BklynJay

The box-art says, "Winner of 26 PC Game awards". Is that for the series or for Sim City V? I have a hard time believing its the latter.

eInk is easier on the eyes than the highest resolution display available on any smart-device. I have half a dozen smart devices and still choose to read (books, not comics or web-pages) on my eInk device when given the opportunity.

It is impossible to love more than I love this right now.

Is that Joel Spolsky's office or the Fogcreek library?

Very cool! I'd like to be able to see / comment on a video by clicking on it.

1. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It's ok to mope for a day or two. Get it out of your system. Then get it together for long enough to act, because you have work to do.

2. You're in your early 30's and you feel like all your decisions have been made and that everything about your life is set in stone? I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt, that isn't true. You're still young. Don't focus on what you've done. Let that be chapters 1,2 and 3 in your biography. What do you want chapters 3.3 through 8 to say? Do you want them to say, "He made some mistakes and let them rule the rest of his life"? Or "He got his act together and made opportunities for himself."

You're on Hacker News. HN is absolutely rife with stories of people creating opportunities for themselves.

One last thing: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

Very cool. Now I need something like this to be projected up on the giant-screen of my secret underground lair.

One of the comments: "It's funny that all these guys loved the letter, yet didn't realize it's their fault that the letter even had to be written. If only they hadn't been falling for trumped up resumes and bogus cover letters for years."

The scariest part - from the article, elected government officials lend credibility:

The Church of Scientology opened its new National Affairs Office in Washington, D.C., in a ceremony led by David Miscavige. Joining him in this dedication were Members of U.S. Congress Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) and Danny Davis (D-IL); as well as Liz Gibson, Senior Program Manager, Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Looks great!

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music also gives some notable dates in music-history.

What could possibly go wrong?

Thank you for the feedback. I suppose my question was operating under the assumption that once I decide how I want the contract structured, I would have a lawyer write it up sufficiently. Its more a question about do I want to share ownership of the source with the client, fully assign, etc. What is considered reasonable in the freelance development contracting space.

On what planet does this make sense? Here on Earth, this is generally considered "unwise."

Dad of the Year Award: For. The. Win.

Great job! Congratulations. It takes a lot of persistence and drive to see a project through to the end.

Q: What's the best way to generate a random string?

A: Ask a first-year CS student to quit out of Vim.

Who else is expecting the chief scientist on the project to say: "What could possibly go wrong?" :)

Great work guys. Easy to use website with a clear design. Love the product and will be ordering at least one.

Well, obviously the solution is to just check it 100 times a day! :)

(that's what I do)

I've been out of it for quite a while. It was somewhat unsettling to reflect back upon my experiences. Usually time softens the edges of a harsh experience, and you recall the "good times" far more frequently than the bad. Usually.

As an influential Managing Director once told me, "This business brings out the worst in everyone."

Right on - London vs. US is very different. I envied my UK friends who left work at 4pm on Fridays to have a drink with their colleagues, when I'd regularly be working till 8 or 9pm.

Yep. But even though you say "of course it does," the majority of people don't realize that until its too late. There's nothing obvious about the situation from the outside looking in, unless you possess uncommon introspective abilities or have read up on what you're describing there.

It's funny you should mention London - our London counterparts always did speak differently of their hours, managers, and opportunity for growth. So I agree with you!

I worked exclusively on front-office systems nearly for the entirety of my time as a developer for an investment bank. I didn't even get into how there are very few opportunities for growth and other, more HR-related/culture aspects of the job.

I'm glad you have good things to say about your work! I just wish I could describe the time that I and my colleagues spent at those banks in a better light. It was utterly life-altering when I left. I felt like I was living for the first time since college.

I would agree, except having witnessed all of this firsthand, the burnout part tends to affect your outlook on life. The money becomes rather meaningless, if you can believe it.

Bottom line: everything about financial software is what Joel Spolsky warned you about. If you want to work on software, go to a software firm. If you want to just pay the bills and are not passionate about software, finance software is..well, read below.

I've worked in finance as a software engineer at several large investment banks for many years. The software consists of a mash-up of legacy stuff incorporated into generally very "safe" architecture choices. Unless you work in some highly specialized (and very rare) type of group, you won't be making any decisions as to what language to use, database, environment or any other project specific choices. They do not value the product. Expect no documentation of anything and consider it a gift if you ever see an internal wiki. While documentation may be the exception in some circles, any developer worth his salt knows the true value of writing stuff down, or at least commenting code, so you can come back to it at a later date. This isn't the type of software environment where they're going to appreciate the years you spent in school, learning how to measure time-complexity of various algorithms. For the most part, those algorithms are already written and those data structures have been decided upon for you. I literally have conceived maybe a handful of algorithms over the years.

You will spend your time maintaining hacked together code that was assembled by literally 30 other people who came and left before you. There will be little to no testing before software is deployed into production. You will likely not have an adequate test environment. If you are lucky enough to have a test environment, chances are that it won't resemble production in any meaningful way. This test environment may be called "your development environment." You will work with many people who do not understand, nor respect, the art of writing good software. You answer to "the business," ie: traders. Traders for the most part, will not appreciate what you do. Its too nebulous for them, and most people not in tech at the IB, for that matter. I'll never forget when we rolled out our new auto-trading system and the IBank laid off several dozen traders that day.

Depending on how your group is organized, you may be on call 24/7. Some groups have coverage structures, with people covering production software in shifts. Expect to be interrupted on holidays. Expect to work on at least one of the following holidays every year: Xmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, Easter, any other national holiday. Projects will be scheduled poorly. Timelines will exceed aggressive-scheduling and wander into "insane" territory. This may be the norm, depending where you work. The quality of the software you write will suffer for it. Your lifestyle, health, social-life, family-life, interests, hobbies and life will all suffer for it as well.

Politics will rule everything. Politics will stifle your productivity, unless you have a great manager who keeps you away from all of it. Unfortunately, I've never met a great software manager in finance. I'm sure they exist, but I've never had one. There will be many meetings. The meetings will run on and on and many topics will be discussed that concern none of you, which could have easily been hashed out in minutes over email. But you will spend hours in meetings because thats the corporate attitude, and finance is as corporate as it gets. The excessive meetings will impact your productivity and result in regular 12-14 hour days, year-round. You'll have far less resources than you require to do the job even adequately, because the people making the decisions about funding view tech as a cost-center. You'll frequently realize, when you read hacker news, that there's a great many exciting things happening in software outside of the world of finance software. You will see none of these exciting things.

I know this seems like a long, negative entry, but I assure you - my experience was not unusual. I strongly caution anyone passionate about software against going into finance software. I've worked as a software engineer and (unusually) in the front-office on the trading side.

I couldn't agree more. :)

I'll never forget the conversation I overheard where someone who was utterly and completely miserable (at arguably the quintessential Wall Street investment bank) described how miserable he was, but also that they pay him so much money, at age 34, that he'd "lost the ability to complain."

The hours, lifestyle, verbal abuse, sociopaths and general disregard for virtually everything except making more money, will eventually wear you out. As an influential managing director at an investment bank once told me in a moment of honesty, "This business brings out the worst in everyone."

I don't know if we can necessarily draw that conclusion from the limited information in that statement. It would seem almost as if she shuns technology deliberately.