turk73

Luckily, we're not a democracy!

The first one I used was a DEC UNIX based workstation. That thing was pretty cool at the time, circa 1993. I learned a ton about UNIX on it and was really my only access to that type of OS until Linux first came out a year or so later.

Later on, I worked at a healthcare company that used a cluster of Alphas running OpenVMS or whatever the hell that OS is called. This was circa 2011-2014. It was DEFINITELY NOT COOL ANYMORE. That hardware was really old and the software on it was subject to frequent restarts due to memory leaks. The company used it to try and operate order intake for a multi-site online pharmacy. The system was impossible to interact with, it had a bizarre TCP socket based API, one awful, buggy, SOAP service, and otherwise data could come out via reports generated in a binary file format. Not strictly DEC's fault as the Alpha hardware did last a long time, but it was generally an awful experience for me to have to deal with that particular system. The company tried and failed to replace it so they doubled down, bought the source code for a ridiculous sum in the millions of dollars, and proceeded to try and maintain it themselves by hiring crusty old timers whose people skills were either way out of date or never existed in the first place.

Oh, and the repairs to the hardware were through a local computer salvage firm that basically bought boards and other bits off of EBay. This is a major player in the online pharmacy space, mind you.

Tech Lead here, 20yrs or so experience I guess it is now, I don't know what counts and what doesn't.

That's a good list, but I find it's very difficult for any one person to live up to all of that. It's asking a lot. How is my role going? They're asking a lot of an introvert who is fun to work with but not great at motivating others or being empathic. I'm a decent leader, but not a great leader, nor will I ever be. It's just not my gift and while I try to improve those skills, I know that I will only get so far because I'm not a corporate person at heart. I have no great respect for how US companies are managed, no great respect for managers, especially the MBA variety, whom I compare to parasites--blood sucking, unethical scoundrels. I don't wish to be "the worst of us." I get that many of them didn't set out to be that way, but something about corporate culture germinates profound psychopathy in people.

Not going to lie to you, being a "software engineer" (an extremely loaded term these days, and I argue, one that isn't a correct labeling of anything we do--there is no "engineering" whatsoever) and the role is not worth the money they pay you. "Information Sharecropper" has a more honest ring to it.

I don't believe that. There was a guy who made a Youtube video showing the hundreds and hundreds of daily flights coming and going from China even weeks after the outbreak. He said "there's no quarantine if you have money."

What I am wondering is why no significant outbreak in Indonesia? Philippines? Southeast Asia? India? If it is a pandemic, those countries will be hit hard. I would also expect Rio, Mexico City, to see huge increases in cases before Europe and the US. So far that has not happened.

Totally agree. Open concept at my place is beyond ridiculous. I'm not a zoo animal.

Zero privacy, bathrooms are disgusting, kitchen is disgusting. I just give up. I work at home as much as possible.

It's too bad our technology can't do anything with Venus.

I'm ok with it as long as you come here and integrate, don't take welfare, and understand our Bill of Rights isn't a suggestion. We're done making "accommodations" on that stuff.

I grew up in a house with 1 bathroom for 7 people. It was a living hell. I think that issue alone caused massive strife in my family.

My current house has 4 people and 4 bathrooms.

So sick of this garbage. White people are not the bane of society, far from it.

Clown world.

I grew up pretty damn poor. Anyone that looked at me as a kid would have said I had no future at all. I picked myself up and worked hard, sacrificed good times, and cut as many financial corners as I could for too many years. It's been a fucking grind. Regardless of my skin color, it was no cake walk, I felt very little "privilege" as the accusation goes. It was just work, endless work. Especially bad was coming behind the Boomer generation that absolutely hated my guts just for being young. You might say mentors were few and far between and every time I reached out, I got my hand slapped. I was looked at (and still am looked at) as a labor commodity and little else.

Also, it is truly hilarous to me that Goldman Sachs, the bank that the US Govt. BAILED OUT during the financial crisis, a bank largely run mostly by people of a certain ethnicity, has any moral standing whatsoever. These fools should be out of business for what they did, not laying down this crap!

Also BlackRock--what a POS company that is! They came in to a well regarded local firm and absolutely gutted it. Want to know why? PENSIONS. They had to get rid of anyone with a pension, so they did all kinds of miserable fuckery to pull that off.

You just say "My ____ died and I had a tough time with that" (where blank is mother, father, daughter, son, whatever). If they have a problem with that you don't want the job anyways.

I know you don't want to celebrate, but you should. My wife had two in a row while trying for our 2nd child. It was really rough going for us circa 2007-2009. One of them required a DNC, which was just a miserable experience due to the "abortion" connotations.

We made it through together. When you have children you have to accept that you may lose them and must be prepared to handle it. Still in all, several years got eaten up there with worry, doubts, and fears.

We had a 100% healthy "Double-Rainbow" son in 2010, he's just about 10 years old now.

Keep your head up, be kind to yourself, and be aware that LOTS more people than you imagine have gone through this.

Childhood memories are not scientific fact.

I grew up in Upstate NY. There were plenty of warm winters in the '70s and '80s. I don't think anything is remarkably different.

Also, we had some summers that were freezing--like you never wanted to go swimming the whole summer except maybe one week in August. Other summers were blazing. My parents' old farmhouse didn't have A/C. They still don't have A/C now.

Need to look at total miles driven, not just population size vs. number of deaths.

Doesn't Norway have huge taxes on automobiles which chill ownership? If so, then population is not relevant. If only 10% of people can afford to own cars, then the number of crashes and fatalities will certainly be low.

The US standard of living is far higher. Whether that leads to more fatalities or not is anybody's guess. I would prefer the idea that we don't bother teaching people to drive very well or that people don't value developing their own good driving skills.

I really enjoyed taking Chemistry in college, especially the labs. I learned a lot and found it to be far more engaging that my Mathematics curriculum.

The problem with Chemistry is that to do anything interesting professionally, you must have a PhD. The PhD in Chemistry is a long, difficult slog.

Exactly. The whole point of Go is to fix the issue with Python where you have to have all the right libraries installed wherever you intend to run.

The problem is that most cash money market or savings accounts are only insured to $250K each. If I move money out to them to await my big moment, I have to open several accounts.

Back in 2007 I had funds in NetBank which happened to be the first bank to fail during the crisis. My money was bailed out 100% by the FDIC. But it was a tense time and a lesson I won't ever forget.

Today, banks can fail and the laws have now changed such that savings accounts may be used to "bail in" this time. So beware--cash is not safe, actual hard cash is not safe (can get stolen, safe deposit boxes are not allowed to hold any cash), gold and silver must be in hand, but are not safe for the same reasons as cash. No investments are safe, not even money market funds--those nearly broke the dollar peg in 2009/10.

So what should we do? Bitcoin? Give me a freaking break, lol!

We went to FL in 2009 and I remember vividly how many condos were on sale for unbelievable prices. The thing was, you could not get financing and I had no idea how long any recovery would take if it ever came at all. I expected another leg down, not a recovery. The only reason we had a recovery is because Bush fired up the printing presses and Obama kept them going. Then gas prices went totally insane which is how they bailed out all the banks--on our fucking backs! And NOBODY went to prison! Oh, and the worst part was all the "Peak Oil" propaganda all over the Internet which had to be a psyop because they had to justify the high oil prices which were in no way justifiable at all.

So after long consideration, I think this time we really should just shoot the bastards.

Seriously. Here's how the software business works: There are people in management with MBAs who follow the same template no matter what company you are talking about. Management sees everyone non-management as part of the infrastructure. Developers are not human beings to them, they are a commodity. A developer is the same thing as a printer or an office chair to them. To be in management, you have to also be "good" at dehumanizing others, drinking a lot, saying "yes" to anything regardless of how ridiculous that thing is, and generally going along to get along.

I have job-hopped many times hoping to find a place that values developers. After 9-10 jobs I now realize my mistake. There aren't any. Every place I have worked is more or less as I just described to you. This is 21st century business. This is what they didn't explain in college. This is what is wrong with all business in general is this commodification of people--they don't care if you're a good developer or a 10X problem solver, most are happy with cheap. If the labor comes from India or China or anyplace with a contract that puts the laboror in a one-down position of servitude, all the better because those people can be exploited much further. Again, they don't even care about quality, they desire only "good enough."

Now, there is something worse. White males are considered less attractive people to hire. They are trying to punish us for being intelligent and successful. If you don't believe me, just wait, in time you will experience it yourself.

Me too, but I need help. I have been working on ideas for my "2nd career," well, really it will be my 3rd, but that's beside the point. I need a way out of tech. I have enough money already, I just need a freaking path to another kind of work. It's not been easy. It's either I do what I am doing or it's $15/hr Target cashier type of job. Not bashing the Target cashiers, just making a point.

Troll.

Free = infinite demand. I don't think that will ever work anymore than throwing open the floodgates at the border and letting in all the world's surplus population who want to come and get free benes from us and wipe their asses on our flag.

When something is given away for free, people value it less. So making college "tuition free" e.g. saddled to the taxpayer, is not going to produce quality graduates or get us any kind of ROI for us lowly, un-represented, long-suffering American taxpayers. So I suppose if we make it "free" that could be final nail in the coffin.

With the limitless debt situation we have in the US right now, the Fed could just print off another $2-3 Trillion and paper over the whole damn thing. All of us will be poorer, of course. You like getting paid in Monopoly money, right? Zimbabwe dollars all right with you?

This is a thoroughly American debacle brought on by Bill Clinton and abetted by every US President since then. Their simplistic idea was to make education "affordable" for all, and in their infinite wisdom, they fucked up higher education beyond all recognition. They invited Wall Street bankers to come in and wreak financial havoc. The schools were all in on the scheme, so if they eventually all go under, remember, they have it coming.

I disagree. Luxury cars depreciate in value just like any other car. The right school is an investment in future income by way of the people you get connected to as well as what you learn and build a career off of. It's what you make of it, though. It's not an easy road no matter what. Is it worth it? Maybe. Or you could fly to Vegas and put it all on black at roulette, I guess.

Yep, my Bachelor's in CS and Math from at SUNY school was $2750/semester plus room and board. I worked summers, worked on campus, got a job on campus that provided a room, and took out just a couple of loans. I don't actually know how much my degrees cost me, but it was less than $50K and my family and I struggled to pay for it. My first job out of school in '95 was a whopping $35K/yr and some benes.

I'm looking at the SUNY website and it looks like tuition, fees, room and board is about $27K a year now. It's about double what it cost me, roughly $108K for four years.

I have two children and one is coming up on college age. I'm not advocating for "Ivy League" for her. There would have to be a really strong argument for that because the prices have skyrocketed in the past 20 years. Nobody is "working all summer to pay for college" unless it's at some corporate internship that actually pays decent.

My kids need to be practical people, understand money and especially debt, and be able to make strong investments choices--and also take the risks I couldn't take. College debt is not a risk, it's a surefire way of being poor and having fewer options. You have to have a plan you can articulate whenever you are taking on debt.

The only reason I can see stretching to some rarefied school is because you want to connect socially with people who are more well off than you are in hopes of "marrying up." I think that what I just said did pretty much worked out for me--after all the hard work I put in, a fundamental irony of my life is that my happiness didn't come from schooling, it came from marrying the right woman whom I would not have met had I not sought out a PhD. You can't overlook the indirect benefits.

I'm sure that's where the money is, but I can't really stand being around psychotic people all the freaking time. C-level execs, puke.

I don't know what you mean, exactly.

I do recall that in 1991, I was the only student in my "Introduction to Programming Using C" 101 class (as a Freshman in college) who could understand pointer arithmetic. That class ended the careers of many aspiring Computer Science majors.

I eagerly learned C++ a few years later. I did not understand at the time what shitpile OOP is. I was totally in OO because it was the "industry trend." Someday we'll fully recover from that entire folly.

Unlike LISP, C is still #2 on TIOBE vs. LISP which is #27, aka no place.

Really? How? I learned LISP back in college, enjoyed programming in it and got into Clojure for a bit around 2014.

But there's no jobs doing it, so other than having a bit better understanding of Functional Programming, there's not much there.

I think the problem is the quality of the average software developer is pretty pathetic right now. Not only can most of them not understand FP, they have never even heard of LISP.

It would be smart for all professional people to not allow themselves to be managed by outsiders, top down or otherwise.

The current intellectual climate at today's US universities is one of near total ideological "purity"--the kind of purity Adolf Hitler and Stalin would be proud of, mind you.

I understand how academic people allowed it to happen. It has to do with being poor but proud. Collectivism is like a drug to these kinds of people because they just want to enjoy their research, live in a bubble, have no profit motive, and generally get along in life attempting to not offend others. They extrapolate that lifestyle like a template for all. After all, it works for them, why would anyone disagree? They crave consensus. Those who don't go along are cast out, but usually "gently" and with as little conflict as possible. Never mind that some of those cast out are destroyed by it, that isn't the concern of these elite minds. They judge who is unworthy.

Honestly, if you can't change a flat tire on your car yourself, how smart are you really?

It's not just SV. One major company I worked for had only one validation requirement on the code we checked in which was the ensure that the copyright header saying that the code was owned by the subsidiary in Lucerne, Switzerland was present. That had to be for IP and tax purposes because nothing else makes any sense to me why that would be so important. It was not a Swiss company. So all the code and business products of value were offshored to some tax-friendly locale. Although I never thought of Switzerland as being particularly tax friendly.

The backlash from all that unemployment is going to crash the system at some point. The gilded, automated future is DOA. Even now, $15/hr is starvation wages, even outside of HCOL areas.