Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

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Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

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Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

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Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

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Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

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Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

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I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

Reviewer 2 strikes again.
Source: Academia Obscura on fb

Am annoyed. Not mad, just very disappointed. So the guy I emailed yesterday about doctoral research positions hasn't responded yet, and this is causing me somewhat of rejection anxiety, specially considering recent events.
Honest to god, if this one fails I'm abandoning academia and research and making cool stuff. Fuck society. I could make so many useful life saving stuff, but they didn't let me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, I'm enjoying my current minimum wage occupation. It's stressless and repetitive and I pay fuckall for tax. I didn't want to go antisocial, but I was driven here. So there. This is why y'all can't have nice things. 🎤💧

For context, I've been working for a couple years now with Rust, and, I have to say, the experience has been astoundingly pleasant. The language is both incredibly productive and meets each of my use cases and stipulations regarding speed, safety, and complexity. That said, I've come to beg the question, "what is the point of functional languages like Haskell?" To me, what seems attractive about Haskell is the inherent thread safety, and the added syntactic niceties of code written in the language. However, one must keep in mind, my experience with Haskell has been pretty limited, simply due to the massive learning curve that the language presents. Such a "learning curve" brings me to my central point: these days with languages like Rust which bring together the best from functional and imperative worlds, it seems like functional languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Let's face it: no sane person will choose to learn a functional language as their first language, outside of academia and mathematics, and OOP/OOP-like languages remain dominant in the space. So, why then, is Haskell any different? What benefit do languages like Haskell pose in the modern CS space that thread-safe, non-GC languages don't already provide?

Like an idiot I decided to continue to grad school directly after finishing my undergrad (which I finished later than usual because I switched from a different major) only because my university has a pretty big deep learning lab with important professors.

After a year in, I realized that academia isn't that interesting to me and I'm nearing 30 with no real job experience so I'm hesitant to drop out for fear of not being able to find a job. Meanwhile, I'm dreading every morning when I have to go to the lab and do some BS experiments instead of being out there building stuff. I bought the hype and now I'm stuck.

Kindergarden teacher... have 3 kids myself, love to teach them stuff and do activities with them. Kids between 2 and 6 are great. They can already tell you what they need but are not yet under the pressure to perform in a competitive school system. They're the most authentic human beings imho.

Other than that, maybe something in academia. Holding lectures can be huge fun if you got at least a few motivated students.

One problem for CS education is that the salaries for academia are so low compared to industry that if someone is even vaguely competent, they can at least double their income by working a 'real' job. Now this may be different at higher levels of colleges but generally those folks are such bullshitters they wouldn't last outside of academia.

As what to improve?
Depends if it's a research or vocational course.

For vocational; heavy on group projects, common tools, methodologies and architectures. All demonstrated in something like c#/java/python. And one project must have a web app (db, app layer and JavaScript from end)
Basic knowledge of algorithms, runtime analysis (O notation) and some data structures and you're an instahire.

For research, go wild. Deep dive into the math, algorithmic side. Read up lots of research papers. Try out different programming paradigms. You would aim for a career in academia, AI, quant finance etc...

*this is gonna be a long one*

This year has been a Year™️. I'm kinda fed up with the industry in general, and I'm not sure how I'm gonna get back to working.
I also got an official autism diagnosis, which makes me feel like there isn't really gonna be a workplace where I'm not gonna want to die. It's fucking exhausting to deal with corporate bs and I don't have the bandwidth for that.
Recently I've been focusing on finishing my studies and I've been considering a hard turn to academia. tbh it's not an idea i like to entertain, but i do like that it has more autonomy and room to breathe. I also like teaching, that's not the problem for me, i just hate the research culture in general. I find it pedantic and gatekeepy in a way that really pisses me off.
Anyway, I'm mostly exhausted, but i do enjoy this field, I just don't know where to go from here.

"Reviewer 2 is always a bitch"

Aaaaaaaand I'm looking at gloomy reviews which means my paper is gonna get rejected soon. Why oh god why!

(Actually, I know why, and maybe this is for the best, since I pulled the method out of my arse because I found out environments were unstable and had to nag about it to not fully lose a year's worth of investigative work. But also, this is my first conference rejection. Literally. 😐)

... There's a slight chance one of the reviews might save me tho, so keep your fingers and toes crossed for me, pleaeaeaeaeaeaeaaeaease! 🙏🏻

We had a tutorial on how to use spark/Hadoop.. part of the tutorial was the installation instructions for Ubuntu vms.

The Prof insisted we used an older version of Hadoop (v2.1.5), so naturally this required pulling older repos and older versions of java.

Naturally, some of the people in the class got some namespacing issues and garbage left from uninstalled packages.

Now, the tutorial was geared towards business/math people, not com sci. So most of the people didn't understand why apt didn't let them run certain commands (even though it very clearly just asked for them to run autoremove or autoclean, like in the "error message"). When the Prof and their "experienced TA" saw these messages, their recommendation was "make a new fresh vm".

The fuck? I heard that, run over and was like no. Just run the suggested command, it's literally a simple issue. And the guy didn't believe me. I had to sit him down, show him how I literally typed what the console was asking for, and everything just worked... The guy's response was "well that's Linux for you, its really complicated and can never trust anything, this time it worked, but next time it might not". Dude... Do you even know what you are saying? Like you are a supposed expert, least have some understanding of the package manager you are using. Maybe things will then be less "schrodinger cat".

God damn I can't wait to be out of this stupid fucking school. Never going back to academia.

Love it when a shady colleague of mine says something to me and another to someone else within a few months. She also kinda told me I shouldn't do a PhD, cuz not everyone is made for it.

Sexism is well and alive in academia! The worst part is that half the time it comes from women.

I hope karma pays her back, cuz I'm too busy to do so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Finishing my software to predict ice-hoceky results... so I would finally have a portfolio to show for, just in case I decide to drop off of academia one day 😥

I wanted to go into Academia but wasnt smart enough

!dev

Post rejection, I'm basically emailing my last supervisor, and I think... I think I'm forcing him to be my mentor... 🤔

Although forcing people into doing things is really not my style, but I'm kinda sorta out of will to live. 😐

I hate academia so much

The gap of data science in industry and academia is so large. As a data scientist in a large financial company, I see that people are still using traditional models such as linear regression and SVM, while people in academia keep inventing new concepts and techniques such as deep learning.

I am not saying that we should completely embrace deep learning, or stick to classic methods. But I just feel so surprised that the gap is so large...Sometimes I am even thinking whether I am doing the right "data science"...

Is it possible to make games on hit anime's like bokuno hero academia, naruto.. Without facing any copyright issues?
If no, what all specifications should I look forward to cater?

Got a new job and I'm moving from academia to industry. Decided to step up my web dev game by using Netlify and GatsbyJS to build a static site blog.

Not a difficult task but it forces me to look at more current technologies.

The first one was changing the main topic of my research activity, from distributed systems to AI/Deep Learning... Then moving from academia to companies, two very different worlds and two very different approaches, but I still like to think that my formal background is driving my decisions and helping me, even with everyday problems

I feel like we we not only 'advanced' various fields by pulling people off some lord of the flies island who only wanted to dance around with a severed pig head in reality and training them, but also depleted and destroyed many essential fields by removing all valid motivators from our environment by spreading so much cynicism and unguided lust for power over others in the absence of any of the unifying beliefs of former generations that the professions are going to implode in the years to come.

so I wasn't very experienced when i went to work some place years back. I'd worked on my own. and I was criticized by their 80k per year team lead as having 'only done some simple things'... when his project didn't work, and par for the course their criticisms were coming from people who took a standard backend on a very large project that actually had been designed to function and something else likely needed fixed, to 'HEY LETS USE LINQ TO SQL APPARENTLY WITHOUT TESTING RELATIVE PERFORMANCE !!!!! AND WE'LL THROW SOME AD HOC QUERIES GENERATED BY MICROSOFT AT OUR SERVER INSTALLATION AND WATCH THE PERFORMANCE 'GAINS' THEN WE'LL BACKTRACK AND PUT STORED PROCEDURES BACK AND GENERATE HOOKS TO THEM LIKE A CLASSICAL DAL. JUST USING LINQ TO SQL'S CONTEXT OBJECT ! HURRAY I HAVE A BACHELORS AND 15 YEARS EXPERIENCE !'

There are so many details to fill in teaching the mindset of how to do things right in the first place is kind of expensive to begin with and you don't necessarily learn that in school working on common comp sci projects in academia. But they should have known better. I'm actually embarassed to list linq to sql on my resume as I think back.

i have a senior project presentation due this week, am soo fucking tense, this insructors be asking questions - like dude no one will pay me for this, am doing it for the grade

Is there a place to find standard models open-sourced by Academia and Companies ?

Any GitHub repository?

My career has been a roller-coaster.
SE 》SSE 》PM then quitting all to join academia. Now back to same old place. Looking to explore AI/ML roles. Any tips?

Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:

So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...

Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.

Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.

Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.

Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...

None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.

The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).

By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.

In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.

To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!

Is academia just a display of how well you can be a good cog in a system? I feel like I've done more admin work than development just to pass. Too far in to quit though.

Did anyone left academia for industry did it work it very well for you? If you back do you think this transition harm?

Haskell is very much like academia. It just makes folks go "fuck this" in the first year.