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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • How do I plan for job instability? By interviewing at many places continuously. By keeping my job skills and interviewing skills sharp, while interviewing continuously. By keeping my eye on the market and my value, by interviewing continuously, and evaluating the incoming offers.

    It’s not easy, but it’s pretty straightforward. I picked a job sector with lots of opportunities and upward mobility, but also tons of instability. I picked a place to live which gives me physical proximity to those opportunities. I work smart and stay agile. All of that without a college degree.

    Stuff is expensive and we don’t always have everything we want, but we’re secure enough to have everything we need, with a healthy risk management plan.

    I do live in a major city in the US, so I have more local opportunities than someone in a small town. But I’d argue that my decision to live near where there are job opportunities was part of my planning process.


  • I mean, yeah, I plan for that. If you’re a wage earner like me, you should know you’re employed at the will of some company, and they don’t give a shit about you.

    I plan for this by interviewing for other jobs at least once a month. I turn down offers every few months. I keep my skills sharp and my eyes open, and change employment when it makes sense.

    The longest I’ve been at one company is 7 years, but it’s not unusual for me to change companies after 18-24 months.

    I don’t plan to get laid off, but it happens a lot in my industry, and I roll with it. It is planned out, risk management, or whatever you want to call it.





  • I’m pretty sure I didn’t mess with systemd, though that would probably be the right way to handle it.

    I was able to update a runtime config so if any storage wasn’t available it just halted the service. Then I created a short script I’d invoke manually which decrypted the luks drives and brought the dependent services up. I also added monitoring to alert me when the drives weren’t available for whatever reason.


  • I use separate disks for data storage and my OS. That way a headless system can boot and all the services like SSH can become available, and I can decrypt the data drives remotely.

    When there’s an unexpected reboot I can still get into my system and decrypt remotely which is nice. I can also move the data storage disks to another system without too much hassle.

    I did have to make sure some services were fault tolerant if an encrypted volume was unavailable when the OS booted. An example of this might be torrenting software, I needed to make sure the temporary storage was on an encrypted volume. The software had a sane fault mode when the final storage location was unavailable, but freaked out for some reason when the temp storage was missing.

    Once set up the whole thing is pretty easy to manage.