greyhair

People under 60 have no idea how crappy the air quality was in the late 1960 through 1980. And it really didn't improve much until the mid 1990s, when most if the old cars finally aged out and left the road.

Perl! Oh, poor Perl.

Python 3, or its children, will be around a long time. As will some version of /bin/sh

I am very far from being an Excel guru, very far, but one thing I have found useful is having everything come out to an intermediate result, and calculate against those intermediate results. If you see weird numbers in the middle, then end result is likely wrong, figure out why your intermediate results are messed up. If you want to be fancy, you can even error bound your intermediates if you know your valid ranges.

I am not certain, but I think part of the 'blob' thing on WiFi internal implementations is to prevent someone breaking certification, particularly for the interference mitigation for things like DFS.

So people writing apps using crappy coding are cratering Easylist basically through unintentional DDoS. It is the apps that suck. Full Stop.

I have noted over the last five to ten years the general retrograde usability of phone apps and full desktop apps in general. Bad UIs, inconsistent behavior, performance issues on stuff that, at least on the surface, appears to be trivial.

I don't understand what is causing the general slide in quality, but it is clearly visible, and it seems to me, untenable over the near term.

Is it the tools? Is it the app churn pressure? I really do not know, because I work in a very different part of the industry. We have our own issues there, but that has more to do with technology churn (particularly in wireless standards) than in the tools and platforms.

So what is up with the app world, in general, and the web app world in particular? I am all ears, because as I said, I don't work in that space.

I could retire now, if I had to, but I hope to do this for another three to five years. It is just far too interesting and fun. I had an older coworker that worked full time until he was 74. He also just enjoyed the work and the people he worked with.

It is a marathon, and change is constant, which makes it more interesting than a lot of careers in the long run. Plan for the long run, and make room to live your life all along the way.

I have made the commitment to myself, from that time, that I only work 40 hours a week. I'll occasionally work a little overtime if I am on a roll on something interesting, or if there is a short term panic at work, but very infrequently, and never, ever, more than fifty hours in a week.

I make that clear when I interview, and I will admit that on individual jobs that has been a deal breaker, but those were the small minority of interviews.

The twenty four years since then have all been good. Four different employers, all in embedded development, all interesting challenges.

I have to believe that the BBB claim had some effect on that. The BBB may have accepted Ford's word, and closed the claim, but it resulted in some messaging up the consumer complaint chain.

A lot of people are ignorant of spectrum allocation, and sideband interference. Twenty years ago I had an old Samsung flip phone (2G/3G). I could tell every time a text came in when I was sitting at my computer, because the speakers would let loose with a tell-tale 'bzzzt bzzzt bzzzt' before the phone could finish handling it and displaying that I had a text. The handshake with the tower would be picked up somewhere in the audio path.

I had a primary care physician in the late 1990s that had been polling his patients on that his whole career, and said that a little more than 80% of his patients met at a bar. So there you go.

I also agree with your assessment on partners, I have had a couple that were important at the time, but looking back, where more like friends with benefits. Only two were really significant. One that tortured me emotionally and basically set me up for over sensitive warning flags for about five years, what a mess. The other one I married over 25 years ago.

He was old, early 80s (since retired and passed on) and said he had been asking his patients that his whole career, and had been keeping track.

I met my wife at a bar. Now, this was pre-smart-phone era, I will grant you that.

He said that a little more than 80% of his patients met their spouse at a bar. He said every time he heard someone say "You need to go to church", "you need to volunteer", or any other thing like that, he would interject that no, you need to go out drinking and carousing with friends. And always with friends. Apparently, out drinking and carousing alone is not nearly as effective.

You will have to accept the word of dead physician from the 1990s on that. Post 2008, the numbers have likely shifted.

But I still recommend drinking and carousing with friends. (That doesn't mean heavy drinking, you don't have to get plastered to carouse)

My wife and I were very aligned, right from early on, concerning financial disposition and family goals. We got that right out in the open early. We completely merged our financial lives and closed on a house, both names on the deed, both names on the mortgage, a year before we got engaged. When we got engaged, we couldn't afford an engagement ring, joint decision on that, and one of her friends got up in my face about it, 'where is the commitment?'. My dear fiancee held her ring finger up against the house and said "this is the commitment".

That common ground, those common goals, has made everything that followed much easier. Thirty years this past Spring.

After we met, it was clear that we had been frequenting the same bars for about three years, and had attended many shows together/apart, but neither of us had any recollection of recognizing each other at any prior point. The shows were significant acts (for example, an ear bleedingly loud Bob Mould at the Green Parrot in Neptune NJ) that had to be the same show, could not possibly have been a different weekend with some common local band.

But there you have it. No contact until she noticed me sitting at the bar watching a live band at a worn out dive bar/night club, and wanted to know what my T-shirt said. She was drunk. She was adorable. I was smitten.

I think that is untrue. I worked at the Network Systems arm of Bell Labs for sixteen years, and we could demonstrate five-nines of uptime on complex systems written entirely in C.

C is a rough tool, I will grant you that, and Rust is a welcome addition to the toolkit, but saying that most code written in C is horribly unsafe, does not make it true.

So the interviews were more about finding out if I would fit within the team than hard technical interviews. People knew me, and knew what skills I brought to the table.

Your network matters. And if you think it doesn't, stop, think again. Your network matters.

One final note. I have interviewed people. Never oversell yourself on your resume. Don't put down that you are an 'expert' at this or an 'expert' at that, unless you really are. Because you just may end up being interviewed by someone that is. And nobody, absolutely nobody, is an expert at fifteen different unrelated things. Don't do that. I have been doing this for 38 years, and I am pretty good at about five things. And those five things that I am good at have changed on a regular basis since the day I started.

I still enjoy it most days, like always, there are days where nothing clicks, or as happens in the embedded field, the hardware just won't cooperate.

It has just been constant learning from day 1, and I think that, as much as anything, still keeps it fun. After 38 years, I still learn something new regularly. Perhaps because it I chose to work in embedded development that is even more true. New chips, new technology, it changes constantly.

Most of what I have done in my life, so far all in the field of communications, is already obsolete. T-carrier systems (E1/DS1/DS0)? SONET (Does anyone use SONET these days)? ATM (not the money machines...)? K56 modems? I guess some people still use DSL. IS95 cell service?

Constant change, constant learning. Yet the fundamentals at the bottom remain, so there is always this stable ground to stand on.

I have reached a point where I no longer want to lead, I no longer want to spend countless hours in meetings. I just want to have features to develop, technical problems to solve. And people younger than me to work with.

As you get older, always seek out organizations with people much younger than you. They are a joy to work with. And don't be grumpy, don't make assumptions, and don't insist on giving out 'advice' unless you are asked.

But do introduce them to the company 401k, and any employee stock plans. And do let them know about the concept of 'same day sales' on exercised shares. Their education will have given them a good technology jump start, but schools are still deficient on personal finance. Don't pry into their finances, but guide them toward good early saving behavior. Trust me, they will thank you five years down the road.

""leaks""

I was able to answer the question. Many did not, but the process was more about how you handled yourself through the process, how you communicated with the interviewer as you walked through the problem, than it was about reaching the actual solution. I know several people, bright people, that were hired there even though they never solved the puzzle.

After I got the proper solution, I asked the person that administered the quiz "Is this an indication of what kind of code gets written here?" He just started laughing and saying "no, no no". Because I would not take a job at any company that actually wrote code like that.

That interviewer ended up being my first manager, and we had a good work relationship. It was a great few years of my career.

Oh, that's right, Apple doesn't fully support PWA, because it breaks their rent model.