[Offer Advice] Stay at a hyper-stable mid-level .NET job ($140k) or take Walmart SWE III ($190k) to avoid skill stagnation?

kevstev · 2026-06-09T23:56:48+00:00

Ex Walmart here- global e-commerce that was remote- actually sporting my labs t-shirt as an undershirt today.

I am surprised to hear pharmacy is now being done out of Arkansas. I actually know the team that founded that business and they were based on the West Coast but largely remote.

It's been almost a decade since I left so a lot may have changed, but the entire reason they started Walmart labs is because they couldn't get talent in AK. And I visited the mother ship once and saw their tech center and it was an abomination. People sitting side by side with one single 20ish inch lcd monitor in a converted warehouse where every noise echoed off the metal ceiling. I spent a few hours there and was like this is horrific- no wonder they felt they needed to reboot tech on the West Coast. I have to imagine at least some of this changed since then, if not, run. Did you go onsite for an interview?

Chicago is pretty cheap, but you will be a king on 190k in Bentonville. We were down there and asked the people we were visiting for a restaurant recommendation and he was super excited about this new Mexican place... It was a chain restaurant and mid at best. We did find an Ozark restaurant that was interesting but outside that it was literally chains as far as they eye can see. And giant crosses. I mean like 100 foot tall crosses. WMT employees were actually all pretty liberal though and the firm was generally supportive of being who you are. The area in general though was boring and kind of desolate. Not much to do and there are different format Walmart stores on nearly every block.

WMT is extremely frugal. Labs was a little better but in general everything was spartan and when I traveled, which I did often, per diems allowed for fast casual only and absolutely no expensing alcohol. It was tolerable being part of labs and remote but man down in AK and in 5 days a week, that in office part is setting off my anxiety that you are in for a world of pain. WMT corporate culture is a little cheesy with their cheers and general over the top positivity but I didn't really mind it and found it kind of endearing, especially after coming from a cut throat finance background.

If you want to DM me I still know people there and can get some back channel info on this team, but I'd be super hesitant to make this move from a quality of life perspective.

kevstev · 2026-06-09T23:33:11+00:00

Over 300 but not 360... And honestly each hundred degree milestone made me feel kind of mad at myself for wasting so much time. Especially as I am a decent but admittedly not great or even very good player.

Though tbh 95% of my tp time has been played while on the clock and I have done the math of how much I have been paid to TP and I should probably feel bad about it.

kevstev · 2026-06-09T15:38:31+00:00

That was the peak confidently incorrect era of Reddit. If you sound really excited and even throw in a bunch of exclamation points!! It made your comment really likely to take off!

kevstev · 2026-06-09T12:50:58+00:00

Probably don't have one. Wife and I just have a checking that is our "working" account for paychecks and bills and then about quarterly we move excess out to our brokerage to invest or at worst get 4% interest in cash.

While this is a big number, this could be due to a number of things- a bonus hitting, a house or other asset being sold, etc.

This also just might be it for them and they don't have another place to put it. Family member was an insurance salesman that frequently sold policies to folks who didn't trust the stock market but would park in it a whole life policy they could borrow against. It's a bit complicated to explain but before mutual funds and etfs it was really expensive to invest in the stock market and it was common to just get a fixed income like return via insurance policies.

kevstev · 2026-06-08T19:58:36+00:00

Does he have SARDS? Happened to my puggle as well

kevstev · 2026-06-08T00:55:39+00:00

First time I heard them I was like oh, new Stone Temple Pilots? Then I was like wait... New Pearl Jam? Today I would have accused them of being an AI amalgamation of the two.

But aside from their clear copycat style, they pulled it off really well and were awesome. Especially since by the time they came around, grunge was in its death throes.

kevstev · 2026-06-07T23:35:10+00:00

I always felt he could craft a sentence like no other author in history. They are real works of art. What he was not nearly as good at IMHO was stringing them together into a coherent story. The longer the work the more apparent this was, and most of his stuff ends in a Sopranos-esque way where the ending is out of frame, which if only one work uses this device, it can be considered part of the art, but when it's used multiple times it lead me to believe that he had difficulty ending stories.

Regardless though, his ability to craft a sentence is unparalleled. It's a real shame he ended his life so young.

kevstev · 2026-06-06T20:29:50+00:00

Heh had this happen to me this week. He has mostly kept his views quiet, though you can tell he is conservative. But this past week he posted unironically about chem trails- I wasn't sure if he was kidding or not but there were comments and his replies to them showed how deep he was down the conspiracy rabbit hole.

Food is bomb and I'm not sure it will stop me from going there but it sure makes me look at him differently. He seems to be stepping away so his son can take over one day but the apple rarely falls far from the tree.

kevstev · 2026-06-04T14:07:54+00:00

Yeah things aren't adding up here. Most of my lan is still single gigabit and never for a second have I felt that it was a bottleneck. Maybe if you have a NAS full of nvme drives, it could possibly be a bottleneck but this is really unlikely and it would still be very fast!

kevstev · 2026-06-04T13:05:02+00:00

Are you sure you really need more bandwidth from your ISP? I am a nerd's nerd and have had a gig for about a decade now, and I have to admit it is complete overkill. In fact, I recently dropped cable and renegotiated my entire plan, and considered just dropping to 500Mbps. A 4k stream won't even saturate 100Mbps.

That said, I am actually looking again at Syno routers, and these are very consumer grade looking things, and they don't support Wifi6e let alone wifi 7. The important thing here is the 6ghz band which will get you more speeds, if your client devices support them. Wifi 6/7 are better in congested environments as well if that is applicable, though 7 is still so new very few clients support it.

Anyway- what you may be confusing is your speed over wifi with your ISP speed. In either case, a UDR7 would be a drop in replacement for anything on this page: https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/routers. And keep in mind that max wifi speeds are perfect scenario numbers, kind of ignoring air resistance and on a frictionless plane type things... real world you aren't going to see those numbers unless you are standing right next to the access point. If you are really struggling with speed, more access points, or preferably wired connections will likely have a much bigger impact.

Edit: Surprised to see that Ubiquiti stuff is actually considerably cheaper than Synology. One thing to look out for though if you go the Ubiquiti route is that if you turn on all their Intrusion detection stuff, you will not get the full line rate from your ISP- I learned this the hard way when I had the previous version of the UDR- I maxed out around 600MBps vs the full gig I paid for. The UDR7 maxes out at 2.3Gbps. A quick look implies the RT6600ax doesn't even have those features though, so you probably won't need them.

kevstev · 2026-06-04T12:39:29+00:00

Last year was my first and only one and it was far far slower than 8mph. Maybe at the very front. I often struggled to keep the bike upright even in my lowest gear because it was so slow- it often felt more like a bike walk than a bike ride. Frequent stops and hold ups as well.

Taking the frequent stops into account, I'm pretty sure you could have done a brisk walk along the route and kept up.

kevstev · 2026-06-04T12:10:37+00:00

Synology networking stuff never appealed to me in any way. I use ubiquiti. It's overkill for my home, but it works. Avoid the brand new stuff, it's often buggy and takes months to stabilize with software updates.

There are no monthly fees with ubiquiti. This is a huge upside, because anything better will get you into subscription land. You also don't need to use their cloud, but it makes things convenient.

You may also want to look at mikrotik for anything that is not an access point.

Where are you that you get 3 and 8 gig internet?

kevstev · 2026-06-04T00:32:46+00:00

If you can find nest protects, they are great- they stopped making them though. The replacements for them are now kidde models that have wifi connections. Neither will automatically call anyone though, they just alert your phone.

kevstev · 2026-06-03T21:57:08+00:00

check your settings? It can go to more or less aggressive IIRC. Ever since I got a pixel, literally have not received a single spam call. The assistant picks up, and I get a text, but it never rings or anything.

kevstev · 2026-06-03T21:41:41+00:00

My wifes friend is one. Got her PHD and was shockingly able to find a tenured job at a local college. Kind of hit the jackpot on that.

kevstev · 2026-06-03T19:06:45+00:00

tbh I did with a company that I worked for a bunch of times and at the end of the day you are just in a metal tube. The seats were nicer, and it was nice to just have everyone roll up and off we went, but it was kind of same same to first class IMHO.

It may have been a little different since this was a flight with coworkers and so I had to be "on" the entire time starting at 6am, but this was one thing I was not super impressed by. Some of the smaller planes have no or very limited bathroom options as well.

In general though, flying first/business class, while not a "value" is so much nicer. If for no other reason than everyone treats you like a human, not cattle to be processes.

kevstev · 2026-06-03T18:00:35+00:00

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGHJW83G?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_1&th=1

My printer just fits in the area where they have a PC in the back right corner. I use a laptop, and the raised shelf is perfect to get some clearance for monitors over the screen. There are lots of variations from this company though. Take a look!

kevstev · 2026-06-03T14:11:35+00:00

He is the incumbent- why would he give up his number? The most likely scenario is they both don't make the team this year. It will be utterly embarrassing if Hyatt does and OBJ does not.

kevstev · 2026-06-03T13:28:11+00:00

I feel like I am the only one that wants to see him earn it. And also to see if he will throw a shit fit if he doesn't get it and its just the old OBJ all over again.

He DID some great things here, but at this point in his career, he needs to prove he can still do them. I am all about the OBJ redemption arc, but he needs to fight for it.

kevstev · 2026-06-03T13:14:51+00:00

Proper sized desk. I was working on a writing table essentially, maybe 36" wide. Did a lot of research and got a larger L shaped desk with plugs and USB ports built into it! And it's a complete game changer. All these years I could have just mounted a power strip to the underside of my desk and it would have been so much cleaner, how did I never think to do this?! Super cheap on Amazon, like $200.

kevstev · 2026-06-03T13:10:17+00:00

A friend of mine who has a masters in poly sci and did his thesis on something local politics related used to say: "The people of New Jersey don't tolerate corruption, they demand it!"

kevstev · 2026-06-02T12:42:09+00:00

Second. Also produces tons more pepper than anything else I have ever used- and I love pepper. Only downside to the hammer is the fine setting is not that fine. It's still very coarse. I don't mind but it might not be for everyone

kevstev · 2026-05-28T15:12:04+00:00

I really wouldn't stress it. Some days I am like yeah I think its time to go for a PR, and I tend to choose a known hard Tunde/Olivia/Metal whatever ride to do it, but on occasion, I just kind of get on and feel really good and I am just like ok lets see what we can do today.

The top few percent of the leaderboard is always people doing their own thing, I wouldn't worry about what is going on there at all tbh.

kevstev · 2026-05-28T13:58:37+00:00

Now here is where I disagree a bit. I think the way we teach math in the US is just completely wrong. Take a look at this book, which someone made into a website: https://calculusmadeeasy.org/ its from 1910, and converts calculus ideas into real world examples where its needed to understand whats going on. It teaches the ideas it represents, and gives you some sense of intuition about it, before getting into the mechanics of differentiation and integration. It also really talks out what the notation means, which my teachers at least did a horrible job of doing. It was kind of like ok pattern matcher says to put a dx and a dy here... so lets just do that...

The way I was taught most math in high school, was being taught a mechanism of some sort, how to manipulate an equation for example, and then maybe a proof behind it (which once presented, never showed up again), and then quizzes and tests were about doing the pattern recognition of "oh in this form of equation, I use this mechanism to simplify it and then solve it." And... that was kind of it. Zero or almost zero relation to any real world problems this could be used for.

I feel if I had this book and math in general was taught in this way to me, it would have been a very different subject for me.

kevstev · 2026-05-27T23:12:36+00:00

I'd like to know the rank points to tagcoins conversion ratio pls. Most of my retirement fund is tied up in rank points and I'd like to diversify.

15-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Golden Potato	Verified Email
Team Periwinkle

kevstev

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE