HN user
As a (former) team-lead and engineering manager (now back to working as an IC), I can say, to paraphrase Edward Gibbon, that management is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions in which it is almost superfluous.
After suffering a mass layoff last year, one observation points to explicit and endemic ageism:
All my former colleagues and reports 15-20 years younger than me landed jobs within a matter of months. Those of us 50+ remain unemployed a year later. It isn't about skills; I was at the top of my game when a layoff robbed me of my livelihood. It isn't a matter of pay. One of my former reports whom I mentored when I was a senior IC left right before the layoff hit with a job offer making as much as I was at the time as a manager.
It was even explicitly revealed to me by an insider and former colleague who referred me to one position that I didn't get that the hiring committee wanted to go with someone younger, after which he caught himself and backtracked saying "earlier in their career". I was told on another occasion that I'd make a great addition as a manager or principal IC, but that they were reviewing their needs and deciding to search for someone less senior.
Ageism is 100% real.
Did you also get the uncomfortable bodyload that 2C-E is notorious for?
Refine your way to the Waffle Party
A point that bears repeating is that once your unemployment benefits run out, you no longer factor into the count of the unemployed.
Jean LeRay invented sheaf theory while he was a POW in Austria in WWII.
The New Yorker didn't even get the caption right. From L-R it's Kevin Saunderson (at the mixing board), Juan Atkins, Derrick May.
I'm assuming this is a piss-take.
I too never really grokked some essential points of linear algebra until I (re)learned it from a chapter in Hungerford's Algebra book, part of Springer's yellow GTM series. I was taught from Strang in undergrand, and while I did well in the course, I often found myself blind as to what all these computations meant. I recall that Strang had said in his preface that the subject had been taught too abstractly and the crucial importance missed, which reading Greub e.g. or other treatises of that era may be true.