Scubabear68

Somewhat related, I learned to be very cautious about LinkedIn and their job postings. I hit a couple that looked like regular companies and started to apply, but they were really fake job postings just go harvest your information. Even when you abort the process, it's too late. They take your info and put you on a zillion job sites automatically with endless email spam.

My cousin worked in a toxicology lab in a hospital.

Way back in the 80s he was commenting on how understudied and under published Acetaminophen toxicity was.

In particular, taking Tylenol for hangovers was (and still is) a common but very dangerous practice.

As others have said, it is crazy easy to overdose on the stuff and suffer liver damage.

Yep. Many years ago I worked at one of the top brokerage houses in the United States, they had a phenomenal Google search engine in house that made it really easy to navigate the whole company and find information.

Then someone discovered production passwords on a site that was supposed to be secured but wasn’t.

Found such things in several places.

The solution was to make searching work only if you opted-in your website.

After that internal search was effectively broken and useless.

All because a few actors did not think about or care about proper authentication and authorization controls.

No.

In the US at least, most kids are in public schools and the collective community foots the bill for the “daycare”, as you put it.

Yep.

Right now I am living the opposite, consulting to a huge company where anyone can convene huge meetings with no agendas, especially if they are a compliance person, or product person.

We have many, many meetings where many people have no idea what the meeting is about, or even worse they will talk about 3 or 4 different topics.

They also practice what I call Rumor Driven Development. It is not fun.

Pretty soon all ML related government contracts are going to go to a company named Trump Intelligence.

In my experience, technical people tend to tag way too many topics with “simply”. It is usually best to get rid of the word.

I have always said that HATEOAS starting with “HATE” is highly descriptive of my attitude toward it.

It is a fundamentally flawed concept that does not work in the real world. Full stop.

I was lucky enough to work for Manx Software starting, I believe, in 1988. So I not only had free access to all of the Aztec C products, but also learned tremendous amounts from being able to see and work on the source code itself.

I also ended up being a VI guy because Manx had their own vi implementation…

Memories indeed.

I am most likely ADHD, probably in the spectrum to some degree.

Tried college three times and dropped out every time due to expense, boredom, and personal issues like my father passing away from cancer when I was 21.

I went into software development via tech support for a C compiler company, and worked up from there.

Worked for the NY stock exchange, two top tier brokerages, several prominent Fintechs and ultimately consulting into banks and payments companies.

It worked for me because I am largely an auto didact and do terribly in a school environment.

The lack of degree came up only a few times, and no one has cared.

At least in software development careers, degree matters very little to not at all.

After having read a number of school board “audits”, and read about Enron etc, and looked beyond that to other instances, it’s clear that audits are generally worthless as a rule. The auditors are shown what they are shown and not allowed to color outside the lines.

Find a discrepancy and every damn time the auditors will say “oh, that information was not provided to us”.

It’s like if you hired a judge for your own prosecution. What judge is going to find you guilty?

See also ratings agencies in 2008.

Pig Latin with ROT13 encoding, of course!

Because you can code, gold should flow copiously into your coffers and the masses should genuflect to our awesomeness.

Or, it can be like everything other job, and not so much.

Ad tech has given developers the illusion they are extremely valuable.

They are, but not that much. Not by a long shot. Google et al massively distorted the software development market by at least 4x, if not more.

What we are seeing now is a massive correction back to some level of sanity for tech worker comp.

Given the situation, he did stay calm and slow. He did an excellent job trying to keep the cadence measured.

But Trump jumped in angry at the implication that one day Putin will come for the US. That is when Trump stated his machine gun speech … millions will die, world war 3.

This was a shameful day for America. Period. Full stop.

It is very instructional to read the source code to FitNesse framework.

https://github.com/unclebob/fitnesse

You can see how all his ideas come together into a ball of hundreds of almost empty classes, and gems such as "catch Throwable".

There are. A lot of Java code bases look like this.

It is all as bad as you imagine. Functionality is spread out all of the place so it is very difficult to reason about how it all hangs together.

I am so damaged by our local school districts outrageous outlays that reading this all I can think of is how this family traveled the country on tax payer money over a pretty stupid non-sport.

Which I recognize is over the top, but in particular the covid ESSR funds to schools were invitations to everybody and their sister to bilk public schools anyway they could with programs like this.

Our regional tiny PreK-4th grade school gifted itself with a $25k wall to ceiling video game system along the same lines (https://play-lu.com/). These companies even have marketing literature on how to use ESSR funds.

For those who want to dive down this ea bit hole a bit for our local spend dilemma:

https://www.westamwelltimes.com/post/champagne-dreams-the-lp...

42k lines of code is not "massive" except for maybe a 1 man personal project.

In particular, anything that has a lot of liquid benefits from using lower power for longer.

Of course, putting a quart of spaghetti sauce in an open container and microwaving it at 100% will result in some very cool sauce explosions as localized steam in the source rapidly expands and blows giant sauce bubbles all over your microwave.

Hmm…see also The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

If you have the energy to mine in space, you have a massive kinetic energy well to “throw rocks” into.

Keep in mind Zelle was created by a consortia of big banks.

The result is about as good as a consortia of giant banks is going to get.

We were relatively poor back then. I got a Timex Sinclair 1000 after begging relentlessly for it, $99 was a lot to my dad. I was around 13 or so.

Learned BASIC, assembly, a bit of Forth on that thing, and as I grew up branched out to C64 and Apple II’s and PCs, eventually became a professional developer.

It all was enabled by the TS 1000 (and by extension the creation of the ZX-80 and ZX-81).

To steal a cheesy movie quote, that $99.95 little slab of plastic and chips changed my stars.

South Hunterdon School District.

We live in western central NJ so the options are pretty limited. There were only a handful to pick from, and there were roughly two price tiers: tier “A” was around $15,000 a year per student, tier “b” elite schools were $50,000 and up per student per year. Our choices were down to only three schools, one was out because it was all-boys, and we chose out of the other two based on meeting teachers and staff.

Yes.

And many made it work in the face of adversity.

Many others did not make it work just due to bad luck or timing.

But districts like ours completely failed at it because the entire leadership is incompetent and teachers never got the support they needed from the administration to make it work (including monitoring teachers to ensure they were actually working).

I had to rewrite my response a few time to remove all the curse words.

At least in NJ, you have no idea what you are talking about. Our school laws are completely broken. Just so you know I have spent about 300 hours a year for the past three years fighting with, dealing with, trying to improve our district.

I know a large number of teachers who have been campaigning for years to eliminate all forms of teacher evaluations, with the claim that “you can’t measure what we do!”.

Which is utter horse shit, but it’s where we are today.

The result is that many schools don’t really track teacher performance, and as you indicate you can get wild inconsistencies.

The best parents can do (other than leaving) is to aggressively direct kids into the better teachers’ classrooms. We see that all the time - one class has kids who’s parents are “in the know” and gets the good teacher, the other class is where the kids get dumped who’s parents don’t complain. The district knows who is bad and who is not, but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences.

Our school district local enrollment as a result has declined from around 900 kids to just 650 in just a few years as a result. The kids left are those too poor to go private or home school, those not lucky or connected enough to go to a “choice” school, and a small number of die hard loyalists reliving their glory days through their kids at the same school they went to.

In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district.

Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.

He has been a total disaster because he lacks leadership skills, does not understand finance and hides behind the hodgepodge of technical jargon that public education has become.

So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons.

But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year.

We did not like what we saw. A few teachers were really good. Many never bothered to show up, “class” was a note to do homework or something. Others were just plain terrible teachers who didn’t know their subjects well and couldn’t really teach.

More and more our district was also relying on computers and software to make tactically replace books and teachers, and not surprisingly that did not work so well.

Yes, remote learning and covid and all that was a shock to everyone, and all schools took a hit during that time. But this was a window directly into schools, and seeing how well yours did in the face of adversity.

The truth is, at least for our school district here in NJ in the US, schools suck in massive amounts of money, give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.

There has also been the constant creep over the years to turn schools into social welfare systems. This is well intentioned, but in reality is just another bureaucratic money suck.

I could go on. But in short, home schooling and private schools both have risen in popularity because Covid revealed just how bad many public schools in the US have become.

I think the question provided the answer. The market is being flooded with ex-FAANG developers and it is no longer a job seeker's market. In today's environment it is a LOT harder to get hired by anyone, let alone a FAANG company. I know really good people who have been out of a job for +6 months now.

Based on past history, now is not the time to shoot for the stars, but to start consolidating your base and preparing for the next upturn.