I have at Tesla system with 3 batteries, and I argued during installation to include 8kw of panels situated on the west side of our roof against Tesla ‘s engineering. The panels would only by 72% efficient on the west side as opposed to 74% on the east side (catching the morning sun). But my modeling showed that we would exhaust the batteries in the evening due to the fact that my usage was higher in the late afternoons and it wasn’t offset by any generation of solar panels during those late afternoon hours.
After modeling scenarios based on historical usage PER HOUR, I was able to show that if we had enough solar generation during peak late afternoon hours, we would be able to ‘survive the night’ on batteries until morning solar generation resumed. This means my 14kw solar panels coupled with 3 batteries gets me completely off grid for 9 months out of the year. That’s not bad considering I get 7ft of snow during winter months and I am surrounded by very tall trees.
Optimize on hourly generation not daily, most solar companies use DAILY numbers without a clue on hourly usage. I currently get 0.08$ for every 1$ in electric production, so there is very little benefit in producing electricity when you don’t use it. Optimize your system based on your usage not on DAILY production. If electric companies would give me credit of say 0.90$ per 1$ then the equation changes, but electric companies would rather benefit from your overproduction, be careful as these systems are not cheap!
This exactly. We run a 100KW microgrid on Hispaniola, and most of our panels are oriented to maximise winter afternoon sun, or just pointed randomly at the sky. Random pointing gets us more power than all oriented 12 degrees south because the power we care about is in overcast conditions, especially high altitude overcast, and that is variable in intensity in different sky regions on a minute by minute basis.
Also 12 degrees south would put a mountain partially in view of the panels, and mountains don’t provide much light here. (I don’t mean the mountains would block the sun, just a band of otherwise visible sky)
When we do have high intensity light, the late afternoon is when we want it, and also when the sun is most off to one side of the sky.
My advice: over panel as much as you can. We can fully charge our batteries while running the farm and 6houses in three hours of full sunlight, so we still get plenty on overcast days, and even on the few darkest days we make about 70%. We have to supplement the solar about 60 days a year total, burning a total of 300 gallons of fuel over the year for a small farm and 6 houses.
There is no 1$ in electric production, unless you are selling and buying simultaneous at the exact same date and time, and from the same location. A fair price would be the current market price at the point in time, subtracted with the cost of operate transmission, facilitating the sale, and the predicted reduction in market price by increased supply. Depending on where you live the price difference between the average day of selling and average day of buying may very well be quite different. It is not uncommon in Europe to see negative market prices, where overproduction is not going to benefit the electric company at all.
The Powerwall system prioritizes filling up the batteries first. I assume it will take pretty much your entire solar day to fill your three batteries so why didn’t you choose the model that fills up your buckets as the first priority? I think the rule is “optimize on hourly storage” and the hourly production should follow that requirement. Doesn’t the 74% give you a bigger area under the production curve than the 72%?
Bear in mind that charging and discharging batteries has an efficiency penalty - perhaps 98% efficient for each. So 74 stored is worse than 72 used directly because 74 -> 72.52 stored -> 71.06 discharged.
And usually the efficiency is much worse than 98%.
Oh, and also batteries such as the tesla power wall can only be charged and discharged about 1000 times before they have lost a lot of capacity. So generating when you use also makes your batteries last much longer. You could think of this as a cost of battery depreciation per kWh stored.
That 1000 is for NMC batteries and its a 70% capacity. Still enough to be useful.
Also, there's a lot of factors that go into play. For example, this assumes the batteries are fully charged and discharged. If you do something smarter like going down to 40% and up to 80% then they end up being able to do a lot more cycles. In fact, battery age starts mattering more than the cycles.
But besides that, LFP batteries are currently being used in home battery storage (including powerwalls) because it's cheaper and it has 5000->10,000 cycles before dropping to 70% capacity.
Generally, though, I'd agree that having more generation throughout the day is better than having perfectly optimized generation.
> Oh, and also batteries such as the tesla power wall can only be charged and discharged about 1000 times before they have lost a lot of capacity.
Powerwall's cycle life is much better than 1000. The Powerwall warranty guarantees 70% capacity after 10 years of daily cycles (i.e. 3650 cycles). This means they expect the capacity to be substantially above 70%.
> The Powerwall warranty guarantees 70% capacity after 10 years of daily cycles (i.e. 3650 cycles). This means they expect
... to have pulled some corporate restructure which leaves a bankrupt legal entity responsible for the warranty claims before they start costing any real money.
The Powerwall solar controller prioritizes the home before sending surplus to the grid. And in the home, the controller will send power direct to any running load first, then to the Powerwall battery. Any spillover then goes to the grid. It’s very dynamic. I would go with the algorithm to “capture the rain into my rain buckets the moment I can” because the rain could stop. Solar irradiance is unpredictable.
If you have time based billing you can also input that into the system and it's even more effective. For example, if you tell it that electricity is cheap from 9am - 5pm (peak solar) and expensive from 5pm - 9pm (peak residential demand) it will take your trending consumption and decide when your solar production isn't keeping up with foretasted demand and let you charge from the grid to at the cheap rate to make up the shortfall and minimize cost. It even factors in things like grid charging speed and total site usage limits, which are great given my 100amp panel.
That strategy make sense if you're goal is longevity for your first battery units. But with most early-adopter, often the attitude is to know you'll be upgrading somewhat frequently (3-5 years) due to rapid advances in the tech, until more advanced offerings come around that could least 10-20 years.
Excuse what might be an ignorant question, but is the difference between 74% and 72% significant? At a big scale it certainly could be, but at the scale of a single family (or even small-ish multi-family) home I would think it wouldn't make a lot of difference, but I'd much appreciate a correction
I think the efficiency figure is the one the tesla engineers used. The one that he used is that he’d rather have optimal generation from 1-6pm than from 7-12am
> The Powerwall system prioritizes filling up the batteries first.
I think it depends on how you've configured it. My never charges the battery up from solar. I think it estimates how much power you'll need based on the configuration and charges accordingly. I've noticed on hot summer days mine will charge a bit in the morning then stop, then in the afternoon when the AC kicks on and off it will charge between AC cycles.
This is annoying approach. Mine is not Powerwall so I have to try to play with HAs scripts to only charge battery on excess solar - I have far more panels than I can export, and inverter (Deye) can only handle so much AC so excess DC needs to go into batteries.
Trouble is you don't really know how much excess power you've got until you crank up battery charge current.
We have a small roof with 1/3 of our panels facing east, 1/3 facing west, and 1/3 facing south. Given a sufficiently large roof, it would theoretically make sense to have all of the panels facing south.
However, due to the fact that PG&E keeps shifting our peak hours, we actually get more credit for producing in the afternoon, so when we expand our house, I'm planning on having all the panels (as much as possible) on the west-facing roof.
Also, we plan to install air conditioning at that time, so it will be helpful to be able to handle that peak demand.
> theoretically make sense to have all of the panels facing south
It depends what you are optimising for. East/west makes a lot of sense to optimise for morning and evening sun. Especially as during the middle of the day electricity prices usually drop due to excess solar.
Man your comment rings home so badly. Made a similar jump last year, and I was surprised we outperformed the predictions. Living in a cursed area (rainy + cloudy all the time), more than 50% of the year our electricity is 100% covered by our solar panel. 0 transportation (which is very high too).
Totally agree on the feed-in tariff reality check. Unless you're in a rare location with generous net metering, exporting surplus is basically a donation
Mostly agree, but there are also variables like feed in tariff (or delta between export and import) and mine just changed to 2 cents NZD. I've switched off hot water, battery and car charging scheduler because there is no point to save this anymore.
Plus modeling goes only so far when your behaviors change. I found it's incredibly hard to model this when there's so many variables.
Can your system work during a power outage? Most US installed ones up until about 5-10 years ago could not because they lack a proper automatic transfer switch certified to never back feed.
PSPSes? I lived in Paradise until 2020 and had to do the generator-filling and extension cords dance while not having internet for a week or 2 at a time several times per summer. Comcast/Xfinity's gear would last about 24 hours without power and then internet would go out. Contemplated off grid power, but it wouldn't been pointless and futile to sink any more money into an area that was fundamentally unsuitable for long-term occupation.
So, instead of living in a desertifying moonscape with jacked-up insurance costs, we bailed for around the 100th meridian west where there aren't forest fires or earthquakes. And no hurricanes or floods either. The most concerning things are hail and wind which can be more-or-less mitigated and/or insured for, while tornado risk here is on the order of 0.0001%/structure/year.
Did you answer for A/C or is there a way to get heat from trees (without burning them)? (not a sarcastic question though I concede it probably sounds like it is)
This has been my experience as well. Rails can do a lot, but it also allows you to develop junk. Most sites built in Ruby end up in the latter category, especially if built by a team that doesn’t use basic software architecture patterns.
Why is azure ‘bad’? Is it because you dislike Microsoft?
In my experience Azure is really good and getting better. Even if AWS is more popular, Azure is gaining traction, is more intuitive and easier to use, and in my experience: cheaper
Had to do multi cloud with Azure, worked on network infrastructure, vnet, peering, firewall, vpn gateway, etc.
Documentation was almost worthless, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. Encountered and filed more bugs trying to get it up and running than I did for years of using Aws. Support was mediocre. Non existent ipv6 support. This was a few years ago and in comparison to Aws.
If you even have a remote chance of running in this race I recommend you go. I raced in 2006 and 2007 and it was by far the most fun you can have on four wheels, and the people are just amazing and welcoming. When you are racing a car you care very little about you experience real racing and it equates to real fun. One of the best things I have ever done.
The mere statement that a 5 year ‘Senior’ software engineer has more perceived value than a ‘Senior’ software engineer with 20 years of experience is just crazy. Let’s replace ‘software engineer’ with ‘electrician’ and then tell me this is sane.
A 5 year software engineer may have more perceived value per cost than a 20 year software engineer. Sure, if they have the same salary, you hire the 20 year engineer, but they don't. The 20 year engineer expects more pay, and (rightly) won't work for 5-years-of-experience wages. So you have to find an employer that perceives the additional value of the additional 15 years of experience.
Have you seen the salary requirements for these jobs? People are being paid way more than they were being paid 10 years ago. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is turning down jobs because of insufficient wages. The perceived ‘value’ that an employer sees is the ability of being able to exploit a younger engineer with ridiculous timelines and all night ‘coding sessions’ because they don’t have a family waiting for them when they get home.
How would unionizing help stop a company from setting up an offshore subsidiary? It may prevent layoffs in the short term - but even with big3 auto manufacturers it hasn’t prevented a move in manufacturing to Mexico and Canada.
I think the solution here has to come from the federal government to explicitly increase sw development employment in the US. Just like we find ourselves in a bad place with scaling chip manufacturing, we will find ourselves hamstrung in sw dev.
I doubt unions can help here - except maybe pressure the government (and that too works mostly on democrats if at all).
Canada (close to Detroit) has always been part of the US auto manufacturing scene. In fact you could take what you write and replace the US with Canada and you have what people (and unions) in Canada are complaining about. Not sure what to replace Canada with in your text though. Maybe Mexico a second time?
The union can force an all-or-nothing decision, but some companies can and will easily choose "nothing" and keep only the overseas developers, not the local unionized ones.
That would certainly make the union workers more attractive given the average consultant’s experience, teaching ability, and understanding of the business.
It remains to be seen if the UAW's achievements will work out in the EV era. They need to unionize Tesla or they will lose hard. Looking at the teardown of GM & Fords EVs vs Tesla, there is no profit being made whatsoever by the old guys. Everyone either loves to idolize Musk or downright hate him with a passion. At the end of the day, the union companies need to still sell a compelling product at a good price. Couple that with how freakin fast Musk moves and the Union companies will eventually end up in bankruptcy court unless something drastically changes: Either the legacy OEMs turn their act around (unlikely see Boeing) or the Unions successfully unionize Tesla. Will be interesting to see the show nonetheless.
People have been saying 18-24 months for the last 15 plus years. Its not going to happen at this point. Lets say the truck is a complete flop, the amount of runway they have allows them to just pivot to something else. Plus these engineering achievements give them massive breathing room to cut costs compared to their competitors. This is what I said by people unable to look past their hatred or love of Musk and look at the actual details on the ground.
As for Twitter well, I can't explain why his other companies get 1 million plus applicants while this company languishes.
I can explain why Twitter languishes. Other than the obvious troll hole he’s turned it into, it also doesn’t fit the brand he worked so hard to build around himself in the 2000s and early 20teens.
What he’s doing with Twitter and all his culture war nonsense is beneath him. Or at least it’s beneath the character he created that people compared to Tony Stark.
People who want to work on spaceships do not want to go help him stan for a guy called "catturd2."
I mean yeah its true. In fact I recall going to DEFCON this past Aug and they had a handful of Starlink engineers there. I tried to get them to discuss that whole Twitter saga, they absolutely were adamant that they did not care one bit. They really emphasized how they are doing cutting edge work at starlink and it definitely showed in the town down equipment that they brought to demonstrate. Tesla/Spacex get so many applicants thats its insane.
This leads me to want the OEMs to succeed, we desperately need a counterbalance to Musk because just shaming his employees won't change a goddamn thing but if there was another place where A players can be embraced well that would put a massive chink in the Musk armor. Hell I remember there were a whole group of furry employees at Tesla as well. Tesla has also participated multiple times in pride parades. I wonder where they are now...
It’s worth asking why there aren’t way more Elon Musks.
He’s not superhuman. I think he was once quite smart but I feel like he’s fried his brain. (I think the fash brain worms are an opportunistic infection.) So what made him able to get these companies going?
A lot of lazy critics think it’s just luck. Founding a rocket company and a car company and having them even work at all is not luck.
Maybe he’s showing us that the bar is actually not as high as we think, and instead that the process whereby we promote people to levels of wealth and influence where they might have the opportunity to do what Elon did is horribly broken. We aren’t promoting competent people to pivotal positions as a society, and in fact are probably filtering them out.
I guess you can see that clearly in politics. Look at all Presidential elections 2016 onward. Look at the whole lineup during the primaries. You’re telling me these are the best candidates we can find for the highest government office? Really?
Protectionism doesn't work beyond selfish short-term interests. American cars are not exactly paragons of technical or mechanical prowess compared to their Japanese or German counterparts.
I've been a software developer for the better part of two decades, I'm not worried about the C-tier code coming out of rural India. You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.
I’m okay with my fellow citizens being selfish and protecting their livelihood. No one else will. “Whose interests?” You’re advocating for shareholder returns (labor arb savings->profits). Ain’t nobody coming to save us.
If we can mandate EV batteries be built in the US to get subsidies (Inflation Reduction Act), other protectionism mechanisms should be on the table. Otherwise, businesses will do their best to maximize profits in the market they’re offering in without any labor contribution back, extractionist style.
And at the end of the day, the ones doing the outsourcing will have outsourced themselves out of a job too. China won’t need American MBAs when they can do everything in house.
Jack Welch died before getting outsourced after driving GE into the ground, and there are lots of folks like him still alive, empowered, and with that belief system. These are the folks controls are needed against.
I appreciate you telling me what I'm advocating for. Any basic macroeconomics class covers the effects of protectionism. Yes, in the short term wages may be artificially propped up, industries may be (temporarily) saved, but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
> but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
The evidence does not show the American worker being better off after these policies you support were enacted and have had decades to run. Free trade is great for shareholders and some consumer cohorts who get excess utility, but terrible for workers. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
> Any basic macroeconomics class covers the effects of protectionism. Yes, in the short term wages may be artificially propped up, industries may be (temporarily) saved, but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
You're almost certainly correct in the sense that the people of the entire system will be better off, but your own domestic market could suffer at the gain of the other market where the business is now being outsourced to.
A good example of this might be tech in the EU. The EU basically has no major tech companies because we "import" all our tech services the US (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc). It's great for us in the sense that we didn't have to pay anyone to build amazing online services like Facebook, Google, etc – it's just free stuff we get here from the US. But who benefits the most from this arrangement, is the US or the EU? I'd argue that the EU allowing the US to provide all of our major tech services has been great for US growth, but it's stagnated the EU economy in recent years as we've had no real reason to build 21st century companies here. The free stuff we get from the US actually comes at a cost for us even if overall the economy as a whole (EU + US) is better off for it.
Similarly, imagine an extreme scenario where US companies outsource all work to low-cost labour countries (I know this is impossible, but assume the US is 100% service sector jobs which could be outsourced). Would this hypothetical scenario be good for the US economy? It might be good for companies registered in the US because now they can provide their services to markets they serve for a fraction of the cost, and it would be great for those low-cost labour countries getting all this foreign work, but it would be awful for the actual US economy that's allowing this to happen in the pursuit of efficient markets.
So yeah, you might be growing the whole pie at a faster rate, but it's possible mass outsourcing doesn't help grow your share of the pie. And like with manufacturing, you also need to consider how you'll lose technical competency within your domestic market over time if you outsource too much, and this will likely lead to the country you out sourced to eventually out competing you in your own industries. We see this today in China.
If you want to cripple tech innovation in the US, outsource all your software engineers so there's no one in the US with the skills or resources to start the next Google or Facebook.
> and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
The theory only says that all the people globally will be better off. It does not say anything about citizens of a specific country that is applying protectionism. They may be better off for it, they may be worse - it depends on the particulars and, as most economic interventions, can only really be judged post-factum.
Do people forget that a 40 hour work week exists because of unions? Did we forget that having weekends off and holidays off was not a thing until unions? Did we also forget that children were put to work at a young age until unions?
I think many well-off people just don't care. They might support them in a poll but question their utility in a specific sector like software. Or how another commentor said they weren't concerned about competing with people writting c grade code in India since they have been writing software for 20 years.
I don't think unionizing will help with off-shoring for development. I do think unionizing could bring about more equal treatment though. It seems most companies ignore their own policies when it comes to ratings, work assignment, hours, etc. Devs have very little recourse. Of course the assholes that do well and aren't afraid of c grade coders are the ones who don't want unions since they might loose their edge over others comp-wise.
No, a huge amount of Americans are actively hostile to unions as a concept. The very idea that employees should be able to negotiate as a block instead of individually has been scapegoated as basically all of society's ills.
Consider the common refrain: I'd rather negotiate for myself
It's like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how power dynamics work, as if you as a solo person in a 1000 person company could somehow EVER be more valuable to the company than the entire labor pool.
Newsflash: If your company doesn't throw a fit any time you try to take time off, like CEO comes and talks to you personally fit, they think they could replace you just fine. 40 years of project management has attempted to build things just for that.
> It's like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how power dynamics work
The misunderstanding is yours. Workers understand what you say just fine, but don't care about out-negotiating the company. They will never meet the CEO at the bar, so it means nothing to them. They want to be able to out-negotiate their neighbour so they can peacock dominance over someone they actually interact with.
The purpose of a union is to establish a brotherhood between metaphorical neighbours so that they don't try to be assholes towards each other. While that does, indeed, improve the overall worker position against the company, it hinders the power dynamic between them. And that's where you find the pushback.
It's much like you find in 'middle-class' neighbourhoods where you see households trying to outdo each either with nicer yards, or fancier BMWs, or whatever, all while racking up crazy debt to pay for it all. If they invested the money they pour into that stuff instead they would be way better off, but being better off isn't the motivation.
> Do people forget that a 40 hour work week exists because of unions?
Is it still forgetting if it never happened? Both the idea of the 8-hour work day and weekends predate the first recognized union. The 40-hour workweek became the norm during the Great Depression by way of government initiative in an attempt to spread the work out across more people.
Unions have long supported the 40-hour work week, but are not meaningfully responsible for it. If showing support for something is necessary for something to exist, then you could probably say that just about everything exists because of unions...
Even still, we're talking nearly 100 (when it became common) to well over 200 years ago (when it was conceived). Even if unions actually were responsible, people are going to naturally ask "What have you done for me lately?". Where is the 10-hour workweek?
The weekend was due to organized religions. The Atlantic has a great article on the history of it. Henry Ford pioneered the 40 day workweek without union prodding, only through his own experimentation.
Besides, let's say youre right and unions have given us all those things. Those standards are over 100 years old. If it were true, it would mean nationwide unions did some things 5 generations ago and have collected literal trillions in inflation adjusted dues* since and have provided nothing in return.
*
11% of the US is unionized, representing about 1.1 trillion in annual payroll. Average union due is 1.5%, that's $16.5B per year in union dues collected, over 100 years = $1.6 trillion. But union membership used to be much much higher than 11% so its actually a much bigger number than $1.6T. But you get the math.
"and the people are better off with free, open markets long term."
Eh, maybe not. It depends on the demand and availability of skill/labor. If you have a high percentage of low skill labor and you can outsource low skill labor to cheaper markets, then what are the current low skill citizens going to do? Surely the rust belt is not better off now than when coal and steel (and other manufacturing) were still a domestic thing. Maybe other areas of the county faired better, but with median wages dropping over the past 50 years, it doesn't seem like a strong case.
> You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.
I dislike the tone as there are plenty of good devs who've been cut and replaced (sort of) by offshore. Don't equate laid off/replaced with "really bad dev".
The downside is for people disabled. Maybe they aren't a terrible dev but they aren't a great dev either. If they're on par with outsourced labor, they aren't so safe. But what else can they do?
If I lost my job right now, I'd be totally fucked. I'd end up working at Walmart. Masters degrees might as well be toilet paper.
I remember driving through West Virginia with my parents to visit family as a kid, and my dad was lamenting the fact that its full of the haves and the have nots, with the distinct implication that the haves did something wrong to end up there, and the have nots would be just fine if it wasn't for those pesky rich people. I was just left thinking that if life was haves and have nots, shouldn't you spend your time trying to be one of the haves rather than lamenting the way reality was? But in reality, both those views are overly simplistic.
It's a pretty big leap to go from a software engineer to Walmart. The median software developer (~$110k/yr last I checked but could be outdated) is somewhere in the upper teens as far as income percentile (20% being around $100k and 10% being around $150k[0]). Pretty much any non-management role at Walmart is going to land you in the bottom half.
I'd be curious (but it's none of my business) what about your situation makes that the most likely outcome. I'd bet there are ways to head that off.
Basically anything tech-adjacent - product, "business analysts," management. Maybe something like tech writing but there are going to a lot of decent devs who make terrible tech writers so that's much more on an individual basis. And then there's the devs who still code but that's not their focus - SDET, devrel, that sort of thing.
Devrel would actually probably be the easiest thing to get into with a few years' foresight. Building a following on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter/X, etc. will make it infinitely easier to land that first devrel role.
You bringing up teaching is a good point - I'm not sure about where I currently live but where I used to live you could get a substitute teaching cert basically by just passing the background check and having a college degree. It was pretty easy to get an add-on certification as well to teach your subject or closely related ones. I can't say what it's like everywhere though, and to be honest most of the people I know who have teaching degrees have left or wished they could. But if you can get a job and can deal with the bullshit you're basically set from a put-food-on-the-table standpoint.
Most of those roles you list require strong interpersonal skills. That's usually not something an autistic person is strong at. Not a big market for many of those either (dev rel, tech writer).
I'm looking to switch into IT from teaching. The job security in teaching is the best but half of my colleagues are in psychotherapy. Last year we had 30% of our teachers on leave. It's not a happy life unless you're a social butterfly and unless you enjoy yelling at kids.
Tech Writers - nope. Nothing dealing with boilerplate text is safe, in any field.
Twitch/YouTube - nope. That is just celebrity economics again. For every half dozen people that make it (and make it is just back to median dev salary) there are thousands that only get a few viewers.
Teaching - this is option. But as noted by others. Can have own problems and a lot of people leave.
I'm an old Dev looking for second career, and it is tough. The option is to just re-skill and be dev again in another industry. Dev's be Dev's. It doesn't seem like there are many upward paths, and limited sideways paths.
What, product manager, analyst, marketing? Tried them, they all have downsides.
Even with all the crap, I only find comfort in creating things. Coding.
There are extremely talented Indian engineers, but I don’t think this discussion is about the elite “cream of the crop” but more so the rank and file.
I have been assigned to lead offshore teams with engineers that need direct guidance on very basic coding tasks, produce low quality code and become combative when receiving feedback.
So many times I’ve reviewed and requested the same changes to code, classic example: a try/catch then completely ignore a caught exception, just to get some code “working” for the example inputs. When I call this out as a problem, it’s met with “well you did not say that in the specification, I have completed what was asked”. Another commenter had a similar anecdote where all input validation was removed to get test cases passing… are we expected to write things like that into a work spec? Seems like this would take longer than for me to write the damn code myself
There's gotta be something between Satya and "C-tier code out of rural India".
There are of course lots of bad coders in India, but there are also many really good ones. And whereas in the past they had to emigrate to US or Europe to fully make use of their talents, nowadays some(many?) choose to remain in India and work remotely. It's silly to dismiss and underestimate their skills.
As far your experience with developers that follow the specs literally, in an almost maliciously compliant way,
that might be learned behavior from working on projects where the tasks are spec-ed and estimated and any attempts at going above and beyond ultimately result in late delivery and punishment, so developers quickly learn to only do the bare minimum of what is described. Granted your examples are extreme and pathological, so maybe you just had the misfortune of working with really bad people.
Additionally, unless you pick the developers yourself, you're at the mercy of the agencies who assemble those offshore teams, and often the economics are such that it doesn't incentivize them to hire the best people available. From my experience, many good developers find work on their own, outside of an agency, contracting directly with the remote company.
Those talented indian engineers are paid on the global market rate though. The logic also goes the other way, those don't want to be underpaid.
That's why these outsourcing threats from companies make me laugh, they don't understand that software is a global market and they also are competing in it.
The world class FAANG-level Indian engineers which are underpaid just do not exist.
After modeling scenarios based on historical usage PER HOUR, I was able to show that if we had enough solar generation during peak late afternoon hours, we would be able to ‘survive the night’ on batteries until morning solar generation resumed. This means my 14kw solar panels coupled with 3 batteries gets me completely off grid for 9 months out of the year. That’s not bad considering I get 7ft of snow during winter months and I am surrounded by very tall trees.
Optimize on hourly generation not daily, most solar companies use DAILY numbers without a clue on hourly usage. I currently get 0.08$ for every 1$ in electric production, so there is very little benefit in producing electricity when you don’t use it. Optimize your system based on your usage not on DAILY production. If electric companies would give me credit of say 0.90$ per 1$ then the equation changes, but electric companies would rather benefit from your overproduction, be careful as these systems are not cheap!