228 karma · joined November 18, 2010
Voice Of The Whirlwind is from The Expanse series, where a human colony finds ancient aliens tech and builds a class of warship called the Magnetar-class shops. They use an intense magnetic weapon to literally dissociate an Earth station as a show of force.
In real life, it’s going to take you longer to understand the problem enough to even attempt the naïve solution. So in the context of an interview, get ANYTHING working.
We got a timer and set it to chime when the feeder went off, which helped.
The feeder has an app that triggers an alert on my phone and now if my phone makes that alert sound, they perk up and bolt to the basement.
So they’ve also learned to associate the alert sound to food….
After doing software development for 20+ years, you’ve been using those structures as a small part of the larger problems you now solve. If you go looking for a new job, you don’t necessarily remember all these tricks to invert a binary tree, and you fail. Even though you have all that experience in what you actually will be asked to do on the job.
The first thing I thought after we knew we weren’t injured was, “oh NO I am going to have to buy a new car!”
Used Alltracks with more miles were going for both more than what I paid and more than the insurance payout (also more than I paid).
I have given up ever having a manual again. I managed to get a Honda Accord hybrid, and the only thing I can say about it is the gas mileage is nice right now. But it’s absolutely soulless, I feel unconnected to the road when driving, and it’s just boring and an appliance.
None of them got offers. One didn’t even get past the take-home. I worked with them. I KNOW they had the tech skills to do it.
Did you ask questions about their CV projects that dove into the implementation of the project?
Because if you need a job, the wild asymmetry between you and the interviewers.
You have to be ON for that short time and ready to deal with questions like what you got about "best vacation" or in the next question code a red-green tree implementation, followed seconds later by describing a full scale cloud architecture.
All of that in an hour.
And if you falter anywhere along the line, they reject you and you worry about how you will feed and clothe yourself and your family.
One very important skill you’re taught is to ignore what you feel-your inner ear will lie to you and try to kill you. Pay attention to the instruments to know whether you are turning or ascending/ decending.
My last job was a fixed bank of PTO- that had to account for everything; vacation, sick. I was constantly anxious if I woke up feeling unwell because that was some number of days I wouldn’t be able to take as vacation.
If a company wants to have a limited amount of time off, they really need vacation and sick time as separate banks, treated differently for different reasons-vacation for planned, sick time for unplanned.
Fast forward 25 years to when I applied to grad school. There was a measles outbreak happening and in order to attend I either needed to have a recent vaccination or a blood test proving immunity.
Even though I had natural immunity I just went ahead and got the additional vaccination. It was faster, cheaper, and I didn’t care.
The point is, medical knowledge changed. No one made a big deal about needing an extra vaccination. No one made a big deal about even needing certain vaccinations to do things like go to school. Why now?
It was a clever piece of advertising ruined because some self important snot could not see the humor.
There’s constantly this exhortation to “work hard” and “overcome the obstacles”. People work ALL THE TIME. There’s an underlying pressure to be on constantly.
And I’m asking “why?” I’m an IC. I am by no means invested in the company. If some big event happens, the C-levels and investors may pay out. I might be lucky and keep my job. I’ll bet money that the good health insurance we have and “unlimited” PTO goes away when that happens.
So again, why should I put in extra to make someone else rich? I have no problem with working within reasonable bounds and trading my skills for a salary. I don’t want to start my own business.
So it may cost you more or take you longer. If you are truly interested, you keep with it, or decide to stop.
Within a week of setting the "would hear from recruiters" flag on my admittedly-thin LinkedIn profile, I had 3 solid leads from 3 companies.
I had 3 in-person interviews, and even feeling like I flailed a bit on a couple of the coding exercises (I had the exact panic about writing The Game of Life in 60 minutes), I had two offers and one almost-offer. (The almost was more due to they wanted a principal engineer vs. senior engineer).
Maybe around where I am companies are learning their lesson.
Simple constructors or accessors that end up not getting coverage are fine, I believe you can see that you have little risk in not writing test for them. If you're shooting for package-level tests and you have no separate tests for POJO's (in Java) - little risk there.
But if you see a big section of exception handling that has not been tested -- that's a sign of a risk. Test that stuff.
What about the employees of WeWork? They lose their jobs because "a bunch of rich people paid for a guy to live like a king."
They lose their homes, access to health insurance, the ability to retire someday.
There's a big difference between some billionaire losing some rounding errors and someone trying to provide for their family.
-Just as I was finishing college, my father, who only had a high school education, worked for GTE Sylvania for 25+ years. The company was sold, then closed the small plant he worked at. The best he could find after that was stockroom work at a department store. That triggered depression in him and a big rift in my parent's marriage.
-20 years ago my brother worked for Xerox, and was laid off/downsized. He and his wife had a third child on the way, had just built a house. It took him a year to find a job as IT support for a law firm. That traumatized him so much he's overworked for the company ever since.
-I worked for Kodak for many years. The last 2 years I worked there in the early 2000's, my department was under constant layoff threat. At that point, I'd decided I was moving out of NY, and wanted the severance package (but didn't get it)
-After moving to WI, 9 months into my new job there, our department had a round of layoffs. I was terrified since I was the last hired, and now was hundreds of miles from my support network. I survived, and went on to work there for 10 more years.
-My partner, after working for a financial services company for 26 years, got a boss who didn't like him, and frankly I think did not like LGBTQ folks, and maneuvered him into being a "displaced worker". He got let go, 5 years before his pension and years of service would have put him in a place to be able to comfortably retire.
So I haven't ever been laid off, but I have seen how much damage it can do to people I care about and their futures.
I worry about this every day, especially seeing what happened to my dad and my partner. I have been saving for retirement, but I really need the next 5-10 years to let that build to be able to comfortably retire.
Bravo to them for doing it!
"Phone-as-camera" - people have always traveled with cameras since it became practical. They took crappy pictures of fireworks, or whatever, on film. Perhaps a bit more mindfully because of the limited amount of exposures on a roll of film, but it's still a major way to capture a memory. A shutterbug would spend just as much time shooting film and not being "in the moment" as someone with a phone. It's just that now phones work as pretty decent cameras along with all their other features.
"Phone-as-nav" - this is a great advance over paper maps in that it tells you where you are on the map.
"Phone-as-comms" - also a great advance in that you can get in touch with travel companions or make contact with locations.
"Phone-as-distraction" - aha. THIS is where I think the issue comes in; if you are too busy tweeting or reading email or playing Clash of Knights while you're visiting the Pyramids or the Forum Ruins, THAT'S a problem. That's where you need to put down the phone and be a part of what you've traveled to ostensibly see.