rongenre

I have a decades-old math degree and ended up working in tech as an engineer. Are there options, like a "Math Camp for the Middle-aged" where I could get a chance to re-learn everything I've forgotten?

What this also seems to miss that most startups have a limited budget and thus a limited talent pool. While your existing team members might not be an "enthusiastic yes", to the superstar prospects the startup isn't either.

I learned to program in the 80's: BASIC on a Commodore PET and Apple, and C on an Amiga. In 1987 I took my first programming class in high school, and it was in Fortran which they told me was what "professionals used".

Coding was in Wordstar, and I remember being outraged that code had to start on column 7. Isn't this simple bookkeeping what computers were for?

I ended up going to college as a math major and avoiding the engineering degree because they coded in Fortran.

Reading that too - it's quite good!

Archive link: https://archive.ph/pyh3j

Most of my gen-x friends from mid-2010's SF have moved to the East Bay. I much prefer going to Berkeley or Oakland to crossing the bridge.

I studied German in college, and was just terrible at it: And because it was a class, the further behind I got, the worse my experience was. Standing in front of a class and sounding just.. obviously bad really hit me hard.

I'm about a year and a half into daily Duolingo German: I'm not going to say I "get it", but I'm doing better at grokking the grammar and I'm further than I ever was in class. I'm a few months from being entirely done with their course.

I'll be doing italki afterwards.

and a time-traveller

Anybody who buys in an "affordable" neighborhood - at least in CA - is making a lot more than their neighbors who've lived there for decades. If you're polite, you don't flaunt it.

I got my dog last summer, I noticed my mood improve immediately.

After hearing Michael Pollan's interview about caffeine (specifically the parts about how long it's half-life is), I went from drinking 6-7 cups of [caffeinated] coffee daily for over 25 years to - decaffeinated tea.

I was prepared for withdrawal, but.. nothing really.

It would be great if a nonprofit decided to come up with its own internet index and duplicate the functionality of circa-2000 google.

Imagine it could be done for under 10M?

Well that's reminiscent of old amiga hold-and-modify, but good point.

If it were cheap, it'd be amazing for displaying artwork

The other point here is that it's taking ~10 years to go from a company being started to going public. So most employees are going to have to make the decision to either cough up thousands to exercise their illiquid options and pay taxes on them or just have them expire worthless.

At this point, joining as a seed-round or series A employee seems like a sucker's bet if you're expecting equity to be worth anything.

Walking 30-60 minutes a day is basically "get a dog"

Living in a tech hub gives you access to a super-liquid job market. If you take the offer and move elsewhere, and you suddenly get a new boss you can't work with, you've got a lot less options.

Probably a really good plan for the companies though: great way to have a loyal workforce that won't switch jobs for a 10% pay bump.

Apple tried to own the software distribution channel back in the 70's (like they do with the app store). I didn't work out, but I don't think they were ever terribly happy with needing to produce general-purpose computers.

“If an important decision is to be made, they [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.” ― Herodotus

I went cold-turkey in February after 25 years of drinking really strong coffee in well... hacker-heroic amounts.

Oddly, no headaches, and the quality of my middle-aged sleep has gone way up. I do like the routine of drinking a hot beverage but I'm finding decaf chai to be a decent replacement.

From Peggy McIntosh's list: "If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones."

It was pretty amazing going to JDK 1 and seeing names in the source code I remembered from doing VisualWorks Smalltalk.

They should pay more.

Working fully remote also means your hunt for your next job is really difficult. One of the upsides of working in a tech hub isn't just the job you have, but the next job you can find.

Compressed anything is high entropy

I used to be able to do this - take a double espresso, wait an hour, and sleep through the night. But as I've gone through my 40's, insomnia's been a problem.

Further, Pollan's interview suggested that even if I could sleep, caffeine was interfering with "deep wave sleep" - so I gave it a shot. I consider myself lucky that none of the headaches or [extra] irritability kicked in, so there's that.

After hearing Michael Pollan's interview on NPR and hearing about caffeine's 6 hour half life, I stopped cold turkey. It really has done wonders for my middle-aged insomnia.

Standard software advice (including the famous Netflix document) is to interview every couple years.

It also give you data points on your market worth, which is highly valuable even if you don't switch jobs.

A lot of startups (especially really young ones with no hiring process) don't know how to do those.

They want to know you weren't in jail. That's it.