"Eric @ opposite-lock.com" (theyrerolling)
03/28/2019 at 13:30 • Filed to: Worklopnik
3
12|
"Eric @ opposite-lock.com" (theyrerolling)
03/28/2019 at 13:30 • Filed to: Worklopnik | 3
| 12 |
As you may have been following, a job change has been in the cards for a while, I just couldn’t quite find the right one... After light negotiation, I signed the offer letter and will be starting on April 15th, or at my earliest convenience.
Giving my current employer a typical friendly commonwealth gesture as I leave the train wreck.
I have been pretty miserable the last 6+ months there, so this really shouldn’t surprise anyone there. Everyone in my personal life has been dissing them and harsh toward me for being associated with them. It has also devolved into the purgatory of primarily maintaining a handful of things that are delicate through no fault of my own. Humorously, there was light at the end of the tunnel in the form of signing a deal with the devil (a single small vendor that cannot be readily replaced, putting us in the ugly position of having to be able to acquire them hastily should they go tits up), though it would alleviate my pain. Not to mention the fact that the company is small, subject to the whims of the economy, hasn’t turned a profit since before I started, and is dependent on a company that is totally inaccessible to the team. That very company just randomly failed to order anything a couple weeks ago with no explanation or forewarning, sending a shock through the business community that depends on them. I was so spooked and despondent for days that I had to do something, even if it was ridiculously half-assed, which it was...
I didn’t even bother to put together an actual resume; I slapped in some existing text in random formats for my last two positions and hastily wrote a crap description of my current one. I simply didn’t bother to include anything beyond that because it was too complicated and decided that there was no point in even including my education because it lets them know I’m an old codger, doesn’t directly apply, and could only distract them. I then slapped together the most half-assed cover letter of my life, for which I’m absolutely ashamed. When I re-read it later, I saw that I just trailed off with no conclusion whatsoever for the first bullet point. The entire process took about 15 minutes and I didn’t exactly have high hopes to begin with, so why try? In fact, I couldn’t say I knew anything about 2/3 of the stuff on there, just vaguely linking a few points to concrete work I’ve done with related concepts... A few days later I get a message and schedule a call, where after about a 15-20 minute call I’m pretty sure I’ve botched it. I hear nothing for 4 days.
Then, there I am in the passport acceptance office with the baby and my wife, which is a white painted cinder block room with a desk in the middle over which a guy was yelling at a pair of people that either were hard of hearing or didn’t speak much English. People were backing up. We had an appointment, but it wasn’t for a couple minutes... Then my phone rings. Based on the number, it’s 9-1 odds that it’s one of those scam robo calls, but the remainder is that it is the guy I spoke to before. So I pick up but can’t even hear them over the yelling, plus it’s a freaking faraday cage of rebar in there, so I step outside, have a curt exchange with him, and rush back in to barely make it in time for the appointment.
I was confused by the call - the guy had goofed up once before on scheduling, so I thought he had scheduled the interview for five minutes ago (definitely did not recall that being mentioned prior, in fact I was surprised to hear from him at all), so we had some text exchanges. I didn’t even realize it was scheduled for Tuesday of this week until Monday. Yeesh.
That interview went well, surprisingly, though she was just as in the dark about me as I was about the job (I figured it was cohesive in some context that I didn’t understand, but it was actually a mix of accurate and painfully inaccurate). We spoke for an hour.
He gets back to me Tuesday afternoon saying that she was impressed and wants to work with me; he’ll call Wednesday to hash out numbers and get me an offer letter.
What a whirlwind. I still don’t understand why they called me back based on all those blunders, but I really look forward to developing prototypes/proof-of-concepts in an R&D lab with embedded devices again. It’s definitely my favorite type of work...
Now to break it to my current employer/team that I’ll be moving on. It’ll be bittersweet and I’ll probably do it Monday.
random001
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
03/28/2019 at 10:36 |
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This all sound
s
like good news, though!
Future Heap Owner
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
03/28/2019 at 11:42 |
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Oh nice, I thought this was more general tech-y software stuff (e.g. web stack or IT), not embedded. That’s sweet! Sounds like a really nice change from your current position.
WilliamsSW
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
03/28/2019 at 12:01 |
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Congratulations on your escape!! I hope the new gig works out well--
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> Future Heap Owner
03/28/2019 at 14:26 |
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I’ve always been quite odd for my industry. CS people hate me because they know I’m trained to manage them, yet the stuff I like to do you’d usually hire a team that includes a CE to do . I’m pretty specifically a devices, networking, and R&D person when I have the chance. I actually hate doing typical desktop software and web stuff because it’s ridiculously boring and/ or frustrating .
As I explained in the interview, making computers interact with the physical world is what I do for fun and it’s a bonus when people don’t even realize they’re interacting with a computer. A fun one we discussed were ideas for managing a parking garage for maximum efficiency.
VincentMalamute-Kim
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
03/28/2019 at 14:48 |
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I still don’t understand why they called me back based on all those blunders,
It sounds like work you want to do but they don’t seem to have their shit together; that part doesn’t worry you?
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> VincentMalamute-Kim
03/28/2019 at 14:50 |
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That’s the thing, all they do is process my paycheck and benefits. I actually work with people that are likely competent.
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VincentMalamute-Kim
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
03/28/2019 at 14:52 |
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well.... competence with paycheck and benefits could be important to you.
I hope it works out. Sounds like it can’t be worse than the current situation.
Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
03/28/2019 at 14:52 |
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Managing a parking garage for maximum efficiency is logistics, not HMI. There’s also some data analytics and statistics required to really do it right.
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> VincentMalamute-Kim
03/28/2019 at 14:55 |
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My current one is fine at that. I don’t think they’d grow to over a hundred people and work with a major tech company at this level if they couldn’t handle that.
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks
03/28/2019 at 15:01 |
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You’re thinking a little too far inside the box, these are aspects, but if you have effectively unlimited resources, you can do stuff that ignores the box entirely. Whether this will be a project is uncertain, but clearly they think about things in ways that are not at all typical.
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Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
03/28/2019 at 15:30 |
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Hardly. (Believe me, anybody who’s worked with me knows that I set the box on fire sometime in 1995.) At the fundamental level, it’s a logistics problem.
How do you move car from Point A, to Point B, and back to Point A in the most efficient manner possible? Conveyance here is irrelevant because it’s A-B-A whether it’s directing a driver to a spot or it’s automated elevator system. Pretending it’s something else is just being deliberately thick, quite honestly. (Kinda like Elon’s idiotic ‘boring company’ bullshit. A single lane going 70MPH is not a new idea or even an interesting one, and it’s as far from innovative or intelligent as you can get.)
It’s when you move past simple path optimization that it gets interesting. Because now your question is: given customer A driving car B, how long between parking and retrieval? Assuming an automated system, how do you pre-load customer cars without impacting ad-hoc retrieves? And so on.
Yes, this really is the kinda stuff I randomly think on when bored. Keeps me from being completely filled with the need to justifiably murder everyone responsible for SIP.
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks
03/28/2019 at 16:17 |
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You have definitely thought about it.
What if you wanted to optimize it for payload delivery? Density? What if someone parks badly? What if you could put lines on the ground dynamically? What if you could identify particular people or cars? A seemingly rational actor may do something they believe is optimizing their results , but is actually pessimal not only on an individual level, but affects others around them negatively .
There are many similarities between a parking garage and a data storage device...