world32

Can't speak for Beijing but the only thing from that list that fits London is that guns are banned.

Because of the massive cost and buerocracy around maintaining a gradation system of handouts like you describe. By some calculations it can even be cheaper for the gov to go all or nothing than it is to run a system of checks with specific tiers based on need.

Interesting point. I have stuck with the same stack for about 6 years so maybe this is why I find it easy to get jobs?

As for remote work, the majority of the jobs I've had have been either fully remote or partial - like between 1-3 days a week in the office, the rest from home. Never found any difference when applying to remote jobs myself.

Nothing, its always been easy for me to get jobs as a developer, I don't understand people that find it difficult. If you have at least one years full-time experience and are competent on the job then most companies I've known will be desperate to hire you as there is such a huge shortage of good developers.

Sorry if thats conceited.

This is a very honest and non-naive answer about the pros and cons of working startups. The "We're a family!" bit made me laugh too - the startup cliches are real.

I would add - don't assume that because its a startup that means you have to be working 60 hour weeks. I have worked in and known plenty of other people who have worked in startups that were 9-5 with hardly any over time. There are plenty of startups that succeed with the majority of the employees working normal office hours, you just don't hear about them because they don't brag in interviews about how hard they are "hustling" and how they do yoga at 5am in the morning etc.

I dislike using the laptop screen because it causes you to have poor posture. Even if my laptop screen was a retina display that was better than a normal monitor I would still use a monitor for my back's sake.

As for multiple monitors, I have tried it for a while but much prefer a single 24" screen. When I've had multiple monitors I ended up hardly ever using the second one.

"Linux" is already named after a man!

I have also read a study (can find a link if somebody wants it) that observed bushmen in the kalahari (or somewhere like that - mostly untouched by modern civilisation) and found that the distribution of sleeping patterns (i.e. night owls vs early birds) was pretty uniform. They also found that because of this, there was always somebody in the tribe who was awake at any given point. They theorised an evolutionary advantage to this in that there is always somebody awake to keep watch.

Yeah rubbish article.

Ok I see what you're saying. But if you have learned something through practice, can't you validate it by researching / googling it? See what people are saying on stackoverflow, in blog posts, in books etc.? Also many university film and publish their lectures on youtube, i.e. Stanford Software Engineering course:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMDCCdjyW8&list=PL3BD1325B3...

> But after years of good performance reviews, successful projects, and promotions, I started to finally allow myself to believe that I knew what I was doing.

Back to your original post, this kind of learning is FAR more valuable than anything you will learn in university. You have learned through practice and experience. I have probably interviewed at at ~20 different companies in the last 6 years and never once have I been asked a single question about my university degree, literally never. Nobody cares about them. They know that its the experience that counts, not the degree (though I'm not saying degrees are worthless either). In my experience I would say around 40% of the software developers I have worked with either do not have a degree at all or have a degree in a completed unrelated subject (i.e. Philosophy). The idea that one developer would discount another developer's idea because he doesn't have a degree in computer science is actually laughable.

Though I'm only saying all of that in order to tell you that a degree is not the answer to your imposter syndrome. The answer is to educate yourself, read books, experiment with different technologies and system architectures, read blog posts and discussions, watch conference talks, go to a conference, join slack channels and discuss topics with other developers. You should feel confident that you know what you're talking about because you have put the effort in to determine what the best solution is based off of research and practical experience, not because you paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (assuming your in the US) to have some guy tell you ideas about software engineering which are probably out of date anyway.

You're right that the end user doesn't care about what technology you use, but do they care about things not working? Do they care that a new feature takes 3 months to develop when it could have taken 1 month if the code had been better architected?

Its funny to see management types dismiss the programmers as being "airy-fairy" when they talk about things like code quality and technology stacks but then they wonder why things get completed on time, why bugs happen, why sites get hacked etc.

Somebody else has mentioned this analogy before in this thread, but if you had a house built would you say the same thing about the structural integrity? "As long as the floor can support me then thats all that matters", "House dwellers don't care what kind of structural beams are used to support the floor they just want it to not collapse". That kind of a mentality is ok for an average person living in a house but you'd you have to be off your rocker to hire a building manager who said that.

Why would having an education make an idea or decision any more valid? A good idea is a good idea is a good idea.

Also I really shouldn't have to list the famous tech entrepreneurs who dropped out of college or lack degrees entirely because its pretty much a cliche by now.

Please explain the experience that has led you to write such an awesomely bitter post about this! :)

"How are young developer trained to cybersecurity?"

In short, they are not. Which is why you see so many high profile companies being hacked all the time.

> Programmers are not different from other professions no matter how special you may feel.

I find it odd how offended you seem by my post.

I don't think that programmers are any different from other professions in this sense. But the subject of this thread is about programming which is why I commented about that. It is just like other STEM subjects in that - a lot of people study them at university, but only a few people actually go on to work in the field they studied. Some studies find that only around 25% of STEM graduates actually go on to work in the field they studied.

http://shortsleeveandtieclub.com/what-percentage-of-engineer...

Hence why I said "Chances are" - meaning "there is a high probably that".

That book was not his sole source of information.

A key take-away from this is that the author learned to code because he had a real incentive to do so - in order to create bots to get better at runescape and make lots of money as a side-effect of that. He quickly saw how knowing how to code gave him abilities that his peers didn't have.

Now imagine if he tried to learn java by attending a class for it - i.e. sitting there for an hour listening to some guy explain how a for loop works. Chances are he would be bored silly and never get anywhere with coding. I think its important for people learning how to code to have a genuine motivation behind it - have something you actually WANT to build. Don't just learn it so you can get a job.

This is why burnout is a thing amongst tech workers, especially for Silicon Valley style startups. I also can't understand why some employees would fall for these YC cliches "changing the world", "hustle, work hard play hard", "passionate about our business" but the fact is a lot of people do fall for that. They end up working long hours, for a company that really doesn't do anything remarkable at all, if this company didn't exist no-one would care. Yet their peers and the YC-culture tells them that they should be really passionate about this so when the reality doesn't live up to that people burnout.

Other than Spain, I think the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and most of the Scandinavian countries are ones where you could get by with English while you learn the local language. Oh and of course, the UK and Ireland (if you consider those as European). Though because of that, I think its likely you will never really learn the local language because you will have no need to. In most big cities in those countries people will probably talk back to you in English even if you try and speak the local language. But it really depends on what kind of experience you want.

Out of curiosity, would you be happy with anywhere in Europe or are you looking at certain countries / regions?

100% this. For a team of good developers this is by far the best model to get things done. SCRUM only serves to prevent a very bad team from doing even worse then they would do otherwise. However for a team of competent developers SCRUM is painfully stifling.

Can we please stop with the "I see lots of foreigners", "I don't see any foreigners" anecdotes!? Seriously, I expected better from HN posters. From this article we can see that there are 2.73 million foreigners in Japan:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/03/22/national/number...

And with a population of 126.8 million people that means that 2% of the population are foreign.

So do you think it's OK for me as a white Englishman to consider a black person born in England to not truly be English?

What about for a German to consider Jews to be less German? Is that ok too? Its just their "culture" right?

Edit: I suggest you watch this exchange between a black Englishman Gary Young and the white supremacist Richard Spencer. It's nasty stuff right? Him telling the guy "you're not a real Englishman". Yet you have japanese friends who say exactly the same thing about non ethnically Japanese people and you think that's fine? How do you square that circle?

https://youtu.be/puJ-arJgkZU

No, don't tell them. Not because they will take it as a threat but because you will look quite silly if you do mention this. Recruiters scan LinkedIn for anybody that has even just a couple mention of the skills they are looking for and then send all the matches messages along if they're be interested in a new job.

If you had an actual job offer on the other hand then that would be a different story. Then you could reasonably say "I have had an offer for this much salary so please can you match that otherwise you are asking me to work below my market rate for you and although I like working here I don't think it's fair to ask that of me".

It was a snarky comment, but also amusing.

I don't see how will ever be possible? There are just way way too many parameters to code an AI to do lateral movement or escalation once inside a system.

For example, even trying to exploit a famous vuln like dirtycow still often requires small tweaks to the exploit script in order to get it to work. There is no way an AI will be able to do that.

Though if you are talking about an "AI" that checks processes running, versions installed etc. and runs the appropriate exploits scripts metasploit already has that in the getsystem command. Though I wouldn't really consider that AI.

https://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/priv...

> Why Meterpreter isn't controlled by an AI or achieving some other autonomous state, I'll never know

How do you think meterpreter would be controlled by an AI? Do you think there should be an AI that will automatically figure out a way to hack into a system or escalate privileges?

Regarding other tools like nmap and metasploit - they are frameworks which let you run modules specific to certain exploits. Metasploit has countless of new modules being developed all the time. And nmap has its own scripts to target new kinds of attacks.

Though the basic functionality of nmap will not change anytime soon because network protocols are largely the same since 10 years ago.

Need more info really to diagnose your problem. For lack of focus you can try the pomodoro technique. Although I would say that if you can't focus on something chances are you also don't enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it why are you doing it? Do you want a high-paid job as a programmer? Because if you don't really enjoy programming then your life will quickly become miserable as a full time programmer. This is often masked as "burnout".

That said, I would suggest to learn coding by building something that you actually want to build. Maybe you have an idea for a project that could make money somehow? Then learn the bare minimum you need to learn in order to build that project.

If you just sit there thinking "I am going to learn how to code" then you will likely dick around learning little bits here and there with no real aim. Coding is a means to an end, not a means in itself.

Here is another idea: take a look at the projects on freelancing sites like Upwork. Try coding some of them yourself. You could make yourself a goal to complete a paid project on Upwork within one years time. Pick a language/platform, find projects in that area on upwork, do them yourself as practice runs, learn the bare minimum you need to complete each practice project. As you do more and more you will learn new things each time and eventually you will be confident enough to do a paid project (though you will likely have to bid a pretty low price to get the job!). But you will have the satisfaction of having earned hard money for your efforts, even if its not much!

Thats great, you are gaining a TON of really valuable experience. It also means that you are worth a hell of out lot more to this company than 23k. If you were to quit and they had to hire somebody to fill this role, they would have a very hard time finding somebody to do all that at 23k, even at 35k it would be difficult. Junior developers are not really expected to be able to do everything that you're doing right now.

If I were I would start applying to jobs, and when they ask you what salary you would expect I would go for 35k, you could reasonably push it to 40k depending on how confident you are at negotiating.

Feel free to PM me if you have anymore questions.