jcadam

All you did was say you like Little Rock. What is this place becoming, Reddit?

Oh, everyone has a number....

Up here in Alaska, I tend to get a little water seeping into my basement at the cove joint (walls are ICF) after heavy rain and/or the spring thaw. Now, the floor in the basement is concrete, and whoever built the house had the baseboards and drywall over an inch off the floor, so towels and a de-humidifier tend to dry it out and nothing gets ruined since we learned to keep things off the floor. Trying to think of a way to address it without digging around the foundation to put in more/better drainage. Maybe just add a sump pump... I know, kind of a band-aid solution.

And which ones do we keep? Which senior engineers are just coasting and which are among the few who are the final reservoir of institutional knowledge holding everything together?

Does anyone know? Meh, let's just hand the task to HR and hope it all works out.

Ah, the 'ol "workforce greening" where we get rid of all the expensive old farts and replace them with younger/smarter/cheaper devs right out of school.

It's brilliant and it always works. There are no downsides whatsoever.

I've got a tea kettle going on my gas stove right now and I feel fine.

My introduction to programming was with Integer BASIC on the Apple II. I was about 7 years old at the time and was hooked instantly. From there, I moved on to Amiga AMOS (also a basic), Pascal, C, and so on...

Given the state of the field these days though, I can't help but wonder if I should have gone into some other line of work instead.

Ah man, go outdoors... fly a kite or something.

I've been a software engineer for 20 years now.

Based on the rates charged and the difficulty even finding an available plumber, I'm pretty sure an experienced plumber makes a better living than me.

Also, plumbers/electricians/etc. have been able to raise rates with inflation over the last couple of years, whereas I'm making the same salary I was getting back in 2021 (so effectively, my labor is worth less than it was 3 years ago w/ inflation).

> Why do companies do that?

Sane hiring practices are inversely proportional to company size.

A young engineer must know that getting stuck on a legacy project is a career-limiting move. Happened to me when I got stuck on a old Ada codebase for a legacy aerospace system (unemployed in 2008, you take whatever job you can get), and it took years, and a good chunk of my spare time doing projects/studying, to find a company willing to give me a chance working on something modern again.

Now, someday when I'm in my 60s/70s, and you have some legacy system written in some defunct language nobody under the age of 50 has any experience with, sure, I'll do it. But it'll cost you.

Yea, yea, I know. The one time I just assume it'll be fine, because Dell sold a developer edition of the 9315 with ubuntu pre-installed. Then I receive it and find the linux support is a total kludge with custom drivers and disabling most of the power management features in the BIOS.

Finding a laptop that runs Linux natively and acceptably is always a challenge. My Dell XPS 9315 touts linux support, but only with an older version of Ubuntu using custom drivers (as I discovered after purchasing it). So I've got manjaro running that took quite a bit of coaxing - though the built-in webcam has never, and probably will never work with any linux other than Ubuntu 20.04, and the APM has always been extremely wonky (also, much BIOS and config tweaking to get it to work acceptably).

In any case, if these ARM-based macbook pros can run linux native with minimal fuss, I'd buy one -- but AFAIK, they're not there yet.

Java EE will be the COBOL of 2037...

"Indistinguishable from a pair of sunglasses" is pretty much a hard requirement for me to even try anything like this.

No doubt most of the clowns walking around in public wearing these things were paid influencers. There's probably a niche for something like this, but it's not ready to be a general consumer product.

I've found laptops always go back, but monitors they tend to not care about. I've been on contracts where they only want the laptop back, after sending you a complete setup with monitor, keyboard, etc.

Last big layoff I was a part of in the before times, I was working for a huge aerospace company who just lost out on a major gov contract. We were told layoffs were coming, and they would happen on a certain day. You would get a phone call to come to your manager's office for a private meeting, or you wouldn't and that meant you were not laid off.

So everyone is sitting at their desk, too keyed up to do any work, just waiting to hear who's desk phone is going to go off next.

My call came late in the afternoon (about the time I was starting to think I was safe). Everyone in the cube farm knew you just got hit as you walked toward the boss's office where the boss and the HR lady were waiting.

Last time I was laid off (2022) it worked this way. It was a remote job - I was pulled into a random 1:1 meeting with my manager and immediately afterward I found all my permissions/access was gone.

I have a 7500W dual-fuel generator but haven't gotten around to installing a transfer switch yet. I have a well pump and a gas boiler that I really miss when the power is out :)

Radiant in-floor heat is pretty efficient (and it's nice not to have an ice-cold floor first thing in the morning), just need power for the circulation pumps and the boiler. My back up heat is a wood-burning stove - and we have lost power for several hours when the temps are -20F or so...

Could use such a ship as a time machine (well, that only goes one way).

When I was in college, programming assignments were turned in with a code listing and a 3.5" floppy disk shoved in a paper folder.

Kids these days just push to a code repo and call it good - they'll never know the joy of seeing "unreadable disk" scrawled in red on their code listing when they get their assignment back.

Or... when you finally get to the part of the game that requires you to insert disk 7 of 7. And then you discover disk 7 is bad.

Javascript shell?! It's like c shell, only worse.

> tech or biotech or anything that pays well

Go into plumbing. Plumbers around here in my small rural area charge $200 just to show up. It's probably more in the bay area.

> fire everybody

At the very least, anyone in a management position.

I live in Alaska and Alaska Airlines (which isn't Alaskan - it's HQ is in Seattle) has a rather... notorious history with safety/maintenance issues. I fly Delta whenever possible when travelling to the lower 48.

Yep, prefer designs from the Old Boeing (pre-merger). The 737 MAX doesn't count because it is not really a 737...

Apparently the door was permanently plugged, as Alaska Airlines didn't order the airplane with that optional door in place. So... turns out it wasn't so permanent - and definitely an issue with Boeing rather than the airline.

Looks like I have to stop making jokes about Scarebus. Boeing quality has been in a steady decline since the McDonnell-Douglas merger.

Nice. I sat through a sales presentation/demo by D-Wave once. Very interesting, though limited to a particular class of problems.

Heck, the copy on their homepage is a big clue:

"Our customers are building quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, portfolio optimization, drug discovery, materials sciences, scheduling, fault detection, traffic congestion, and supply chain management. What problem can we help you solve?"

You have to REALLY need it to spend the money.