braindouche

A lot of landlords don't seem to really understand that their rental properties are a business and an investment, and thus inherently have risk. Fewer still really comprehend that the little landlords generally are carrying a lot more risk than the bigger property management companies. They just keep being shocked and offended when they seemingly discover this risk for the first time all over again.

wait a darn tootin' minute there, are you telling me that paying for a Windows licence has become a cosmetic microtransaction?

The problem is that the drug doesn't stay at an effective level in the body for 40 days (it also takes more than a month for the drug to take effect), and the consequences of allowing lupus to flair include accumulating permanent damage to, for example, heart, lungs, kidneys and joints. Additionally, there's no good information yet on how an immunocompromised patient in a flair will react to coronavirus infection, beyond the general notion from our rheumatologist that putting your malfunctioning immune system into a state of dysfunction and then getting the virus that puts your immune system into a state of dysfunction is probably really bad.

source: my partner has rheumatoid arthritis and takes hydroxychloroquine, and we've been concerned about exactly this sort of thing happening for a while now.

Can't speak for the OP, but my background is exactly the same, self-taught web dev, started in 2007, worked for myself for a decade (no college degree, either). I understand where he's coming from. I'm also now a senior front-end engineer at a fortune 500 company, so I figured out how to transcend as a programmer.

As a self-taught, self-employed coder, I can tell you that you can get extraordinarily far without knowing a single fundamental. Just having a willingness to dig in and tinker will put you miles ahead of what most people are willing and able to do, and you can absolutely build a career out of a can-do attitude and google. Over time, however, what seems to end up happening is that many people in this situation (myself included) learn systems without learning technologies.

At my place of employ, we distinguish between Application Developers and Software Developers, and I think that's a thing a lot of large companies do. Both are valuable, but they're fundamentally different. You can have a very advanced Sitecore Application Developer who writes Sitecore code all day, but if you hand him an IDE and ask him to write up a CRUD, he'll flounder, whereas a software engineer can more or less invent something new on the fly from scratch, but isn't going to be particularly fluent in any given third-party system.

I think, overall, these long-term self-taught web developers hit a wall like they do because they're really application devs and not software engineers. Sometimes, it's actual apps (I'm looking at you, WordPress and Drupal), and sometimes it's libraries or frameworks like jQuery and Bootstrap. I certainly did. It's basically the same sort of fluency one often finds in bootcamp grads, just with much more practice.

I managed to get over the hump by basically starting over after 10 years, relearning the basic fundamentals of browser development and really mastering development with vanilla html, css and javascript, learning the fundamentals of node, local automation, and just enough computer science to be dangerous. With that, I took those skills and started working for other people again, as a developer on a team. I can't tell you how valuable it's been to simply have other human developers to compare myself to. This is what I learned:

1: There are a lot more shitty developers with CS degrees out there than I realized. However mediocre I may be, there are loads of my peers out there being just as bad.

2: You'll advance faster than your peers once you enter industry. Junior developers can usually program, but senior devs use old age and treachery to get shit done. You've done the hard part already by gaining experience -- now you just have to catch up with technology.

3: You'll find the software engineers around you are generally more specialized than you are. People who work for themselves for a long time get very good at doing everything all the time and learning new things quickly because clients are needy and think you're good with computers. This is a superpower. This is what tech leads are made out of.

I mean, look, I couldn't re-implement quicksort of you put a gun to my head, I've never written my own compiler, and my networking fundamentals are complete shite. But I can negotiate for the resources my team needs, I can bash a misbehaving legacy codebase in a language I don't know into submission fast, I can sniff out an overengineered solution at 30 paces, I can architect a front end, I can delete code at a furious pace, and I can sit on juniors until they start making simple solutions instead of elegant ones.

I'm 40. I've been doing this for 14 years, and I'm exactly where I should be in my career. That's enough for me.

how did that change go for you? because I'm living through that transition right now at my company and it's not been smooth.

Oh you're almost certainly right, it would have been easier with the degree. I don't have any degree, and programming is a second career for me, so in a world where 26 year old senior developers are a thing, it's just one more thing putting me on my back foot. My biggest regret is not starting down this path 10 or 15 years earlier, honestly.

I am absolutely willing to believe it's a market segment thing. I live in a smaller city full of colleges, so the handful of large companies hiring want all of their jr devs to be right out of college, and that's straight from the recruiter's mouths. I was forced to apply to all the small companies.

And, for what it's worth, my current job and the two before it "required" a degree. From what I can tell, that requirement is to filter people on the low end of years of experience. Old age and treachery counts for a lot more than you may think.

The only evidence I have is response rates, and about 12 companies that responded to a man's-name resume that did not respond to an identical resume with a woman's name. I have consulted with a labor lawyer, who told me that this might be actionable if I can get enough women together to also perform this experiment and gather together in a class-action lawsuit. I don't live in a particularly large city, and I believe it's almost impossible without astroturfing.

Hello! Now you've met a female dev with no CS degree. There may be a reason we're thin on the ground, too. My "training" as a software dev consisted of 10 years of self-employment as a freelance web developer, and when I decided to transition to working for a company, I faced massive hiring discrimination. I couldn't pay someone to interview me! And I did demonstrate that it was discrimination, too. My resume was getting something like a 2% response rate with my name on it, but I put a man's name on it and sent out a bunch, and suddenly I was getting a response to more than 80% of them.

Anecdote is not data, and it's only my individual anecdote, but it's my experience that breaking through into the industry to be incredibly hard. Since then I've made up for lost time and advanced faster than a college grad would expect (junior dev in a shitty agency to enterprise lead dev in about four years), and I attribute that to spending so incredibly long as essentially a junior dev freelancer and just being older.

So it can be done, certainly, but I strongly suspect there are several filters working against self-taught developer women making that transition into the industry, and one of them is definitely gender discrimination. And no, aside from sending out resumes with a man's name on them, I don't know how to fix it.

female law school graduates have outnumbered male law school graduates for a couple of years now. The future is here already, they're just in junior positions.

Of course it's valid. Look for patterns. If 100 Apache Helicopters sign up for your app, congratulations, you just uncovered a new and very specific marketing segment to target.

For you and your friend: http://phpdoesnotsuck.com

My personal favorite anecdote: I was out driving in the car with my partner. I said "hey, that guy is riding an electric unicycle", and then starting 4 hours later and lasting for 5 months, facebook showed me ads for electric unicycles.

Rails is not an example. Rails was extracted from a single project codebase, Basecamp. Extracting a Solution Factory out of the solutions we make is a great idea, but starting with a factory-first mindset is what distracts and then breaks programmers.

So basically, after "disrupting" cab companies, Uber would be transitioning into a software vendor for cab companies.

It's a thing, and well-studied, at least on some levels. The top achievers in any given high school cohort usually aren't the kids with the highest measured IQs, for instance, and the kids with the highest measured IQs aren't usually more successful after graduation.

What I'm hearing you say is "Employers are not providing raises commensurate with employee experience and value, leading to churn and a lack of mutual investment".

If your kids get into coding and if they're doing Javascript (which I think is a good place to start for lots of reasons, but python might be better) I can personally recommend Free Code Camp for learning basics and intermediate topics in javascript web development. The interface is thoroughly gamified and it's very effective for people who are, but ONLY after they're enthusiastically hacking away at web dev. They'll be much more successful at learning the basics once they realize that they want and need the basics.

Have you ever been laid off? Because that's EXACTLY how it happens. The young, new, and expensively specialized are dumped first. (It's less about hard and soft skills than it is about generalist vs specialist, and business school preaches that management science is a generalist practice.)

Oh this is interesting. This behavior is fairly common knowledge among cat people: if you have an adult cat that's being persistently hyperactive and displaying increased hunting/pouncing in a manner that's out of character for your cat, you need to take your cat to the vet for a checkup, your cat probably has dental problems and isn't eating.

What I'd like to know is why this reaction isn't more common among humans. I'm a fat person who's tried calorie restriction and all it does is make me tired and depressed. I suspect there's a good reason for that, and it has a lot to do with why I'm a fat person in the first place.

In public schools in the US? No, not really.

I once decided to talk with a "Hi this is Windows your computer wanted me to tell you it has a virus" guy once, and he's going through his script, trying to determine whether I have a Windows box or a Mac by describing whether I have a command key or a win key on my keyboard. My fancy-pants programmer keyboard happens to have neither, but in trying to explain this to him, he got so mad I literally heard him throwing things off his desk, last of which being the phone itself. I assume my family is still cursed, though I never took his physically improbable suggestions.

Disposable fountain pens are a thing now, and shockingly good writers. You can have all of the writing with none of the guilt.

Hero still makes these pens, they're such an outstanding value that these knockoffs have generated knockoffs of their own.

I've said for years, the American system gets itself all tangled up because we (want) to teach two entirely different writing systems to children: we start with manuscript (printing) and then once the kids are used to that, we consider slapping them with cursive (and a hideous Palmer hand or a derivative to boot).

You want to teach cursive effectively? Drop manuscript training entirely and start kids on the joined-up writing in first grade.

It's a choice to get a highly competitive "dream job" that's full of long hours and crap pay. It's exploitation when you're given crap pay, work extremely long hours, your company clears close to two billion dollars in profit that year, and then lays you off (to use recent news about Activision Blizzard as an example).

I'm not necessarily against companies making money, because fully automated gay space communism isn't yet a practical option. I'm not against working long hours, and I'm not against prioritizing things other than money in someone's career choice. That's all valid! What I do have a problem with is companies taking advantage of people and hurting them.

I would suggest reading about crunch I the video games industry, and remember that people take big pay and benefits cuts just to work in these places. Here is one to get you started: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2018/01/16/c...

Ok, but only if we can also stop saying React and Vue in the same breath. React is the spearhead of a galaxy of the biggest, heaviest, enterprisiest solutions in it's class, and it has it's place, but Vue is at it's best in lighter applications. You can do quite robust SPA development with Vue, but I'd argue it's even better when it's sprinkled lightly into a project, as a drop-in replacement for the ajaxing and updating we used to use jQuery for.

The FEE is a libertarian think-tank, and quite comfortably to the right.

That is literally every open office I've ever worked in. Walls are desirable, windows moreso, and corners are coveted. Remarkably, the highest-ranking workers seem to all occupy those desirable desks. Even more interesting, I've seen company officers bring in bookshelves to create spaces where they cannot be approached from behind (that office space was odd and mostly lacked corners). Egalitarian workspaces are a myth.

Those are also two communities with extraordinarily high rates of eating disorders.

I've heard this old saw a million times, or maybe once a year for a million years, but what does it really mean? Nobody seems to be able to describe to me a developer with one year of experience ten times. What does this look like in practice?