FWIW - A whole host of the pre-IPO GitLab folks went to Chainguard. A lot of them, many in leadership roles. Most importantly, In Sales Leadership. These are people whom don’t really believe in high-pressure sales. Rather they aim to show the value and not squeeze customers for profit or making a number on a chart go up.
That second paragraph is what scares me the most about pure public healthcare options. The following isn’t to compare/contrast systems.. it’s just a viewpoint.
My cardiologist went “tests look fine, heart looks fine, there’s no reason for you to take colchicine. No clue why you have issues, everything is fine. Just take this brand new beta blocker to manage your heart rate.”
Meanwhile, there’s no answer why my heart rate rises 30-40BPM randomly when I stand. Why my heart rate drops to a very difficult detectable rate when I sleep. No answers as to why two sips of wine causes my body to go into shock. - All resulting post-Covid.
That same doctor told me to discontinue colchicine; yet without colchicine most medications, inc. ADHD, are maybe half as effective.
These are items which deserve answers. Not an answer of “just take another pill”. Some of those “unnecessary” tests can provide inclusion/exclusion information. Yet just refusing that knowledge denies answers.
In the US I can just find new doctors. But in other systems it’s either difficult or impossible.
Provided someone told GitLab Support. This was likely fine. GitLab can handle this much load. The platform as a whole has increased and improved over the years as new customers are added.
Think about this… every CI/CD Job runs a clone. That’s a lot..
They’ll know because in the US and abroad the banks send the balances and transactions to the IRS. I get letters every year/6 months that I’m subject to additional withholding because they haven’t gotten any $$ but they show I have.
This is entirely jurisdiction specific, so I can't say for certain, but in almost every country I've looked into it for, there is a set of paperwork that an individual can use to independently invoice for work, without the effort of setting up an incorporated company. You will definitely need to record the income you received, and declare it on the relevant tax forms.
There is often a scale variance too - in Australia, "hobby" income is treated differently from "business" income. [0]
In Germany, there is the concept of the "Freien Berufen" ("liberal professions"), in which you can freelance without a company. [1]
> ... the client also will demand...
The client may also demand these things of you.
They are certainly capable of dealing with sole traders, and will have some services provided by people who do not have those things. (Your boss does not check if the receipt you submit for the new bookshelf for the office comes from a registered company or a sole trader carpenter.)
Depending on the scale of the services you are providing, they may prefer to deal with a registered entity, but for small one-off things, that may not be necessary.
If you are regularly working with large businesses who are funding your work, it's worth looking into the most effective tax and legal structures for you. But if you just need to send the occasional invoice off to someone who wants something quick done, it's useful to know what your options are.
One final thought - even when dealing with organisations who prefer to deal with registered businesses, you have options. You can choose to be employed by a company which does that on your behalf. Either a business which you have a good relationship with, and is willing to enter into a casual employment contract with you and bill for your services, or a dedicated contractor management company. Either way, you give up a percentage of what you bill, but in exchange, they take the paperwork and liability overhead.
> There is often a scale variance too - in Australia, "hobby" income is treated differently from "business" income. [0]
I have an ABN and I am registered for GST for side hustles beyond the hobbyist income threshold. This costs me about 10 minutes of extra admin per year when I do my tax return.
All I need to do is give the tax office three figures: How much money I earned, how much GST I charged, and how much I paid (ie how much they need to give back to me.)
You don't seem to understand the power balance here. The client is in no position to demand anything, since the article author can just tell them to scram, and they can solve their own problems.
Working with corps is not a problem. Unless you have a slave mentality that is, and let them bully you and stomp all over you. If they have their wits with them, they will fully understand what negotiating position they are in, and not make unnecessary demands on the software creator.
I have a company in Estonia for cases like this. The amount of paperwork is nearly zero, the corps are happy they’re working with an actual company, and you can do things like holding money there (for business purchases) and paying no taxes in your home country (unless they have a CFC rule, notably US and Japan, in which case eh good luck).
It depends. Sibling thread has some horror stories about Germany, for example.
Estonia has been trying to get foreigners to open their businesses there for a while now: https://e-estonia.com/ But I don’t think that helps US residents too much (ask your tax advisor about CFC rules; I have only a vague understanding that it’s a PITA).
It also mostly doesn't help EU residents. If you live in another EU country, your tax office will treat your Estonian company as a local one since that's where the business takes place in truth.
I love those visits. I've occasionally had sharp chest pains which go away after a number of seconds. They've never been accompanied by typical heart attack symptoms, so I usually ignore it (not smart, I get it).
After one such episode, I decided to schedule an appointment with my general practitioner. They refused to see me if I didn't go to the ER first. I was pretty certain I didn't need an ER visit, but went anyway.
I waited hours, a doctor eventually saw me in the waiting room, and was never admitted. I think it cost $2500 or so, with insurance covering only part.
Huh, that's interesting. That matches something that I get sometimes, usually after I've been driving a long distance or sitting at my desk doing mouse-heavy stuff for a long time. I put it down to poor posture.
It hasn't happened quite so much since adjusting the steering to track and centre properly so I'm not constantly pulling the car left away from the middle of the road, and raising my seat a bit by unscrewing the seat from its base, putting in about 8cm worth of wooden spacers, and screwing it back down with long studs and nuts instead of the daft wee screws, so it's not sitting at its "most extended" height.
My BP pressure has slowly creeped up over the years to 155/95 range, despite being quite fit with no real lifestyle issues. Was told to monitor it. Did a reading a few weeks ago: 190 over something. Not good. Went to A&E where they confirmed the reading with their cuff. Sat there for several hours. BP kept climbing until it reached something like 235 over something (probably partly due from a feedback effect of knowing my BP was high). Felt fine, apart from the anxiety related to the BP reading. Did a few tests, but no-one seems to know why it spiked. They gave me some meds and it slowly dropped. They let me go when it dropped below 180. Now taking a calcium channel blocker and it is very slowly trending down. Now about 160 over 100.
Commenting to add - Insurance negotiated rate may actually be 1500$. If it is and they charge insurance 1500$. They legally cannot charge an individual a different or lower rate. Even if that person doesn’t have insurance and offers to pay cash.
This is one of those weird horrible traps health insurance puts you into. OP may charge insurance 1500$, insurance may only pay 20%. But that now means they have to charge individuals the full 1500$ price.
So honestly, Cudos to the OP for identifying this trap and then moving to just charging a reasonable flat rate.
This is a valid story, and I have no doubt it’s real. I’ve heard and seen many stories like this that have happened.
But… I’m going to say the dirty, quiet, and unlikable thing out loud.
That had nothing to do with DevOps or its philosophies, processes, or patterns. That was bad leadership from the top down plain and simple. It’s likely not even the individual engineers faults. It’s leaderships fault for not setting clear objectives, implementing them, ensuring that the engineers had a real plan before beginning, and making sure no individual was too in charge of things.
Leadership in your case was likely career management who knew very little about technical items. Managers who were technical were probably shot down for not playing politics properly, not producing the correct “metrics” and “kpis”. So they moved on.
That’s a company culture issue that has little to do with tech.
I think the comment you are replying to is pointing out the terrible ramifications of just taking a random sysadmin team and expecting them to work in a full blown devops role. I too have seen similar situations play out, and in slight reverse - in their scenario the devops guys were calling all of the shots, ive also seen (and have lived) the opposite where devs call any and every shot on devops stuff and the devops team is treated as little more than glorified IT tech support but for devs (understandable how a business could come to a conclusion about why that makes sense, given how they perceive the sys admin -> devops progression). This sounds like it’s what you may want but it has its own sorts of problems - devs dont always know the right thing or what to ask for or what not to ask for. Really good devops guys are experts at guiding these conversations collaboratively.
I have known and worked with some really great former sys admins gone devops. I am working on mentoring one right now, but I have to be kind of insulting about it and be like “forget everything you knew before it probably won’t help now” which sucks because sys admins do form pretty decent understanding of OS’s, databases, networking, etc. however, when it comes to the code part and more importantly taking all of these concepts and applying them to reasoning about infrastructure code and complex systems is very hard for most people and you have to take a “im a total newb” mentality a lot of people dont seem easily capable of doing.
Valid assessment. The CIO in question did not have a technical background as was far more interested in fostering cliques than good engineering practices. The culture of the place was toxic as a result, it rewarded surveillance and not performance. It promoted fantasy land project managers who ignored reality.
Still, it made me very wary of the idea that devops is separate to development.
Managing relationships with project management and the difficulty that entails with most devops orgs where ive been is a symptom of the same problem I feel is being circled around. Good devops managers manage around these realities really well, can think of some specific examples in my head - it’s very much a several way conversation that should punish silos. however in practice it seems to reward it. If devops worked with and closely with devs you do not need layers of semi competent project managers in between acting like glorified note takers.
Self hosted GitLab with a self-hosted LLM Provider connected to GitLab powering GitLab Duo. This should ensure that the data never gets outside your network, is never used in training data, and still allows you/staff to utilize LLMs. If you don’t want to self host an LLM, you could use something like Amazon Q, but then you’re trusting Amazon to do right by you.
Do with that knowledge what you may.