I'm in a few women in tech groups. A woman, who is a highly experienced developer, shared that she had a conversation with her male friend, who is a startup founder. He said that his criteria for recruitment are high levels of math and physics since high school and early interest in programming (e.g. age of 10). She said his criteria made her sad and excluded.

A fellow woman developer commented that it's reasonable to feel sad when you learn your good friend is an idiot. I snorted some Monster out of my nose reading this and I'm still coughing and chuckling.

To be honest, the founder's requirements do sound super ridiculous, and I imagine his startup is made up of clones of the same guy type, wearing different shades of gray t shirts and sandals with socks.

So I've decided if I am invited to a school career day the what I'll do is this.

1. Start by handing out one of those logic puzzles that are like Sally lives 2 houses down from Bill, Bill is 3 houses away from Maggie where does Jerry live type of thing. Then I'll tell the kids they have 10 minutes to figure it out.

2. After about three minutes I'll tell them that they also need to figure out where Jerry lives and not give them enough information to figure that out.

3. 5 minutes in I'll start asking them why it is taking so long, and it shouldn't be that hard. I'll also ask about where Phil lives who was never mentioned before.

4. At 7 minutes I'll look for anyone who might be figuring it out and tell them there is a much more important high priority problem I need them to solve and give them a new puzzle and tell them I expect them both to be done on time.

5. At nine minutes I'll start yelling at them that they must not be that good and why they haven't finished yet if any of them complain I'll tell them they are just dumb.

6. At ten minutes I'll ask them to turn it in and then immediately throw it in the trash and tell them that wasn't what they were supposed to be doing, and tell them they did it wrong.

I figure that is a pretty good representation of what working in software engineering is like.

I work for healthcare client project in a start up, worked two years straight without a break.

Client is very inconsiderate about developers work-life balance, he always wants to release every features yesterday.

Never had a reasonable deadline, worked late nights most of the time. No one had backbone to control this client from our side.

Its only developers team, no project management, scrum masters or anything, everything has to be taken care by Dev's.

I decided to take a week break from work.

The first day of my leave he pinged me 3 times to change an "from email" address for notification email which no one give a damn about.

I never replied or did anything. But the part of myself is dying of guilt.

Now I can't relax myself completely.

Re-thinking of my life choices atm.

I loved programming since high school, I can work on computers 24/7 without tired. That's how much I love it. Now I'm just tired of it.

If anyone who read this till here. Thank you.

Someone here on devrant that used to go under the name LetMeCode ranted about php and said how much they'd rather work with the Phoenixframework.

Love on first sight. Studied Elixir to get a job as an elixir dev and got my first and current job right after graduating high school.

So yeah, that rant might have changed my life. Saved me from becoming a java or php dev for sure!

At a previous company we hired an 18 year old guy and father from a minority and without a high school degree. He could write enough code to get the job. However, he took 3h long lunches, came in late to work and apparently had a problem taking orders from women. At one point all the juniors got an earful because of his attitude and he got let go, not long after. It still saddens me because he could have made a really good career if wasn't for his attitude.

I have been on Reddit...
I have been lurking in ProgrammerHumor...

I am not proud of these things...

I got called a "Big Shot" because I didn't think the concept of pointers in C/C++ was ever particularly hard.

If I remember right. I learned in high school how pointers worked when they explained how arrays worked in Pascal. When I taught myself C it didn't ever seem like it was a difficult thing to understand.

Is the concept of pointers really that hard to understand for devs?

So today is my last day at my current job. I've been here for 4 years and started working here even before I'd even graduated high school. It's really bittersweet. On the one hand I'm so excited for my new job (and vacation), but on the other hand I'll miss this place so damn much. Some say you shouldn't get too attached to your employer, and while that might be true for many cases, I feel that I've gained nothing but positive things from these last 4 years.

Having gone from just having colleagues to having actual friends has been an awesome journey, and I think a good indication of our good relationship is the fact that one of them even wrote me a goodbye song for our little goodbye breakfast this morning.

Idk, just thoughts...

Anyways, away I go. Let's hope my new job will be somewhat good as well.

Looking around where I work, I'm reminded of when I was young and ambitious, like all the other kids around me at the time, with a dislike for all the older dudes and dudettes in upper management. With the exception of three other guys around my age, everyone, including the CEO, was in high school, middle school, elementary school, or not even born yet when I started my career. Just like them, I was plucky and chatty and (trying to be) funny and social. I didn't know how fast I would go from that set to the old fat guy that they look askance at and wonder how I'm still around with my weird ways and "boomerish", socially retarded behavior. What's really galling is that I'm solidly Gen X, like some of them, but I guess I talk more like a Boomer because my parents were older when I was born and I was kinda raised in that mindset. I'm the office schlub now. A man out of my time. And I've never been in any kind of upper management, even. I am Kevin Malone.

When I was in high school, I was learning to code on my own. I showed my python code that I was really proud of to the girl I liked. she didn't understand what it is, she thinks its weird, she thinks I'm weird.

She has a point.

A 20-Something: “Hey, why aren’t you dressing up on spirit week decades dress theme days in the office this week?”

“Because I lived in all those decades and my childhood is not a costume.”

“Okaaaay…”

“Because when we dressed up for spirit week in high school we nerdy kids would always get made fun of by the jocks and cheerleaders because we didn’t get the memo that spirit week was only for the cool kids. I have trauma I’m still working through because of that.”

“Geez, I…”

“Look, I got rid of all that shit years ago. Now I’m supposed to go to a thrift store and spend money I earned here for real world needs on 4 new sets of clothes I will wear one time each? That’s literally my gas money to get to this office in an inflated economy. No.”

Me. In my head. Coming up with things to explain myself when I show up at the office dressed like it’s a regular day.

real story. In high school, a librarian (women) recommended me a book. I read it in classroom, it was fine for the first half and then.... the real story began.

It was 50 shades of grey.

It's been about 4 years. I'll soon be completing bachelors. And I've yet to return the book, out of shyness.

I found my some documents about my dad on Ancestry and showed them to him because they’re things he’d like to see. His high school yearbook photo. His college yearbook photo. The flight manifest from when his family came over from Puerto Rico.

He was happy to see these. He doesn’t have his yearbooks because they’re not things he would have been able to afford at the time. The flight manifest helped put some memories together because he was a little boy when his family moved.

He did get a little freaked out when I explained why Ancestry had these things. But I think that outweighs the joy of discovery.

“Lazy mom lazy wow” presented by Gail Swanlund was probably the most impactful piece of art to me.

Through simplistic form, this art piece presents the idea of caring about oneself and quit the eternal rat race for money. But somehow for its metaphor, Lazy mom lazy wow chooses the notion and aesthetics of death and decay. The closest analogy I can think of is the music of American Football. Some kind of liminal, eerie aesthetics. Also, the movie Gummo and the game Life is Strange, part one.

The piece deliberately avoids being aggressive and celebrating its notion. It’s not “quit the rat race and celebrate because life is so good”, it’s “quit the rat race by putting yourself into coma so nothing matters anymore”. The descent into eternal comfort of realization that you don’t have to do anything anymore, but also sorrow of losing meaning.

It feels like launching Counter-Strike Source in the year 2051, only to walk around cs_office and realize there are no players anymore, and they will not return ever again. The sense of watching an old VHS tape of you having a conversation with your mom in the hospital as she’s counting her last days because of cancer. The sense of comfort of coming back to your hometown. You remember your childhood and your high school crush, only to realize that those moments won’t happen ever again.

I'm mostly self-taught, but there are a couple people who defined my understanding of computing

- My amazing elementary school friend whose father worked at IBM and who initially turned my interest from astrophysics towards computing. I don't know whether physics would've been fruitful but I know computing is.

- My high school friend, who taught me the basics of OOP. Though we agree on almost nothing today, his explanations about code quality defined my understanding of the matter which I then used to draw completely different conclusions

- My high school mathematics teachers, who tolerated the way I abused every tool at my disposal to construct proofs that resembled a rollercoaster, and helped me develop my own understanding of mathematics

- 3blue1brown for producing replayable videos in a similar quality to my high school maths lectures with additional stunning visuals. No content on the internet fits the way I think quite as much as that channel.

First computer I saw was an Apple II running Oregon Trail in grade school. Then I played computer games on my uncles Apple IIe. The first home video game I ever saw was Pong. It was a device you hooked to the RF input on the TV. It had 2 paddles to control the input (single axis controllers). The first game console I played on was the Atari. The first computer I programmed was on a black and white Macintosh. Then the other programmers in my high school told me the PC was better. Well, it was better for learning IMO. That was with Windows 3.0. But the programming was Turbo Pascal in DOS. DOS gave you complete control of the machine. Better at the time for me learning to do graphics and sounds programming. The first computer I bought was a 386 and I played with VR programming. Made my own joysticks using the limited joystick port. Fun times learning electronics and software together.

Partial thoughts, are thoughts that sound like they should have more to them. However they are intentionally left short to create a sense that more is to come. This creates a state of anxiety in people and their desire for closure. The sentence is more effective if you say the last part of the sentence with an increasing pitch. This indicates there is more to the story. When in fact there is no more to the story.

Here is an example:
"I saw this guy walking down the street..."

People will automatically assume there is more to this story. So they will say something like, "And then what?" The response is: "That is it. That is what I saw." This is the peak time of frustration. They may even argue with you or storm away. Be prepared to be called names.

There is actually some history behind this.

...

Hehe, no, I am not going to leave you high and dry. In high school a dude I knew would always make fun of my friend. So I started doing these partial stories to the dude. He would get mad and storm off each time. I would do this several times per day. So it can be a tactic to deal with difficult people.

What getting an AWS solutions architect certification got me:

Acceptance into the 4 top high schools in the area( one of which being in the top 5 public schools in the United States)

2 internships/apprenticeships

1 opportunity at the local college for some research experience

Vasts amounts of knowledge about servers and back end technologies I have never known about

And of course, the most important one, getting all the aunties attention at parties

People like to say that certifications don’t help but they get your foot into the door, it’s up to you to do the rest of the work