considered monoliths by the outside world.
Kubernetes is a good example of a microservice architecture. It was designed in a way where each microservice work with other microservices in a way where the dependencies are not so coupled together.
For example, the API server only reads and writes resources to etcd. A separate microservice called the scheduler does the actual assignment of pods to nodes by watching for changes in the resource store against available nodes. And yet a different microservice that lives on each node accepts the assignment and boots up (or shuts down) pods assigned to its node. It is called the kublet. The API server does none of that.
You can run the kublet all on its own, or even replace it to change part of the architecture. Someone was building a kublet that uses systemd instead of docker, and Fly.io (who seems to hate kubernetes) wrote a kublet that could stand things up using their edge infrastructure.
The API server also does some validations, but it also allows for other microservices to insert itself into the validation chain through pod admission webhooks.
Other examples: deployment controllers, replicaset controllers, horizontal pod autoscalers, and cluster autoscalers to work independently of each other yet coordinated together to respond to changing circumstances. Operators are microservices that manage a specific application component, such as redis, rabbitmq, Postgresql, tailscale, etc.
One of the big benefits of this is that Kubernetes become very extensible. Third-party vendors can write custom microservices to work with their platform (for example, storage interfaces for GCP, AWS, Azure, or Ceph, etc). An organization implementing Kubernetes can tailor it to fit their needs, whether it is something minimal or something operating in highly regulated markets.
Ironically, Kubernetes is typically seen and understood by many to be a monolith. Kubernetes, and the domain it was designed to solve is complex, but incorrectly understanding Kubernetes as a monolith creates a lot of confusion for people working with it.
That's the good old two pizza team service oriented architecture that Amazon is known for. Microservices are much smaller than that. At current job I think we have slightly more microservices than engineers on the team.
> At current job I think we have slightly more microservices than engineers on the team.
You are free to do that, but that's a very specific take on microservices that is at odds with the wider industry. As I said above, what I was describing is what Google referred to internally as microservices. Microservices are not smaller than that as a matter of definition, but you can choose to make them extra tiny if you wish to.
If you look at what others say about microservices, it's consistent with what I'm saying.
For example, Wikipedia gives as a dichotomy: "Service-oriented architecture can be implemented with web services or Microservices." By that definition every service based architecture that isn't built on web services is built on microservices.
Google Cloud lists some examples:
> Many e-commerce platforms use microservices to manage different aspects of their operations, such as product catalog, shopping cart, order processing, and customer accounts.
Each of these microservices is a heavy lift. It takes a full team to implement a shopping cart correctly, or customer accounts. In fact each of these has multiple businesses offering SaaS solutions for that particular problem. What I hear you saying is that if your team were, for example, working on a shopping cart, they might break the shopping cart into smaller services. That's okay, but that's not in any way required by the definition of microservices.
> Model services around the business domain. Use DDD to identify bounded contexts and define clear service boundaries. Avoid creating overly granular services, which can increase complexity and reduce performance.
"Microservices" were called "microservices" because "service-oriented architecture" had devolved in practice, and even moreso in the general consciousness which had largely rejected it for this reason, into near-monoliths that supported SOAP and the WS-* series of standards for integration.
Then, after they became popular, people got carried away with the "micro" bit, and "microservices" started getting rejected because the associated practice had skewed in the opposite direction that had caused "SOA" to be rejected.
I guess the next iteration needs to be "goldilocks services".
I started making the case for organizational efficiency rather than a technical argument. Demonstrating where the larger number of people and teams necessary to make a decision and a change and how that impacts the amount of time to ship new features has been more effective IME.
It's less about how old microservices are and more that ZIRP being over, there is now finally pressure to improve software development efficiency, and to a certain extent, optimize infrastructure costs. Developers are now riding the new wave.
IMO, Engineering mindset is a huge challenge when it comes to 'do you do microservices'
And by that, I mean that I have at times seen and/or perhaps even personally used as a cudgel - "This thing has a specific contract and it is implicitly separate and it forces people to remember that if their change needs to touch other parts well then they have to communicate it". In the real world sometimes you need to partition software enough that engineers don't get too far out of the boundaries one way or another (i.e. changes inadvertently breaking something else because they were not focused enough)
Yep, I’m sitting on the same fence. We can all see the circular deals in the high tech sector which has been the recent engine of the stock market. It’s all uncertainty, everywhere you look.
The article details the story of a business that tried to change their address in NZ. Thier documents (while correct to NZ) didn’t match the criteria of Wise and then Wise effectively closed the account. The support and appeal process was basically nonexistent and even by the end article it is unclear that the business owner were even able to retrieve the funds in the Wise accounts. Also the author’s personal account with Wise was also closed.
I hope this is a very brief overview of the article, which I would encourage people to read. In speaks to the huge imbalance in power and accountability in dealing with some companies
From the article, Amazon has 1.5 million employees across offices and warehouses. With about 350,000 corporate employees in executive, managerial and sales.
So that’s about 4% of the non-warehouse staff. What’s their normal staff turnover rate per year?
I wonder if it’s another staff reduction (cos we over hired and want to remove people who didn’t impress) under the cover of improving business productivity using AI
Hat tip to raziel2p who was going down the same in thier comment
It’s actually not warehouses. It’s groceries. Amazon jumped from a few hundred thousand to 1mm+ with the acquisition of Whole Foods. The corporate jobs is inclusive of engineering and aws.
They do an annual “top grading” layoff that’s variable in size from 5% to 10% which are performance based. There is obviously attrition as well. This leads to a constant hiring flow as these are typically backfilled.
These layoffs are often in addition to top grading and are not backfilled.
Note this is also on top of the RTO misery and thumb screw attrition drive to force out top performing talent in an inverse top grade maneuver.
Almost every single person I had an ounce of respect for at Amazon has left over the last few years. I find it hard to understand why anyone would work there any more.
I’m not sure I get what part of what I said this relates to, but the visa system in the US is extraordinary draconian compared to other countries for high skill work visas. It’s extremely limited in quantity and if you lose your job you need to find a new one within weeks or need to leave the country. Converting to a permanent visa is difficult and has long time commitments and even then you are not secure in your status. As of recently even minor vehicular infractions can lead to violent deportation and family separation, losing all your belongings and if you own a home forced to sell and remove your kids from school. I know a lot of folks on H1-B and other visas and they live in constant fear especially in competitive cultures like Amazon where people are let go almost capriciously - jeopardizing their life with their families and constantly leaving them insecure in everything in life.
To your point the system is friendly to the employer, but it’s very much not to the employee.
This is a lot. If you are in a company large enough, you surely know at least 20 people and one of them is gone. The earlier floated figure was even larger: 30K
I suppose it’s what you are used to. A company that I worked with had under 100 staff, very profitable but had a staff turnover of about 10% per year.
People joined, some stayed, some left and it was fine.
Perhaps as the departures were staff decisions not some faceless corporate executive, dropping X% cos that’s what he thinks would please the markets or his boss. Or the department is making profits but as much as his MBA says that’s sufficient. That’s the really depressing and infuriating aspect.
Let them prove that this is not a big deal, but also take note that this is going to continue.
It sounds like the first step in desensitizing folks about firings and forcing the remaining people to work in fear. That’s what they want, they said it themselves, they want people to work in fear.
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