internetman55

Everyone needs the humanities. You go to Princeton and you're gonna find Brian Kernighan teaching computer science and digital humanities crossover class and explaining tech basics to the 'educated laymen'. The people at the top of the field know this; why haven't the rest of us figured this out yet?

There's little demand to hear someone who isn't a top talent perform music. You can just go to a concert hall and watch someone world famous play with several hundred other audience members, or buy a recording. There is a lot of demand for simple custom business applications, and many people without an obsessive interest in the field are more than skilled enough to provide the product.

I have this problem as well. I would see people who sit in meetings and send emails do very low-effort work all day, and think they were working hard. When a former manager started cracking down on developers walking outside to cool down and think or spending any idle time, I started putting the similar amount of thought and mental effort into my job, to get 8 full hours of 'work' done without burning out. During this period, I got basically nothing that wasn't super routine done. Any minor hinge in development would take days or weeks to work through instead of a few hours. Said manager was perplexed and began complaining constantly about how the pace of development was slowing down and that milestones were being missed.

To be honest, I'm not sure if this kind of thinking is conducive to getting good work done. If someone is smart, self-motivated, and so on, you can mostly count on them to work hard on important stuff given a bit of direction. The "work sucks, do your job" attitude is, in my experience, one way to get workers to check out, stop caring, and start maneuvering politically so that they can do the minimum amount of work necessary to not get fired. If you add to this that the threat of firing means little to a lot of younger folks with ability and a network, since they have very few financial liabilities and can easily find another entry-level job anyway, you risk easily creating a bunch of unmanageable low-effort workers. The worst part is that managers seem to kick into "just do it" mode when things are most precarious for the organization.

This seems to be common in other industries with liquid job markets and little financial benefit to staying in one company over another, ex young people in low-end retail jobs who live at home

Kind of disagree. Kids are still learning the piano, violin, etc. In my view learning how to play pop songs on your guitar is sort of an instant gratification approach to music. These days a lot of folks just use rapping or electronic production in that niche.

Yup, you have both kinds. You have some people who are trying their best, and you have some people like a relative of mine: doesn't bother to get any jobs he sees as beneath him, has been to jail for dealing cocaine, lives with his mom into his 50s, and molested one of his nieces.

Massive agreement. This kind of stuff is a total dead-end for your bran and your soul in my opinion. You're going to start getting mad at completely mundane things because you think everyone is trying to dominate you.

I've heard someone say that he thinks a lot of night people aren't actually night people--they're just people who don't decide when they want to sleep or wake up and drift until they collapse.

Many of us who work in large corporations have worked on stupid projects that waste hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in company funds. Oftentimes, these failures happen because no one is willing to call his manager a moron.

I've got relatives down South who bought my cousin a pink .22 rifle for Christmas at around 8-10. Not sure if I would do it for my kids but I didn't hear of any problems.

If you want to learn decent undergrad math you really dont even need that much. 1yr analysis, 1yr algebra, topology. Then maybe a combination of a more indepth linear algebra course, an optimization course, a probability course, a stats course. You could probably do all that and a few more electives in one year full time.

From what I've heard from some foreign students, the 400 level American undergrad courses are what they are expected to learn as freshmen.

Do you really not need familiarity with the relevant math to be admitted to AI doctoral programs? I wouldn't have thought that was the case.

Do you know any undergrads? Writing notes in cursive was was essential to me taking a bunch of math and CS courses at once and doing well.

I thought the Indian guy on BBT was one of the more sympathetic characters. He is a bit sheltered, but seems to do significantly fewer stupid things than the rest of the cast. Also seems to be a good friend. But I've only seen a few episodes.

I always just read it as dysfunctional people getting into comical situations. I see the show sometimes at my parents' house, and it doesn't seem that bad.

I am with you on this one. I tried to 'do it all' in the past, without really good results. Now I just try to work, practice my religion appropriately, and exercise a few times a week. Everything else is done whenever I feel the urge only. Seem to be getting more done, paradoxically

I thought that the point of a liberal arts education was 'knowing how' to live a good life, and then possibly knowing how to communicate effectively through speech and the written word.

One of the most cutting arguments I've heard from liberal arts education advocates is that STEM extremists want to turn college into a high-level trade school.

Quite a few folks these days seem to make very non-trivial philosophical claims, then claim that philosophy is not worthy of attention in the same breath. It's very odd to see.

Hm, not sure. My first boss 'managed' by assigning tasks to people and recording start/finish date in an Excel sheet. Multiple week projects were the same as one-day fixes of they made it on to the sheet. I was 'managed' by having my task completion times compared to 15yr developers, and given no feedback other than to work faster.

We also had a lot of slowdown because we were stuck on a shitty off-the-shelf program he bought. He went for this one instead of the more usable competitor because it was cheaper. If he could get developers to build a working tool in the cheap product by holding them 'accountable' in his Excel sheet, he could push for the product to replace the more expensive competitor and gain some reputation in the corporation.

In the end, most of the project was a horrific failure. His best employees left, and control of the project was transferred to another manager inside of a year or two.

I think a lot of this could have been avoided if my boss had any idea about what he was managing.

Man, I hope things have gotten better! I've said a prayer for you.

That's what I do (just periodically go for walks outside). Some managers don't like it, but I usually just ignore them (sorry dawg, my health is more important to me than pretending to be productive for your sake). I usually ended up getting a lot more done when I was doing it as well.

Bible

Bodybuilders today are on mass quantities of steroids, insulin, human growth hormone, etc. The old strong men (Görner, Sandow, etc.) can compare favorably with pretty much anyone not on PEDs today. In general they had smaller chests, but I think that was an aesthetic choice, as I've heard large chests were considered somewhat effeminate at the time.

I attended a state school where we had presentations each semester from Google recruitment, including advice from alumni Google employees on how to schedule your classes and choose extracurricular activities if you wanted to be a strong applicant. I don't doubt that top school folks have some resources that others may not, but Google had some presence at my school (East coast state school with quite strong mathematics department and a relatively strong CS department).

I definitely agree on this.

Mathematical logic class taught by logician? Awesome

Automata class taught by expert in complexity theory? Fantastic

Rudin class taught by PDEs expert - amazing

The worst class I had was an introductory algorithms course taught by someone who specialized in teaching.

That seems like a reasonable heuristic. I'm not really educated on the subject, but I think it has been used in the past (trust is conferred to countrymen with children, since they have skin in the game).

As someone new in this industry, I'm noticing that whoever appears more normal in meetings instantly wins any conflict, regardless of who has the most valid arguments. I find myself preemptively doing as little work as possible on days I think I'll have some sort of discussion in a meeting, since being frazzled from writing code ensures that the other party can force their demands on you without issue. It seems like people are also throwing out little jabs constantly. If you are in a relaxed state of mind, you win and they look weak. If you are worked up and respond, they win. Basically I writing code seems like a horrific waste of time on most days.

Is this normal?

I'm new in this industry, but based on my life, the experience of some close friends, and anecdotes like this, my impression is that you need enough career security and cash savings that you can just ignore stupid requests from your boss and not care about the fallout. Of course that is probably unsustainable outside of entry level jobs, so I am sort of convinced that I should have a 6-10 year plan to exit it

Wow, that exactly describes my company.

Our group ignores the ops stuff necessary to keep our product up and running to keep pushing out garbage for the next big demo. Most of our product is not working multiple days out of the month.

Some MBA guy with ambition learned enough technical skills to keep things up and running with some help from me.

Boss goes to MBA guy to keep things up and running and considers the problem "solved". MBA guy is running himself ragged by logging on after hours and screwing around with data files just to keep things running, then doing the same admin BS all day.

After MBA guy is let go, he is badmouthed for coming up with an unsustainable solution. All future admin work is explained as being necessary only because of him.

Eventually we had our "launch" and our PM did the "big presentation" to our company leadership. After everyone started to realize our product was garbage and we had boatloads of promises we could never keep, she just jumped ship.

I would have considered the whole thing a joke except it ruined my health and relationships for several months.

I'm trying to edit this but failing. Psuedo-PM leaves the company, MBA coworker is let go, project is transferred from my manager to someone reasonable.