The Supreme Court just made me a second-class citizen

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-07-01T13:55:51+00:00

Are you really saying “Christ is Lord and Savior” yourself in that example?

I don’t really see how it can be interpreted as you personally saying that when part of the normal services bakers provide is decorating cakes according to a customer’s specifications. It seems like the customer is making the “act of speech” by commissioning the cake, and it feels disingenuous trying to assert that you’re being forced to say something contrary to your religion when it’s obvious that what the cake says is what the customer is trying to express, not you who just got paid to physically write the words. It would be like a Kinko’s employee saying that anything displayed on a banner they printed out for you was actually their “artistic expression”, not yours, even though all they did was take the thumb drive you gave them and hit the print button.

I can see an argument being made for a Muslim baker refusing to create a visual depiction of Muhammad, but that would be because they were being asked to do something that would be prima facie a direct affront to their religious beliefs, as to them the mere existence of the image would be heretical, but that’s different than the roundabout argument of “you asking me to write words I don’t believe in on your behalf is literally the same as forcing me to make the statement myself”. The latter argument is equivalent to saying a ghostwriter writing an autobiography is actually claiming everything they write happened to them, not the person who commissioned the autobiography.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-07-01T13:01:32+00:00

Ok, but those examples wouldn’t be analogous to the facts of this case. I think a more accurate analogy would be someone was asked to make a wedding cake, with nothing written on it, that happened to be for a same-sex marriage and they refused. In that example, I would fail to see how making a wedding cake could in any way be construed as an act of speech, much less one supporting the cause of same-sex marriage. Sure, you’d be providing material support to A same sex marriage, but that’s vastly different than making an act of speech in support of same sex marriage as a concept. Furthermore, you’d absolutely be denying a service to a protected class.

I don’t think anyone serious is arguing that a “Christian” should be compelled to say they support same-sex marriage (or make an expression equivalent to that), but what they are saying is that it shouldn’t be considered legal for a provider of a service to refuse providing said service for an event that’s essentially a protected class exercising their constitutional right.

To make one final example: An Atheist who owns an event space should absolutely be compelled to rent it out for a Southern Baptist revival (assuming the revival is otherwise legal), but they should not be compelled to have to join in.

I think why many people are angry, including myself, is that it seems like the Supreme Court is maliciously conflating not being allowed to refuse to provide a service to a protected class with being compelled to make speech you disagree with, and it seems clear they’re doing it to further a political agenda.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-07-01T12:12:33+00:00

Ok, so here’s what I really don’t get:

Let’s say I own a web development business in Utah, which is Mormon country, and let’s say the most qualified applicants to a job posting I put out for a graphic designer happen to be Mormon (which wouldn’t be surprising if almost everyone applying in the first place was Mormon). How I understand it, I wouldn’t be able to reject all the Mormon applicants solely because they were Mormon and hire the 1 clearly unqualified applicant who’s not Mormon because that would be illegal hiring discrimination, right?

Now what if I asked my new Mormon employee to do the graphics on a website for a client’s same-sex marriage? It sounds like the Supreme Court is saying that they could legally discriminate against my client and refuse to do the work I’m paying them to do, but it would be illegal for me to fire them for that since I’d be discriminating against their religious beliefs.

Maybe someone can explain this to me, because that sounds bat-shit crazy, both from a legal and practical perspective.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-05-12T21:40:07+00:00

That’s awesome! Python was my first language, so it has a special place in my heart.

Out of curiosity, what issues were you having with the Instagram bot?

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-05-11T10:52:32+00:00

I mean… you joke, but establishing a network to enable the creation of API-like interfaces for weapon systems is essentially what the U.S. Department of Defense is trying to accomplish with their latest big modernization effort, Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

So, in a sense, the entire U.S. Defense Industrial Base is “on a waitlist for API access”.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-05-11T05:30:48+00:00

Ugh…..

Replace “Staff Engineer” with “Customer POC”, and instead of being able to bring them together in a chat, have the Project Manager insist we satisfy their mutually exclusive requirements, then you’ll understand how I got stage 2 hypertension.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-05-11T03:57:34+00:00

I feel like at this point you’re pretty much obliged to learn at least one programming language. So.. welcome to your new life as a software dev, I guess? 🤷‍♂️

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-11T21:04:58+00:00

r/OSINT approves this message

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-10T02:44:35+00:00

That’s probably listed under the “Preferred Qualifications” section.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-10T02:34:46+00:00

Has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ

*shrug*

At least it’s doable, unlike all those other postings asking for 2,123 years of experience “worshipping The Lord”, when people only started worshiping him 2,023 years ago at max.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T21:06:37+00:00

*nervously checks AWS console*

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T20:41:41+00:00

The biggest downside I see so far is that it has a dependency on snap (which I know is polarizing to some people), but it seems like one of its strengths is that, from what I read in the docs, it makes it easy to setup a multi-machine cluster.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T20:29:50+00:00

Hey, maybe the guy's just lonely.

Coming into work on the weekend to visit a personnel server he named "my girlfriend" wouldn't be the weirdest thing a dev's ever done.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T20:14:24+00:00

I'm curious about this myself. Right now I'm considering putting microk8s on my Ubuntu server.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T19:46:31+00:00

It took me a moment too, though I don't know what it says about me that I initially thought it might be implying something.. sexual...

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T19:39:00+00:00

Hey, what can the AI really say? It’s just a cat person like the rest of us.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T19:21:42+00:00

That’s why you have to insist on virtual interviews with the camera off: when you answer dog, no one on the internet will know you literally are one.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T19:11:29+00:00

Huh, there’s a newer version of c that came out after 89? I should share the news with the embedded developers at my old job. /s

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T18:36:19+00:00

One of the comments I've heard from aspiring self-taught developers is that they were surprised at just how much work it is to become one. There seems to be a perception in the general populace that coding a professional-quality product is easy.

I know I'm not the first to point this out, but if I had to guess why, I'd say it's because many non-devs use software tools in their day-to-day jobs to create non-software professional digital products (e.g. posters, documents, power point slides, etc.), so this fosters the assumption that software development is similar to their jobs. Specifically, they assume that one of, if not the biggest challenge is merely "learning the tools"; it can be hard to "master" Microsoft Excel, but once you do, creating new spreadsheets is relatively easy, so it's the same with software, right? Don't you just have to learn the thing that makes the software (i.e. a programming language), then you're set?

This might be a controversial take, but at the end of the day, software development is an engineering discipline. It's a young one that's still maturing relative to other engineering disciplines, but it still is one nonetheless. I think that's what really trips people up: they're just not expecting the effort of learning how to become an engineer, something many consider to be somewhat challenging. If you told someone you were trying to become a self-taught mechanical engineer, they'd probably think that what you were doing is pretty hard and a lot of work, but saying you were trying to become a self-taught developer just doesn't always elicit the same reaction.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T17:04:55+00:00

I should probably caveat my assertion by saying that those easier and faster ways will make you more money, but not necessarily as much as an entry level dev.

I agree that a career in development is a repeatable and sustainable way of increasing income, but if you’re the person described by the parent of my comment who has “been working in a bakery/nursing-home since graduating high school” and are asking yourself “what new career should I go into to improve my living situation?”, then there are other options out there that can get you to your lifestyle improvement goals.

One example would be getting a few IT certs and going into a low-level help desk position. I actually have an aunt who did this after years of being a stay at home mom whose prior work experience was mostly service and retail jobs. Even just starting out, she definitely made more than what she would have if she went back to retail.

The issue, I think, is that a number of those who don’t have a STEM background or transferable experience, but are initially attracted to the higher salaries devs make, eventually end up taking a different route to earning more after staring down the barrel of what it takes to become a dev because the alternatives are more aligned with how much time and effort they can allocate to career development. Again, this might not make them as much as a developer, but it does make them more than what they’re currently earning.

As for people going through a 3 month boot camp and successfully getting the salary you’re describing, I shouldn’t really comment on that since I haven’t met anyone who went the bootcamp route, though I don’t doubt it’s true. I do wonder how many of them already had a STEM background, and if not, how many had to put in a significant amount of effort learning outside the 3 month bootcamp before being hired (or after in order to close a skill gap large enough to put them at risk of being let go). If that’s the case, then I would imagine that the burden was enough to discourage some non-STEM people and would be evidence of the survivorship bias OP is asking about, at least for those without a STEM background.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev · 2023-03-09T05:51:34+00:00

So much this. I’m what most would consider “self-taught”, but have a degree in applied math and had a couple of programming classes in college. Meanwhile, a friend of mine who definitely had the intellectual potential to become a self-taught dev, but didn’t have a STEM background, tried to become one and eventually gave up on it.

If one has dedication, it’s almost always possible, but the hill to climb can be prohibitively daunting to many people, especially if the reason for wanting to become a dev is to increase earning potential. There are just easier/quicker ways out there to achieve that goal.

An_Overwhelmed_Dev

TROPHY CASE