Rubin Observatory | https://rubinobservatory.org | Senior DevOps Eng | Tucson AZ OR possible remote from US states
And now for something completely different.. (drumroll)... astronomy!
We're building a big telescope to carry out the biggest, faster, widest survey in optical astronomy. I run a small devops team in a much larger data management division - we do current data services work - lots of Python (3) data services (FastAPI) running on Kubernetes on Google Cloud and on-prem (ie sometimes in... actually clouds).
I have a number of refugees from well-known dotcoms in my team, here's why they tell me they work here despite, you know, the universe not handing out stock options:
* Sustained and humane software development, with opportunities to refactor code for incremental improvements and extend your codebase over multiple years
* No pager. If you want to turn off your phone after hours, fine (I keep mine on because fixing telescopes is actually fun to me but there's no on-call)
* No doing interviews as your job.
* 100% open source with many opportunities to upstream (all our code is on Github: https://github.com/lsst-sqre )
* Surprisingly (for academia) current toolchain and coding practices
* Benefits, stability w/ opportunity for growth. My full-stack engineer joined 8 years ago and is (still) doing better work every year. My most recent hire is a security engineer who has been with me longer than the average dotcom tenure and seems to think it's Christmas every time I tell him he's allowed to tidy up code we already have in production.
* Pay is decent, more so if you're not paying Bay Area rent. Not as much as you'd make as a Senior Engineer at Google. But:
* Nobody is the product. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
If you're interested: https://ls.st/square-job . And if you are a US taxpayer, thank you for funding our scientific mission!
If you're ever looking for a data scientist, one of my good friends has a PhD in astrophysics and left academia to do SQL, Python ML, and dashboarding. She's super sharp and I think she'd jump all over an opportunity like this.
Hah I ran into the comment size limit and took out
- women work here - in technical and scientific roles
You are welcome to tell your friend to reach out, I am always happy to talk to fellow women in the field so I can learn what they are looking for and let them know when the right fit appears.
Actually, in case it's of interest to her, over at the American Institute of Physics in the DC metro area, I'm looking for a solutions architect to help support the institute and the 10 member societies connected to it. The role is to help define infrastructure standards regarding our digital experience platform (Blueconic, MailChimp, Tableau, Brightspot) as we migrate away from Drupal.
Challenging project that can help influence engagement with students, the public, and the physical sciences community for decades to come.
This is why I mention things like "surprisingly current toolchain for academia" :-) My personal philosophy is staying current costs far less in the end that falling behind and then needing a giant transition...
Oh thanks for asking, I should add nobody is _required_ to get out there and be a performing monkey or anything, but it's nice to get out there and talk about our work once in a while, especially since we're taxpayer funded and also because it's nice to remind ourselves occasionally there's more to this job that git push :-) One of my devs hates giving talks and so he doesn't and that's fine.
The mission of the telescope is to carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and so if you search for Rubin LSST you'll get even better stuff I'm sure.
PS not a talk but here's my favorite video we have ever put out, it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GicDYZXMboc "We'll be counting stars" as the song goes...
Thanks for asking, sorry for the delay I was checking with the bureaucracy what the answer is (as we are technically government subcontractors we don't make the rules).
My understanding is we do sponsor H1s. The vast majority of nationalities are fine, however we do have on-premises computing on a Department of Energy facility, and they bar citizens of the following countries from being granted an account on their systems: https://www.state.gov/state-sponsors-of-terrorism/
so a candidate with those nationalities would be at a disadvantage.
Unfortunately for reasons outside our control, remote work is only possible from residents of the following US states:
And now for something completely different... if watching the Fortnite black hole has given you the feeling that maybe you would like to find an actual earth-killing asteroid before it blows up our map...
At the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (https://www.lsst.org) we are building an astronomical observatory that will map the sky at unprecedented speed and depth.
We are looking for a senior security engineer with strong devops chops (or alternatively, a senior devops engineer with strong security credentials). Less exciting version here: https://ls.st/zc5
This is academia, so salaries are not what you are used to up there in SV, but it's a chance to contribute to an awesome, if not historic, science project.
| Large Synoptic Survey Telescope | Senior Cloud Solutions Architect | ONSITE Tucson, AZ | VISA
Cloud engineering where clouds are the enemy! I'm at a major astronomy project to build a telescope that can observe the whole sky twice a week (lsst.org). Our Education and Public Outreach folks down the hallway from me are planning a bunch of cool projects for the general public, kids, and citizen scientists and need someone to come up with how it could all be done using current technology stacks.
So! You get to be one of the first people to learn about the earth-killing asteroid and you get to work on something that your annoying uncle can understand when you go home for Christmas and he asks "So what do you do all day with that computer?"
This is a technical leadership position and as the team is still ramping up it has to be on-site, but Tucson is a great town to live in (they don't call us "The Portland of the SouthWest" for nuthin') and you can buy a house for what it takes you to rent a closet in SV :-) If you need a visa that is fine, we're a quasi-academic shop and our HR is used to this kind of thing.
Don't let the incredibly sucky job application site put you off, it has nothing to do with what the rest of us do :-) Apply here http://ls.st/bo0 (I'm sorry, academia will have cool recruiting practices in, oh, 2045 or so). If you have questions drop me a line (email in the profile).
PS. You get to work with @astropixie in case you're a fan
In terms of time taken, the men took 22.48 minutes with instructions, on average, [...] compared with the women taking 23.65 minutes with instructions, on average,
I [female] would lose 5% in time over a median guy just by slower screwdriving, never mind cognitive performance. This is why I assemble Ikea furniture with a power screwdriver - it's not easy work if you're not used to it.
Note a single piece of furniture and a tiny sample size used. A more complex piece could have very different results. Also, including time without instructions is almost pointless in the real world as Ikea ships instructions.
Those take a considerable amount of strength to "lock in"... I always do them when my wife and I assemble furniture. We are quite slow because we apply wood glue to every joint.
Is there good research on the different in strength? I remember reading Swedish statistics that women are about twice as likely to be regular exercising than men, which I would assume has a large impact on strength.
"Mean maximal hand-grip strength showed the expected clear difference between men (541 N) and women (329 N). Less expected was the gender related distribution of hand-grip strength: 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects."
A popular website for calculating strength standards is:
http://www.strengthstandards.co/
This site is intended for people serious about strength training. Somebody who does "regular exercise" without specifically focusing on strength is unlikely to be stronger than the "Novice" level.
According to Wikipedia, the average US male weighs 88.3kg and the average US female weighs 74.7kg.
The big three (squat/bench/deadlift) 1RM total for an average untrained male is 186kg. For an average novice female, 175kg. This suggests that ordinary exercise is not sufficient to make up for the difference in body size and testosterone levels, and only those rare few females who are serious about strength training will be stronger than the average male.
interesting observation, so you'd claim the difference could be entirely due to strength? That'd be an interesting follow up study -- w/ and w/o powertools
Unless you personally know either of the people involved, I don't think you are in a position to make a judgement as to whether it was "love, sacrifice and reward" or "prevailing cultural pressures at the time that were always regretted later"
How does that make a difference? We're supposed to discount his wife's sacrifice because of potential social pressures?
If you really wanted to be a cold hearted bastard about it you could have done a cost benefit analysis on the potential earnings of a theoretical physicist vs a secretary in the early 1950's before you discounted it from being a financial decision, but then you couldn't have made an opportunistic political statement due to a man's death.
Well, the thrust of it was that the man's career is important, and the woman's isn't. So assuming they had no children at the time, it was entirely consistent with that for her to quit college and take a job with no career path in order to fund his education. (If they had children, of course, the ethic would have been that she should stay home to care for them... indeed, she would likely have had no alternative.)
I think frossie has a good point, actually. We can hope that it was as jusben1369 suggests, but we can't really know that. Maybe being married to Gene gave Marian all she wanted in life, and maybe it didn't.
I am bothered by this - it's a completely unnecessary reinforcement of a stereotype. I don't understand why an androgynous name (eg Alex) or a neutral name (R2D2) is not an option, if the software is not up to recognising two different appellations.
And it can create a cognitive dissonance if you allow people to modify half-assedly - eg. it annoys me that I have to ask Siri for help when I have set Siri to be an Australian male voice.
It is important that code reviews are public enough that people see other people review each other's code - a system where the only code reviews you see are the ones you do and the ones you get leads to poor expectations of what they are for.
Having at least two very accomplished and (culturally and organisationally senior) people routinely "model" reasonable review behaviour can be stunningly effective.
Also this is an area where frequent team conversations about what good code is outside a review situation helps to build a certain culture. It helps step away from nitpicking and arguing.
These are the kind of calculations that make me weep - somebody getting happy with numbers without engaging their brain as to the answer. Obviously the Tesla factory is not going to require 20,000,000 Megawatthours to operate - that is as much as the whole electricity production of the State of New Hampshire.
Assuming their input data is actually correct, I will speculate they are calculating the energy cost of the entire lithium battery production from raw materials, such as extracting lithium from mineral deposits, the majority of which would happen before the materials arrived at the Tesla factory.
I also expect Elon Musk knows what his electricity bill is. Given his investment in green technologies and his general success in delivering projects, I would be rather surprised if he advertised a solar factory if there was a chance he would be out by 4 orders of magnitude on how much power he would need.
>Assuming their input data is actually correct, I will speculate they are calculating the energy cost of the entire lithium battery production from raw materials, such as extracting lithium from mineral deposits, the majority of which would happen before the materials arrived at the Tesla factory.
If you look at one of their sources[1], it is clear that this is the case.
According to this study[0], it takes about 116 kWh of input energy to create a 100 kWh battery, given the materials. The majority of the total energy usage is in material production, not battery production. Assuming Tesla is not making their own materials, this deflates the required input energy substantially.
> Assuming Tesla is not making their own materials, this deflates the required input energy substantially.
And also inflates that amount of greenwashing involved...... Why crow over renewable energy when your use of energy is irrelevant relative to your suppliers?
But their statement seems accurate and clear: they will operate the GigaFactory using renewable energy. They don't claim or imply that they will extract the materials using renewable's or that all their suppliers will use renewable's.
They should source their lithium from solar-powered contractors. Maybe even sell them some panels for a good price.
(I realize the brine is already evaporated in the sun, but there's electrical separation after that.)
Reportedly, the gigafactory will import ore from the mines directly, and process it. So, optimization might be possible, especially given that they can choose more expensive extraction processes because they don't have to compete on the cent.
They don't have any magical technology that allows them to dramatically reduce energy needed. The obvious conclusion is that they won't make anywhere near as many batteries as assumed.
Transportation uses very very little energy compared to everything else that needs to be done.
You will not find your magical technology in shipping.
Additionally ocean shipping is cheap enough that it can take less energy to ship something to the other side of the world than to the other side of Nevada.
I had a dig around, you are right that transport of lithium is relatively negligible in the energy budget (back of an envelope calculations suggest around 0.5 kwh for a 1 kwh capacity battery), transport of other material such as nickel is actually more important, but even when you add them all together it is only maybe a couple of percent or so of the energy involved.
It seems that the drying process is the one to target as it accounts for around 50% of the energy budget and uses big electric ovens. Electric ovens are something that respond very well to economies of scale though, given the losses are a function of the volume versus the surface area, so you could see significant reductions there with a factory this size.
That is because that is the ACTUAL purpose of that (Selective Sync) dialogue he is showing, contrary to his implication that it is related to upload configuration. When you have 2 work computers and one personal laptop, perhaps you have a CAD Drawings folder that you would like to sync between your work computers but don't want 100 GB of work stuff on your personal laptop. What the Selective Sync feature allows you to do is untick "CAD Drawings" on your laptop Dropbox settings, so that you don't fill up your disk with stuff you don't want in that machine's context. It's a nice feature.
And now for something completely different.. (drumroll)... astronomy!
We're building a big telescope to carry out the biggest, faster, widest survey in optical astronomy. I run a small devops team in a much larger data management division - we do current data services work - lots of Python (3) data services (FastAPI) running on Kubernetes on Google Cloud and on-prem (ie sometimes in... actually clouds).
I have a number of refugees from well-known dotcoms in my team, here's why they tell me they work here despite, you know, the universe not handing out stock options:
* Sustained and humane software development, with opportunities to refactor code for incremental improvements and extend your codebase over multiple years
* No pager. If you want to turn off your phone after hours, fine (I keep mine on because fixing telescopes is actually fun to me but there's no on-call)
* No doing interviews as your job.
* 100% open source with many opportunities to upstream (all our code is on Github: https://github.com/lsst-sqre )
* Surprisingly (for academia) current toolchain and coding practices
* Benefits, stability w/ opportunity for growth. My full-stack engineer joined 8 years ago and is (still) doing better work every year. My most recent hire is a security engineer who has been with me longer than the average dotcom tenure and seems to think it's Christmas every time I tell him he's allowed to tidy up code we already have in production.
* Pay is decent, more so if you're not paying Bay Area rent. Not as much as you'd make as a Senior Engineer at Google. But:
* Nobody is the product. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
If you're interested: https://ls.st/square-job . And if you are a US taxpayer, thank you for funding our scientific mission!