fm2606

At the time I went through it 2004 / 2005 time frame, EMT was 3 or 4 months.

Paramedic was approximately 13 months but it was a school that just did EMT and PM classes.

I'm not sure if standalone EMT / PM schools are still around. The local college offers it now. It always did but I think it is the only game in town where I am at, but honestly I don't know.

Back when I was hired in 2006 and going through fire school we were told 70% of the United States is volunteer.

Either due to the remoteness of rural living or just people in rural areas have more grit, the call volumes are much lower.

I live in Florida, but I am from a small rural town in MO and my mom still lives where I grew up. I was just there in August and I picked up a brochure for the county ambulance. They have 5 ambulances for the entire county and their call volume was approximately 3000 calls per year!

The county fire department I worked at has approximately 40 station and the busiest station doing 3000+ EMS calls on its own. Our department did all the 911 transports. When I left in 2020 we ran approximately 90,000 calls.

Yeah, fair question. To me "real" is crunching numbers, doing experiments, figuring stuff out, along the lines of what I did in my core college classes.

"Paper" is pushing paper, almost in the literal sense. It was just boring for me.

We live about 2 hours away from great dive spots. At the time we, my wife and I, were diving our kids were small, so we had to find someone to watch them. By the time it was said and done and we picked up the kids, cleaned the gear, it was a long day. It just got to the point it wasn't worth it to us anymore.

The one thing I feel I can point is being able to talk to people either one on one or giving a presentation. Part of it could be getting older but I do feel like the FF/PM experience played a significant part in it.

What it did not translate to, for me, was working under pressure in IT. As a paramedic I had standard operating procedures / guidelines to guide me AND once we departed the scene I was usually no more than 30 minutes away from a doctor AND I didn't cause the problem to begin with AND once I gained confidence in my abilities I didn't get nervous as much or questioning myself. For the most part there is only so much you can do in an emergency situation in the field.

However, if something breaks in the IT world and I have management breathing down my neck (doesn't happen often) I worry that it was something I did, I don't know how to fix it, I'm not fixing it fast enough, blah, blah, blah. You would think non-life threatening IT-issues would not bother me but they do. Day to day office politics and team interaction doesn't bother me much though.

Another thing I feel like I got out of the FF/PM career is a get-it-done-figure-it-out-as-you-go. From the proverbial cat in the tree (never had that call) to a person having a heart attack, to person needs to be extricated from a vehicle, you can't just say "nope can't be done" or "I'm not doing it". I now see coworkers pushing back on stuff without even making an attempt. Try something, anything, but just don't say "nope can't do it". That is frustrating to me.

> Compensation is one thing, but the experience for me has been priceless.

Yep. When I got hired on at the fire department I took a $12,000 pay cut. Overtime was abundant so it was easy to make up the loss plus some. But you definitely can't purchase the experience

Shit, vomit, piss, etc.

Go into majority of nursing homes and the smell is a combination of shit, piss and disinfectant

I have written about this before here on HN.

I obtained a BS in Aerospace Engineer in 1998. After job jumping several times I realized I didn't care for it. I was basically a "paper" engineer, which was my fault as I never pursued jobs that did "real" engineering.

Anyway, around 2003/2004 I went to night school for EMT. The purpose was to be a dive master on dive boats (I was/am a dive master - I don't dive anymore). It was fun.

My engineering job sucked so I jumped into paramedic school right after EMT. I really enjoyed it. About a month from graduating PM school, county fire department came in to class and said they would hire paramedic only but we would have to cross train to firefighter.

In Feb 2006 I was 35 yo with a 9 month old baby and decided if I didn't do it then I never would so I applied and got hired then department put me through fire school.

It was the best career decision of my life. It didn't take long to see a bunch of people get hurt from the job, so I figured I better have a back up plan since I also have chronic health issues. From 2010 to 2015 I did an online Masters degree in CS. After completing it I started working part time remote jobs as a developer.

Then COVID hit in 2020 and they pulled me out of the field due to my health issues. I turned 50 and was getting tired after 14 years. I started applying to full time jobs and landed one.

In 2022 I switched jobs again for a better org and I am still here. I just switched positions from Java dev to cloud engineer in May.

I absolutely enjoyed 85+% of FF/pm but it is a young person's game. It gave me confidence I probably never would have found. Again, it was literally the best career move I ever made and would recommend anyone to do it.

> This is why I have always said, that a degree in CS is useless without some degree of passion towards it.

I would add I don't know how anyone can do any degree and career without some sort of passion for it.

For me personally, not only do I need passion but I have to have some sort of belief in the product and/or company I'm working for. In the early 00's I worked at a company, not software related nor was I working as a developer, and didn't like what I was doing nor did I believe in the product, it was lacking in so many areas where they were trying to frame it fit in the product market. I left after 3 years and did something completely different.

I still have my HP 48G and love it. I don't use it much and take the batteries out so they don't corrode in the case.

Every time I use for more than a couple of calculations I think how much I prefer a RPN calculator.

This is me to a big extent. Sometimes I feel like I to learn for learning's sake. Which is okay, or at least that is what my therapist tells me. I struggle with the fact that I "think about doing" vs actually doing.

My work is my hobby too, that is why I struggle sometimes wondering if I will ever retire. Why retire when what I'm doing is for the most part fun. Sure, there are days that I'd rather be "doing X", or more like "studying X" than actually working but I'm enjoying work so much lately that it soon passes.

Work also forces me to actually DO instead of thinking about doing. I have to perform. People are depending on me to get stuff done and that is a big motivator. With my personal projects, no one needs it or is expecting it so it is too easy to abandon.

I used pg vector chunking on paragraphs. For the answers I saved in a flat text file and then parsed to what I needed.

For parsing and vectorizing of the GCP docs I used a Python script. For reading each quiz question, getting a text embedding and submitting to an LLM, I used Spring AI.

It was all roll your own.

But like I stated in my original post I deleted it without backup or vcs. It was the wrong directory that I deleted. Rookie mistake for which I know better.

I tried scripts but got blocked. I used wget to download tthem

Everything I run, even the small models, some amount goes to the GPU and the rest to RAM.

Hmmm...now that you say that, it might have been the 20b model.

And like a dumbass I accidentally deleted the directory and didn't have a back up or under version control.

Either way, I do know for a fact that the gpt-oss-XXb model beat chatgpt by 1 answer and it was 46/50 at 6 minutes and 47/50 at 1+ hour. I remember because I was blown away that I could get that type of result running locally and I had texted a friend about it.

I was really impressed but disappointed at the huge disparity between time the two.