jeffreybaird

I mean, you have power over their lives with force. You can decide at a moment's notice that their livelihoods could be taken away. Or, you could sell your company to someone who would do that. A union just levels the playing field.

Absolutely. I love where I work, and I love my coworkers. I want to make sure that the culture of openness and transparency stays that way. I believe that the best way to do this is to form a union and give the employees formal power in the corporate decision-making process.

Forming a union is a great tool—for marginalized workers. Unions are historically intended to protect vulnerable members of society, and we feel the demographics of this union undermine this important function. We're concerned with the misappropriation of unions for use by privileged workers, some of whom receive compensation more than twice the average income in NYC, in addition to flexible work from home hours, above-and-beyond industry standards for parental leave, 25+ days of paid vacation, a wellness stipend, a bike stipend, an education stipend, a weekly catered lunch, and a great deal of other benefits. We're already a radically thoughtful and ethical company with our PBC, and can do more to lead the way in the tech industry by providing an open environment that's free of hostility.

Because a company treats their employees well, they always will. And employees should just take what they are given instead of trying to get a seat at the table. Welcome to the brave new world of woke stools and scabs.

This is much more similar to the IWW model of organizing.

Congratulations Kickstarter! I hope this becomes a trend in the tech industry. A union is not only about getting better pay, or more vacation - it is about having a voice in the future of the company.

Wow! You are right! Nobody is entitled to anyone's labor! We should make sure we let the capitalists who use the labor of everyone around them to extract profits.

Why do you assume that degrees are "worthless?" How are you defining "worthless?" Based on the research, getting a degree significantly increases your earning potential. But I would argue that even if that wasn't the case and everyone got philosophy, literature, and history degrees, our country would be significantly better positioned globally.

And I agree with your statement that the problem starts earlier. Although most of our issues with primary and secondary public education can be traced to poverty and racism. So, I think we should raise taxes to address those as well :D.

You prefer an under-educated population? The most valuable asset we have in the technology and service based economies is human capital. We need a creative and educated population to continue to compete. I think we should eliminate all for-profit education and preferably make all universities public.

Raise the income tax, create a VAT, kill the mortgage-interest tax deduction, add a Financial transaction tax, tax capital gains like normal income, stop subsidizing fossil fuel extraction, add a carbon tax, and lower the threshold for the inheritance tax and raise the percentage.

Author here.

I am not trying to diminish this person's personal experience nor fail to have empathy.

You did.

However, "incredibly stressed about the state of the world" is itself a sign of poor mental state, and I think that it paradoxically is harmful to make this sort of statement so casually in an an article ostensibly supposed to bring awareness and understanding of states of mind.

This entire piece is about my mental illness, so great observation.

We normalize extreme emotional reactions too much. It prevents many from understanding that they have an inability to cope with daily life, for whatever reason that may be.

I agree that I have a mental illness, I fail to understand how that wasn't already abundently clear in the piece. The normalization of talking about mental health is the goal here.

Comments like this only add to the overwhelming messaging that mental illness is something we should be ashamed of. I would encourage you to refrain from commenting in the future.

I blogged about my process two years ago, here:

http://learnwithjeff.com/blog/2012/08/21/how-to-get-a-job-as...

TL;DR: Pushed code daily for about six months, had some awesome people helping me, read a lot of books and listened to smart people talk about code.

The issue is men don't use the app. I downloaded it on my SO's phone and was able to find most of the college age guys I know on it. None of them knew they were on there.

My fiance works at cosmo and gave me the heads up that they were in the office. Was wondering how bad the interview would be.

This seems like it could get unwieldy fast. If you are looking for a way to abstract web development to a single, concise language, why not check out http://elm-lang.org

I think it is the wrong question. As Seth Godin says in his talk at TEDxYOUTH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpbONjV1Jc "if something is worth remembering it is worth looking up." Tests should be open note, open book, all the time. If you can cheat on the test just by googling the question, the right question isn't being asked. It is time we ask our students to start thinking critically and not just have them bubble in memorized facts on a scantron.

I don't know if the OP is reading this but he should probably be a little careful. I found it incredibly easy to track down "Steve's" Linkedin profile. While what he went through was awful, fighting a libel suit would only make this worse even if he eventually won.

Here is there website http://www.kixeye.com/

"Think about what it means to drive. The cabin, steering wheel, pedals, controls, engine, tires and chassis of a car are all controlled by you. The world through which you move is outside, not inside. Even in malls, you park outside the stores. The stores do not intrude inside your personal space. Driving is no less personal and no less masterfully yours when you ride a bike or a motorcycle, or pilot a plane. Those are all personal vehicles too. A browser should have been like one of those, and that was kind of the idea back in the early days when we talked about “surfing” and the “information highway.” But it didn’t turn out that way. Instead browsers became shopping carts that get fresh skins at every website."

What exactly would this look like?

Part I found most interesting:

"PersonalWeb has been working closely with the University of Texas at Tyler and other community participants to develop products in the search, social network and content filtering technologies.

BDE CEO Kevin Bermeister said, “We are excited by this next phase in the business and are looking forward to working with PersonalWeb to pursue development, licensing and participation in businesses that use our patents for content addressable storage, cloud computing, search, social networking and other important developing technologies in the rapidly growing distributed computing category.”

In an interesting addition it looks like Personal Web Technologies was recently involved in an acquisition that resulted in these patents changing hands.

http://www.personalweb.com/media/20110928_PressRelease_Perso...

Self-taught developer here, I think the foundation is incredibly important if you desire to advance in your career as a developer.

That being said, you don't need to know all that to get started. I probably would have hated a CS program if I had tried it in college. Now, however, I am completely fascinated by things that would have terrified me before.

There is a lot to be said for Just in Time learning as opposed to front-loading your knowledge Just in case you need it down the road.

Many scientists are atheists or at the very least not strictly religious. It seems that you currently have to believe in God to be elected. Is this keeping many of them from even running?

I like the idea. How can we hold them accountable, assuring the research that was intended to be done, actually gets done?

The post has moved, so if you are looking it is here:

http://jeffreybaird.github.com/blog/2012/08/21/how-to-get-a-...

Most of us use some amount of open source software. I think it is in our benefit to support those who make the effort to create and maintain the software we use every day.

So, there have been a lot of negative comments and I understand where they are coming from. I will try to address them as best I can.

"Seeing a self-taught guy with 6 months coding experience writing software at a medical lab testing facility makes me a bit nervous."

I am working mostly on internal systems and when I venture outside of that I have my own branch write thorough tests and have multiple people check my code.

"I shudder to think of the quality of his code and the projects he or people like him are let loose on."

My code is pretty shitty. But, I know how bad it is, I know my limitations. I work long days and more after work to improve. I am not pretending, I am learning.

"Very fancy, but I am a software engineer, or programmer, as you prefer it to be called. Engineer means that I studied 5 years at university (Bs + Ms), and I know what I have learnt there, and I wouldn’t want to work with someone that doesn’t know about algorithms, algebra (it helps you understand a lot of things and opens your minid), compilers, statistics, concurrent programming, software architecture (1 full year course), UI designing, networks, databases, etc, etc."

I disagree that amount of time in a University is what allows one to become a programmer, it is the skills and knowledge acquired at the school. I didn't have that option, I needed a job in under six months or I was going to have to get a job doing something I didn't love. I worked hard and got the job. Am I a master? Nope. But, I have put myself in a position to become one with continued hard work.

I think that is all of them. Many people glossed over this line, "When I started this search I thought I would be scrubbing toilets in exchange for nightly code reviews."

The fact that I am not doing that is a mixture of my willingness to clean toilets to learn the craft I love and a market desperation for developers.

Honestly the six months started as a weekend curiosity, and those ten hours often became twelve or more. Addiction was an understatement.

"It's not an easy trip.. it's not just six months... it's a lifetime. Yes you might get a job in 6 months but then you will have to work even harder to keep that job and to be in the game."

That is exactly why I fell in love with programming. There will never be an end to the learning.

TLDR If you work your ass off you can get a job doing what you love in a relatively short amount of time.

I wasn't claiming that I am an awesome programmer but I got good enough to put myself into a position where I could learn from awesome programmers, on the job, while getting paid.

Either you didn't read the article or you missed the point.