People underestimate the performance cost of 4K. The step from 720p to 1080p was a mere doubling of pixel count, but going to 4K was another 4x increase.
The choice of a relatively low screen resolution is one of the main reasons that the deck can run modern games so well.
There’s still basically one with a couple storage options - they have shipped with different fans though. My (fairly recent) unit has very reasonable fan noise.
Remote: Prefer to work in-office, but would consider remote opportunities.
Willing to relocate: Possibly, for the right opportunity.
Technologies: Linux, Python, Rust, C, Kubernetes
I have been working in SRE/infrastructure roles for the past 13 years at employers including Google, Facebook, and several smaller companies.
I am interested in both SRE-type positions and roles developing systems software. I'd especially like to work with rust or on open source software.
My job search started a few days ago so I don't have an updated resume yet, but my work history can be found on my LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markatto
I had very mixed experiences as a customer in ~2009 - it was definitely possible to get through to someone very competent, but it was pretty difficult. We were trying to use their "cloud" VPS offerings (I believe it was openstack-based, and I liked the idea of supporting something more open than AWS), which were extremely buggy (for example, we had to default-retry every api operation multiple times in scripts because pretty much every type of call failed 40% of the time.) I generally had better success getting information about outages by reaching out employees I knew on freenode than I did through official support channels.
Why do you think the unit economics of Carvana have to be worse than a traditional dealer? Maybe they have to do more shipping of vehicles around, but they are less reliant on storefronts/sales staff. It seems likely to me that they overspent on marketing/gimmicks/badly timed top-of-market inventory, but that doesn’t mean that the business model fundamentally can’t work.
A higher cost higher quality service can succeed, but that's not the Carvana business model. The Carvana "business model" was "sell as many cars as possible and work out the economics later" and it's now "try to lose less money by any means necessary" (including by sacrificing quality of service).
I am not theorising about their costs, rather, I am referencing their own financials. Per their financials, they must achieve >$4,500 in gross profit per car sold in order to break even on a sale because the cost of providing their service is around $4,500 per car. As far as I know, they have never achieved this and they have only come close during periods where the second hand car market was at its most ridiculous supply-chain induced peaks.
You could start an online second hand car dealership today, with the same online purchasing that Carvana offer, and a better quality of service, and build a great business with great unit economics... if that was your strategy from the first day. Many such companies exist! There are lots of upmarket car dealerships that'll give you excellent service -- and it'll cost you less than $5k over market.
Carvana can't just undo a decade of bad mistakes, they can't just switch from "losing money" to "making money" because every foundational decision about the business was made in the context of "who cares about money, we want growth". You should not think of a company as an implementation of a business model, a company is so much more. Carvana has something like 20,000 employees: at that scale, radical change is basically impossible.
1) I have more of a sysadmin background, so someone else will have to answer this. I will say that if you interviewed in the sre-swe track, transferring to a swe role is not difficult.
2) I have been on call for most of my career, but google is the only employer that has actually provided compensation. Depending on your lifestyle, the extra pto can be really nice (for example it’s easy for me to ski on less-crowded days), but as I’ve gotten older being on call has definitely gotten more painful (now that I have a serious partner, not being able to do things on the days she has off can be frustrating.) The actual difficulty/stress of the pages you get will be highly team-dependent, but SRE does a reasonable job of training and tracking pager load.
3) This is highly team-dependent, but there are many teams where systems skills are not a big deal. You need to be able to think in a reliability-focused way, though.
4) Some teams actually develop their own code, other teams rely on swe teams for most of the code. You will read a lot more code than you will write, and you will write less code than they say you will during the interview process. This is also true for SWEs - everyone spend more time big-company-ing than computer-ing.
5) I have not done this, but I have considered moving to a SWE role because there’s more open source opportunities on that side.
6) I’ve found google to be the best place to work of the mega corporations I’ve been, but honestly if the money was the same I’d prefer a smaller company. I’m better at tasks like “chase this bug though a bunch of layers until you find some weird kernel behavior” than “explain why your rollout plan is compliant with our reliability directives.”
I use the "multiple security keys" approach, and the biggest problem is keeping track of which keys are registered with which services and making sure the list is up to date. A few examples of situations where this is a problem:
1) I don't keep all of my keys on my person, so if I want to sign up for a service when I'm not at home, I have to remember to go back and add my other keys at a later time. If I wanted to, for example, keep a backup key in an offsite location such as a safe deposit box, this would be even more painful.
2) If I lose a key, I need to go and change every service to deactivate the lost key and add my replacement key. This is both time-consuming and error-prone, as it requires me to keep a full list of providers that I use keys with somewhere.
3) Some providers do not even allow you to register multiple keys.
1. You register both the primary and the backup key with every identity provider (ie GitHub)
2. You only carry the primary key with you at all times. You keep the backup key in a physically safe space (ie next to your birth certificate).
3. In case the primary key gets lost, you make the backup key your new primary key. You can log in with it everywhere because you already registered it in step 1.
4. You order a new key which will become your new backup key.
There are many SciFi titles that are extremely expensive in hardcover these days. There is a lot of amazon volatility, so I tend to use price watch sites, but some also consistently stay in the hundreds of dollars (for example, the original printing of Hyperion). I suspect that this is because the genre used to sell badly in hardcover and many SciFi fans have come into money over the last few decades, but I'd be curious to hear from somebody who understands the market better.
I have worked at both Google and Facebook without any degree or certification. In my experience, these companies care a lot more about interview performance than formal credentials.
