Specific language expertise rarely matters. I intentionally avoid discussing specific technologies used to achieve results/goals/services unless it's highly relevant (e.g. creating a RESTful web service etc.)
It's good to have your technologies listed, and be honest if your doing something out of your comfort zone... but there really isn't a technology out there that can't be picked up in 1-3 months.
+1 to this. Especially at the 16-years-experience level. Maybe earlier in someone's career where their primary focus is how to fit in and ship stuff without getting stuck all the time. But at ~staff level, your thinking and your contributions become a lot more language-agnostic (not entirely, but mostly)
I would not say that clojure/haskell/elixir can be picked up in 1-3 months in most environments. I do agree that you should highlight broader engineering experience and keep langs/techs as merely a proof of some competence in those.
If the job mentions the technology and most clojure/haskell/elixir dev jobs do then well unless they state "looking for experienced person willing to learn" in description I would not bother them. (at least with my complete lack of experience in tech). Similarly as I would not apply to "weird-tech-i-merely-heard consultant". Also think there should be consistency on the job titles/descriptions on the side of job posters.
I think this is a great idea! Sadly, I don't think the goal of the admissions staff is to let in a diverse class. It slowly has become a race-to-the-bottom of "which applicant will enable me to tell the coolest story at the cocktail reception" (note this announcement's focus on highlighting individual members of the incoming class).
I would like to offer a more nuanced spin - there's a large quantity of great, original content out there, but the era of the sitcom is over. We're in peak prestige tv - every new show requires you to have watched the whole season and requires a big time commitment and emotional investment (game of thrones being the quintessential example of this).
...yet the last few years have been quite hard! All of us are navigating a COVID environment where working remotely, educating kids, and entertaining ourselves have all blended together. There's a bifurcation of eyeballs - I simply don't have the time or emotional bandwidth to watch "prestige tv", but it's very easy for me to put on friends, or the office, or seinfeld, and carry on with my day!
Why do you automatically assume that kids are miserable in the suburbs? My kids rather like running around in our backyard, use our pool everyday in the summer, and having tons of friends on the block.
At the same time, I can't imagine that they would enjoy living in 2 bedroom apartment, having no yard to play in, etc.
This disdain for suburbs is quite tacky and out of touch. It's okay to think differently. I'm glad you enjoy living in the city! Luckily, this country is big and there's enough space for all of us!
==This disdain for suburbs is quite tacky and out of touch.==
It's also out of touch to assume every family in "the city" lives in a 2 bedroom apartment with no yard. Lots of families in my city (Chicago) live in 3 story walk-ups, duplex-downs or even single family homes which all have yards.
Perhaps we could all be a little more open-minded about how other people live.
A 3 story walk up is going to be a 2 br apartment in most cases, and may have a shared outdoor space but it’ll cost as much as a large house in the suburbs with a big garage and 2 big lawns.
==but it’ll cost as much as a large house in the suburbs with a big garage and 2 big lawns.==
Based on what metric?
Here [1] is a three-bedroom apartment in one of Chicago's nicest areas (Ravenswood/Lincoln Square), with heat/water included, right by the Brown Line for $2,100/month.
Find me the large house in the suburbs that will run you $2,100/month. Don't forget to include the 20% down payment, on-going maintenance, utilities, and an additional car.
Kids like suburbs just fine before they understand there's a big world out there outside the family unit. Often things fall apart after that phase.
> I can't imagine that they would enjoy living in 2 bedroom apartment
OK but that's a problem with a limited imagination, not how your kids would actually feel. Do you know that 90% of families in the world live in close quarters, in places like 2 bedroom apartments (or -- gasp! -- smaller)? Do you think all these kids really hate their lives because of the size of their apartments? Do you think young kids even realize that they "should" prefer a 3000sqft house to an apartment?
> this country is big and there's enough space for all of us!
Sure there's space, but space isn't really the issue. The negative social and environmental impact of a suburban lifestyle is unsustainable. Future generations are going to look back on our settlement patterns and think we were truly insane, hundreds of millions of people each with multiple personal cars spread out from each other such that cars are necessary to do even the most minor tasks. It's taken some incredibly opaque collective blinders for us to have ended up thinking suburbs are a responsible way of living.
I've lived in countries where families living in 2 bedroom apartments is the norm, and sure, they don't hate their lives. But they live in them because they can't afford more. The families I knew all aspired to a more suburban home.
"The negative social and environmental impact of a suburban lifestyle is unsustainable." That's a problem with a limited imagination. Cars are becoming electric. There are things called towns that exist in suburbia and can be reached easily by bike or walking.
The environmental impact of suburban lifestyle is not limited to personal transportation carbon emissions. It also involves huge amounts of expensive (in land and resources) infrastructure, and individual suburbanites have a much larger resource footprint than other people.
The same people would consume dramatically fewer resources (each, individually) and cause dramatically less environmental destruction if they lived in a smaller personal space with far less bulky/expensive per-person infrastructure and used shared rather than individual services (e.g. transportation).
The problem is solved in my suburbia since the county has resisted any sort of building for the past 50 years. Also, the new suburbia housing I see being built, is much more concentrated. Seems people like houses but don't care as much about big yards.
My suburbia is trending the same way. Almost all new construction is on a lot of 5000 sq ft max. Most is closer to 3000 or multi-family. The trouble is that the old way of zoning still prevails and all of this semi-dense housing sits multiple miles away from the retail and job centers in the town. Everyone still needs one car per working adult, so really nothing of substance has changed.
Only if you examine the problem so superficially you can't think of any other cost of personal vehicles than burning gas.
Cars burning gasoline isn't the only or even the smallest problem with everyone needing to own a car. Think of the supply chain required to produce, deliver, and dispose of personal vehicles for everyone. Think of the civil infrastructure required to enable everyone to have a personal car. Think of the human cost that humans being terrible, irresponsible drivers takes on society. For starters.
> There are things called towns that exist in suburbia and can be reached easily by bike or walking.
There is a thing called weather in much of the US and world that makes this unrealistic. Further it's disingenuous to claim it's feasible to walk to a town to do your groceries from a suburb. You're going to need to walk at least 2-3 miles (best case) to a grocery store and you're not going to be able to carry more than a couple days' worth of stuff, less for a full family.
The suburban way of life is going to crash and burn, spectacularly. It is running on credit it can never pay back. At least 2 generations have covered their eyes and ears and yelled "naaa naaa we don't believe it". It's time to acknowledge that we can't carry on that "tradition'. Either we voluntarily adapt, or our surroundings will force the change.
It wildly varies by suburb. The one I grew up in had few-to-no kids on the block, and even if there had been, there were only a couple of small, underwhelming parks within walking/biking distance. Comparing notes with other people, this seems like the more common experience of the suburbs.
The disdain (at least for me) comes when you do the math and realized how absurdly subsidized the suburban lifestyle is.
Who is doing the subsidizing? You hear about cities annexing suburbs to access the tax base. If suburbs were a drain, wouldn't they be doing whatever the opposite of annexing is?
A few of the wealthiest suburbs in the country are enclaves of people who rely economically on the city but don’t want their property taxes to pay for poor people’s amenities and services, so carve out a separate municipality. Cities want to re-absorb these, because the current setup is grossly unfair.
This is not representative of suburbs in general. Many suburbs, especially older ones whose infrastructure construction (but not maintenance) was heavily state-subsidized, are struggling and financially unsustainable, leaving their (less wealthy) residents in deep trouble in the long term.
After asking this question I started reading more about it. The biggest subsidization is about mortgage interest tax deductions. I never thought about that as a subsidy, but I suppose it is. They should end it.
I grew up in the DC suburbs. The closest pool was a few miles away, so required a car. The schools were all miles away, so required car/bus. By the time I got to high school, most of my friends lived miles away, so for a few years, seeing them required transportation. Grocery store required a car. Heck, even the closest corner store required a car. Fortunately, my mom was able to stay home for many years, and when she did return to work, she went into teaching, so that transport was readily available. For kids with 2 working parents, getting around kinda sucked - it impacted their ability to get to/from school off-hours, get to sports, etc.
I still live in the DC suburbs, but picked an area with a lot more walkability. Walkable grocery store (plus pharmacy, coffee, dining). Schools are walkable. Bike paths and walking trails everywhere. Golf course out my back door. Walk to work. Walk to Metro. But, the median home price is higher here than my parents' area, and that's in an area that's already expensive.
When I was old enough, I did as well. Didn't help for some things... middle school was ~7 miles from home and across several major arterial roads - making that ride in winter wouldn't have been safe (would have been in the dark on way to school).
I raised (or rather shared in raising) a kid in a 2BR apartment in Manhattan with no yard.
We also happened to have a weekend/summer cottage in the suburbs. It was near the beach and had a yard and bikes and all those wonderful suburban pleasures.
He absolutely begged us every weekend to let him stay in the city where he could see his friends by subway/walking, didn't need us to drive him anywhere, had freedom etc.
> disdain for suburbs is quite tacky and out of touch
Have you yourself been a child growing up in places of different density? I personally did (my time spent mostly in one of the nicest suburbs in southern California, but alternating for a couple months every year with a walkable small Mexican city), and then since then have been in cities (where my small kids are now growing up).
Are you sure I am the “out of touch” one here? Have you ever tried living with kids in a 2-bedroom apartment? It’s really not a big deal (though note, there are also plenty of larger apartments/condos and single-family houses in cities, and plenty of cities around the world without outrageous housing prices). In the city you might not play in your yard, but you can play at the nearby playground or park with the many neighborhood kids.
I think you underestimate to what degree people design their life to provide what they think is the best thing for their kids.
A lot of people ended up in the suburbs because of their kids, not in spite of them. Proximity to other kids, organized sports, good schools, after-school activities, etc... It can be very car-centric as you pointed out, but when there are other families on your block going to the same things, you quickly figure out how to car pool to share the burden.
There's more than one way to live a great life with kids.
Fwiw, I hated growing up in a suburb precisely due to the inability to get anywhere without being driven. I had to rely on my parents any time I wanted to see my friends. Having a back yard to play in wasn't much of a consolation.
I have a scansnap and it's pretty much changed my life. The OCR is pretty good, and easy enough to do that my wife or kids can do it. Anything scanned automatically gets OCR'ed and placed in a family dropbox folder.
Everything is OCR'ed so I can search for it if I need something, and since everything is one folder, the next time I'm on a plane or at an airport or whatever, I just turn on a movie and spend time categorizing the files in the folder.
I feel like programmers have become "soft". I bet the old guard is okay with something like this - a lot of C, C++, assembly skills - this is what it meant to mess around with computers!
Now, you can just be modifying CSS and call yourself a programmer. You get one of these devices, and you're sorely disappointed!
As the complexity of our every day devices increase, less and less people are capable of contributing anything meaningful to an OS like Linux, let alone in their free time. It also doesn't help that the abundance of high level languages discourages learning about computer internals in younger generations.
Language is very small part of it. For example me contributing a anx7688 driver for pinephone to make convergence work was C coding, yes, but also reading through type-c spec, battery charging 1.2 spec, usb-pd specs, alt-dp specs, and figuring out how it all works from 0 knowledge, to tie all that together on a quirky HW design, with several hardware bugs that I had to discover first, and non-cooperating PMIC/and type-c controller, on 3 different pinephone HW variants.
C coding is the easiest thing. Hard part is figuring out what needs to be done and getting quite detailed understanding of how everything works on HW level, lots of trying and testing with various USB devices in various scenarios. There's also a lot of reverse engineering, because no HW vendor cooperates with random fucks from the internet and gives them free support. :)
Killer apps for me are physical keyboard, GUI bootloader that can do multi-boot (so that I can switch between one of the mobile distros and a Xorg based i3wm desktop, because there's no way mobile distros will ever have reasonable performance for convergence use), convergence with accelerated video playback and a reasonably smooth web browsing, possibility to run Arch Linux ARM as is with access to the entire package repository of software (that is not ad laden or spyware by default) on my fingertips, and full control over the security of my phone by being sure I can run my OS without the CPU ever touching any code on any modifiable storage inside the phone,... :) That's already there with original Pinephone.
I'm currently TA:ing my uni's Introductory Computer Engineering class (from logic gates to assembly). It's not as much of a weed out class as you'd think and yes, it's the first class they take, along side some introductory python. Most of them do seem to hate the assembly part though personally I found the part where you have to actually make an instruction to be much harder when I had to take this class
The pool of programmers has grown. There are more good programmers than ever, but the barrier to entry is also lower. It isn't necessary to pass through that kind of trial by fire anymore.
I don't think the elitism here is necessary or even the root of the issue of code contributions. The apps currently present in these PinePhone operating systems were developed and are supported by knowledgeable and hardworking PinePhone users, but the fewer developers there are, the more limited the support is.
I don't see anything elitist. Anyone can learn assembly language, C, and even C++ and Rust with a bit more dedication.
Anyway, much of the work getting these phones ready as daily drivers is in getting apps that run on them mature. There are lots of languages adequate for apps.
Though a bit elitist, his comment isn't discouraging anybody, and does hold some truth in that getting closer to the hardware allows you to do things you can't do otherwise.
I feel like it's unfair to disparage him as harshly as that.
What's elitist in learning a craft properly? Working with a higher level language doesn't mean that learning C, C++, algorithms, data structures and a bit of math isn't terrible useful.
The Pinenote can't arrive fast enough! I'm sitting on a ReMarkable 2 that I hate because I didn't realize how serious they were about crippling the usefulness of a really beautiful stack of hardware.
It's really, Really, REALLY dead-set against letting you do anything useful like use wikipedia or stackoverflow on your ultra-long-battery-life beautiful-display device that you might, I dunno, want to use to look at reference material.
Also Bluetooth is hardware-disabled, so no keyboard. What the hell, people. After seeing all the hacks and stuff I figured that might be possible, didn't learn otherwise until after placing the order. Whoops.
sorry, but in Texas, big box retailers do not use armed staff. Target, Wal Mart, CVS, Walgreens, Best Buy - I have never, ever seen a worker with a gun.
As a life-long Texan, this sounds ridiculous to me. A Wal Mart employee is more intimidating, simply because they're Texan?
Even in the ultra-liberal Bay Area my Walgreens, Target and Best Buy employ armed security. I find it doubtful that Texas of all places doesn’t have armed security.
(Oddly I’ve only seen unarmed, tired looking security in CVS. Perhaps they’re too cheap to pay for armed gaurds.)
The only time I’ve seen an armed guard at a retail store in the southeast is when they have off duty cops late night at very high crime locations. It is extremely uncommon here for a Target or Best Buy to regularly employee armed security.
Most everywhere in Atlanta has armed security, CVS included.
It's not ever really geared at shoplifters though, as a lot of people seem to forget that shoplifting isn't really the biggest crime you can do in a store.
I don’t think it’s most everywhere in Atlanta because I lived there until 2 years ago (I still visit regularly), and it wasn’t the norm anywhere I regularly went. Atlanta is a big place, so I’m sure there’s room for variation.
Maybe there is somewhere in Texas where those stores employ armed security. I've never heard of it nor been to one. I think armed security is more a function of crime than of local sentiment towards guns.
> box retailers do not use armed staff. Target, Wal Mart, CVS, Walgreens, Best Buy - I have never, ever seen a worker with a gun
It wouldn't be the corporation arming the staff, it would be the staff arming themselves via a CCW/CHL. The first letter states 'concealed', so by definition you shouldn't see it.
>A Wal Mart employee is more intimidating, simply because they're Texan
Its less about any individual employee, and more about the general culture and nature of crime in the two areas. If I were a criminal in Texas, I would undoubtedly prefer crimes with less chance of confrontation.
The billing is so consistent I just get a check every year from each person. I pay for my parents' lines. And my sis/BIL pay for theirs in one check. I round up a few $ for admin fees.
A completely fantastic deal for the everyone. Would not have been possible with Verizon or ATT as their bills had so many gotchas and varied every month.
My wife's immediate family is 9 adults, 6 of whom are all on the same cell plan because it's cheap and convenient for everyone involved. If everyone gets along, there's not a whole lot of downside here.
The biggest security risk with being on someone else's mobile network account in the US is that someone else has control of your phone number.
These days, access to your phone number basically constitutes verification and authorization from you for many things, including transfers of money.
I control the phone lines for myself, my wife, my mom, one of my cousins, and my sister. But I would not give someone other than my wife control of mine or my wife's phone number, no matter how much I trust them.
>If everyone gets along, there's not a whole lot of downside here.
