ggariepy

I've been writing code since I was 12, and I'm 57 now. I majored in Computer Information Systems back in the 1980s. Honestly, I got a lot more out of the other aspects of going to college than I did from the coursework related to my major.

There's some important development that happens at traditional college student age. Some of that can be fostered by attending college. Some of it happens organically no matter where you are.

Your son seems atypical: he knows what he wants to do, he has solid skills, and he is probably already better self-educated than the typical graduating college senior would be in software development.

So at this point what he needs is not necessarily the education, but the magic piece of paper -- the diploma -- that makes him hirable in more places.

A business degree with a minor in a development-oriented course of study might serve him better than spending $160K on what essentially would be a mix of formalizing his learning / reviewing what he already knows.

Because, after all, isn't the point of an education to learn something you don't know already?

So back to that important development: your son needs to become more well rounded. He seems to have excellent aptitude for programming and data processing. How are his social skills? What is the status of his business acumen? Does he aspire to work for himself or start a company someday? To what is he going to apply those skills he's got?

The answer to that is what he should go to college to learn. A generalist degree in something like business might serve him very well. Wasting four years of his life and $160K on stuff he already knows probably won't do much except help him refine his skills in beer and girls. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but maybe not six figures worth of value, either.

I would encourage him to either go to school and round out his learning, or just jump into the working world and find where his skills are deficient and let that inform a future college decision. Just my $.50

I use BackBlaze. Cheap and reliable.

You can do it on the cheap with CCRs and estate sales. My Kenwood HF unit was bought for $250, I made wire dipole antennas. I'm surrounded by Baofeng equipment as I type this. Total outlay for all of it probably on the order of $1000.

I do so want an Icom 7300, though.

Not in the USA. We still have 50,000 watt clear channel stations. On a clear winter night, local lore has it that WJR-760AM Detroit could be heard in Mexico. Crystal radios still work...well, not fine, but as good as they ever did. AM frequencies are low enough they skip off the ionosphere.

My take: the people voting for right wing candidates don't believe in "redistribution" which IMO is not a proper function of government. The left really wants to take the nation's wealth and give it to people it deems to be deserving of it; the people voting for the right wing disagree wholeheartedly. As do I. Get your hands out of our pockets.

The hell it isn't reasonable.

Band app: https://band.us

I spent 15 years with HP in their services division. I liked the work I was doing, even though I was slightly underpaid for it. I would have stayed there but they cut me loose back in 2014 with 50K other employees. They did give me a decent severance package (3 months pay with health insurance) but it was shocking how easily they just cut me loose after years of dedicated service. In the end they did me a favor; I've spent the subsequent 10 years doing interesting stuff for four different companies in that time. I'm in my mid 50s now and thinking about optimizing for a decent retirement sometime in the next 10 years. I don't know if I'll be forced to change jobs again or not.

Yes I regret being with HP for 15 years; I had a lot to learn to be marketable again after being there for that length of time. But since I'm working toward retirement now, I will probably try to stay as long as I can where I am.

I switched from Gmail to Proton last December ('23). So far it has worked okay, but there are some complaints.

First, the Android app is simply not as good as Gmail's. It doesn't allow a read message/delete it/move to the next message. This interrupts my workflow as I deal with large amounts of mail.

Second, I'm frequently running ProtonMail via web on two separate PCs. The two seem to get out of sync. If I bulk delete emails from my inbox on one machine, the other machine sometimes doesn't reflect this. Sometimes the emails reappear on the machine I used to delete them.

There have also been edge cases where I have lost an email I was composing on the PC under circumstances I've had a hard time narrowing down. When it happens it's incredibly frustrating, and there are no remnants saved as a draft. I wish I could tell you how to reproduce it for certain. It is usually happening in a dual-machines running scenario.

All in all the solution overall lacks the polish that Gmail has. I wish it wasn't so.

I was laid off in March, 2023, a victim of the startup shakeout after the SVG banking collapse. A year previous, I had a small bidding war for my services. When I was let go this March, it was in the midst of the Facebook and Amazon layoffs.

It was terrible. The market had flipped 180 degrees away from where it was in 2022. I did not, however, have problems getting interviews. I got lots of them. I also got ghosted regularly after third and fourth interviews as the companies interviewed dozens of candidates looking for the very best deal they could find.

Now, for some perspective, I am a 30 year veteran of the IT industry, with well over 20 years of programming experience under my belt. You guessed it, that means I'm in my mid-50s. Did I run across ageism in my search? Not overt, but undoubtedly, yes.

Were companies overwhelmed by the number of applicants? Unquestionably. I had one recruiter tell me they had over 150 applicants for a single programming job, and they planned to only talk to 10% of them. 10% is still a LOT of interviews to find the right candidate.

So yes, the job market is bad, although not for traditional reasons. The economy seems to be chugging along, even though it's rumored to have one foot on a banana peel. Companies are hiring. But there's a lot of competition out there for posts, and companies have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the number of candidates to choose from. They don't know how to act.

So if your resume isn't in as-expected format, forget it. If your interviewing skills reveal you're an introvert with poor social skills, forget it. If you don't respond quickly and professionally to every serious inquiry, forget it. If you're not making your job search a 3-5 hour DAILY effort, forget it.

In other words, you have to bring your A-game right now, where you might have gotten by in previous years with just having good coding skills and a halfway decent resume.

The good news is that everyone can bring their A-game with some practice and effort. I got hired after two months. It was hard-- gut-wrenching, even -- but after dozens of interviews I finally landed a good job that met my requirements.

If you are working right now and you aren't saving your money for a rainy day, you're being foolish. Fortunately, I had been saving, and my bank account wasn't destroyed. I feel bad for people in this market who don't have savings. Be prepared to weather a six month outage. And keep upskilling. Complacency will get you laid off.

I've read The Code Project Insider for at least ten years, possibly quite a few more. It is similar to HN, sometimes but not always sourcing articles from it, with a bit of a .NET focus. It's a really good way to keep up with the industry, mailed out for free daily. You can see the current edition online at https://www.codeproject.com/script/Mailouts/View.aspx?mlid=1...

Some percentage of the population is comprised of violent sociopaths. Those people need to be locked up for the safety of the rest of us. People who have committed victimless crimes, like minor drug use, should almost never be incarcerated. People who have defrauded other people in some way, including petty larceny, should be punished by some means other than incarceration.

Pretty much what I'm saying is that jail time should be reserved solely for the violent.

The self-flagellation is annoying. The author should get a grip and ignore the Twitterverse.

The problem is the network effect IS the game. Without it, you can have a perfectly functional but essentially useless social media application. MeWe comes to mind for me. I thought it would be a perfect Facebook replacement. I thought wrong. With a user community in the mere hundreds of thousands (last I checked) virtually nobody you know is on MeWe, even though technically they have all the bells and whistles Facebook does, and they pledge not to sell your information.

That site is about as batshit crazy as I've ever seen. The author needs to step away from the keyboard, go find his meds, and take them.

I recently spent the $700 to become a Certified ScrumMaster. This is within the past month, so any evaluation on how much it has helped my career is premature, but being that I've found myself to be the accidental ScrumMaster at work, taking the course to learn what the role is supposed to be seemed worthwhile. It has given me some credibility with management that I didn't have before, although the long term effects are as of yet unknown. It was an interesting two day class and a 50 question multiple choice exam. I had the privilege of taking the course with Chet Hendrickson, one of the originators of Extreme Programming (XP) and a contributor to some of the books written on Agile. I think the knowledge was worth acquiring and I actually enjoyed the course, which is more often not the case.

I'll do it for $950/month!

I don't think there are any purely communist economies operating in the world today, and even if there are, there is still a market. It's a badly distorted market that performs poorly, but a market nonetheless. If you have human beings involved, there's a market; it goes with the territory as part of the human condition.

I've worked for three different employers and have never left this spare bedroom. Relocate? Where? To my living room? :-)

The purpose of a union is to create a labor cartel which tends to standardize the price of labor above the rate at which the market would likely set it. IP clauses and non-competes are a small part of the issues plaguing our industry. Putting constraints on the labor supply is probably not a good thing; it leads to the market for labor relocating to less union-friendly climes. Ask anyone from Detroit how well that worked out.

I read the linked article, then I read part of the original study the article was based upon. My Statistics 101 interpretation of this is the study is bogus. First of all, you have to properly define the terms of what 'burnout' consists of. The study doesn't seem to do that. Second of all, even a well designed study, which this is not, is not statistically significant with such a low number of population samples. They interviewed 258 people for this. My conclusion: this "information" is worthless.

I've had nothing but terrible luck getting progressive lenses for years. I'm in the -7 diopter range, so the correction has to be pretty strong. Usually the script is dead on for some part of the visual range but hardly anything else works clearly. The single vision lenses I have for computer use are right on point. I have a pretty significant astigmatism in my left (non-dominant) eye, and that one is always jacked up.

I've been going to the same ophthalmologist for several years now and over that time he's made a few mistakes in the script; twice I've had to have the glasses remade because of errors on his part. He came highly recommended, but the recommendations you get tend to be aligned with whatever hospital system you get them from, rather than true recommendations based on actual craftsmanship.

I'd be interested in figuring out how to find an ophthalmologist who uses the Zeiss i.Scription tool in combination with a subjective test. I probably need to start going first thing in the morning as well; since I have to have my eyes dilated I tend to go in the afternoons after I've been hacking code most of the day; it sounds like that could be hurting the quality of the prescriptions.

If anyone in the Detroit Metro knows of a good ophthalmologist with the Zeiss machine, do send me a note.

I've worked remotely since late 2004 with one six month exception. It's hard to answer questions like "did it hurt my career" because there's no control group to test against. What I can say is that it has worked out particularly well for me, and part of that is because I don't have any particular ambition to rise up in management (I'm a dev.) Although I think it is possible to advance a career into management working remotely, it is probably more difficult to build the personal relationships necessary to do so. If, on the other hand, you're like me: quite satisfied with coding in silence in a spare bedroom without other people around, it's perfect. I get to do what I want, I don't have to commute, and the office rumor mill isn't a big factor in my life. I will continue to work remotely for as long as I can pull it off.

I'd try to take a cellphone video of every room in the house, opening closets and drawers as you go. Move at a deliberate pace; you will need to review the video and write down what you see in it should the house burn down, and sweeping too quickly through will make that difficult.

A 32GB thumb drive with scanned copies of your important documents is a nice-to-have if you can swing it.

I would only try to grab medications, three day's clothing, then irreplaceable items first, followed by what you have room/time for. If you have firearms, they are likely only covered up to $2,500 on a basic homeowner policy. Please be sure any left behind are unloaded, the heat will cause them to discharge otherwise.

Anything that is essential to earning your living (tools, laptops, photography equipment, etc.) is high priority.