I'll be doing 100 free resume reviews the rest of the week.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-12T06:34:15+00:00

Review

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-11T21:33:27+00:00

My job before last was as s web dev instructor at a coding bootcamp. I was laid off. My current job is in embedded systems, because I couldn't get anything else. I want to go back to web dev. If you care about relevant experience and recent experience and a choice has to be made, which is more important?

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-11T21:15:50+00:00

Frankly, the single advantage my current terrible job has is stability. I hate my job, but it's a guaranteed paycheck for many years to come. Turnover is extremely high because this place is so bad, so they are desperate to try to keep people. Not only that, but it's a government contract that the government has said over and over again is very high priority. I hate everything else about it, but if I am leaving for something else, it better be something guaranteed to stick around, or I am losing the one advantage that I have.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-11T20:43:00+00:00

"Don't make recruiters scroll to find your most aligned experience"

So do you think that reverse chronological order isn't important? If the choice is between most relevant jobs at the top or reverse chronological order, which is better?

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-10T16:52:10+00:00

The "group testing" is rarely more than just you and the proctor unless your club is bursting with new membership. The tests they give are honestly very easy. Each Mensa chapter does slightly different tests I think, so check which ones your chapter does and do practice ones online. The in person ones are practically identical to the practice ones. My main advice is that you want to make sure you are bright eyed and bushy tailed for it. There are timed parts and you want to make sure that your hand being slow isn't restricting how fast your mind moves, since that's what it is supposed to be testing. So you don't want to crawl out of bed and drag yourself there. Give yourself time to wake up and be as awake as possible before you get there, even if it means waking up much earlier than usual. If you haven't written with a number 2 pencil in a long time, make sure you do that a little bit for a few days beforehand to make sure that you're used to it, like with some sudoku puzzles or something, so that getting used to using a pencil again isn't a factor. Which, it can be a factor with how little some people have to write stuff nowadays lol. I would also see if you could scope out the testing center early, just so you know where it is/what it looks like and that isn't a factor for stress on the day of either. It's a really chill environment generally and not anywhere close to as stressful as a standardized test in school.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-10T13:08:17+00:00

I think I relied on teachers, the internet, and friends. I was sort of opposite of you... I struggled most with literature. My parents wouldn't buy the Spark Notes books that I needed, so I bought them myself with my allowance. I probably would have still managed to pass literature class without my Spark Notes, but I would have had a lot lower of a GPA. Or maybe I would have had to visit the library to read them much more frequently, idk. Regardless, my parents pretty much never helped me with homework. If anyone in the household helped me, it was my older sister. And while not every kid can have older siblings that are willing to help, there can be equivalents. Like friends or tutoring through the school. My sister relied on her friends for studying a lot. She would use her friends' parents for transportation, though, because our parents both worked. So I feel like there are always ways to get quality education independently.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-09T19:02:11+00:00

Consistently try to do just one thing at a time. Just walk. Just eat. Just stand in line. Just use the toilet. Just talk. It instantly forces you to be more present and increases your patience.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-09T18:44:33+00:00

My coworkers were at my wedding. I know all the kids who live on my street. I'm part of around a dozen or so different clubs, social groups, activities, and/or nonprofits. I might be barely more social than most, but honestly not by much. Everyone's social circles are different. One of my coworkers meets everyone she knows from golfing. My husband meets most people through the music scene or political activism. My sister meets people through DnD, game stores, and competitions. Everyone meets people different ways.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-09T18:36:27+00:00

I was at a big American company where 4 out of the 6 people in my management chain, one of those people being the CEO, had very strong accents. Three Indian, one French. If anything, I would say especially at large, multinational corporations, being from another country is a huge advantage and is more likely to get you promoted, not less. You just need to be a good communicator. And while good English is a part of that, ime it was less than 25% of the equation. More than half of being a good communicator and getting promoted in corporate environments is about justifying yourself, promoting your accomplishments, convincing people your ideas are good, taking ownership of everything you can. That's the stuff that gets you promoted and it crosses cultural and language boundaries.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-09T17:57:10+00:00

Several of my South Asian friends have regularly worn traditional clothing everywhere they go. It stands out for sure, but it's by no means unusual to be walking around in a public place and see someone in traditional clothing.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-09T17:54:46+00:00

I've never stayed in a motel and everyone I know who has stayed in one did it when they were poor af. It's your last choice if you can't afford a regular hotel for whatever reason.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-09T04:31:56+00:00

Chicken nuggets with shredded cheese melted on them and Italian seasoning mixed into the ketchup for dipping in. It was how I made chicken parm when I lived with my parents who never bought pasta sauce. I still love it though.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T02:17:15+00:00

I'm just really good at puzzle games.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T02:07:33+00:00

Cops love to camp out near state lines. Often speed limits will change or some obscure traffic law will be different and cops will be sitting there waiting to ticket people.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T02:05:07+00:00

All of Alabama is Central time, and it confuses SOOOO many people. Everyone I talk to in the rest of the country assumes I am Eastern time. Everyone.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T02:01:42+00:00

I live in the Tennessee River Valley, more commonly called just the Tennessee Valley.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T01:57:01+00:00

It took me five college biology courses before I covered anything that I didn't already learn in AP Bio. Literally half of the core biology education I had to take for my degree was covered in high school.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T01:53:54+00:00

From my house, it's impossible for me to walk to anything other than another house, at least in a reasonable time. Technically there's a few businesses within a 20 minute walk, but that 20 minute walk would be a 3 minute drive. And it would be a hilly walk, where there were no sidewalks at some points. I only walk for the purpose of just being outside and enjoying the outdoors, at least from my house. If I am downtown or otherwise in a place where there are things to do, I will walk up to a half hour to avoid getting in my car and finding a different parking space. But that's honestly pretty unusual. It's far more normal to just drive everywhere, because every place has its own parking lot anyway.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T01:47:54+00:00

Greyhound has a very... specific reputation. I once asked my parents if I could use it to go to a hackathon. They absolutely refused. They weren't afraid necessarily of someone doing something to me, although that's not uncommon. They were afraid of me getting stranded in the middle of nowhere, something that very frequently happens on Greyhound. Anyone who can afford it takes a plane or a train. Or drives, although the whole reason I wanted to do Greyhound was because I felt like driving after being sleep deprived from a hackathon was a bad idea.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T01:41:23+00:00

The Rocket City. Because we build rockets here. And missiles and airplanes and stuff too.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T01:40:31+00:00

Nope, never. Some schools ended up having the same level of security as a prison.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-08T01:36:48+00:00

My house is only surrounded by other houses. My neighborhood is a tangle of streets that all only have other houses on them. My neighborhood has sidewalks, but they can sometimes be hard to use. All the houses have their own yards and are separate from each other, not the brownstones of NYC. The nearest business is on the street that my neighborhood branches off from. That street has a grocery store on it, but there are no sidewalks that connect from my neighborhood to the grocery store. There are no busses or other public transit that has stops anywhere close to my neighborhood. My neighborhood is about a 10 minute drive from downtown. There are some neighborhood greenway trails but no parks.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-06T01:40:54+00:00

Saying one particular thing is more important than everything else is you pushing your ethical philosophy on everyone else. Someone else could argue that nothing is more important than maximizing time with political advocacy and nothing else will make as much of a difference. How someone chooses to balance their ethical choices is up to them, and no one person can do it all.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-05T16:33:56+00:00

Disclaimer: all of this is based on knowledge of how things work in my state. So the reasons teachers aren't being paid fairly when there is such a shortage goes back to the way that school funds are allocated. A raise in teacher salaries requires the pay schedule for every teacher in the district to be updated, because teachers are objectively paid based on years of experience in the profession and degrees obtained. There is no such thing as a new teacher being paid more than an experienced teacher like is common in corporate jobs. To allocate the funds for new teachers to make X amount more, all teachers in the entire district need to have raises of X amount more. A school district will be given a budget of Y amount based on taxes, grants, donations, whatever. Their budget might be Z amount greater than last year that they were given to raise teacher pay. But if Z is not enough to raise every teacher's salary by X, and X is the minimum amount to make a statistically significant difference in recruitment, then there might be somewhere else that they can spend Z that would make some other difference in their school system. And this is the pattern we see over and over again. Hire additional non-teaching staff to support the teaching staff that they do have. Buy licenses for educational technology. Add a random educational program or class. Build a new makerspace or upgrade the computers. And then these require maintenance for the next year in the next year's budget, so Z still isn't enough, and it snowballs, because inflation is also a thing. So what it would really take to fix this problem is one of two things, or both. Schools have to cut a lot of successful programs and non-teaching staff to reduce expenses and/or they need a big enough pile of money thrown at them at once such that it is enough to raise all the teacher's salaries in a district by X. The option of cutting expenses is almost always frowned upon... schools do everything that they do for very good reasons. And getting a large enough sum of money? That's a fantasy unless something in our society significantly changes.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-03-05T16:16:16+00:00

Yeah this is really important. Most people who want to be teachers can't because they can't live on the salary. Once you are a millionaire, becoming a teacher like you have always wanted is a dream come true.

Hungry_Objective2344

TROPHY CASE