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It is actually sometimes healthy to compare yourself to others, in order to have a broader perspective and prevent tunnel vision.

I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool?

I'm curious about the possibility of the commissioner role for this situation.

From my point of view, the AI is the artist and prompting an AI to produce a specific image is akin to commissioning an artwork.

I think we have moved beyond human agency, and creation of art is reduced to the simpler constituents, the roles of artist and (if there is one) commissioner. The request to make an artpiece can also come from a machine.

There are still a few message boards that I frequently go to, not as many as before, but they have their active community. Having their own Discord channel also helps boost activity.

In particular in a hobby like PC building, using a message board for build logs makes sense given the format. And probably other "log/project tracking" sorts of coverage. Like Reddit, you get a free captive audience that requires less effort than blogging about it, but unlike Reddit you can post build updates to bring your topic back to the top without making multiple threads.

And these tech firms don't really ask tricky interviewing questions? I'm aware that FAANG companies ask Leetcode style questions which I'm not willing to drill myself over. That wouldn't be very low maintenance if the interviews are also cutthroat competitive.

I am considering probably Infosys or Accenture, though. I hear their interviews don't go deep and they give some in-house training.

I consider "no major uses beyond web" to be a strength. Whereas other languages were adapted into use for HTTP servers, PHP was a tool for HTML rendering from the ground up, and therefore a specialist. I tend to trust specialists overall when it comes to tools, wouldn't you agree?

Cloud-based hosting services personally give me too much analysis paralysis. Sometimes I just want old school shared hosting that already has an Apache config that is sensible for most small-mid scale work because it's more intuitive to deploy.

Generally one of two things needs to happen.

Either a new industry, or new innovations in existing industries, creating more low-skill jobs in the same manner that previous industries have done.

Or make the need to work in order to make a living obsolete for many.

Could you elaborate on this? Would it involve devising a new unit of measurement? Your reply reminds me of this page: http://wiki.c2.com/?HowLongIsaPieceOfString

A robust professional network is almost always more valuable and more resilient than a MS CS. I actually think that this is OP’s biggest opportunity/challenge.

You are actually right about that. I do not have a robust network. It could be a negative, but I also learn that you don't have to allow negative traits to define you, or your worth.

I have learned this from someone else who works as a software professional, who is bipolar and depressed. He also works at a fortune 500 making 6 figures, and takes on leadership responsibilities. He says that he hates himself, but loves his wife, and that despite being antisocial, it doesn't have to dominate him.

He also says his personality and social network does not affect his ability to work, and he works hard for his team. If he can do it despite his shortcomings, so can I. Dwelling on your negative qualities are a distraction, and incorrectly convinces you that your negatives have to commandeer your self-worth.

I will need to follow in this guy's footsteps. Forget about my lack of a network as something that defines me. I have to play to my strengths, and downplay my weaknesses.

Elaborate?

What are some examples of this?

More importantly I want to know if you read the content of my post, and what are your thoughts on that content and your personal reflection of it.

interviewing.io has been in private beta for months and I am still on the waiting list since March.

Then my goal, ostensibly, is to find a large company with interviewer(s) that are like and sound like me. Instead of trying to blend in, I will try the other approach. Try to find my "soul company" within the major big companies, so I don't need to artificialize myself. There are many big companies to choose from so it's very likely I just haven't found one who has a lot of people like me.

I'd like to be a fly on the wall on some "sample" in-person interviews to see what I have to do and how to do it.

A master's degree will not materially improve your employment prospects but will cost a lot of money and years of opportunity cost.

I don't like "don't do it" advice without any compelling reasons. It is better for me to try and fail than to regret not having tried it. I am going to seek people who will support my desired path.

What if I wanted to work at NASA or Intel? Getting an internship from one of these companies is hard enough. But not impossible, and worthwhile building valuable connections from your internship for referrals to a full-time job.

But going to work there with no formal CS background, no inside referrals, with a non-STEM degree, with tenuous experience is much, much harder.

So there is my argument for wanting a higher education. At least I stated my argument.

Yeah, I don't consciously answer everything as how they want to hear. Nor do I want to. When I have a job interview, I just go to the interview. I've never done more than look up what the company does, and perhaps a quick refresh on basic algorithms.

But bigger companies they are more willing to hire based on learning potential, correct? They can deal with the longer run of investing in an employee.

Quick learners can cross the Y-intercept of knowledge of those that know more but learn less quickly.

Amazingly, the only company in the tech hubs that has given me any algorithmic questions is Amazon. But I am not deluded enough to say I am 100% doing well on the technical side.

All the other companies with some reasonable amount of public exposure, (like Zillow, Coinbase, ArenaNet, to give a few examples) interviewed me on more holistic and technical concepts, such as how would you use an API to build a website, or how would you design a database, etc.

startups try to be selective; but they're really desperate to hire

That is a paradox I am still trying to figure out LOL.

Ostensibly, startups are huge on culture fit. But also at the same time they want someone who knows a certain stack in and out, and can't attract those people all the time.

So startups and large companies are selective, in different ways?

And that is really gonna be a game changer for me, in turning my interview strategy into something that satisfies subjective needs.

I guess it's because so many candidates, as you say, can do the job because they perform well on an objective basis that larger companies have to reach into other less objective criteria to filter them out?

Out of the comments here so far, I really resonate with this the most.

In particular the paragraphs where you talk about how larger companies want you to be a specific fit for a role. I've noticed that a lot of times my enthusiasm for working at a company comes out like "put me anywhere you feel is best, I won't let you down!" and it never occurred to me that some managers don't like filling in a lot of the gaps themselves.

So if that comes across as being indecisive then it must be a clear sign that I do not know how I would fit in. Sometimes I do get a manager saying they want to hire for a specific department and I just roll with it. And when you describe your experience, then it sounds like going with a "just put me in wherever" attitude ironically makes you sound disinterested even if that was not the intention.

As far as studying up on the data structures/algorithm specifics, I've been around enough big company discussions to have realized it. I go against the common grain in that I actually prefer whiteboard interviews over take-home test projects, too. Because everything about the interview is transparent and both sides essentially invest the same amount of time and progress with it.

Yeah, I truly agree with this. Couple the fact that I have a non-STEM degree and no internships. I picked up my first web dev jobs just from scouring Craigslist. Smaller companies that were open-minded enough to give a junior dev a shot. But I did stop using CL years ago and use better resources for job listings now.

So without any insider info on how big companies operate on a high level all the way down, outside of reading web articles or forum discussions, I have to put the pieces together on my own. My personal network is pretty diffused and fragmented, too. I know a person I met at a tech meetup years ago, he now works at Amazon. But he's too busy to reply and doesn't seem interested in being a referral.

As silly as it sounds I thought the small-to-big company would be the most logical career progression, as I even compare it to a music career at one point. In that you first have to produce and sell for an indie label before getting picked up by big shots such as Sony. But my reality is me spinning my wheels in the small co/startup circuit still waiting to "make it big".

Yes. Most companies don't want to provide feedback due to liability reasons.

Only big exceptions are TripleByte and Enova. They told me that I come across as too "junior" in giving explanations despite my years of experience. The smaller companies are probably holding me back in career growth.

The feeling I get is that if my resume is good enough to get into the interviews, then it must be something about my presentation that has been conditioned from me due to working in smaller places. Like it could be something about the small company jobs might be making me talk differently about my job experience. And that could be turning off the big company hiring managers.

Kind of a like a farm guy trying to make small talk with someone who's only lived in a big city, it will be noticeable. It makes it harder for both people to find common ground. Does that make sense?

Admittedly that may be one of my big failings since graduation- I continued to treat subsequent jobs as simply "jobs" and not a career.

When I got out of college I had a very incomplete view of what getting a career afterwards entails. I didn't get an internship, I didn't go talk to my professors after school, I didn't care about clubs (because I didn't participate in clubs in HS). Career center wasn't very helpful for art majors. I did not live near campus, as I took the train to commute daily.

I'd be thinking it's okay if I didn't get an internship because I've already had relevant part-time experience at that point. So I just hopped online to apply to more jobs. And figured, as long as I'm professional and do my job well, everything will be fine.

Also, it was difficult to foresee the appeal and benefits to networking for your career, because I had trouble making friends in college and in jobs, and I fell back on my high school friends for social activities. Whether I was working as a cashier at Sears or building web pages for a local client, my social life and work life were always separate.

I found most of my classmates in art classes difficult to relate to. There are no clubs or social groups for art majors, either. This turned me off from attempting to make friends in college and I stuck with my old high school friends. I think it's harder to appreciate the benefits of networking if you have a hard time finding people with common interests. So I missed the forest for the trees.