screwturner68

I don't want to live anywhere where I can see my neighbor. These people are choosing this lifestyle. These same people are a massive tax on society because we have to subsidize this lifestyle because it's very expensive to provide services to places where nobody lives. Why would you build a hospital where only 10,000 live? Why spend $5000 to drag fibre to someone's house so that they can pay $50/month for internet access? How can you afford to pave a road where one person has 800ft of frontage and pays $1500 a year in SALT?

Again, at the end of day this is a choice and their choice costs everyone. I can't really feel sorry for these people, it's what you get when you want to go it alone.

I know people with English degrees in IT and Music degrees teaching school, why would anyone consider this wrong or a waste?

My parents were college professors, English teachers, and two things they kept pounding into my head all my life was to one, learn to write a sentence and two, college is not there to teach you a trade it's there to expand your mind. I think it's unfortunate that companies feel that they no longer have to invest in their employees and teach them the job, they have pushed this off on the employees. Sadly, people think college will teach them a job and except for a few degrees Medicine, Law, Engineering it doesn't.

Yep, I moved from Dev to ops many years ago simply because I wanted to talk to someone..anyone. I've been in consulting for the last 20 years and I talk to customers good or bad almost every day and I do get a kick out of it when they are stoked with my work. The funny thing is as I'm getting older and working with more complex and closer to alpha products I find myself writing code to make my life easier, funny how that works. As far as the industry as a whole, I wouldn't recommend it to my kid I think it's dying or at least dying in the US.

you get what you pay for, these companies have been racing to the bottom for years, trying to save that extra penny because IT is considered a cost center and always has been. In addition moving to the cloud is just a way to shrug off responsibility, it's not our fault it's AWS.....actually it is your fault because you were trying trying to save money and you handed off your business to the lowest priced contractor and now are surprised that the contractor doesn't care about your business nearly as much as you do.

I have pretty much the same story, started with a Vic20 (without storage), got the 4K expansion cartridge when my programs stated to exceed the builtin 3.5k, moved on to the Apple 2 and the Commodore 64 and then on to PCs. Mostly learning in basic and then I was doing a lot of dBase in the mid to late 80's, learned C & Fortran in HS and then I learned C, Fortran, PAscal and Assembler in college. The on to VB, C++ and then I pretty much stopped programming for profit in 1999 and moved into operations. In about 2015 I started coding in Python, life is so different when you have Google, stackoverflow and a module that does pretty much anything you want -why didn't this stuff exist why back when.

One of the best classes I took in college was a "learn how to study class", I never had to study before college so I was woefully unprepared for engineering school. Probably the best thing I learned in the class was the Cornell Note Taking Method. I implemented the method the next semester of college and totally crushed it with limited studying, I probably should have continued using it but I was a knucklehead and didn't.

I use them in my home lab. The company is too cheap to provide me with a real lab but $1000, ebay and some creativity I can pretty much do whatever I need to do on my own.

They used to give whoever was on call for the week $200, we had a guy saving up for his wedding so he offered to be on-call for anyone who didn't want to be on call. It was a good deal for him and everybody was happy. It's amazing how cheap companies are today, for $10K you could make a lot of people happy.

before my promotion it was 0-3% and now it's 0-10%, after a decade of 2% (or less) bonuses I almost choked last year when I got 10%. This year I'd be thrilled with 5%.

I actually used to use that line with I'd talk to some of our vendors support people. They'd start dragging that feet, wanting to get rid of me and I'd say, "you do know what project this is right...." and then I'd say if we can't fix this really quickly it will be on the news and your company will get dragged into it and nobody wants to testify to congress that the market place site was down because of a bug in your equipment. It was pretty amazing how people went above and beyond when you put things in the right perspective.

Why? It shouldn't take two months and multiple interviews to hire a quality employee. I've been hired multiple times by large companies tech and otherwise during my first interview. They liked my resume, they liked my experience and I proved that I didn't have a third head and would wear a suit if totally necessary and that was good enough because they needed the worker. The whole process today seems gratuitous, at least in the United States everywhere is still at will employment, if it doesn't work fire them and hire someone else. Frankly I think the process is so long because a company doesn't want to hire new people/a replacement, they'd rather string the workers along with the "we just can't find the prefect fit" and pocket the savings than hire a needed worker that might not be a prefect fit -nobody is a prefect fit. Or maybe the answer is simpler, they really don't need another worker.

It sounds like you really don't need to fill the position, is that true? I know when I hire it's because I need someone yesterday not in the next year. The multiple interviews and hoops that applicants have to jump through are akin to fraternity hazing not a interview process especially for non-entry level positions. My last three positions I was hired during my first interview, my guess is that today that would be unheard of, again I question if there is really a need to fill the position or the company is just adding another worker.

I worked in the "rescue team" for a couple of years and the politics was one of the reasons I left, you never knew when the supreme court would stick their nose in and you'd be out of a job. I used to describe that job as having 100 bosses, 55 of those bosses wanted you to do your job for the least amount of money as possible and the other 45 wanted you to fail.

I was on the market place rescue team, keep throwing money at a problem and it will go away.