nigelk's comments

nigelk | 2 years ago | on: Culture Change at Google

as did the Google recruiters and HR people I spoke to before accepting the job :)

nigelk | 2 years ago | on: Culture Change at Google

It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.

nigelk | 2 years ago | on: Culture Change at Google

The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge.

It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.

nigelk | 3 years ago | on: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

As someone who was there start of 2007 to end of 2010, this resonated. My first two years were very different to the last two.

nigelk | 7 years ago | on: Losing 100 pounds in 276 days

I lost 50 pounds in under 200 days, and then another 20 over the next year.

Here's what worked for me:

  * Calorie counting to work out baselines
  * Accept the feeling of being hungry and learn to relish it ("I'm losing weight if I'm hungry")
  * Do light weightlifting at home
  * Exercise naked in front of a mirror for positive and negative reinforcement

nigelk | 9 years ago | on: Geek Career Paths

VP of Product

Director of Product

These titles both exist...

nigelk | 9 years ago | on: Does Google's Hiring Process Put Off Talented Applicants?

My interview for Google as an SRE in late 2009 consisted of well over half design questions around improvements of a system with lots of users.

One of the best series of questions I've ever gotten in an interview. We probably spent close to an hour just on one major aspect of the service.

nigelk | 10 years ago | on: Why expat Americans are giving up their passports

At least part of the complication is that overseas equivalents of 401k funds that may be mandatory to contribute to are often considered to be bank accounts by the IRS.

nigelk | 10 years ago | on: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

Excellent, thanks. Hopefully we'll see tools like Cloudability support it then.

I'll check it out again, really the frustrating management aspect was the lack of org oversight over multiple projects started within your domain.

nigelk | 10 years ago | on: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

There are some great aspects to Google Compute, but I hope this change results in catch up on features needed for corporate adoption compared to AWS.

The lack of a billing API and the lack of centralized management are really painful if you're trying to adopt it across an organization.

nigelk | 10 years ago | on: Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+

My understanding is that they didn't do a write API due to fear of automated spam and poor S/N ratios.

nigelk | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Visa Explorer – Salaries, lawyers, companies of all H-1B in the USA

It's not just that, looking through my current and past entries some of these records just aren't correct, and don't even match the data provided on LCAs etc.

nigelk | 11 years ago | on: New Data Show How Firms Like Infosys and Tata Abuse the H-1B Program

Not right, but not entirely wrong either.

The process for an internal, expedited H1b transfer is significantly simpler than an H1b from scratch.

nigelk | 11 years ago | on: Gavin Andresen, the Most Powerful Person in the World of Bitcoin

I think they're ruling out hyphenating. Cooke-Bell and Bell-Cooke.

nigelk | 12 years ago | on: Trapperkeeper is a new Clojure framework for long-running applications, services

Not sure if you're the one who changed it, but the " Trapperkeeper is a new Clojure framework [...]" title works fine and is much less misleading imho.

nigelk | 12 years ago | on: Trapperkeeper is a new Clojure framework for long-running applications, services

Your comments apply to the HN link text, not the article or headline.

Puppet Labs isn't a single language company.

nigelk | 12 years ago | on: Getting Started with Docker

What are you finding unreliable in terms of tooling for Puppet on Windows?

nigelk | 12 years ago | on: Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

This is a very ordinary problem, and it's usually solved like this with Puppet:

Specify the service declaratively, and subscribe it to the package that provides the payload.

  service { 'myservice':
     ensure    => running,
     enable    => true,
     subscribe => Package['myservice'],
  }

Then when you upgrade the package on that node, either by using ensure => latest, or by manually specifying the new version, Puppet will automatically restart the service.

nigelk | 13 years ago | on: A Tale of Two Interviews, Part 1

Maybe it was open source software and/or he went through a simple CLA process?

nigelk | 13 years ago | on: Abandoning Rubygems

Thanks for the feedback andyl.

We're thinking very much about the direction of embedding all dependencies, but we're also conscious of the needs of the Linux distros, who don't package software that way.

There is a downside to having all your apps embed their dependencies. It becomes significantly more complicated to update libraries in response to vulnerabilities and bugs.