I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
ergoemacs.org
ergoemacs.org
But being compassionate does not require you to analyze this person's merits. The only thing to 'analyze' is that he begged you for help.
Also, please remember the hackers, family, and friends we have lost to suicide. People say "I wish we'd known. Maybe we could have helped." Well, you know; and there is a chance you could help.
Help from anonymous strangers can save lives. The flip side is that the potential for harm is greater than the aid of a professional or friend.
It's so tightly coupled to the scenario (nature vs nurture) that efforts to argue are probably futile.
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html
There doesn't seem to have been a deep bench for his support team for a very long time, if ever.
When I went to school in Gainesville, there was a saying: No matter how weird you are, there are a bunch of people who are weirder. The internet is that at scale. Thirty years ago, Xah would probably not have known people who he could identify with or that anyone identifies with him. The internet gets some people out of their isolation. It lets them talk about things that they find interesting or that matter.
I don't talk programming languages with the locals. The appropriate topics are children, church, and Auburn football - which runs from National Signing Day in February to the BCS in January.
And some kind of help is the kind of help we all can do without
- Shel Silverstein
Just, please, be careful in categorically deciding which is which.
I don't see any evidence of him having a medical problem, but he surely deserves our compassion.
He needs to socialize more in an environment that will get him a job that allows him to pursue his passion and get out some more.
Perhaps some unobtrusive ads on his website geared to stuff which fits in with the leisure interests and hobbies of Lisp hackers and relate geeks should serve him well.
It will require a notice to Adblock & Noscript users that they should unblock ads and Javascript from his page as they are unobtrusive
I'd never heard of him, so I skimmed over his resume and checked out his site an hour or two before the call. I remember when I was looking at his site I was seeing various articles around math and programming, and then articles about things like "2 girls 1 cup". The breadth of articles completely threw me off. He seemed to have this unfocused interest in EVERYTHING. After looking over everything I could I had no idea how we'd be able to use him, but I was really interested in talking with him.
I went into the call expecting a lot of tangents about various topics he was passionate about and thinking I'd constantly have to refocus the conversation. Instead the conversation was pretty boring and not really going anywhere. He had breadth, but the depth was not there. At least not for the things I brought up. I couldn't understand how someone who seemed to be interested in everything could have no real interest in anything.
For the last couple of minutes we talked about his site, and how he maintains/updates it. He finally seemed to light up, and we hit on something he was really interested in talking about. The basics of the site looked like it was just a couple of scripts, a lot of static text files and some emacs. The setup might have been impressive in the mid-to-early 90's, but it wasn't relevant to anything we would have wanted/needed.
The call lasted maybe 20 minutes, and then we wrapped it up. Every topic, other than talking about his site, was a dead-end. My internal feedback at the end was: "No! Maybe... if we were trying to hire encyclopedia writers".
I think his main problem with interviews is that his real-life personality doesn't even come close to his online personality. If I would have gone in expecting the standard slightly-awkward developer interview, things might have gone better. I still would have said no, but it would have been a weaker no.
Not so internal anymore! Don't get me wrong, I read your comment with interest, but then was struck with how we are talking about him as if he _was_ dead. Apparently he likes his life to be public but actual job interviews somehow strike me as private.
I wanted to give some perspective on what "not interviewing well" means in this case. It seemed as if a lot of comments were assuming age discrimination and issues with mental illness among other things. I wouldn't doubt that is the case sometimes, but from my experience that wasn't the case. There were other issues. I'm sure most people who interview him run into the same issues.
I think his biggest interviewing problem is that he can't live up to the expectations others will expect from a one-man encyclopedia.
The conversation didn't follow the script in the interviewer's head. Maybe that's because he wasn't interested in the topics at the start of the interview, maybe it's because the interviewee wasn't comfortable until the interviewer expressed an interest at a less impersonal level.
Think about it this way, what really interested the interviewer was the website, and until that came up the topics were from a checklist. Many people can tell the difference between going through the motions and seeking information.
The icebreaker was the website and then the conversation ended. To keep things moving, it's often better to put the icebreaker in front of the convoy.
The phone screens I performed were just a quick first round check to see if a candidate would be a valuable employee for us. They weren't supposed to be super in-depth or time consuming for either party. The whole thing is basically one big ice breaker. Hoping that I can hit on some topic that will cause a candidate to expose some skill, knowledge or enthusiasm that would move the company forward. There was very little structure. It was all about finding skill overlap, and then trying to decide if they would pass an in-person round of interviewing. If I hit on an ice-breaker at the end of a conversation, it means I had already exhausted all of the others.
Part of that is mediated by my experience when I first discovered his site. I was learning about Emacs when I found it, I'm pretty sure. Anyway, there was something I thought was pretty interesting - might or might not have been Emacs related - so I submitted it to HN. Showed up dead, immediately. Apparently his site was banned. It no longer is, of course.
But that's the way his relationship with the tech world was structured - banned by HN. Now maybe he had been spamming submissions or trolling, but it's possible his site was just blocked because it was Xah Lee: I mean there are people in this thread who are still judging him based on his behavior a decade or two ago.
A person who has spent a lifetime as an outsider is likely to have a different set of defense mechanisms - a different set of survival skills. What I was getting at is that the thing you both were interested in on a personal rather than a business level was his website. Unlike his 'professional career' it's something he can take full credit for and which is objectively worth being proud of - it's full of useful content.
My sense is that creating content is what he could be exceptionally productive. Maybe what's called for is an agent and an editor.
Accomplishment highlights:
* Autodidact. High school dropout. No degree.
If the first paragraph of your resume calls attention to the fact that you didn't even graduate high school, it sets a bad tone for the rest. Many people will throw your resume away without reading further.
A couple of months ago at the Go London User Group a young guy came up to me and told me he didn't have a degree, was totally self taught, and wanted to know if it was even worth him applying to CloudFlare.
I told him to apply.
He started last Monday.
I can only speak for CloudFlare, but educational background is _a component_ of a candidate. But it's only _a component_, it's not everything. We're interested in what people know and what they can do. I honestly look more at people's personalities, employment history and Github than what college degree they have.
Also from the potential hire himself. It's not that he sucks, his college didn't prepare him for this new role. It's not his lack of passion and really any deep interest in the craft, it's just that he had wrong lecturers, also most of them even weren't there to lecture most of the time, so what can you expect?
So now we can hire him and train him for a year or more, because without it he's completely useless, but that's ok, because he's just like we expect him to be. On the other hand, this one here who was willing to take all the responsibility for himself, who's eager to prove his actual skill doing useful things, he's too dangerous, because... What? Because he could actually end up doing something, and then we'd feel bad?
I'm not saying what you say is wrong, like in untrue, but I can't help but feel it's somehow unfair.
> a school continuously assessed the individual abilities over the course of several years
Yeah. Some abilities. That differs from person to person and from college to college, but these abilities may or may not be the ones you want to optimize for.
For large companies, predictability beats quality. Keep in mind strict business processes exist to defend organizations from incompetent workers, even at the cost of limiting competent ones. Incompetent workers are cheaper. Since the processes prevent competent ones from achieving outstanding results, there is an obvious incentive to hire only incompetent ones.
> I can't help but feel it's somehow unfair.
Not sure about fairness. I certainly don't like it.
> Yeah. Some abilities.
Those are the abilities large banks and insurance companies want. For the average non-technical manager, being able to consider developers as interchangeable cogs beats developers that are impossible for managers to characterize or predict.
It usually comes out conversationally months down the line, and we therefore are mathematicians, school & college drop-outs, physicists, chemists, geographers, and marine biologists - and all developers.
In no small part this stance comes from my own experiences when I first set out into the world as a naïf graduate, thinking that a masters (Desmond - didn't let my degree get in the way of my education) in Physics from [redacted] was somehow valuable. Turns out that a first in urban forestry management counts for more with most employers, because HR witches don't actually understand the skills they're supposed to be assessing, and therefore just get told "throw everything that's not a 1st in the bin". Which is a despicable waste of talent, and why I therefore do not give two hoots what you studied or where, if at all.
But you clearly believe that your 2:2 in Physics (for Americans, a 3.0 GPA) is worth more than someone else's 1 in Urban Forestry Management (for Americans, a 3.7 GPA) so presumably you think that there is some variation in difficulty among degrees, and presumably you believe that smarter people will be able to get better degrees?
Nope, I believed that. I now realise it's total bunkum, as while one degree may be more challenging than another, from a hiring manager's perspective it's the GPA/class that counts, and little else, and value is in the eye of the beholder.
When your own situation is comfortable it's easy to lose sight of how being unable to get work makes you feel totally worthless and life hardly worth living. It is not right to throw people away and deny them the chance to contribute because they are imperfect in some irrelevant way.
It would make me happier (because what's fun about just living comfortably!), and it might help others. Win-win.
But doing this from within an existing company is perhaps even better
Yeah, do this, it really works, at least worked for me and apparently a couple of other commenters here.
The general advice is to lie^Wdisplay social skills, ie. present your facts in a way which makes them look like they are what the other person is looking for, and hide everything which would interfere with your lie... I mean, story or narrative.
People don't want to really know who you are, even if they tell you otherwise - especially in the professional setting. They want to read an interesting story and resume is the ultimate literary short form. For me writing a resume is very similar to writing a short story or novel, it's just even harder, because you're the main character. But the creation process and reception mechanisms are essentially the same.
The only specific advice I could give is the same I'd give other aspiring writers: get yourself a competent editor (a human, not software!) and let your imagination run wild.
Most of my professional success is a result of social skills and a lot of experience with wildly different social environments and cultures. While I do work hard at being actually good at what I do (because that's just more fun!), I could get pretty far as a cruddy developer.
And that just feels unfair, and frustrating. I do understand that social skills matter when you work for a company, in a team, but it often feels like they're way too important (evidence: incompetent people at top positions in companies who primarily excel at manipulation or are extremely socially skilled).
Of course, there's a difference between a geek who just lacks social skills, and a geek who is just not a nice person and also lacks social skills to hide this (or lacks social skills because of this). I've met my share of those.
But even then, it's hard to (fully) blame the person in question. I've met my fair share of arrogant, abrasive, unsympathetic, or misogynistic geeks who seem to have mostly become that as a reaction to having been bullied or ostracized. Often, it's self-defense or just inability, and quite frankly the main reason I didn't turn out that way was because I was in the right place at the right time, and I had wonderful peers who dragged me out of my isolation.
It just sucks. And I wish I could fix that. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to know that you are competent, or even well above average, and still not get the jobs that downright incompetent people seem to have no trouble getting.
(I don't mean to justify 'bad' behavior, by the way, but to a degree understanding where it comes from allows me to still sympathize with, say, a racist.)
It's not particularly fair, but social awkwardness does tend to send a signal about what people value. And what a socially awkward person clearly does not particularly value is time spent with other people. I'm not saying everyone needs to be a gregarious extrovert (I'm certainly not), but if I were looking to hire someone, I'd be a bit concerned if it was obvious that they had no real interest in anything that isn't directly within their bubble. It's not just "are they skilled" it's, are they actually going to fit in the company?
It doesn't have to be, true. But in the same way that a tone-deaf or rhythmically-challenged individual can probably never be even a decent musician, there are plenty of people who can probably never become 'socially skilled'. Consider autism, for example (in all it's degrees), and also the fact that it's probably quite a bit more prevalent in our profession.
> I get what you're saying, but I also tend to think: if they're so smart, why not learn some social skills?
Why are so many very intelligent people alcoholics? Why are so many doctors smokers? Why do so many psychologists have psychological issues?
There's a massive gap between knowledge and practice, and I've become increasingly convinced that not being aware of that gap is one of the primary reasons people have trouble turning 'saying/thinking' into 'doing'. We underestimate the difficulty.
For example. As a student, me and a friend of mine were living rather unhealthy lifestyles. Then a few years ago she suddenly 'got serious'. She started working out, implemented a healthy diet, and applied herself more to her studies.
A month ago I remarked that I really admired her strength, as I still struggle with these things (to a degree). Her answer? She'd been raised with a strong emphasis on health, her family was always into sports and they're all over-achievers. From her perspective, she merely 'dropped' a habit that was deeply instilled in her, and had little trouble picking it up.
I've found that most of the 'changes' and personal development that I see are not a result of mind of matter, but more a result of upbringing, social environment, and being in the right place at the right time. It's not just that, and I think it should't ever be used as an excuse, but it's much more that case than we often suspect.
A socially awkward person who doesn't 'value' time spent with others more often than not 1) just hasn't proper experienced the value of this, 2) has been actively shunned or bullied socially, or 3) just hasn't found the particular people that they can enjoy time with.
tl;dr: the value we place on things is often a result, not a cause. Or at least it goes in both directions.
I just think a lot of what we call social skills really comes down to, frankly, giving a shit about the person in front of you.
For exceptionally smart people sometimes this is hard.
Interacting with average people can be mind numbing. I mean the average person is.. well, average. But I think 90% of social skills is finding a way to be interested in the people around you. Finding what's interesting about them. As annoying as the phrase is, I think "if you're bored than you're boring" is pretty much true.
Charismatic people don't have some fundamental gift, for the most part, charismatic people are charismatic because they seem to find a way to be interested in all the people around them. Or at least they can fake it.
Sometimes I think about 18 year old me versus 28 year old me. 18 year old me was undeniably smart, but shy and awkward. 28 year old me is (reasonably) socially skilled. The only particular difference between the two is 18 year old me only really wanted to talk about myself, or things I liked. 18 year old me was a total fucking narcissist. 28 year old me tries to figure out what other people are about, and engage them on their terms. It sounds small, but actually caring about other people is a thing some people have to learn, and it makes most social situations about 200% more interesting.
Honestly, I don't think that that is always true. It's possible to have great social skills and not care about people at all. We sometimes call people like that sociopaths. And on the contrary, some people can care greatly but not understand how to express their care/interest.
Very true. But first of all I'd argue that 'giving a shit' in itself is a skill. We are, to a large degree, taught to be nice. Watching the average eight-year-old in a school yard is a clear example of that. They're practically psychopathic: developed enough to understand the concept of 'the other', but they haven't necessarily learned how to empathize.
I suspect there's a strong correlation between being socially outcast or awkward (whether biological, developmental or contextual in nature) and taking up programming and computers as a hobby. For me that was the case, and for most geeks I know it was too. In fact, the very definition of a nerd is someone who focuses unusually a lot on one thing, at the detriment of other things (usually social).
Plus, it's a relatively recent development that 'social' kids are also into computers, on account of wanting to make games, or emulating 'skater geeks' like Kevin Rose. I still remember that it was rather 'uncool' to be in chat rooms, for example. Or reddit being the nerd version of digg.
And finally, people have a tendency to conform their views to their experiences (more than the other way around, I suspect). So it kind of makes sense that a person with few friends, or a history of no partners, will conclude that 'people are shit'. Misanthropy is usually not innate. I've met a shocking amount of people who are eerily similar in their deeply negative view of society with no real experience of friendship. Some of them, in their late twenties or thirties, seem beyond help.
Yes. No doubt. I think for intellectual people, the tendency is always to move to a higher level of abstraction and generalize. Works well for ideas, but not for people. A lot of times, the interesting thing about people or situations is in exploring the details.
(That's probably not going to make it on a motivational poster any time soon.)
I've definitely noticed this in myself. By constantly abstracting things (perhaps exacerbated by my work), I lose the human connection sometimes and only later realize that I wasn't as empathic or caring as I wanted to be, simply because I got caught up in the abstractions.
In my process of becoming a 'functioning adult', perhaps the most important steps involved realizing what my limitations were, and then learning to accept them.
And looking back, I often 'punished' myself for not trying hard enough, or for being lazy. I only later realized that some things are just much more difficult for me, and the better solution was to shape my lifestyle and environment around those limitations.
The problem of concepts 'lazy' or 'incapable' is that if you apply these concepts to yourself or others, they can easily become just a vehicle for whatever mood or state you're in.
It takes years to learn them. In an unforgiving environment. If you were punished or mocked every time you got even one answer wrong on a math test growing up, would you be terribly interested in math?
It's not particularly fair, but social awkwardness does tend to send a signal about what people value. And what a socially awkward person clearly does not particularly value is time spent with other people.
Think of it this way: your brain has a number of very, very powerful "vector units" which do certain types of specialized processing insanely fast. Most standard "neurotypical" humans come with their "vector units" preconfigured to analyze and anticipate the reactions of other humans. Some of us don't have such preconfiguration, so we learn to apply them to interesting things we find in the world, like math or programming or board games or something and we become pretty good at intuiting about deep, complex systems. But we have to learn, from square one, things about sociality that everyone else just seems to assume you already know -- and, again, is willing to punish you for not knowing.
Local bars in cities tend to have very diverse crowds who are accepting of just about anyone as long as you're not a complete asshole. Even the creepy guy at my local bar who hits on every girl who walks in is part of the "crew".
From there, it's just a matter of talking to people and gauging reactions naturally. Your brain will adjust.
It's worth the effort though. It's definitely helped me!
Not learning crucial skills is just lazy and self-centred.
I've met amazing devs with no social skills because they didn't want to put effort into learning anything except what they enjoyed.
The world doesn't owe you anything - it's up to yourself to do your best to acquire what you want. You don't get what you want just because in your own opinion, you deem yourself to be deserving of it.
But these, I believe, are relatively rare. I like to believe so anyways, and I try to give nasty people the benefit of the doubt. Because this: http://www.ic.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/story/oldmanscorpion....
For example, manners say, "don't swear at people in conversation." We all know it can be okay to swear at people in conversation, but Xah Lee hasn't learned when to swear at people.
Xah Lee, stop swearing at people for now and stick to your technical guns. Once you get on some stronger footing, experiment with venting.
I'm not trying to pick on people that lack social skills. Obviously that's an unfortunate predicament. But I do think the general nerd meme that social skills "shouldn't" matter.. I don't like that. They do matter, a lot, there's no getting around it.
Was it worth all this effort? Maybe. However most people will think that they should probably have spent their time on something else.
It's pretty much the same situation for socially unfit types - why spend so much time on something they'll never be good at no matter how hard they try. In the end they would just end up being both socially and technically mediocre.
If I learned social skills with the same abilities that made me smart, I wouldn't use that knowledge to interview, I would use it to build an AI.
The comparison is invalid because so far no one has learned social skills that way.
If we understand others by imagining how we ourselves would react, then the things that make it hard to learn social skills will be things that make you different, even if they also help you with something else.
Go fuck yourself. Why not learn to be understanding of struggle?
I have worked in company where people had generally good social skills, were helpful, able to listen carefully and receive feedback and criticism without going mad. On the other hand, have worked in environment where most people were passive-aggressive, unable to compromise or negotiate, unwilling to empathize with other teams. It should come as no surprise that in the latter situation, projects were always running very late behind schedule. (Causation could also have been the other way round, since everyone was stressed out, the basic defense mechanism was to stop worrying about other people, which in turn was slowing down the project further...)
I would add that the different behavior were not really due to individuals but rather to the overall "culture", and modeled after the top manager behavior.
Maybe I am wrong, but early in my career, I used to believe that SW project were technical challenges, but for bigger project, it is much more an organizational challenge, and the way people interact with each other is a big part of that. And being able to listen is as important as being able to communicate clearly.
Absolutely! I didn't mean to imply that social skills are unimportant. If I were to hire a programmer to work for me in a team context, the better choice from a business perspective, often, would be to hire the less-competent but socially-skilled.
But that sucks. Because the best way a socially awkward or socially underdeveloped individual will learn the very essential skill of being more social is through acceptance, a safe environment, and constructive feedback.
Furthermore, it's often not the real problem. A big problem in almost all companies I've worked for is that the managers (who usually are very socially capable non-geeks) were just not skilled at dealing with their developers. And in my opinion that's a core element of their job, to learn how to handle introverts or those less skilled in the social things.
Some of the developers I've worked with were very socially awkward, but if you figured out how to talk to them, they had no trouble communicating what needed to be communicated. To a degree, I think the ones who are socially skilled should use their strength to help those who are not. And if you're a manager, I'd say you're partly paid to do exactly that.
There are so many facets to this argument I won't attempt to cover them in this comment but people with solid social skills are not only easier and more pleasant to hire but are also better hires in many ways due to organizational social cohesion and the fact that the "hacker" may have a better understanding of the customer or recipient.
That's what I don't buy about his Xah Lee's argument that he's terrible at it - if he's written tutorial material that people find useful, he's more socially capable than he thinks. My suspicion is that his drop-out and autodidactic arc are social inhibitors for him; I think he lacks self-esteem due to it (no matter how well self-educated you are). I know that all too well because I wrestle with it myself as a highschool dropout and self-studied person.
'why i didn't seek job all these years? well, i can only say i procrastinate and is ok living on a dime.'
Maybe it's not that he doesn't interview well, its that he would be horrible employee.
Isn't that the perfect employee?
the folks who don't need the money (either because they're willing to live like a grad student their either life, or because they're wealthy and working for entertainment) are generally flaky. they won't work their promised hours, give two weeks notice and then just stop showing up, etc.
Needless to say, that was foolish of me. Other people are humans just like me, with their own strengths and weaknesses just like me.
Maybe this was on my mind because of the "RMS FAQ" also on the front page. Enough people want to deal with RMS that he is able to give checklists of what he does and doesn't need. And even he still has trouble making ends meet with speaking engagements, since the $10 check-clearing fee needs to be covered.
We are not alone.
I'm someone who doesn't naturally get social cues. I don't recognize faces. I was bullied, ostracized, and grew up in an abusive household until I convinced my mother to divorce. While children were being children I was protecting my mother, becoming her key social support by 13. I had to be a man before I hit puberty, never having the luxury to act out, cry, or lament the injustice of my situation. There were starving child soldiers in Africa; I had it pretty good. I was a serious A student and got along with adults.
As a result, I was quietly arrogant and unsympathetic. I shunned social interaction with the children around me whom I perceived to be stupid, emotionally weak, rebellious, attention-craving, and suicidal for no valid reason, instead deciding to wait until they grew up.
They never did.
To my surprise, I did. I finally realized that one of the single most important skills for success in society is the ability to handle people and social situations. A person is not competent or above average without it. At some point, you are going to hit the limit of what one person can do and will have to leverage the competencies of others. They will have some you won't, plus one the most valuable commodity of all: time. It is still possible to be a single person success, like Markus Frind from POF, but it often requires social skills and I don't like the odds.
Had I realized this sooner, I would be much further ahead. Turns out I wasn't so smart. Luckily, I only need a decent foundation; this ability can be bought like any other.
I have invested a ton of effort into addressing this with the help of a couple close friends. Progress can be frustrating. Things can be obvious to others yet when you ask them it turns out they either cannot explain, or don't really understand themselves. Everything Is Obvious examines the difficulty in creating a socially capable AI/robot: "social skills" are in fact a collection of often disparate, complex, illogical, and incongruous data points.
We all have challenges in life. This is one of my greatest. If you share it with me, I understand. It is every person's responsibility to choose to improve themselves and to help those around them who've done the same. We can guide people to this choice, but we cannot make it for them.
If you meet us, give us your patience and compassion as you would to any person who doesn't intuitively grasp something incredibly obvious and fundamental to you. I will do my best to do the same for you, though it might not always come off that way.
I've never struggled with social cues by nature, but through circumstances I've had similar struggles with the actual social 'practice'. Working hard at 'fixing' this definitely helped, but a crucial aspect was the help, support, or simply acceptance of those who were better at this than I was. And I try to do that too, in turn.
Good luck on your journey.
The one thing nobody should do is simply send him money or give him a job, since there's nothing on this page that indicates he won't go back to exactly the same thing he's been doing for the past 10 years.
(Also, 1600 rent? what the fucking fuck? dude needs to go sleep in a shelter and use that money to get a thrift store interview suit and pay off his bills)
Unless you're widening the definition for MH problem to include things like anger or Asperger's syndrome.
And the "trolling" story is funny, did he ever think that's why he can't get a job? Because you need a minimum amount of inter-personal relation skills to be in a company. Of course not.
Reality check time.
Sure trolling is sometimes just being an asshat. But it's also a way of creating diversity. An attempt to deprogram members of a cargo cult. It can be fighting group think and ideological tribalism. I've come to think about trolling as often being an expression of a desire to write - it's very essence is writing something that didn't need to be written and doing so in a way that's tailored to one's audience. Just as sarcasm can be a low form of wit, trolling can be a low form of literature.
If everyone who trolled the Usenet or a mailing list or an online forum was condemned for it, who would be left and would anyone want to read what they had to say.
Xah Lee is a person whose particular genius doesn't fit well into a prefabricated category. But his website expresses a genuine desire to help others by sharing what he knows - and what he knows, he knows really well. There but for the grace of god, go I.
Trolling when used for these purposes is often used as a substitute for well-reasoned/articulate point, and has the irresponsible effect of causing grief when it could be pre-empted by simple actions. To not take those actions is often an indication of callousness.
Note: I claim no knowledge on Xah's case, and am not commenting on it.
In other words, it provides an opportunity to write just as presenting a reasoned and rational argument does...only on most of the internet even more so. Trolling is the primary form of entertainment on much of the internet. Outrageous flame wars sell popcorn to the peanut gallery. Some people enjoy watching opponents practice their craft in combat.
That's not to say that that impulse to write can't be channeled to a more productive tone and more constructive ends. But the urge to write is what makes for great writing...or at least its possibility.
Writing like an asshat just happens to be a path of least resistance. Sarcasm and meanness provide easy material. They prompt a reaction and getting feedback is how a writer can improve their craft and flaming and trolling are crafts - just somewhat destructive ones. All that trolling manifests itself in the quality of much of the material on Xah Lee's site. He's been writing for more than two decades.
Opinions like yours simply have no place anywhere.
"why i didn't seek job all these years? well, i can only say i procrastinate and is ok living on a dime."
if the irs notices this and gets pissed, it absolutely puts his 'helpers' in harm's way. by continuing to not file taxes, the probability of irs aggression only increases with each passing day.
i'm all for giving people a 2nd chance, but he still hasn't realized that it's his fault, and only his fault.
It does not appear that he is purposely evading taxes. I agree that it is his fault that the IRS is pursuing him, on the other hand it seems pointless for the IRS to pursue someone with so little material wealth.
[1]: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Do-You-Need-to-File-a-Federal...
I'm not sure how to resolve that.
What doesn't make sense to me is that if he's as poor as he claims, he may actually qualify for a lot of assistance in the form of earned income tax credit, food stamps, section 8 housing eligibility, etc.
I'm not qualified to judge his past behavior or what not but by looking at his bank statement, he doesn't seem to be spending his money wisely. I live a few blocks from him so I recognize those places. Rotten Robbies is a gas station which usually means overpriced groceries and sundries.
If he has the ability to work, he could invest the rest of his money into renting a car and then driving for Uber or Lyft. Uber is guaranteeing $40+ per hour for 6 months which is a hell of a lot more than you make as a dishwasher. The only consideration is if he can keep a 4.9+ rating out of 5.0 which seems like a stretch from someone who may be having problems.
I'm not sure that's actually true. Is it? If you donate money[1] or buy something from him, you're giving him property; whether he is properly reporting that property and paying any necessary tax on that is his issue -- he's not asking you to enter into a conspiracy to hide anything.
At the very least, he could use cash donations to pay off whatever lien is against him. And according to [1] below, the recipient of the donation isn't the one paying taxes on the donation amount.
[1] The gift tax doesn't apply for amounts under $14k or so per year, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_tax_in_the_United_States
"if you can help, paypal to xah@xahlee.org
buy my tutorial:
Buy Xah Emacs Tutorial (http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/buy_xah_emacs_tutorial.html)
Xah's JavaScript Tutorial (http://xahlee.info/js/js.html)
Xah's {Python, Perl, Ruby} Tutorial or buy my entire xahlee.info site content for $50. see ∑ Xah Code (http://xahlee.info/perl-python/index.html)
〔☛ Xah Lee's Resume〕
or, send paypal to this my previous effort to something similar to a kickstart. https://pledgie.com/campaigns/19973
i won't actually be able to draw money from paypal, due to bank/IRS problem. So
better, send your check to:
Huynh Kang at huynh.kang facebook (https://www.facebook.com/huynh.kang) or huynh-kang linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/huynh-kang/24/8b/535) professor Richard Palais, home page at University of California Irvine http://vmm.math.uci.edu/, Wikipedia Richard Palais, richard-palais on linkedin"
Some people need to hit rock bottom to even begin to understand that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Manual labor, however humiliating and seemingly beneath him, may give him the proper motivation he seems to be lacking.
Having to do manual labor for minimum wage is not as good as dead, it is an obstacle. And it is an obstacle that many people have overcome.
I wish the author nothing but the best, but his ability to improve his situation is going to depend on his ability to change his attitude regarding work and what he needs to live. I hope he does. I hope he finds something or someone that will push him in the right direction. But that's what he needs, not a monetary handout. Working as a dish washer isn't going to kill him. It hasn't killed the thousands of other people doing it, some of whom are even happy about their lives and hopeful about the future.
Among minimum wage labor, he also mentioned impending homelessness, lack of private transportation (which, at least in the USA, is a huge impediment) and a total of $23 in life savings, which is pretty bad, even for a lot of people in rough situations.
I don't know if he's "as good as dead", but he's in a hard place, certainly. More than you're giving him credit for.
His situation sucks, I'm not denying that. But why would his likelihood of homelessness be any greater than anyone else working minimum wage? Can he not do what everyone else with a shitty job does and get a shitty apartment with a bunch of roommates for a few hundred a month? Can he not get food stamps like everyone else with minimal income?
I'm not trying to criticize his current feeling of hopelessness. I'm just saying that his situation isn't, in fact, hopeless and that the only way it's ever going to get any better is if he realizes that it isn't hopeless and starts working his ass off to make it better.
And I'm not criticizing him for not having already come to that realization either. It's hard. It takes times. It probably takes help from others who have been there. But it is the only way forward.
It's wrong to be unsympathetic to his plight, but I think it's just as wrong to withhold the truth that many other people have faced the same situation and gotten through it by persistently working their asses off until things got better. He can do this. Anyone reading this in a similar situation, you can do this. It will suck. There's no point in being coy about that. But if you do what it takes to keep working, and work and save smartly, you can get through it. Don't give up hope.
I would even be willing to run a btc fundraiser on your behalf. I don't have a lot of rep on here, but it's pretty solid in the bitcoin space. Google Jason King Bitcoin or Sean's Outpost
Best of luck, man. Stay strong.
Only on Hacker News.
This guy needs professional support for his mental health issues, food to eat and help in finding a steady job.
It's great he's asking for help instead of showing up on the front page as another dead hacker.
> i won't actually be able to draw money from paypal, due to bank/IRS problem.
Which is confusing because in a few lines above, this is written:
> if you can help, paypal to xah@xahlee.org
Can someone who knows the OP provide more context to all of this?
(I know it's probably not too significant and there are other checks in place, but I found it rather ironic when the text right above it happens to be "I try to be VERY VERY careful".)
When looking at his site from the point of view of someone who could be interested in hiring him, it certainly leaves a strong impression - but unfortunately, not a positive one.
What you do in private is nobody's business, but if you do it publicly ... this could rise a red flag for an US employer.
Sticking this one to the US isn't quite fair. I'm originally European (now European-US) and my wife is Chinese. I don't know of any major culture which openly encourages sharing your love of porn.
I was born in Eastern Europe where nobody had a problem with you watching porn as long as you don't do this at work or in public spaces (schools, shops etc ...).
EDIT: comp.lang.emacs doesn't exist, it's been many years. gnu.emacs.BLAH
People with mental illness need jobs as much as, if not more than, those who pass for normal. I know. I have suffered from serious mental issues for 18 years. In that same time, I have enjoyed a long, exciting, and storied career; and I know that my employers have been grateful.
It keeps people with mental illness out of work (because employers illegally consider that person to be a riskier hire) and it does little to help the person being discussed who might just be an asshole rather than being someone with a diagnosable MH illness.
I've been following this guy since a bit before Orkut/Tribe days when he had full hair (~2003?). He's been very inspirational. At first I thought he was a bit of a jerk and a troll (not the right place or time to elaborate on this, but well this was long ago so it doesn't matter) but when I saw him take on his education in his 30s I was quite impressed with what he achieved.
I think this guy is top drawer and seems hard working. I have no idea what happened to him, although I do guess his peculiar character has a lot to do with it.
I've had periods in my life where I withdrew from others, and every time I recovered, I was amazed by how much this withdrawal warped everything about me, and by how easy it was for me to forget simple social behavior. It was almost like I was a completely different person.
So why not Patreon?
Some people find value in the content he creates, and his needs are modest. It is not implausible that enough people are willing to chip in to keep him going, and Patreon provides a way to do that.
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-April/355...
Well, I think his criticisms are pretty well-founded. He just doesn't say it in a way you would enjoy.
> If you are accustomed to Perl's semantics, the search operation is what you're looking for.
> Its mentioning of Perl is irrelevant, since the majority reading that page will not have expertise with Perl regex.
Are you sure? I assume a lot of python users (and the docs he's critiquing are not the latest, and may have some "old stuff") used Perl first. Perl users would be familiar with Regexes, so this is a useful piece of info
Or, praising an example as good for a Python tutorial that uses the format def okaydokey(self): return "okaydokey" which is not recommended by PEP-8
The invective needs to seriously get toned down, though.
Generally when you're used to something that's several orders of magnitude better, e.g. Java docs and you're then forced to work with turds after that it takes some getting used to. Sometimes you never get used to it. Come to think of it.
"Fuck the mother fucking coders in the IT industry."
Looks like he received the very thing he wished on others.
"i don't have friends because i live like platonic monk hermit for last decade"
This guy clearly needs some people skills.
Its very hard for someone honest and hard working in our world to admit to having problems and asking for help from the general population.
He has done good things, and he is a fellow human, who needs help. Leave it at that.
Who cares if he has upset some people on usenet. You think its some kinda karma? Wut? Troll the net, lose your house?
If there are trolls on the net that should be taken care of it is assholes to humiliate and denigrate a man in his hour of need, when he is down and humiliated. That takes a lot more of an asshole than having spirited discussions regarding technical topics on usenet.
http://sachachua.com/blog/category/podcast/emacs-chat-podcas...
2 ) Surely someone in this community can offer him a job writing documentation, at the least? Think of it as charity if you must, but he will probably deliver good value, and he would probably be happy to work cheap, if you're into that sort of thing.
3 ) I will donate $, since that's what I can do from where I am.
On the side note, he should really edit that bank account screenshot. These downloaded images really looks like they were downloaded from imgur. And if you type those filenames into imgur...
Why has he not worked for a decade, and what reassurances are there that he will be able to be productive? There's no chain of trust that would prove that you're not hiring some kind of a ticking timebomb. There's no proof that he's up to speed with any tech since the 90s. There's no proof that he'd not be potentially very quirky and difficult to work with in a team environment. It's a very difficult position to be hired from, and it mostly has to do with the fact that he "let himself go" for a long time.
If you have the option between hiring someone good and "someone potentially good, but also very unpredictable, high-risk and likely to be a long-term project", you'd go with the former every single time, it's a no-brainer.
It's troubling to see a human in pain and even more so to derive joy or a false sense of righteousness from it.
I'm not sure the help he wants is the help he needs, but I hope he finds his way out of that dark place.
Xah Lee wrote:
> What does a programer who wants to use regex gets out from this piece of motherfking irrevalent drivel?
> Any resume that ever crosses my desk that includes 'Xah Lee' anywhere in the name will be automatically trashed.
-rbt at athop1.ath.vt.edu
So there might be concerns if he would fit in to company with all its mundane day to day problems.
I think I would be helpful if he could do an internship or some sort of a program, where he can prove his capabilities to do - "boring" stuff - follow orders of his boss - working teams
Once this is approved, he might had better chances.
>> better, send your check to: [snip]
Maybe someone from Apress, Pragmatic or Packt Publishing can contact him about an Emacs book.
He may simply be describing the two people that would actually notice if he vanished from the face of the planet as his friends because that is the closest thing he has to one.
It's fine to wash dishes if you need money, but if he ever wants a better life for himself, putting up with the annoyances of people who are not like you is a skill that must be both learned and practiced. Introverts, especially extreme loner hermits, have to sacrifice some of their essential spiritual essence to the vampiric extroverts occasionally, in order to have a better quality of being left the hell alone the rest of the time.
A guy like this really needs a mediator to introduce him to more outgoing types, let them have a taste, and then protect him before they scare him back into the shell. It's very unlikely he could do it alone.
"i don't have friends"
Literally, some [new] human contact may help him tremendously.
His Web site with 240 K visitors a month, with some ads, should be enough to help him significantly.
Why would anyone give this guy money? It sounds like his money woes are all his fault. He's just begging online rather than begging in the street.
You won't care about that if you didn't read his Emacs Tutorial. But if you did, consider donating.
No there is my motivation to end the lunch break earlier.
Jesus.
If you don't really know him, his LinkedIn profile shows more details about his work.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/xahlee
Xah Lee's Summary
Full stack web site development. Heavy backend experience + unix sys adimn. Seek startupish, small team engineers environment.
Accomplishment highlights:
• Autodidact. High school dropout. No degree. • Taught graduate math students at National Center for Theoretical Sciences, Taiwan. • Invited speaker to Geometry And Visualization workshop, Tokyo Metropolitan University. • Work cited in US Patent. • Well-known open source contributor in emacs and LISP communities. • Expert in: JavaScript, Perl, Python, PHP, Emacs Lisp, Mathematica, MyLinux, SQL, Second Life Linden Scripting Language. Each with at least ten thousand lines of code. (working knowledge Java)
Specialties: • Design, code, entire system. Understand language, protocols, raw. Do not depends on frameworks/libs when unnecessary.
Portforlio:
• Xah's JavaScript Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/js/js.html 〕 • Xah's {Python, Perl, Ruby} Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/perl-python/index.html 〕 • Xah Emacs Lisp Tutorial 〔 http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/elisp.html 〕 • Xah's Java Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/java-a-day/java.html 〕 • Xah Linux Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/linux/linux_index.html 〕 • Xah's HTML5 Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/js/index.html 〕 • Xah's CSS53 Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/js/css_index.html 〕 • Programing Language Design 〔 http://xahlee.info/comp/comp_lang.html 〕
Xah Lee's Experience
Author and Webmaster XahLee.info January 2007 – Present (7 years 5 months) San Francisco Bay Area
Creator and author of award-winning website http://xahlee.info/ , since 1997.
• 8 thousand visitors per day. 240 thousand visitors per month. • 5 thousand HTML pages • Frequently cited in academic journals as well as online sites such as StackOverflow, Hacker News, Reddit, Wikipedia. Also cited by Microsoft TypeScript publication. (see list of citations below.)
Published more than 50 software. Have a look at
• Xah's JavaScript Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/js/js.html 〕 • Xah's {Python, Perl, Ruby} Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/perl-python/index.html 〕 • Xah Emacs Lisp Tutorial 〔 http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/elisp.html 〕 • Xah's Java Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/java-a-day/java.html 〕 • Xah Linux Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/linux/linux_index.html 〕 • Programing Language Design 〔 http://xahlee.info/comp/comp_lang.html 〕 Xah Lee's Projects
Programming Tutorial: Python June 2006 to Present Team Members: Xah Lee
It seems that his biggest need right now is self-presentation and that's a pretty tough thing to acquire on short notice.
I'd also say there would likely be way more opportunities for someone of his skillset outside of the valley, where the skimpy resume probably looks even skimpier by comparison.
I realize leaving is tough when you don't have a car, but he also won't have a home soon. Some relocation may be in order. Best of luck to him either way.
I think he is in some ways the prototypical hacker. He's very good at what he does, but he struggles to do anything with financial value, and he's got very bad interpersonal skills.
He's done quite a lot of Emacs work, particularly around trying to make it easier to work with. His work was very helpful to me when I was starting out with Emacs, so I've given him some money. His documentation saved me weeks of work over the years, so giving him a days wages is a no-brainer.
I'd agree with your assessment that interpersonal skills are the issue (in fact he agrees, too) and that's not something you can fix overnight.
I really think the best situation for this guy is to get out of the valley for a bit, get a job doing some very focused dev/maintenance stuff in his areas of expertise (Python/JS?) and design a personal reboot plan.
Maybe you should just refrain from judging people like this so harshly when you don't really know anything about them.
Your attitude sucks. I would never, ever want to work with you when you talk smack on people like this without knowing anything about them.
> I think there's a lot of room for boisterous, outspoken and even aggressive developers, but you really gotta prove you have the chops to earn that.
This sentence of yours strongly suggest that you think Xah Lee didn't prove he has the chops to earn being outspoken. You may even think he probably did not earn such a right at all. Even if you don't think so, the suggestion is there for all to read.
Besides, I have read a good chunk of his website. Even when he goes full insult-mode, he generally has a point.
I didn't say nor did I suggest this. I'm simply saying that if you're going to walk into a room and act like Linus you'd better have a track record like Linus.
I didn't say Xah Lee does or doesn't, particularly since I noted above that I didn't know much about him. I'm simply pointing out that if that's your style, that's what you need to back it up.
Oops. Sorry. I retract.
I mean, obviously working for someone for several years implies some level of competence, but your work is nearly always locked away and you can't show it off.
Ideally you'd want someone who does both; working for someone, which demonstrates the ability to work on a team, while also contributing to open source and making their own content, upon which you can grade their technical skills.
As someone who has worked in the corporate world since graduation, I feel I have little to show that is concrete. It's all hearsay.
I feel I'd be better off if I spent time developing myself outside of work hours so that I can have something visible to the world to be proud of, but frankly with a family to take care of it's a struggle to get the energy to do that. I'd like to have my cake and eat it too. It's a little depressing to me, honestly, but it is what it is.
After leaving the school (I didn't graduate), I spent 2 years doing self-directed learning about computing. I have commit access to PyPy and LLVM, am credited in release notes of Mono and IronPython, and hundreds of open source commits to show off. I still had a lot of trouble landing a job. I got lucky in the end, but it was rough.
You seem to overestimate how open source contributions are judged in job search. Corporate experience is not hearsay; it is concrete. Open source contributions are not concrete, because most employers do not know how to evaluate them.
On the plus side: a lot of companies care about Open Source experience and are able to evaluate it.
On the down side: companies who do it are still the minority, and you'll get a lot of competition from similar folks, who'll likely have written even more open source code than you did, and if they have had a real paid-for work experience will probably be preferred
Yes, a thousand times yes. At a minimum it gives you insight into some product/set of products that are commercially viable and people use. You get experience with at least one build system, and code architecture someone took to market. It also gives you a paycheck that frees up worries about food and housing. In the least demanding of these jobs you can use the down time to learn other technologies by building a MVP of the current product in another technology or contributing to open source projects your corporate job uses. The insight gained from one "real job" is a million times more helpful than trolling github and trying to figure out what a given project is used for in the real world.
Example :
Accomplishments (at the top) : High school dropout Education (at the bottom) : Member of MENSA.
seems obvious to me which one of those two should be getting played up more.
His site has been personally very helpful to me, and I hope that he has a run of better luck.
Side note: that he could live at all in San Francisco on that kind of income is truly impressive. At $1600 a month, rent alone is over $17000 a year.
Some don't realize that a resume isn't a life-journal, but rather a carefully crafted group of documents which should help to paint the image of a choice candidate in the eyes of the interviewer, not the interviewee.
Like much in life, the biggest part of the problem is stepping into the shoes of the other party and learning to craft what they expect to see.
Having helped numerous friends and loved ones with their individual resumes was personally enlightening for when the next time comes that I must make one.
He might have mood disorder. http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html
From this, there's a tendency (out of resentment?) for people with BP to discount the experiences and skills of normal people as trivial "small talk" and turn emotional and ethical extremity ("I've really experienced life") into a virtue.
Bipolar, I'm convinced, is a different thing from being manic-depressive (which would, in 2014, be called hypomanic-depressive if the term were still used; but to save keystrokes I'll use "manic" even though modern psychiatry only uses "mania" for extreme highs that even most bipolar people never get.) Manic-depressive is present pathology, a symptom profile that few bipolar people have all the time. On the other hand, bipolar (as I'd define it) is a type of mind (creative, judgmental, ethically rigid) that has advantages (if the manic-depressive symptoms are contained) and drawbacks, but that never goes away, even if the manic-depressive symptoms remit. Well-treated bipolar people tend (contrary to stereotype) to be unusually conscientious, loyal, and self-aware. The flip side of it is a sort of extreme moral mysophobia.
It actually makes sense. If you're bipolar, little things have gigantic consequences. A night of heavy drinking can have you suicidally depressed for a week. Simple excitement about an intellectual interest can become socially harmful (you don't realize that others don't share the interest). If you live in a world where you're punished (by internal and external causes) severely for small mistakes, you tend to become intolerant of others who get away with much more.
Really? I thought the entire definition of trolling was based on intent. Trolling is trying to provoke a reaction from people.
By your definition a significant percentage of the world is trolling the anti-vax and truther communities for example. And many mentally ill people who comment online are trolls instead of just being mistaken for them?
This definition seems a lot less useful to me than the intent based one.
You don't go to an anti-vax or truther community to remind them how crazy they are. When we consider mental conditions, it may be that some people have compulsive troll disorder or something to that effect.
As for mental conditions, that's another definition that seems inconsistent. I thought trolling was trying to provoke a reaction by being obnoxious or acting stupid or acting mentally ill. I thought the whole point of trolling was that you mostly can't tell if you are being trolled or not. Similar to Poe's law.
A definition of trolling that labels anyone who provokes a negative reaction from a community for any reason, like actually being mentally ill or actually being very ignorant seems overly broad. You just put weev in the same category as someone extremely technically illiterate who asks a stupid question on yahoo answers.
Now you just have a synonym for "annoying" or "irritating".
I agree with others that perhaps a documentation role on an open source project would be something that would be in demand, but having the tech writer telling the developers they are doing it wrong is not a good recipe for success (and that seems to be a real possibility here).
Could he set up Google Ads on there - automatic, passive income that just goes straight into his account?
If we give an aggressive pages-per-visit of ~2 and 3 ads and a semi-aggressive RPM of $4 you're talking about ~ $150/mo.
Also possibly a lot more if he sold display ads directly or ran a good affiliate program for technical books and other products.
He's literally competing with his own tutorial by selling other sections of his webpage at probably less than $2 cpm. If he optimized his page to sell the tutorial he would earn more than $2 cpm per unit on that. The 'around the web' units are probably not even being managed because it looks like they are set to the defaults for general audiences, which is inappropriate.
What I would do:
1. Redesign page
2. Kill ads 3. Raise price to $30 or more
4. Aim for 2% conversion (no clue how many of those numbers are unique sessions)
5. 2% x 240,000 = 4800 sales -- 4800 * $30 = $144k before fees and taxes
That's wildly optimistic given that a lot would have to be done to the site and that the people looking for free emacs tutorials may not line up perfectly with those willing to pay for it, but if it's legitimately a good tutorial there's an opportunity there. Even a more realistic .2% conversion would still be an OK living for the guy.
He could even get started by quoting one of the other dudes in this thread who said that it was good.
The ads that he has on the page are pennies and it's hard to actually find the tutorial that he charges for. That he might be a jerk is actually totally fine. You would just have to work it into the copy as him having a maverick attitude and being a no-nonsense technical guy, which works well for selling to people who are technical.
Xah Lee seems like a helpful guy and a decent coder, and I was saddened to find out later that he could also be a highly unpleasant troll. Now, I'm saddened to learn that being an unpleasant troll and failing to file taxes has caught up with him. I hate to hear of him washing dishes for a living, but I can't say I'd jump to give him money, and I wouldn't put my reputation on the line by recommending him for a job.
It also doesn't help that he is insistent on using his own brand of English[1].
I don't mean to say that you shouldn't help him out. And I definitely can't say if he "deserves to be homeless/near-homeless". Just want to point out that the reason why he hasn't been hired isn't mainly because he has had "no corporation to witness to [his] ability", as someone else pointed out.
[0] Recent example blogpost: http://xahlee.org/sex/pretty_girl_racism_facial_expression.h... [1] http://wordyenglish.com/musing/xah_style.html
Edit: Just realised his writing style is only used on his blog, and not in professional stuff.
He acted as a troll for years in the LISP communities. There is no other contribution I'm aware of.
He was more helpful with Emacs.
Sad, really sad.
He might be 'bright', but he is not a programmer - though he lectures programmers in his trollings.
He simply is unaware of the deeper psychological dimension of being a teacher and an advocate and what that means for his personality
That's... age discrimination.
This is illegal in California.
He could get hire if he can past interviews or have notable projects.
The age difference is often not even really a conscious thing. It is expressed in "cultural fit" by most young interviewers. Older devs simply are detached from core pieces of younger culture. Whether that's music, integration into workplace rhythms, lanugage, etc.
It's important to specialize some, get broad technically (don't only know everything COBOL), and to force yourself to at least understand the hot new things enough to be able to speak FROM EXPERIENCE about why you want said hot new thing off your lawn... but still be willing to play along.
If you need to work for someone else, you need to balance your tech-righteousness with someone else's, often youthfully naive, ego.
It can even be as simple as a work schedule that is hard to meet for anyone with children. E.g. shifting the start and end of the work day one hour later can be enough to make childcare a nightmare to secure many places.
I work with a 42 year old and by far he's the person I've learned the most from even though he "still uses Perl" (I love Perl btw) and I'm trying to convince him to learn Git and abandon CVS.
On the serious note though, he did admit he enjoys procrastinating. Why would I help someone who never had and still does not have any motivation?
It's the same with drug addicts. They can't help it. You can be compassionate with them, but it won't help them. What they need is a kick in their arse to fling them out of their comfort zone and embrace the big changes.
Hopefully, OP's new job shall open his eyes and guide him in the right direction.
He does not seem to be handicapped neither mentally nor physically -- and there are millions of people in much more need than such a victim of procrastination.
Don't fret, OP'll be fine.
Especially considering the fact that I went against the reddit traditions and added a "serious note" after the joke ;)
But oh well.
- Self-destructive alcoholic hacker
On the serious note though, there is this thing called "empathy" where a person has the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another person. Have you ever been paralyzed by procrastination even when you knew that your continued inaction would be very bad for you? I have, so it's easy for me to understand what he's going through.
I think what we are seeing here is similar to heroin addiction or alcoholism. But this is an internet 24-7/ trolling rush/ porn addiction that makes it hard to live in the real world. I bet his isn't the only case either. I recommend a three month cold turkey session in the woods of Canada this summer. No net. Up at dawn chopping wood. Real face to face interaction most of the day. Fix this poor fellow right up and give him a new lease on life. I do feel for his case... in the same way someone who drinks a little more than they should might feel for homeless drunk passed out on the sidewalk.
At the same time I am curious how someone could feel significantly differently than the point of view I posted to down vote it. Does someone not believe an internet addiction is partly to blame for Lee's problems? That this isn't a disorder or there isn't a treatment? That his basic needs should not be met? That our social support service system doesn't need a pivot? What exactly is the argument?
There's no point criticizing him, it's obvious nobody would hire him until he "pulls himself out of the hole". But if you live near him and have some spare time / expertise / willingness to help, be a decent human being and help him get to someone that could help or hire him.
Most of are are not as "autonomous" as we think we are, and in unfavorable circumstances, we can all fall off the tracks. And get over the "but don't know the value of maintaining a basic financial safety net"... it's obvious that he already lost the "social safety net" of friends that could have told him this and probably a "psychological balance safety net" too, so it's a bit too late to be any point in telling him this...
His linkedin profile doesn't say or at least I couldn't see his job profile. I would imagine it is going to be hard for him to get a job as a coder (with his reputation and all). Even if he does manage to raise $1600, that only helps him extend his current situation until next month.
He said he's been living in some sort of isoloation ("platonic hermit monk") for the past decade. Maybe a job in a different field may help him give a different perspective from the one he's had for the past decade?
What does one do if they become homeless in the Bay Area?