Using a throwaway for this one. Posting here as a heads-up for anyone else thinking of applying for any software positions in Apple, ended up being a complete waste of time and pretty devastating to be honest.

The process ended up being 8 interviews over two months, 2 of which were onsite that I took paid time off for. The feedback was positive, and they said they would get back to me by the end of the week.

Then two weeks later, for some reason that is still not entirely clear, they decided to close most of the positions on the mobile team I was applying for (including mine), and opened up a few positions for full-stack engineers instead. So I basically just wasted two months applying for a job that does not exist.

I even double checked to see if there was something I wasn't qualified for, or if they preferred another candidate, but they just said something along the lines of 'Apple is an ever-changing business, and when priorities shift, so do the roles we need to meet our goals'. I asked to get more information from someone actually involved in the decision, but only received generic responses from the recruiter, so I've just given up at this point.

The interviews themselves and the people doing them were great, but the process itself was completely soul-destroying. Wouldn't recommend it unless you really want to work there, and even then, expect to wait a long time.

Hi folks, I am working on a side project.

My full time job is hybrid and I would like to spend the weekends working on my side project from a cafe for a change.

Any recommendations where the cafes won't frown upon me hogging a table for 4-6 hours. Of course I'd be a paying customer for lunch and coffee.

Mods - if this is not the right place to pop this question, happy to remove it.

PS: Am based in Dublin but okay to drive < 1h.

After 7 years in corporate tech, I’m starting to question what’s next.

The politics, egos, poor leadership and constant shifting priorities can be exhausting. Sometimes it feels like managing people’s behaviour takes more energy than actually delivering the work.

Has anyone left corporate tech completely and found something different? What do you do now?

Genuinely interested in hearing your experiences.

Random one, but a lad I know joined my time about 3 years ago for 6 weeks then left for another position in a competitor. He then left that company after 8 months, moved to a third company for 2 years and now is back in the second company again.

No judgement, I think fair play to him for getting the offers and maximizing his salary. I would've thought leaving a company after a short period would basically have you blacklisted, for lack of a better word? The cost of onboarding a new employee only to leave quickly, etc. Maybe that's not the case?

He did say explicitly that he chose to leave, it wasn't a layoff the first time, and he's even jumped to a higher position now. Some chess moves there, lol.

Has anyone left a tech company and come back in a different position, not related to being laid off the first time?

Looking for information on the package.

So the Ballinasloe horse fair was this weekend, if anyone remembers the Smithfield markets (the ones that were closed down because of violence at them) it was kind of like that. Spotted on the day was this sign for “Traveller USB sticks”.

I’m sure these USB sticks were just ordinary empty ones with pictures and symbols of traveller life on them, usable to store their photos of traveller life on their laptops. But what would, in theory, get preloaded onto a USB used for dodgy purposes? Dodgy boxes? Key copiers?

Just to be clear, I’m not looking for the social commentary aspect. I just want to hear from experts like yourselves what could potentially be got from a USB sold down a market, either inadvertently (the USB steals from the buyer) or with knowledge (the USB is bought as a tool to use against others)

So I’m a senior software engineer within a company. I only recently joined within the last six months and just recently passed my probation period so positive so far.

Recently I’ve noticed that I’m having a bit more in office meetings with people from other departments e.g. sales and so on. I used to be fully remote so its never really bothered me. I didn’t really care. I wouldn’t listen. I’d just zone out because I have nothing to do there but now in the office I feel like I have to pay more attention because I’m actually physically present in the room.

I feel like I get anxiety or panic attack attacks while sitting in the meeting room and I don’t understand why this is happening. I’m just sitting there not contributing and listening. I feel like if somebody asked me something it would send me over the edge.

How do you guys deal with anxiety for these kind of things especially since returning to office becoming so normal lately?

Feel like I’m the only socially anxious engineer experiencing this.

Just wondering as they seem to employ a lot of people in their IT department yet I've never heard much about it.

I have heard about these issues but didn't know how severe the disparity is. My org in the company works on the frontier.

As someone in Staff+ role in big-tech, I was tasked to bootstrap a team in Singapore. The team I ended up putting together is a good mix of young + experienced. I have been at awe at how quickly they onboarded and how quickly they became productive. The work quality consistently beats my local teams work. This has caused me to deeply reflect about the situation. Why?

We mainly decided to expand because of the hiring pool and Singapore government policy around frontier space. And in fact we get a better talent pool. There is a huge local pool as well as attracts from the whole region (Japan, Australia).

Ireland has a grand total of 0 universities in the top 50 in ranking whereas Singapore has 2. The region has a lot and a lot of folks from China love being in Singapore. Most graduates we hired are from those universities. They are simply better trained. Aside from their culture of hard work, their critical thinking quality and education stands out. Also, their post-tax pay is significantly more competitive than Dublin (hence they stay).

I have been recently asked to put down my preference for team expansion and I am genuinely conflicted.

There is one thing going on for Ireland though. Timezone. The Irish team can comfortably work with Singapore, NYC and San Francisco at the same time.

I don't know where I should scream to push the government to prioritize education quality. TCD/UCD/UCC producing ok mid-tier but the mid-tier is up for a huge reckoning in the age of AI.

Does anyone here work as a Performance Engineer in Dublin, as described in the following post excerpt? If yes, would you mind saying where?

Brendan Gregg's "When to hire a computer performance engineering team"

Large tech companies in the US hire performance engineers (under that or other titles) to ensure that infrastructure costs and service latency don't grow too high, and that their service is reliable under peak load. A new performance team can likely find enough optimizations to halve infrastructure spend in their first couple of years, even for companies that have been using commercial performance or observability tools. Performance engineers do much more than those tools, working with development teams and vendors to build, test, debug, tune, and adopt new performance solutions, and to find deep optimizations that those tools can miss.

To me, the main characteristic of this role is that a business' overall spend on compute is large enough that reducing that spend is a significant business win, even when compared to opening new product lines or bringing in new customers to existing product lines.

There are roles in Dublin where people use the above skills in their daily work, possibly under other job titles, right? I've seen multiple job postings for each of SRE, production engineering and GPU kernel developer which may be of a similar theme. Are there other job descriptions I should also be on the look out for?

I'm almost done a distributed computing course so this seems like the right time to be musing on my life decisions.

What’s the biggest fuck up you’ve heard of someone making in work?

Heard of one recently and genuinely shocked the person is still employed.

Will admit some of this is hearsay and unverified. But we had someone who supported our team join start of the year (wasn’t under our management structure, but worked in a close enough basis).

Nice guy, did good work, no complaints. Anyway come in one day and he’s deactivated in the system despite only chatting the day before about work.

Told by his manager he was a contractor and chose to left the company and a replacement is coming.

Think nothing of it, until I’m having lunch with a coworker in a completely different department who I’ve worked with for years and she asked me did you hear about X.

Come to find out her brother is a really good friend of the contractor guy and she had heard his side of the story.

Turns out the company told him after interviews that he would have to do the first 6 months self employed to “prove himself” and “win a contract”, and that everyone in that specific department had to do it, and not only that put them on an American contract.

Now that manager that hired him left and a new manager stepped in. This person had allegedly got it writing that if they did 6 months self employed they would be given a FTE.

New manager came in and decided she wanted to “shake things up” and has previously worked with two other of the FTE, so apparently when the contractor has work that was being finished she would quickly assign it to other co workers who could get a bonus, which I had noticed as suddenly towards the end of something we would work on, someone else on team would suddenly take over.

Then apparently what happened next was, contractor asked what was happening with their conversion as they were ahead of target, and (according to them) raised that the company having multiple people as self
Employed contractors doing the same work as the FTE and doing it to “win a contract” was likely bogus self employment, as they got no holiday pay, pension or benefits.

Contractor is told not to worry would have an update the next day and manager would come back to them. 3 days later they went to their 1:1 and was told contract was terminated with immediate effect, that there was “no work for them” and had their system access cut (or so they thought) right away.

A month later the manager hired a former co worker of hers to the same role she had terminated someone on the basis of “no work”.

But here’s where the big fuck ups start. Apparently because the manager was new she never did a correct offboarding flow, so the contractor only lost their email, slack and laptop access.

The contractor was part of peer interviews in the company so, they retained full access to the companies systems and the ATS because of the fuck up. They could access this with their personal Gmail.

They had access to personal data, interview notes and. Recording, offer letters, compliance and onboarding documents, CVs of everyone who’s applied of interviewed by the company, because they never set up system safeguards to ensure access was only on the ones they needed.

It got worse, apparently the manager received emails after the termination, arguing and disputing some things she said and asking her to state the position but also noting the contractor had lost access to submit timesheets and could not get paid, which she ignored.

The contractor then apparently tried to report the data breach to her and she ignored the emails
Too, and they had to reach out to someone else in the company and ask them for a contact in privacy.

In short it took her a week to send anything to HR about the termination or data breach.

When HR went back to the contractor they just stated it was down to a “review of commercial decisions” as to why they were let go, and they kicked off because they had been told it was down to “no work”, to cover for the manager hiring her mate.

So now contractor is going nuclear, according to my coworker he has filed protected disclosure complaints in the WRC, bogus self employment complaints with WRC, Revenue and social welfare. They have not only reported the data breach to the DPC, but because they had access
To a global system, have apparently reported the company in California, New York, Canada, Singapore and Australia. (Which as petty as it sounds not sure there’s much legal basis).

You are probably thinking that would be the end for someone in a role 3/4 months, but no, she was actually being called for praise in one of
Our company slack channels only last week and really had me wondering how someone would not just be terminated for that.

So what’s the worse fuck up you’ve ever seen in work?

TL:DR - new manager comes into company, department has a number of “self employed” contractors, someone claimed to have raised it was it legal and terminated 2 days later and told “no work”. Manager forgets to off board and causes massive Data Breach. Manager hires her former co worker a month later and sets contractor off complaints to WRC,
DPC, Revenue and DSW and complaints to global data protection offices.

Software engineer looking to make some very simple PCBs. I’ve tried easyEDA and I had to stop because I was about to throw the laptop out the window.

Is there a better site to sketch schematics and verify they work before ordering a pcb?

Hey all

Im 24yo, Been a junior frontend developer for 2 years now. I’m a bit unhappy with my current company, it’s a bit stagnant and my opportunities for growth are limited.

With the rise of AI im not sure I even want to be a software developer anymore, it feels like it’s sucked the soul out of the job and I’m wondering should I pivot to another type of role. I’ve started looking into solutions engineer roles but a lot of them seem to require sales experience which I don’t have.

I’m at a loss for what my next step is, I don’t know if I move to another company they’ll have the same issues my current one has, atleast I might learn some things but it seems like nowhere seems to have a place for people in the start of their careers, it’s just seniors and AI. Another drastic option is completely pivot and look to education to retrain in another area.

Any help or advice greatly appreciated thanks!

Our CEO has went and hired a consultancy to come in & work with our business experts to find cost savings using AI.

So, how i'm understanding it - they will work with 'domain experts' from each department to understand the process flow then attempt to wire-in (or mould) AI Agents to reduce the human touchpoints. This will be business wide.

Our business processes are quite complex and with that, human heavy; we attempted many time to automate some of these flows - with varying levels of success but the difference then was we were using deterministic tools to solve these problem. i've not met these consultants yet so no idea what strategy they will adopt - my thinking is that will likely code out lightweight LLM wrapper to answer domain specific questions but can't for the life of me see how this will help.

Question: Anyone been through any such transformation projects? Any success stories out there? Any war stories that you are able to share?

I'm hosting a social next week to coincide with SREcon at the Ferryman. It's next Monday, and themed around incident response - details here - https://luma.com/5lgundym

Thanks :)