malvosenior

Sadly those are from the 90s Reading Rainbow, not the original 80s series.

> We could focus, as journalists tend to do, on the depredations of the connected life. As Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have devoured the online world, they have undermined traditional media, empowered propagandists, and widened America’s political divides.

At least they lead with this so you know that it's going to be another mainstream media piece lamenting their lack of influence in the world.

To be fair though Uber did sort of save the day. Transportation is nothing like it was 15 years ago. Drinking and driving is down, I can actually get a ride with a GPS enabled app, I don't have to fight taxi drivers to pay with a card every trip...

I imagine self-driving cars will alter society for the better even more.

iPads in schools may be a good example of what you're talking about but Uber and self-driving cars actually did (or will) enact significant societal change for the better.

It's pretty much always been that way though. Death March was written 20 years ago:

https://www.amazon.com/Death-March-Developers-Surviving-Impo...

I'd say the demand for programmers is higher than ever and pay is definitely higher overall. 20 years ago $150k was a good salary for a programmer, now it's more like $350k.

I just want the original Reading Rainbow. I can't find it anywhere, if anyone knows how to attain a digital copy, I'd love to hear it.

You can read her own words to see it wasn't in good faith:

https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for...

> Recently Google was forced to post a list of rights that we have in the workplace. So when I heard that Google had hired a union busting firm and started illegally retaliating against my coworkers, I decided to make sure that my coworkers knew about the posting.

She was mad at her employer and used her role to retaliate.

> I created a little notification, only a few lines of code, that pops up in the corner of the browser whenever my coworkers visited the union busters’ website or the community guidelines policy.

It only mentions the union busters' website in the OP but she also says it popped up a notification when people visited the community guidelines policy. That's pretty invasive, this is a notification everyone will see.

We should study everything. That studying gender has political implications means it’s more important to learn the truth, not less.

While I agree with your later point about having larger families leading to a healthier mix of time spent, I cant agree with your first point.

Yes, most parents talk a lot about their kids and that can be annoying if you don't have kids. Most single people are just as annoying though. You can talk about your kids or you can talk about your vacation, or your job... for the most part people will find it interesting if they relate and boring if they don't. I don't think there's a qualitative difference there between parents and single people, just different audiences that will be receptive to what they're talking about.

I find it refreshing that he's coming out and saying this.

I 100% don't ever want to hear my co-worker's opinions on politics (even if I agree with them). I work to make a living and survive. Activism can happen outside that framework, otherwise people will be forced to endure it under the threat of losing their livelihood.

It's a distraction at best and a massive disruption to the business and people's personal lives at worst. Look at Google. People are threatening each other, stalking each other, slamming each other in the media... Google created an environment that promoted a particular brand of politics and this is how it ended up. A company that promoted right wing politics would be just as bad.

If you don't like a government policy, take it up with the government not your place of work. It's only fair to your co-workers.

I would view any Lisp project as a major bonus in favor of a candidate. It's really encouraging when you see people who have an interest in different programming languages. When I look at people's open source, being a polyglot is a huge plus. Each language offers a unique perspective on programming and the desire to explore them is a strong signal of a self-learner and someone who is passionate about tech.

If you add making a bunch of money on top of that you have the ultimate combination of toxicity. Arrogance, ignorance, hubris, echo chambers, thinking you're an expert on matters outside of your field, random and inappropriate activism... Google brought all of it on themselves.

Google is now a blight on our industry (in terms of invasive technology and cargo cult copying of their culture and policies). It's so huge and entrenched that it will take a Microsoft amount of time for its relevance to die but thankfully it's going in that direction.

Being able to produce a solution to a problem where one didn't exist before is "shipping". I've never regretted hiring someone who has multiple projects they've created from scratch.

Shipping is different than deploying server-side code. Going from concept to execution is shipping, and it's what I look for in a candidate. Again, this has worked out very well for me. An added bonus is if you hire OSS contributors, they tend to attract more OSS contributors.

That's the beauty of it being published on Github. I can look at the project and see if it was just a `git push` of something meaningless or if it's actually well thought out and demonstrates ability.

Sure it does. Are they solving a problem they were able to define? What does the shipping history for their project look like? Did they make interesting design choices and tradeoffs. Shipping any software is an accomplishment and does a lot more to demonstrate your skills than leetcode interviews.

I don't think that's a fair depiction of why people code on their own time. Some people just love making things, it makes them happy. I'm not young but still find the time to build projects in my spare time because I want to, not because it's training. I'd even go so far as to say I "have" to do that as I get pretty unhappy if I don't have some personal projects going where I can explore ideas and be creative. It's a side effect that I've learned a ton of valuable skills building personal projects and those skill directly translate into market value.

I've hired tons of developers with 15+ years of experience! A lot of them have amazing OSS contributions. Some don't but all can talk in depth about projects they've delivered.

Hiring based on open source contribution isn't the only signal one can look at, it's just a very strong one (the strongest in my experience).

I'll add that not all developers with 15+ years of experience can ship software. Many have let their skills deteriorate or never pushed themselves to learn new things. It's yet another reason a strong personal portfolio is a good signal.

You're right there are a bunch of software development jobs out there! Certainly enough that any skilled developer can find one.

That being said, for me as a manager, I like to hire people who demonstrate the ability to repeatedly ship products. It helps if they've owned that product from conception, through delivery all the way to support. That's a skill that is in great demand and I've never been disappointed when hiring someone with a great project portfolio on Github.

A fair amount, I'm also not young and find time to make it happen. I love building things and I couldn't really imagine not working on my own projects.

It's not about denying you employment. It's about hiring someone who can ship software. If someone has publicly shipped software and you can see that, they make for a good candidate. It seems reasonable to me that people who really love writing software and do it a lot would get jobs and be successful in the industry. I wouldn't judge them on their work/life balance, some people really do enjoy programming that much.

I've never asked my employees to work long hours. That's basic management. I also let them continue working on personal projects whenever possible (getting the rest of the company to agree...).

As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a demonstrated ability to ship.

This is also helpful for people who haven't worked at big name companies or don't have degrees from elite universities. I'd happily hire someone with no experience and no degree if I can see multiple impressive projects they've built for themselves (I've done this, and it's worked out very well).

Yes, it works against people who don't like to code in their personal time, but it also removes a bunch of filters and in my experience works better than anything else for finding good candidates.

Twitter has repeatedly demonstrated that they are not a developer friendly company and that you should never build anything on their APIs. Since day one, they've done nothing but crack down on 3rd party development and peel away access.

They are the last company that should be trusted to develop an open standard.

This is definitely not the case in 2019. Almost everyone has a degree and a lot of people demonstrate almost no ability to think for themselves.

For a slightly more humorous (but very real) take on the management ladder, I highly recommend The Gervais Principle:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

In my experience it's been dead on accurate.

Homeschool kids don't have to be isolated though, and as you say the nerdy kids at regular school are the ones that exhibit this type of behavior (which isn't bad btw, people mature at different rates). I think it's not as difficult to socialize as a homeschooler as you think it is. In fact they're often at a distinct advantage for socialization because they're usually not burdened by hours of homework so have more free time to hang out with their friends. They also can have more unstructured play time during the day if their parents choose to go that route.

The same can be said about any education (even self taught). My point is 120k is a lot of debt.

As a hiring manager I don’t even care if you have a degree, I just want to see you can ship. There are a lot of viable alternatives to that 120k, as you say you just have to work hard to succeed, regardless of chosen path.

I don’t think a good CS degree is “easily” worth $120k.

That may have been the case in the past, but recently there's a trend for non-religious parents to move their kids to homeschooling to better their education and remove them from the toxic socialization that is public school (in the US at least). Many of these parents are well off professionals who can afford to support a family on a single income.

Keep in mind that the reason people homeschool has changed a lot in the past decade. It used to be primarily religious reasons, but there's been a massive uptick of non-religious parents moving to homeschooling to better their child's education and get them out of the toxic school environment.

Unless you're quite young, it's doubtful that you've interacted with many of these next-gen homeschool kids.