pcglue

These guys are being roasted, and rightly so. But let's also cut them some slack. Lord knows what kind of trouble I would have gotten into if the Internet had been around in its present form when I was in high school/college.

So there was no Internet or WWW when I was young. Instead, when I was 14 or 15, I was into the BBS scene. I found a file manager utility I liked that was shareware. Being dumb and young, I took a hex editor to the executable and modified the name/address of the author to my own, and re-uploaded the utility, hoping people would send money to me instead. Nothing good or bad came out of that, but I can imagine doing the equivalent these days would land me in hot water.

Does it mention agile or scrum? If so, pass.

Thanks everyone, it's been helpful to hear how others do things. I already met with the client and exchanged a couple emails. First meeting I'll do free because I want to vet the client as well. But this client asked for another meeting to go over details and still hasn't asked about my rates. In my reply agreeing to this next meeting, I also mentioned what my rates are. Client accepted my terms right away.

I freelance on the side, so I don't do this a whole lot, but this was the first client I've come across that didn't ask about rates at the very first meeting. I've come to suspect, though, he's already financially independent and this business is a "fun" thing for him, so maybe that has something to do with it.

This means you actually store customer credit card numbers and have to deal with PCI compliance? Is ensuring PCI compliance very onerous?

>struggle for 20 minutes thinking about how to solve it before trying something like a doubly-nested loop over all the milliseconds in both intervals, testing for equality.

Tell me you're kidding... that this is just a contrived example. please.

Using a BeagleBone Black to read current sensors and send MQTT messages whenever an appliance (washer/dryer) is turned on/off.

Same reason it still hogs memory and crashes when I leave it open with no more than a dozen tabs for a while (Chrome never does this).

Seeing that bozo at the podium as president-elect, I really feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone.

Find something that is more suited to you, whether it is another job, or some entrepreneurial endeavor. For the longest time, I bought into climbing the corporate ladder. It was making me unhappy and very unhealthy, mentally and physically. Then I came to the realization that I don't want to be a manager or an executive or even a tech lead. I just want to be a peon coder. That is the sum total of my career ambitions. Once I realized this, I changed jobs to a company that doesn't try to push or promote me into tech lead/management; I am and remain a mere programmer by choice. And I have never been happier at a job.

Not saying your ambition should be to be a peon, like it turns out mine is, but you need to figure out what it is and do something that'll get you there.

What type of work do you do? Webdev, sysadmin or ? It seems remote working is only just becoming mainstream acceptable. How were you able to start doing so 17 years ago? Has it been with the same company or many companies? Are you independent consultant? Sorry for so many questions, I just haven't been able to figure out how to work remotely full-time. The best I've gotten was 1-2 days a week. Appreciate your reply.

A good friend and I both started out as software engineers. Dunning Kruger or not, I am a very good software engineer and so is/was he. He also has an insatiable craving for status and cares immensely about how successful he's perceived as being by others. I don't, at all. So for the past 20 years, I stayed a mere developer and strongly resist any attempts to promote me into management. I will actually start looking for another job if I am promoted over my ardent objections. I cannot stand being a manager or tech lead of any kind. I just want to be a programmer despite the popular advice here not to do so.

My friend has gone from engineer to product manager, marketing manager and in "business development" now. He has tried to explain to me what the latter two jobs entail (I understand product manager), but I just do not get what it is he does all day. He hates his job, but really really gets off on how successful society says he is (between management title and salary) such that it seems to compensate for the daily misery.

I am, however, waiting for the day he becomes a CEO and I can be his admin assistant or some other low-key, lower-stress helper (we are still good friends). Beyond a good salary, I really don't care about status or title. I think I would be happier as a janitor if it paid 120K+.

TLDR: Different strokes for different folks.

I had that same exact feeling! I scrolled to the bottom looking for a date somewhere to confirm (there was none), but then saw the reference to stockfighter and finally dawned on me it was likely a new post. Then I read it.

Back when I was working at a MegaCorp who kept trying to turn me into a tech lead/manager? Miserable.

Now at a small company where I just code all day long and nothing else? Extremely happy.

Where you work and who you work with matters.

Good on you for trying something. I hope you learn from this. I can only imagine the trouble I would have gotten into if the internet/social media were around when I was a teenager or even in college.

I have some anti-advice, not what you asked for, but perhaps valuable anyway for you to take into consideration. When I moved to a new home, I started renting out my old house. I found I just cannot handle being a landlord. The seemingly constant calls for repairs just throw me for a loop. I cannot concentrate at my dayjob when I'm thinking about having to yet again deal with plumbers, handymen or other trades people and their associated expense (and they are EXPENSIVE) and/or repairing it myself (and I'm no handyman). I went days with close to zero productivity as the repairs drag on. And this is with pretty good tenants. I cannot imagine the added mental stress if they were bad tenants. I've pretty much decided when the home selling season starts picking up in spring, I'm selling and getting out of landlording.

I have anxiety and I have quit 2 jobs when asked to assume tech lead role because the first 2 times I have taken on tech lead roles, I ended up in the hospital and started alienating my family due to depression, respectively.

I can handle the toughest sr. engineer assignment, but I can't handle the most basic tech lead stuff where responsibility for other people's work is involved. I have since learned to hold back my performance and excel just enough to keep my job, but not so much that I'll be considered for a "promotion" to tech lead or management.

I am just a programmer. I am content with that and aspire to be nothing more career-wise. I call myself a programmer despite the popular advice not to do so here. My life is better and I am happier that way.

I think they can't even proofread. It's probably supposed to be coutureshopla.com. That website looks similarly styled to the mnm* one.

Staying in aerospace/defense industry as long as I did (11 years). It is a dysfunctional soul-sucking environment that affected my health, both physical and mental.

I escaped a year ago and am so much happier now.

Yeah, I left my last company because of SCRUM gone wrong (1 hour daily "stand-ups" and 6 hour sprint planning meetings). One criteria in my job searches now is no Agile/SCRUM (to me, it's just another name for micro-management).

22 months and counting here...