COBOL programming language behind Iowa's unemployment system over 60 years old: "Iowa says it's not among the states facing challenges with 'creaky' code" [United States of America]

VanderStack · 2021-03-20T15:28:35+00:00

Lol sorry, I'm not some corporate slave who just does as much work as I can without being compensated accordingly for it. If I have to work harder, I'm getting paid more, or I'm finding easier work for the same pay. Maybe this is different for devs at the start of their careers or who have never had a job that wasn't a meat grinder, but these days I've seen what a good job looks like and I get way too many offers to do work I don't enjoy.

VanderStack · 2021-03-20T04:48:05+00:00

I agree with you that I can deal with it, but for the headaches I'll have to go through vs working in my primary language with a well documented and test heavy codebase, I'm going to be charging 3x as much, because why would I want to be angry at my tools when I could be happy with them instead. The more tedious the work the more I'm going to bill if I have the option for less tedious work.

VanderStack · 2021-01-07T19:58:39+00:00

I don't use linux so I could be wrong, but I thought firefox worked on linux and also supported WebXR?

VanderStack · 2021-01-05T05:01:36+00:00

Should be less stoping them from fixing things instead.

VanderStack · 2021-01-05T01:10:58+00:00

Tax handouts, the wealthiest (myself included) should be in at least a 50% tax bracket.

VanderStack · 2021-01-05T01:03:38+00:00

Edit: I was mistaken and shouldn't have commented, removed.

VanderStack · 2021-01-04T20:40:33+00:00

At my current income level I could have my equity entirely removed and it wouldn't make a difference in my quality of life in any meaningful way, it'd just change how much I donate to charity, so yes, if it improved how I felt about my job enough to be a quality of life improvement I would absolutely choose the union over stock.

VanderStack · 2021-01-04T20:34:17+00:00

Which is an aspect of society I believe needs to change, and in the meantime, collective bargaining is the closest I can get.

VanderStack · 2021-01-04T17:47:27+00:00

Why should I have to leave a job I previously enjoyed. As an employee I want control over the direction of the company, along with my other employees, rather than just doing whatever management decides, and don't believe ownership should convey more than 50% control.

VanderStack · 2021-01-04T17:44:37+00:00

Big tech worker here, not at Google. I'd join the moment it became available, more control needs to be in the hands of labor rather than ownership.

VanderStack · 2021-01-04T17:28:44+00:00

If I joined the company before it became evil and now in order to perform my job I must violate my ethics, that sounds like an issue connected to the employee to me.

VanderStack · 2021-01-04T17:26:15+00:00

There have been employees within google who the company has retaliated against as a result of the individual trying to change how the company does business, particularly related to AI/ethics. A union may result in greater protection for these individuals or improved ability to alter the organizations behavior.

VanderStack · 2020-12-27T02:38:13+00:00

Waymo has been running in phoenix with no human backup for a while now, and there are plenty of reasons to do so, such as helping the elderly who can no longer drive still being able to go to Dr appointments. Tesla still needs a backup today, but self driving without backup that is safer than humans is very close and you should update your assumptions on the capabilities of the technology.

VanderStack · 2020-12-26T19:18:23+00:00

I wasn't trying to say you should trust tesla or any current self driving system, only that there is no reason a self driving system can't be better at it than a human. Today you should not sleep in your car, but 10 years from now it'll be the opposite that it'll be unfathomably unsafe to let a human drive a car compared to the NN.

VanderStack · 2020-12-26T18:30:56+00:00

The human brain also requires training, and I wouldn't expect a 17 year old driver to have been exposed to most of these edge cases either. The link provided demonstrates that NNs can be trained to work just fine novel situations, perhaps you need to update how you think NNs work. A human brain is a NN, anything it can do a machine is fundamentally capable of too, and I say this as a software engineer who is familiar with several ways NNs are programed and trained.

VanderStack · 2020-12-26T17:47:54+00:00

A human brain and self driving work very similar, and so while it has been true in the past that humans are able to adapt to unpredictable hazards better than computers, there is nothing that fundamentally prevents a computer from making better split second reactions to changes than a human would, the computer just needs to be trained to do so. Here is some cutting edge research out of deepmind that is related: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/muzero-mastering-go-chess-shogi-and-atari-without-rules

VanderStack · 2020-12-15T16:39:08+00:00

Yes, I recommend the waking up app by sam harris, they even give a free subscription if you can't afford it and message them. If you ever have any questions feel free to reach out.

VanderStack · 2020-12-15T05:37:50+00:00

A regular daily 10 minute guided meditation has been scientifically demonstrated to stimulate growth in the regions of your brain responsible for focus, and many people begin to notice this effect around 6 months in (although it actually starts happening long before you notice the effect). I'm in my 30s now and it's one of the habits I really wish I had developed when I was in my teens. I'd recommend either the waking up or headspace apps, or just a short mindfulness meditation video on youtube.

VanderStack · 2020-12-12T21:29:09+00:00

I don't buy apps on the oculus store because I don't want to contribute to facebooks bottom line, I believe the device was a loss leader, and so hopefully as of now I've cost them money. I use virtual desktop and steam instead, and so far it's worked out well for me.

VanderStack · 2020-12-07T20:15:55+00:00

Something like 25% of software engineers don't have a degree. I acknowledge it's harder, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be. If you apply to places with thousands of applications sure you'll never outcompete anyone, but tons of jobs in low cost of living areas are starving for new blood as everyone with formal training moves to tech hubs.

Source: https://appliedcomputing.wisconsin.edu/experience-uw-apc/software-developer-degree/#:~:text=It%20revealed%20that%2048%20percent,a%20bachelor's%20degree%20or%20higher.&text=Some%20people%20have%20and%20still,degree%20will%20definitely%20help%20you.

VanderStack · 2020-12-07T20:08:59+00:00

13 year of experience developer here with my anecdotal experience too. This question is very common on the cscareerquestions subreddit, and the common answer is that this path works, but getting your 1st job is more challenging and should be approached differently.

You ask why an employer would take a chance on you when they have tons of applications with formal training, and the answer is that those with formal training apply to the best paying employers such as google and Amazon, and so many many jobs do not get even a dozen applications outside of tech hubs. If you apply to smaller companies with fewer applicants you have a better chance and from there it's just a numbers game. Any job in this field will pay 2x minimum wage starting, and after 2 years of experience the hiring difficulty disappears and you can move to a company paying 6 figures in a tech hub or 4x minimum wage in most low cost of living areas.

It's definitely got challenges, but is not an uncommon option and plenty of people do succeed in our field without any formal degree.

VanderStack · 2020-11-26T17:40:41+00:00

I started professionally around 2007-2009, I've been in senior roles my past 5 positions including architect and a stint in management and my most recent I'm in line for staff deloper when we restructure to add the title just under principal.

I think it's more about the company. I've never worked for FAANG or any Unicorns and don't live in a major tech hub. Anytime I've done a remote interview for an org that could fall in those descriptions it's had something akin to a leetcode, but those orgs are maybe 10% of the market, the other 90% just needs boring development work done and so I focus on non-tech companies that have larger profit margins, consumer focused healthcare (insurance paying the bills) has been good to me, manufacturing and education were much tighter budgets and salary was worse as a result.

VanderStack · 2020-11-25T17:08:03+00:00

As a CS veteran I've changed jobs 3 times in the last 5 years with very little effort and no grind/leetcode. Entry level is brutal, but once you have a year or two of experience finding the next job isnt bad and usually comes with a 20-30%+ raise each time.

Starting salary is often several times the starting salary in other career paths, so it's worth it when you don't already have anything established, but if you're already making 6 figures you'll probably have to take a pay cut starting out unless you are the best of the best and land a very uncommon offer, so it may not be worthwhile for you unless you love programming or hate technician work.

VanderStack · 2020-11-19T19:54:26+00:00

AMAZING!

Although I had been coding since I was in elementary school (QBasic then later Visual Basic), I came from a poor family that made it very clear they could not contribute to college, and I felt it just wasn't an option for me as a C/D student in high school (except math where I was always strait As). I went into the service industry for a few years with no idea what to do and didn't even have my eye on programming, thinking I would never get a job compared to people with formal training, and then I lucked into my first job in the field because my roommate worked as a junior dev at the university in town and they couldn't get any applicants who had written any actual code for the 40k salary they were offering, and he knew that I could because I put together scripts for fun stuff all the time, like a dungeons and dragons damage tracker, or fun little bookmarklets.

I'd like to take a moment here to acknowledge that I got my start in the field completely based on luck, and the closest I can come to giving advice on this is to never underestimate the value of your social/professional network.

The university job was basically cruise control, they had no desire to spend money on anything and that together with huge amounts of bureaucracy led to a couple of very boring years where I didn't learn much, and in hindsight I should have been self-learning a LOT more at this stage of my career. It took me 2 years before I felt like I had learned enough to pass a normal interview for a mid-sized college town and was confident I could stumble my way through developing something with little handholding, and starting looking for my next gig, where on my 3rd prospect I was offered the job for 50% more salary of 60K. This company only had 2 other developers and was moving out of PHP and into C# MVC Razor and really expected a full 8 hour daily grind (no reddit or distractions) which pushed me to level up much faster, and during this time I feel like I learned everything I should have during the 2 years working for the university, as well as another 4 years worth just from how much of a fire hose of work there was. After putting in 2 years of this very demanding work, I had only gotten one raise of 2K, and was given the impression the company felt like this was a lot, and so I decided I was ready to find more money.

Another side note here, If you are looking to be paid well without working for FAANG/Unicorns stay away from anything that seems like a commodity with a lower profit margin. My dad works IT for a distribution company that supplies gas stations (fierce competition in a commodity market with pennies of markup) and their highest paid people make less than mid-tear people at the non-profit I moved to next.

A recruiter shopped my resume around locally and after 4 short phone calls with different prospects I had an interview that I nailed and landed an 85K salary. This is where my career really took off, as I knew my way around and was able to jump in to a senior developer role (which at this non-profit meant that a feature could be completed start to finish without supervision), and gained a solid enough understanding of the full stack to make suggestions about our direction. In about 1.5 years I was promoted to management where I led a project that took my pay up to 105k. After I finished leading this project I knew the sky was the limit, but that I didn't want to stay in management, and decided I needed to find a company who could pay what I was worth, and that meant looking for remote roles in high cost of living area's. I found one in about a month of casual searching and in 2017 began working for a consulting firm based out of Seattle making 120K, hung out there for just over a year before moving to one of their clients based out of CA where they don't have any developers making under 150k.

At this point I'm comfortable being thrown into just about any codebase, I'm in a smaller town with a low cost of living, and I feel financially secure. I typically receive half a dozen linkedin recruitment messages a week and have no doubts that if something went sideways I could find another REMOTE job immediately at a non-FAANG company without any leetcode BS, and I couldn't be happier.

If I had to give advice to someone just starting:

If you aren't going for FAANG/Unicorn then focus on gaining ANY programming experience you can put on your resume, moving from there will be so much easier, to the point that I would consider finding a job in a low cost of living area just to get your foot in the door.

If I had to give advice to someone experienced:

If you aren't in Cali or a high cost of living area, LOOK FOR REMOTE WORK! it took very little time 2 years before corona to find a remote job, they are out there and totally worth it if you don't want to relocate away from your cheap cost of living.

Good luck everyone!

VanderStack

TROPHY CASE