wwwwwwwwww

The dev team is very territorial about their code. They're virtually in a separate business unit - I don't even have read access to the source code.

To make things worse, the dev lead's boss always defers to his team's knowledge about the issues, so getting certain security issues fixed can require getting upper management involved.

Profession: "Security" Engineer

[08:00] Wake up

[09:05] Arrive at work a little after 9 to fight the power

[09:15] Coffee. The daily pilgrimage to the Mr. Coffee is the highlight of my day.

[09:25] Go to meeting scheduled by demon. I don't need to be in the meeting and nod my head whenever they look at me.

[10:05] Check email to find a customer figured out my email and started emailing me on how to figure out their wifi password. This is their 5th time emailing me despite having forwarded them to customer support.

[10:45] Ask head of developer team if security issue XYZ is fixed yet. Dev team head says he doesn't think it's a real security issue and won't be dedicating resources to fixing it. Tells me to reopen the ticket as a "feature". Researcher plans on disclosing the security issue within the week.

[11:10] Check ticketing system to find 5 new emails from security researchers from India demanding bug bounty for a reflected XSS issue they found on one of our static promotional websites.

[11:15] Briefly consider a career change

[11:16] Remember how big dat paycheck is

[12:00] Lunch

[13:00] Meeting about long-standing architectural security issue that I want fixed. None of the PMs want to dedicate resources to fix it.

[14:00] CEO sends company wide email about how good our security is compared to our competition.

[15:00] By now I've read every reddit post on the first 20 pages.

[17:00] Go home while being too mentally exhausted to go out after work and make friends

Loving the wage slave life

pretty much this. At my school it's an almost universal phenomenon among international students. They literally run a cheating cartel that shares completed labs, tests, and homework. They even have a guy that they buy to take their tests for them.

the school doesn't take cheating very seriously - one time a guy was on his phone looking up answers in the middle of a test. the professor told him to put it away, and he did. a few minutes later he takes his phone back out and is looking up answers again.

it really is despicable how light universities are on cheating

Correction, startup is a code word for "tech company that doesn't make enough money to justify its valuation"

Or if you're a VC, it's "tech company whose current valuation is based on future value"

Snowden stopped being a whistleblower to me when the docs about the CIA's sigint spying gear was published.

There's a lot of docs that are useful for laypeople to improve their privacy, and then there's the ones that are going to do nothing but damage the spying capability of US intelligence agencies against nation-state adversaries.

If his sole goal was to damage the spying capability of US intelligence agencies, then he was a mole, not a whistle blower.

does this control for years of experience?

As a counter, joining a fraternity was the best decision I had ever made. After my first few years of college, I still had no social network and very few friends. After rushing a fraternity, I became part of an ultra-inclusive group and made friends and bonds that have lasted the rest of my life.

Don't rush a fraternity or sorority for the connections - you'll be sorely disappointed when you find out 95% of the other members are just normal people from a normal background. The few connections that may be valuable business-wise probably won't even be in your field.

Do rush a fraternity/sorority if you're looking to make friends and get the social college experience. If you have a history of having a hard time making friends, there are few options that are better than joining greek org.

Don't rush a fraternity/sorority if you have a tight schedule. Parent comment is serious, they're a huge time sink - especially during your pledging semester.

Do rush a fraternity/sorority if you want a head start in social/management experience. I can't tell you how hard it is to promote engineers into management positions because the vast majority don't have the social skills required to reward, pressure, or inspire their underlings. Getting involved in a fraternal organization will get you extremely valuable leadership experience, experience in how to organize people, and most importantly, experience in how to inspire people to do the things you need to get done.

I honestly can admit that I wouldn't be where I am today without the social skills I learned during my tenure in a fraternity. While the vast majority of bad press about the greek system are puff pieces meant to enrage people, do know that the greek system is not for everyone.

this is definitely my favorite reply so far

i know lots of people personally and professionally who will go their entire lives believing with absolute fervor that they're almost always right and that they're smart.

as a result, these people stagnate like nothing you've ever seen. their world views, technical aptitude, attitude, and intelligence end up frozen in time, unbending and ungrowing. i've noticed that literally the most dangerous thing someone can admit to themselves is that they're smart or a worldly person.

by actively recognizing and admitting your imperfections, you give yourself the room needed to grow.

there's probably a Marcus Aurelius/Socrates quote hidden in this comment somewhere but i cant find it for the life of me

recently, people have been fired from their jobs when their political affiliations/donations have been made public

i wouldn't put it past someone somewhere out there in the politically correct machine to fire/not hire someone because they admit that they watch porn

Overdrinking is a problem that I only think is going to get worse until there's some serious changes made to how drinking is treated legally.

When I was in college, I was a part of my fraternity's "risk management" team, a group of brothers whose only job is to stay sober during parties, find people who had drunk too much or more commonly people who had completely blacked out and hush them off away from the alcohol or to a safe part of the house where they could be watched for signs of alcohol poisoning and kept safe from being taken advantage of.

If there's any one trend I've noticed while I worked risk management at those parties, it was that the more taboo it is to drink alcohol, the more that people binge drink it. It's always the students whose parents were the most uptight about drinking or those who couldn't purchase alcohol yet who were the biggest binge drinkers and most common to pass out. There was one period during which there was a university crackdown on drinking at fraternity parties, and the most noticeable thing during the crackdown was that people would drink a -lot- more.

The amazing part about it was when people turned 21, it was like they became seasoned drinkers over night. People who had problems pacing themselves during every party would instantly turn into a moderate drinker once their 21st had passed.

I think it would be very interesting to see some studies done on the taboo of drinking and whether it changes people's likelihood to overdrink, because it seemed with every crackdown measure the local police force took against drinking at parties, the problem only got worse.

at the last conference I attended, ~9/10 of the engineers were using thinkpads and latitudes

personal examples are worthless because of the ridic small sample size

how about "Don't take health advice from econ grad students on the internet, take it from your doctor"

It doesn't help at all. Unless youre working with devices like FETs that are named using the electron flow convention, keeping the electron flow in mind is not terribly helpful.

However there are some subfields of electronics where it is helpful, but it is a niche thing.

because choosing a language for a commercial project is rarely about safety or effectiveness - it's about language popularity, availability of libraries, and replaceability of the programmers.