bitshepherd

If you're just coming out of a firing, the worst thing you can do is have a mea culpa moment of clarity when you're negotiating for your bottom line. You'll get the old standard, "thanks for your time", and away they go to the next person, who may have also been fired, but bent the truth in their favor to get the job.

Getting fired is definitely not the end of the world. In fact, I'd say it's more a measure of the employer/employee compatibility. The hardest part of the interview is determining "do I want to count on this guy/gal/team/company every day?" and sometimes it takes getting shown the door to realize that the answer was "no" all along. From my perspective, if you've never been fired, you've never tested the boundaries of your employability.

The NextBSD project was consuming some of the open sourced bits and bolting them onto a FreeBSD fork, but I'm not sure where that project has left off.

If one can read the language, and know what it does, the errors are pretty obvious. If the prospect doesn't know it, they're not able to talk to it, and the bullshit meter goes off pretty quick if they try faking it.

When I was last unemployed, I made connections with people I had no intention of talking to other than for or about a job. I also kept my tech hobbies up, not cramming about algorithms and whiteboarding code. These hobbies led into questions from interviewers, which led into conversations, which eventually led to a job. My full-time job was finding a job, not memorizing algorithms and CS trivia tidbits.

My point is, you don't have to treat the job search like an exam. In my case, I've had to relocate several times when my network in a certain city couldn't come through and I needed gainful employment. In order to succeed in this industry, you need to be flexible like that if it comes down to it.

The upside is they pay you more to offset the cost of living. The downside is that roughly 50% of my income before rent goes to taxes, and half of that goes to rent.

Not having a degree in Austin puts you at a significant disadvantage when it comes to getting recruited. I had the same problem when I lived there and I, too, do not have a degree.

I have a chat bot that went casually racist about a day or two after activating it. After looking through the logs, I found a particularly vitriolic person that was responsible for the source of this bot's newfound hatred of Asians. My bot didn't get fixated on one particular topic, it just spewed racism and vitriol for a while until it learned some more words. Rather than nuking from orbit immediately, I left it alone to see if it would get past the racism.

So far, it's been a few months since activating the bot. It's not nearly as casually racist as before, but from time to time still throws out something racist just for the lulz. It had a hard time learning context, because of its environment and the linguistic skills of the denizens, but it has gotten much better at when it interacts with people.

Occasionally, newcomers get misled into believing the bot is actually a living person with a mental illness, and not just a collection of random bits of code cobbled together.

It's a comprehensive, yet not too dense, set of documentation for getting people up to speed on how to do things with FreeBSD. You may not find a better one even today.

The Linux distros, for all their good, requires too much handholding and prodding to get a productive desktop development environment working. Windows, too, requires too much handholding, and you're liable to just use a VM for development.

If you want the talent you need, especially in the Bay Area, you have to pay more than what the average developer makes in Amsterdam. I want to like GitLab, but I just can't get that bad taste out of my mouth.

That reputation wasn't built overnight, and it won't change overnight, despite what one out-of-touch billionaire says.

Makes ya think about the fine print with sites that deal with bank account details.