wai1234

Most posts on those platforms are drivel, regardless of authorship. Stop picking on em dashes. The reality is that too many people have short attention spans and no idea of coherent presentation. Everything looks like text messages.

The feed algorithms actually penalize thought. On LI, a snarky throwaway comment will get 1000 impressions. A thoughtful paragraph gets 10. Meh.

Your answer to 1 troubles me. A CS degree program greatly expands your toolbox BEFORE you need those tools. The problem I have with "when I need to" is how do you know now is the time? It's a chicken-and-egg thing. If an employer hears "I'll go learn that and get back to you" too often, you will not work there for long.

For 2, fair enough. What school will give you a BS degree for <15K?

I think you should ask yourself two related but separate questions:

1. Will the CS degree increase your knowledge and problem-solving ability faster than you could without it?

2. Will the credential add substantially to your credibility for hiring managers?

The answer to 1 is mostly about your level of self-discipline and ability to learn independently. If you need the stimulus of a structured environment and a peer group to learn at your best, then any accredited program will be helpful, and your ability to pass coding interviews will increase (with a lot of hard work beyond the curriculum).

The answer to 2 is pretty straightforward: unless your degree is from a tier 2+ school, the raw credential is of little value, and even tier 2 is not certain. To count, an online degree must be presented by the school as competitive with an on-site degree. Georgia Tech offers such a degree program as a tier 1 school, for example.

An unaccredited program is of no value whatsoever in answer to 1 or 2. So, avoid them at any price. You are looking at a 3-5 year project, no matter what, and this is probably a good time to do that. The market will take that long to sort itself out and to realize that vibe coding is NOT the miracle it seems.

With a supportive manager like yours, you should ask to get connected with someone in engineering who might mentor you a bit. If your current side work was driven from that end, you would quickly figure out how the culture works there and if you can get comfortable. You may have the luxury of something like an internship without the hassle.

Given the context you provide, I would suggest you try an online course or two rather than books. There are plenty of free ones but stick to those from credible sources like universities. With ADHD, you will struggle over dry textbooks. The external structure provided by a course would probably work better even with your improved health. If you start with a single self-paced course, you can go as fast as you like and avoid boredom. Burn through it in a weekend, great! Take it slower, also fine. The current lesson covers material you already know, skip it!

Ask your manager what language(s) are used at your company if you don't already know, and filter courses to focus on that for the most rapid progress to your goal.

I recently read this. It's brilliant. Not immediately aimed at a new startup but important to keep in mind when evaluating who to include on your board and how to weigh their advice as well.

https://www.unchartedblue.com/how-to-kill-your-tech-company-...

You have a very poor notion of intelligence. Mimicry does not require comprehension. Without comprehension (or, if you prefer self-awareness), you don't have intelligence. This distinction is as old as Eliza (look it up).

The Turing test still applies. Every time someone shows obvious nonsense from the LLMs, they fail Turing, again. You might get some mileage out of, "but people spout nonsense too," which leads to a legitimate claim for Artificial Stupidity if that makes you feel better.

Yes, if the LLMs could do everything I can do, they would be intelligent, but they can't, for any meaningful definition of 'everything'.

The OP covers all the salient points. We might as well throw in antigravity and FTL travel since we have left reality behind. This is classic Musk. Right down to asking the public to solve his problem for free. Nuts.

As far as the dream that maybe THIS data can be compressed that much, this is analog waveform data converted to digital samples (10b each). IF the information is actually low enough frequency that Nyquist can be satisfied at that compression level, the simplest approach is to just drop the sampling frequency and cut out the middle man. Either the people designing this monster are ignorant or the information is actually at frequencies too high to satisfy Nyquist, leading us right back to la la land.

"The humans behind the API possess real intelligence, and by extension, so does the API."

LOL, no.

My calculator can add numbers to get the same answers I do. I use my intelligence to get those answers, so my calculator must also be intelligent? That's quite an extension you've got there. LLMs mimic intelligence by grinding up everything we feed them and spitting back the patterns they have formulated from that data. They have no ability to extrapolate, as we see demonstrated every day when people report the answers to prompts where the LLM spouts self-evident nonsense.

It's actually worse still. ALL of the 17 responses to the real name were negative if you read what he actually posted. That's an infinite increase. NOT 5x.

"the scope of work is very specific" and not under your control. Word.

This.

There are a handful of majors that are wide gateways: accounting (NOT finance), the core engineering disciplines, the core sciences, the core humanities (including Math). Choose one of those that matches your interests. Avoid the fashionable majors no matter what. Even CS can be underpowered and CE almost always is (do EE with a CS minor if you can handle the rigor of EE)

IMO, this is terrible advice. The core concept that school is passive and life is active is, at best, partially true. Very few people answer to no one and the rest get told what to do, all too often, throughout their lives. The rest is mostly based on the author's life in the academic bubble pretending they know what the 'outside' is all about. For example, the claim that college "is fond of seeing imaginary connections, like Arts and marketing, or Maths and computer programming" obviously doesn't understand any of those subjects.

This one is too easy :)

99% of the parenting advice you will get will be crap. Your child will be unique. In fact, every child is unique even within a family. My two sons are very different.

Parenting is a procedurally generated open world game. The mechanics are known (like changing diapers, so learn how) but you can't predict what's over the next hill.

I realized I didn't answer your question.

Yes, it's a form of hazing.

I'm not aware of any evidence the approach works. Seriously.

The tests select for people that will put themselves through hell just to work for you. They don't measure anything else. See any of the many stories of gifted, senior, often well known devs who did not 'pass' because they refused to degrade themselves by spending months studying to pass an arbitrary process.

The notion that you figure out "if the person applying is actually really smart" is a 'just so story'.

1. Why are you looking (assuming you are still employed)? 2. Why did you get no offers in your 'dream' companies? If you answer those two questions honestly, you will have your answer to this question.

As has been pointed out already, this is yet another round of an old paradigm. Just like every other shortcut (looking at you, frameworks) it comes down to LEGOs (or Minecraft). As long as you are satisfied with blocks world, they are great. As soon as you need a curved surface or a different color, you are out of luck. There's also that detail that someone has to write all that code so you don't have to.

Why is it checking for GA at all? A critical function like accepting payment should be bullet proof. It's critical code and should be treated that way.

Your checkout shouldn't trigger ad block. Stop slavishly bowing to GA everywhere. I'm about to give you money. That's the only 'analytic' you should care about.

I'm tired of being treated as little more than a data cow, always ready for milking.

Just. Stop.

To the person who ignores people who complain because their 'non-standard' browsers fail on their site, why do you have a site if you don't care about your users accessing it? Ego much?

You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.

Why do you believe Google is "really good at building useful products"? Would you buy any of them if they didn't have the Google brand (or pay for any of the free ones for that matter)?

You don't mention WHY you want to get into software. If it's just because you think you can make a lot of money, that's a poor reason to switch careers. You also say you lack experience. Do you mean you have none at all? That would make my first question even more important.

If you have no experience at all, take an introductory software course at a local community college. An online course or how-to book would be a less ideal starting point. You will want more access to an instructor to get you past zero. Understand that you will also need some understanding of algebra and formal logic before you get very far, so if you are rusty or never had much math background, you might take a course in that too.

Getting your feet wet will help you understand what "software" means and if you have an aptitude for it. Only then, should you commit to at least 1-2 years of hard work in your spare time to get to a minimum set of skills that are employable. With patience, perseverance, and a bit of luck, you can get there even at 37.

"My only concern hiring older engineers is that they are stuck in a rut."

Wow, better check that bias.

I'm not sure how it's supposed to work on anything. It's unusable on Firefox. Why does the scroll wheel change font size? Why is the list slanted? Why is it a list at all given it's a web of connections?

Open plan was invented by bean counters and sold to impressionable engineers through a combination of rah-rah misdirection and pop psychology. They save money, period. No claim of improved collaboration or productivity has ever been demonstrated. In fact, lots of studies say the opposite. The fact is that senior management wants to save money and they will do that no matter what the downside impact is on productivity or morale. You can measure the reduction in square feet of rent easily, you can't measure lost productivity or morale at all. Combine the money savings with the usual 'visionary' leaders claiming the benefits of open plan, and you will lose that battle every time. As long as engineers will put up with crappy working conditions, crappy conditions will persist.

There seems to be a belief that such an exam would produce uniformly high caliber practitioners. There are plenty of lousy members of every regulated profession.

The exams in regulated professions are designed to test that you know the jargon and general knowledge of the field (anatomy and physiology, case law, etc,). The day-to-day application of that knowledge is usually consistent with that knowledge. Outstanding members of the field are determined by years of experience and specialization.

Software doesn't meet any of those expectations. The jargon changes weekly and your expertise with O notation and hash tables means almost nothing in day-to-day practice. The fixation on evaluating candidates on those topics is more about what's handy as a way to narrow the hiring funnel than it is about measuring what's important.

Software development is a creative activity. You can't measure that. Safety critical software is developed under regulatory guidelines enforced by process requirements and certification of organizations that follow those processes.

Never, I mean NEVER, intern for free. You will almost certainly be the equivalent of 'drink run boy' and learn nothing. If you are willing to work for free, find a volunteer group where everyone is unpaid. That has its own problems but at least it's sane. BTW, 'non-profit' is not the same as volunteer.

I don't think I misinterpreted, "do things you can't do when you are in your 30s". That's a categorical statement and wrong. Yes, a 30something (40, 50, ...) is not a 20something, some plus, some minus, but nothing zero simply due to age.

I also don't think "make mistakes" and "try new things" are equivalent. Especially in the context of the lovely set of 'mistakes' advised in quite a few other posts in the thread.

Based on your followup, what you meant, is, unfortunately, not what you actually wrote. Nuance is important.

"Make mistakes, they are cheaper to correct at your age."

No, no they're not. The "be stupid early" plan is a major fail IRL. The idea that society will forgive you for it is proven wrong every day. When employers look for anything to disqualify you, that old FB post with you being stupid is made to order, or the arrest for DUI, or any of those early mistakes, are very handy. It's actually much harder to overcome early stupidity than it ever was in the past because the internet remembers.

The math of compound interest applies to a lot of things beyond your bank account. The earlier you learn the basics of something, the earlier you start doing a hobby, the earlier you start collecting RL 'achievement earned' points, the faster they will grow in later years. I would argue that THAT is the way to invest the freedom of youth. Try a hobby or learn something to see if you like it. THAT's ideal to do when you can easily move on to something else while those choices are entirely up to you. You will move on to college and a career with much more confidence that the path you are on is one you really want. YOLO is true. Why would you want to waste any of it?

I also want to call BS on the 'life ends at 30' advice here. You really think traveling is best when you have no money or skills? BS. You think no one >30 is physically active? More BS.