justrudd

I’m helping my dad build a dock and a walking path for his new lake.

Yeah. I just try to separate them in my mind or I’ll quit trying :) Not ready to retire just yet.

For sure. I love my side projects and my jobs. I love writing code and designing systems. I’m burned out on the game I must play (and be good at) to be afforded the chance to write code, design systems, and be paid.

I assume by industry you mean software development. And I’m not tired of that. Where else can you be integrally involved in different businesses? Communications, medical, education, e-commerce for anything/everything. We get to play in a lot of different playgrounds and potentially have a huge impact. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.

I am tired of the interview process. Here’s a take home assignment that you’ll code in isolation without feedback or interaction from us. Completely opposite of how you’d do the job. You’ll have to justify any assumptions you make. And if we don’t like your justification, pass.

Took 2 days on the assignment - this is kind of simplistic, not what we’d expect from a senior dev. Pass.

Take 4 days on the assignment - what took so long? We’d expect a senior dev to knock this out in 2 or 3 days. Pass.

Maybe we’ll tell you’re out. Or we’ll just ghost you. Depends on how our recruiting team is feeling that day.

Behavioral is generally where I “blow” it. I won’t lie and answer the “so tell me a time about xyz”. Sometimes xyz was terrible, and I didn’t handle it well. I know how I’d handle it now and can articulate that. Sorry. We’re looking for someone that handled this exactly right already.

Personally I screwed myself over the years by not chasing titles. I’ve done Staff and Principal level stuff. For years. But I didn’t fight for the title. So I generally get screened out of those pretty quickly because past titles don’t match what recruiting team has been told to look for.

But this is the price that must be paid. So I can work/play in a lot of different playgrounds. Keep applying. Keep trying. Eventually I’ll find something.

> Do you buy bottled water from the store?

When driving. But not for day-to-day.

> Do you filter tap water? What filter do you use?

Yes. Brita. I don't know which one. It attaches directly to the faucet.

> Do you drink unfiltered tap water (which country)? Something else?

Yes. United States. I'm currently in Alabama and drink unfiltered tap water as needed. I also still drink straight from the hose outside when it is hot.

I agree with you to an extent. I was recently laid off (start up out of money) along with the rest of the engineering team. So I’m going through loops. The hardest part of the process for me is getting past the initial recruiter. Once I get past whatever “wall” they’ve put in place, I do pretty well. So I wonder how many recruiters now are using AI to screen applicants? Given the hundreds (thousands?) of applications, probably some of them.

Anecdotally - I’ve been through 2 technical screens where they asked me to use an AI prompt to solve a problem. For one, it was a pretty trivial problem (running an hmac over some values) so I just solved it directly. They asked why I didn’t use AI, and I told them honestly that I’ve done something like this hundreds of times, why would I use a prompt for it? Didn’t make it to the next round. Now it’s totally possible that I didn’t make it because of something else. And maybe those were outliers, but it seems like I’ll need to brush up on prompting…

This made some memories pop. I was on the camera and photo app team. I was not an integral part at all. I think most of my code never made it into the app because being part of that org was a shocking experience. I came from building web apps in an org that got shut down to writing mobile apps that used the Windows build system. My psyche was not prepared.

But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named Adam. To this day I miss working with them.

As I’ve been lucky to be in computers my whole career and I started taking health/wellness seriously before things got too bad, I can probably stock shelves at a grocery or Wal-mart type store.

Why would they hire me over a teenager or someone slightly older? Because I’ve proven for 20+ years that I’ll show up and do the work. I’ve already figured out that I can “survive” on minimum wage. My house is paid for. My truck is paid for. I put “survive” in quotes in hopes that I don’t have cancer diagnosed or some kind of heart disease and need long term medical care.

No. The first treatment was electron since the tumors were in my throat and close to the surface. But my oncologist didn’t like the progress. So my second treatment was just standard photon. Both done with conformal.

This year, during a routine physical, my general practitioner felt some “lumps” in my throat. He wasn’t worried but wanted me to get a second opinion on them. two rounds of chemo and two five week five day a week rounds of radiation later, I no longer have the tumors in my throat.

I was lucky. They got detected early and hadn’t metastasized.

But holy hell was radiation treatment terrible. When I had my first round of chemo to ready me for my first round of radiation, it was easy to “ignore” the chemo. I can’t find the comment now, but they basically state “You get up, you go in, you get sick, you go home, rinse and repeat”. It sucked, but I could muscle through it. The radiation treatments? Damn. By the time the burning sensation in my neck and face got to a point I could ignore it, it was time to go in for another session. By the 3rd session of the 3rd week, my oncologist prescribed me sleeping and high dosage pain pills. My pharmacist didn’t want to refill my pain meds the 3rd time. Thought I had a pill doc that was letting me abuse them.

But all through the pain and the uncertainty, the thing that affected me the most was - I really learned who, in my social circle, I could count on. Made me realize that most of my social circle is acquaintances not friends. Not loved ones.

So cancer really opened my eyes to human connection. Now I just gotta figure out how to do it :)

Helps drown out my tinnitus. But have to be careful because sometimes it can make it worse.

> shooting each other with f-ing nerf guns

Well before COVID and the WFH swing, I left a job that I loved because of f-ing nerf guns. Because it just went crazy. People started with the 1 shot at a time guns. But then someone else bought one that would shoot 10 in a second. Someone figured out how to make a magazine that held 30. And so on and so forth. So when I got hit with 1 or 2 darts a day, sure. But when I was caught in a crossfire of 100s of darts, I just got sick of it.

Various magazines (Dr. Dobbs, MSJ/MSDN Magazine), USENET (comp.lang.*), email lists, MSDN subscriptions (the DVDs full of Microsoft documentation), books, lots of experimentation, etc.

There were actually quite a few resources before StackOverflow.

If you don’t want to anchor a band for face pulls, at least do band pull aparts. I do about 10 every hour on the hour. Shoulders feel great.

Yep. But my concern is with the phrasing “We’d make an exception if someone really needed accommodations”. Like it’s their decision whether or not someone has their camera on. Who is included in that decision? Just the manager? Do they get to look at you and say “You don’t look so bad”? Do you get to veto if you really don’t want to turn your camera on? I think it’s easier to approach every situation with an open mind towards kindness. And sometimes people just don’t want their camera on.