Ideally write the hiring manager and not HR. And, write something that makes it hard to not want to talk to you.
1: Minimal hygiene is writing something that shows you read the vacancy (if any). Don't: "I'm interested in the role, CV attached". do: "You want onsite in Amsterdam, I'm living in Milan but already planning to move to Amsterdam for reason X".
2: Stand out from the average applicant. Someone recently applied with a personal website that was a kinda-functioning OS (with some apps). Someone else applied with a YouTube channel hacking an ESP32 into their coffee machine. Someone applied with a tool on their GitHub profile, super well written, in our target language, doing interesting things on the database we're working with, etc., etc. how could I _not_ talk these applicants? All of these are soft signals that show affinity for their work as engineers. Don't: generic application letter combined with 3+ pages resume with too much detail.
3: if invited: get curious (but not overly opinionated/combative) about their stack. Candidates we've been most excited about have come in asking questions on how we're setup, and why we've made certain choices. Don't: expect the interviewer to ask all the questions, or bring only a prepared question that misses the mark.
4: Its a people process, if that's your challenge, work on that. Maybe you share a hobby with the interviewer, maybe you've both solved similar problems in earlier jobs, maybe you both like Haskell, maybe something else to connect over. Connection matters to most hiring managers.
Context: I’m in the Netherlands. With taxes, power is around 25cent/kWh for me. For reference: Amsterdam is around a latitude of 52N, which is north enough that it only hits Alaska, not the US mainland.
I installed 2800Wp solar for about €2800 ($3000, payback in: 4-5 years), and a 5kWh battery for €1200 ($1300) all in. The battery has an expected payback time of just over 5 years, and I have some backup power if I need it.
I’m pretty sure about the battery payback, because I have a few years of per second consumption data in clickhouse and (very conservatively) simulated the battery. A few years ago any business case on storage was completely impossible, and now suddenly we’re here.
I could totally see this happen for the US as prices improve further, even if it’s not feasible today.
Im in this business, and used to think the same. It turns out this is a minority of callers. Some examples:
- a client were working does advertising in TV commercials, and a few percent of their calls is people trying to cancel their TV subscriptions, even though they are in healthcare
- in the troubleshooting flow for a client with a physical product, 40% of calls are resolved after the “did you try turning it off and on again” step.
- a health insurance client has 25% of call volume for something that is available self-service (and very visible as well), yet people still call.
- a client in the travel space gets a lot of calls about: “does my accommodation include X”, and employees just use their public website to answer those questions. (I.e., it’s clearly available for self-service)
One of the things we tend to prioritize in the initial conversation is to determine in which segment you fall and route accordingly.
(reposting because something ate your newlines, I've added comments in line)
Im in this business, and used to think the same. It turns out this is a minority of callers. Some examples:
- a client were working does advertising in TV commercials, and a few percent of their calls is people trying to cancel their TV subscriptions, even though they are in healthcare
I guess these are probably desperate people who are trying to get to someone, anyone. In my opinion, the best thing people can do is get a really good credit card and do a charge back for things like this.
- in the troubleshooting flow for a client with a physical product, 40% of calls are resolved after the “did you try turning it off and on again” step.
I bought a Chinese wifi mesh router and it literally finds a time between two am and five am and reboots itself every night, by default. You can turn this behavior off but it was interesting that it does this by default.
- a health insurance client has 25% of call volume for something that is available self-service (and very visible as well), yet people still call.
In my defense, I've been on the other side of this. I try to avoid calling but whenever I use self service, it feels like ny settings never stick and always switch back to what they want the next billing cycle. If I have to waste time each month, you have to waste time each month.
- a client in the travel space gets a lot of calls about: “does my accommodation include X”, and employees just use their public website to answer those questions. (I.e., it’s clearly available for self-service)
These public websites are regularly out of date. Someone who is actually on site confirm that yes, they have non smoking rooms or ice machines that aren't broken is valuable.
One of the things we tend to prioritize in the initial conversation is to determine in which segment you fall and route accordingly.
> On the other hand, if each service experiences the same hour per year of downtime but at different times, then the person is likely to be blocked for closer to 100 hours per year.
I think the parent post made a different argument:
- Centralizing most of the dependency on Cloudflare results in a major outage when something happens at Cloudflare, it is fragile because Cloudflare becomes the single point of failure. Like: Oh Cloudflare is down... oh, none of my SaaS services work anymore.
- In a world where this is not the case, we might see more outages, but they would be smaller and more contained. Like: oh, Figma is down? fine, let me pickup another task and come back to Figma once it's back up. It's also easier to work around by having alternative providers as a fallback, as they are less likely to share the same failure point.
As a result, I don't think you'll be blocked 100 hours a year in scenario 2. You may observe 100 non-blocking inconveniences per year, vs a completely blocking Cloudflare outage.
And in observed uptime, I'm not even sure these providers ever won. We're running all our auxiliary services on a decent Hetzner box with a LB. Say what you want, but that uptime is looking pretty good compared to any services relying on AWS (Oct 20, 15 hours), Cloudflare (Dec 5 (half hour), Nov 18 (3 hours)). Easier to reason about as well. Our clients are much more forgiving when we go down due to Azure/GCP/AWS/Cloudflare vs our own setup though...
I have 1Gbit at home, but almost never reach those speeds when downloading games. It’s one of those cases where it makes sense (I want to play now!), but I’m under the impression the limit is upstream (at steam most likely), rather than on my connection. (I do get those speeds on speed tests, doesn’t seem to be my setup).
Steam is tricky cause it has multiple potential bottlenecks. The steam cache, internet connection, decompression (i.e. cpu) and storage. Often hard to tell which limit you're hitting
ISPs happily collaborate with and put speed test servers in privileged locations on their network so you will get higher speeds there even if the actual peering to the outside world is much slower.
You can try Fast.com (Netflix) or Cloudflare’s one which are explicitly designed to work around this by serving the test data from the same endpoints the serve actual customer data, so ISPs can’t cheat.
This still doesn’t guarantee however that you will achieve this speed to any random host on the internet - their pipe to Cloudflare/Netflix may very well be fat and optimized but it doesn’t guarantee their pipe to a random small hosting provider doesn’t go over a 56k modem somewhere (I jest.. but only a bit).
Given that whether you get 30mbit or 30gbit from Netflix won’t make a blind bit of difference it’s not that useful a test. It doesn’t do upload either as Netflix is all about consumption.
Test to where you want to exchange high speed traffic.
I get about 2Gbps max on Steam and Xbox on an 8Gbit connection. The limit could also be due to your disk drive while Steam is installing the downloaded files.
You might check what region Steam is downloading from (it's in settings -> Download or something similar). If it's selected poorly, you might do better by picking one yourself.
It depends. 80% of my electricity cost is taxes. If I produce it using PV, the consumption is never taxed, and the benefit is pretty substantial, on top of the market electricity price. (One rarely finds low risk investments that return 20-25% year)
Roughly speaking the electricity is about €0.06 with about €0.20 in taxes on top. So offsetting consumption nets me about €0.26 cents per kWh.
The installation of a 2800kWp system cost me about €2600 and generates between 2400-2750kWh annually, so about €650 euro. In a 10 year timespan that’s an IRR of 20%, creeping up to 25% for 20 years.
Thanks for the numbers! I had no idea taxes were such a large fraction elsewhere. Good to know/consider. I'm most familiar with California. (and actually can't give a % that is taxes offhand)
After the first year of having PV, I determined my own payoff time of about 5-7 years, so that was nice and self-justifying, and haven't dug deeper into details on that.
Partly, I did the electrical work myself (dug a cable to the shed, added a breaker, etc). Asked the installer to put the panels on the roof and connect it to the existing line. The roof is low, so access was easy and they were done in a less than 2 hours, kept the cost low.
Just happen have some stats on that (non-US context): 60% picks up a local number, about 40% picks up a foreign number (specifically the stat I have is a US number calling someone in a non-US geography).
Stellar | Amsterdam, the Netherlands | Onsite (2 days remote OK) | €70-100k + equity | https://stellarcs.ai
Hey, I'm one of Stellar's founders. We're building voice AI for large contact centers.
Everyone thinks contact centers are boring. They're wrong. It's the last place where companies actually talk to their customers. We listen to calls every week and it's fascinating. AI here actually helps real people: shorter wait times, 24/7 support, lower cost.
Stellar skips the robotic text-to-speech pipeline entirely and works directly with voice. Our conversations are remarkably human, also in non-English languages and local dialects, where most AI sounds like a bad GPS navigator.
On top of this, we're great at integrating with the complex systems at enterprises, and meeting their compliance requirements.
We're cash-flow positive, growing fast with enterprise clients queuing up, and all founders still code. We need engineers who can jump between our Go and TS backends and React frontend. This role is perfect if you:
* Want massive ownership at a small team (not pretend "impact" at BigCo)
* Actually enjoy solving hard problems (real-time audio at enterprise scale)
* Think making AI sound human in niche dialects is a fun challenge
We're building AI voice agents for enterprise contact centers. We focus on remarkably human-like conversations, regulated environments and support for non-English markets (Dutch, German, French, etc.).
All our founders can code, but we're growing and getting busy quickly. So, we are looking for a (senior) Software Engineer: Go/TypeScript (Encore.dev/React). If you're strong in other languages, entrepreneurial and eager to learn, we'd still love to talk. Build core platform features, guardrails, integrations, and tools that help our AI agents handle millions of customer calls.
You'll thrive here if you:
- Want high ownership and direct customer impact
- Prefer building directly with users vs. in isolation
- Enjoy technical challenges at the intersection of AI/audio/enterprise
- Have the ambition to grow into a technical leadership role as the team grows
Ideally write the hiring manager and not HR. And, write something that makes it hard to not want to talk to you.
1: Minimal hygiene is writing something that shows you read the vacancy (if any). Don't: "I'm interested in the role, CV attached". do: "You want onsite in Amsterdam, I'm living in Milan but already planning to move to Amsterdam for reason X".
2: Stand out from the average applicant. Someone recently applied with a personal website that was a kinda-functioning OS (with some apps). Someone else applied with a YouTube channel hacking an ESP32 into their coffee machine. Someone applied with a tool on their GitHub profile, super well written, in our target language, doing interesting things on the database we're working with, etc., etc. how could I _not_ talk these applicants? All of these are soft signals that show affinity for their work as engineers. Don't: generic application letter combined with 3+ pages resume with too much detail.
3: if invited: get curious (but not overly opinionated/combative) about their stack. Candidates we've been most excited about have come in asking questions on how we're setup, and why we've made certain choices. Don't: expect the interviewer to ask all the questions, or bring only a prepared question that misses the mark.
4: Its a people process, if that's your challenge, work on that. Maybe you share a hobby with the interviewer, maybe you've both solved similar problems in earlier jobs, maybe you both like Haskell, maybe something else to connect over. Connection matters to most hiring managers.
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