justrudd

I’m helping my dad build a dock and a walking path for his new lake.

Yeah. I just try to separate them in my mind or I’ll quit trying :) Not ready to retire just yet.

For sure. I love my side projects and my jobs. I love writing code and designing systems. I’m burned out on the game I must play (and be good at) to be afforded the chance to write code, design systems, and be paid.

I assume by industry you mean software development. And I’m not tired of that. Where else can you be integrally involved in different businesses? Communications, medical, education, e-commerce for anything/everything. We get to play in a lot of different playgrounds and potentially have a huge impact. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.

I am tired of the interview process. Here’s a take home assignment that you’ll code in isolation without feedback or interaction from us. Completely opposite of how you’d do the job. You’ll have to justify any assumptions you make. And if we don’t like your justification, pass.

Took 2 days on the assignment - this is kind of simplistic, not what we’d expect from a senior dev. Pass.

Take 4 days on the assignment - what took so long? We’d expect a senior dev to knock this out in 2 or 3 days. Pass.

Maybe we’ll tell you’re out. Or we’ll just ghost you. Depends on how our recruiting team is feeling that day.

Behavioral is generally where I “blow” it. I won’t lie and answer the “so tell me a time about xyz”. Sometimes xyz was terrible, and I didn’t handle it well. I know how I’d handle it now and can articulate that. Sorry. We’re looking for someone that handled this exactly right already.

Personally I screwed myself over the years by not chasing titles. I’ve done Staff and Principal level stuff. For years. But I didn’t fight for the title. So I generally get screened out of those pretty quickly because past titles don’t match what recruiting team has been told to look for.

But this is the price that must be paid. So I can work/play in a lot of different playgrounds. Keep applying. Keep trying. Eventually I’ll find something.

Do you buy bottled water from the store?

When driving. But not for day-to-day.

Do you filter tap water? What filter do you use?

Yes. Brita. I don't know which one. It attaches directly to the faucet.

Do you drink unfiltered tap water (which country)? Something else?

Yes. United States. I'm currently in Alabama and drink unfiltered tap water as needed. I also still drink straight from the hose outside when it is hot.

I agree with you to an extent. I was recently laid off (start up out of money) along with the rest of the engineering team. So I’m going through loops. The hardest part of the process for me is getting past the initial recruiter. Once I get past whatever “wall” they’ve put in place, I do pretty well. So I wonder how many recruiters now are using AI to screen applicants? Given the hundreds (thousands?) of applications, probably some of them.

Anecdotally - I’ve been through 2 technical screens where they asked me to use an AI prompt to solve a problem. For one, it was a pretty trivial problem (running an hmac over some values) so I just solved it directly. They asked why I didn’t use AI, and I told them honestly that I’ve done something like this hundreds of times, why would I use a prompt for it? Didn’t make it to the next round. Now it’s totally possible that I didn’t make it because of something else. And maybe those were outliers, but it seems like I’ll need to brush up on prompting…

This made some memories pop. I was on the camera and photo app team. I was not an integral part at all. I think most of my code never made it into the app because being part of that org was a shocking experience. I came from building web apps in an org that got shut down to writing mobile apps that used the Windows build system. My psyche was not prepared.

But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named Adam. To this day I miss working with them.

As I’ve been lucky to be in computers my whole career and I started taking health/wellness seriously before things got too bad, I can probably stock shelves at a grocery or Wal-mart type store.

Why would they hire me over a teenager or someone slightly older? Because I’ve proven for 20+ years that I’ll show up and do the work. I’ve already figured out that I can “survive” on minimum wage. My house is paid for. My truck is paid for. I put “survive” in quotes in hopes that I don’t have cancer diagnosed or some kind of heart disease and need long term medical care.

No. The first treatment was electron since the tumors were in my throat and close to the surface. But my oncologist didn’t like the progress. So my second treatment was just standard photon. Both done with conformal.

This year, during a routine physical, my general practitioner felt some “lumps” in my throat. He wasn’t worried but wanted me to get a second opinion on them. two rounds of chemo and two five week five day a week rounds of radiation later, I no longer have the tumors in my throat.

I was lucky. They got detected early and hadn’t metastasized.

But holy hell was radiation treatment terrible. When I had my first round of chemo to ready me for my first round of radiation, it was easy to “ignore” the chemo. I can’t find the comment now, but they basically state “You get up, you go in, you get sick, you go home, rinse and repeat”. It sucked, but I could muscle through it. The radiation treatments? Damn. By the time the burning sensation in my neck and face got to a point I could ignore it, it was time to go in for another session. By the 3rd session of the 3rd week, my oncologist prescribed me sleeping and high dosage pain pills. My pharmacist didn’t want to refill my pain meds the 3rd time. Thought I had a pill doc that was letting me abuse them.

But all through the pain and the uncertainty, the thing that affected me the most was - I really learned who, in my social circle, I could count on. Made me realize that most of my social circle is acquaintances not friends. Not loved ones.

So cancer really opened my eyes to human connection. Now I just gotta figure out how to do it :)

Helps drown out my tinnitus. But have to be careful because sometimes it can make it worse.

shooting each other with f-ing nerf guns

Well before COVID and the WFH swing, I left a job that I loved because of f-ing nerf guns. Because it just went crazy. People started with the 1 shot at a time guns. But then someone else bought one that would shoot 10 in a second. Someone figured out how to make a magazine that held 30. And so on and so forth. So when I got hit with 1 or 2 darts a day, sure. But when I was caught in a crossfire of 100s of darts, I just got sick of it.

Various magazines (Dr. Dobbs, MSJ/MSDN Magazine), USENET (comp.lang.*), email lists, MSDN subscriptions (the DVDs full of Microsoft documentation), books, lots of experimentation, etc.

There were actually quite a few resources before StackOverflow.

If you don’t want to anchor a band for face pulls, at least do band pull aparts. I do about 10 every hour on the hour. Shoulders feel great.

Yep. But my concern is with the phrasing “We’d make an exception if someone really needed accommodations”. Like it’s their decision whether or not someone has their camera on. Who is included in that decision? Just the manager? Do they get to look at you and say “You don’t look so bad”? Do you get to veto if you really don’t want to turn your camera on? I think it’s easier to approach every situation with an open mind towards kindness. And sometimes people just don’t want their camera on.

I’ve been leaving my camera off for the past couple of weeks because I’m going through radiation treatment for cancer in my throat. My neck is red, my cheek is swollen from the canker sores that won’t go away, my beard (which I’ve had for over a decade and was quite proud of) is patchy and falling out, my left eye won’t quit “crying”, etc. I don’t have my camera on because I don’t want to explain all that to people. The people that need to know know.

So just an FYI. Maybe people are turning their cameras off for a reason.

I wish the good old fashion art of writing an agenda was still practiced. And not an hour before the meeting. Give me at least a day. I’ve clarified many a meeting just by looking at the agenda and communicating with the host that J. Doe has more experience in that area than I do. I’ve also been able to get meetings canceled by reading the agenda and figuring out what the person needed.

Agendas. They’re worth the 10 or 15 minutes you’ll spend writing it.

My biggest pet peeve is meetings that come out of Zoom chats “Let’s chat about that later in the week” and the subject of the meeting is “Continue Discussion from Zoom”. Awesome.

That sucks. I wish I could say I’ve never had one of these. And luckily I haven’t had one go as badly as yours. The main one I recall is when I had a good manager at the time, and he noticed the amount of time I was spending with the junior. So my manager took it over until they got to more meaty issues that required discussions with me.

Agree completely. Reach out to prior managers that you respected and would want to work with again. In the past decade, I’ve worked with the same manager across 3 different companies. All without a loop.

I’m kind of in this boat. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now (jeez). Mentoring a dev with 6 to 8 years experience is a pain in the butt (yes. I know. Not all of you).

While I’ve got a pretty good memory, a lot of the times I don’t have a direct or complete answer for their question. I’ll have a tingle of a memory that is similar to their question. So I’ll give them that as a starting point and tell them how I’d approach the solving the problem. But they get frustrated that I didn’t solve their problem immediately. That I can’t point them at a blog post of Stack Overflow answer.

But a dev with 1 to 3 years experience? They’ll take that non-answer and run with it.

And I get it. The 1 to 3 probably has 1 maybe 2 tasks they’re working on. The 6 to 10 (to 15) has probably a half dozen things they’ve got to keep track of. Researching is probably pretty low on their list.

Same. Except the books I buy aren’t advanced :)

The books I can see from my couch - Code Complete (McConnell), Transaction Processing (Gray), Algorithms (Cormen), Algorithms (Sedgwick), Starting Strength (Rippetoe), All the 5/3/1 books (Wendler), etc.

I believe what is being said is:

If you are a citizen of the United States of America, and you are returning to the United States from a foreign country, Customs and Border Patrol are not allowed to deny you entry to the United States of America.

Of course the caveats - if you, as the citizen, have an outstanding warrant, they can arrest you. They can take your electronics. They can delay you. They can put you in a room by yourself for some period of time. But they can’t deny you entry without some kind of legal reason. They can’t hold you indefinitely.

It just comes down to how much the citizen is willing to be inconvenienced.

And I believe any American with any felony on their record will have trouble visiting Canada. I once traveled with a guy who had a felony assault conviction from a college bar fight 15 years prior. They wouldn’t let him in.

That's fair. I will say that my parents are loving it. They live in a very rural area.

Until Starlink, the fastest speed they could get from Verizon (the only provider they have access to) was maybe 4 to 5Mbps. And it was still capped at 20GiB a month. Starlink gets them 60 to 70Mbps during overcast/rainy days and 100 to 120Mbps on sunny days with no cap.

I know it isn't altruistic of Starlink to cover these areas, but at least they are. I can now see my parents via video chat multiple times a month vs. seeing them a couple of times a year.

Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, the cable providers, etc. just don't care about them. And rightfully so. They are an extremely small market. It annoys me how much money the US government has given to these ISPs in the hopes that they'll expand rural access, but they never do. Or they use the money to pay lobbyist to say "4g is fine for them"

Haha! My neighbor was in the infantry in the Army, and he’s a smoker. Deployed 3 times - twice to Afghanistan and once to Iraq. According to him he’s been smoking since he was 18 and doesn’t plan on quitting (to each their own). I asked him once if smoking affected his running in the infantry. He told me what his sergeant told him - when you’re getting shot at, your cardio will be there.

I've found that I always pushed myself way too hard while running. The goal is not to be fast or have the best time.

This was a key point for me. Like many, I started with Couch to 5K. During my run intervals, I ran too fast. Had to make up for that 2 minutes of walking.

Eventually, after much reading and trial and error, I finally figured out how to run and how to program running. My standard is to keep my 1 mile time right at 7 minutes. I test it once a month. If it is creeping up, I’ll add in more running/cardio. Otherwise, I keep everything the same.

It took a lot of months of “slow” 11 and 12 minute miles to build up my body to be ready to start doing the tempo runs and speed work. I think too many new runners start right off with tempo and speed work because they “gotta feel the burn”, and they get embarrassed being passed. There were times I was going to quit running because I’m maintaining a 12 minute pace and people walking their dogs were passing me.

I don’t remember where I heard this (or read it), but depending on when you start your fitness journey, remember you spent YEARS getting yourself to where you were. You’re not going to turn it all around in months much less days.

I think everybody’s going to be a little different. But think single digit or low teens on average.

I’ve been powerlifting and body building for about 8 years now. I hover right around 15%. I don’t have a 6 pack. I doubt I ever will. I tried once a couple of years ago. My energy level was so low, and I hated all the food I was eating (chicken and broccoli 2 or 3 times a day, as little salt as possible, etc.). I got to 12%, had a 4 pack, and called it a day. I’m happy where I am now. Not ashamed to admit that I didn’t have the mental fortitude to accomplish the task.

Your VO2Max? You can get a reasonable estimate using this - https://www.omnicalculator.com/sports/vo2-max. But if you really want to know, you’ll need to go to a lab that knows how to run the test. I’ve done a lab test a few times. They’re challenging because you will go to failure. Cost me, at the time, $150.

My test was on a stationary cycle vs. a treadmill. Which worked better for me as I have shit running form.

This happened to me as well with Cox Cable in AZ back in the early 2000s. I returned the modem and got the returned receipt. Next 6 months I had to call and get them to reverse the charges. At that point, I started recording all the calls each time I had to call and get the charge reversed. Recorded 5 months of calls, had them transcribed, and sent the transcriptions, recordings, and a copy of the return receipt to the AG’s office saying “I believe Cox is committing fraud, and I wonder how many people they’re doing this to”. Never heard from Cox again. I did actually wonder how many people just continued paying it because “it’s just $5 a month”

I wasn't paying attention and used one my primary email addresses when donating. Account is basically worthless now. So much spam. Even from candidates in states I've never lived in or currently reside in.

For me (20+ year club):

1.) Senior Dev referred me, and they had a remarkable relationship with management - informal chat and offer that afternoon

2.) Senior Dev referred me, and they had a normal relationship with management - regular interview

3.) CTO referred me - informal chat with them and the CEO, offer letter handed to me at the end of the chat with the CEO.

So I've found that it really depends on who is referring you and what type of relationship they have with the person that controls the money.

edit: fixed formatting.