Public posts preserved on my own site.
"Build string that eval()s to largest number given digits 1,2,3 and ops +, -, /, *"
Shit, I got this question on a programming interview a decade ago and bombed. Here a mathematician spends 30 minutes just going over the infotainment parts of the problem.
If I had to do this again, I would do montecarlo, the tool of choice of people who code better than they math.
Hey techies, in this job market where do you draw the line? These are all options I'm looking at for my job leads.
Archived poll
40 voters
@neurobashing They (C1) laid me off after 2 months (and now are recruiting me to work for them again!) They pay well, but there is no job security. The dysfunction bureaucracy is on par with some of the government shops, so yeah, it's all about coping strategies and hoping you get a reasonable supervisor.
@neurobashing 5 of my job leads are c1 (different req numbers, different lines of business), so if rule them out, my job hunt gets 2x harder.
Job hunting in DC:
I got 13 leads for 11 calendars of job searching.
9 leads are for the *same* 3 companies, Capital One, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
Sure feels like working in a one company town all of a sudden.
COBOL, RUP and YAML are efforts to deskill software development. But tooling has gotten better. Each tooling or innovation has two audiences, non-technical management (we can cut staff! hire temp workers! we can outsource to South Sudan!) and the people that use the tools. I create more value when I have a modern programming language, an IDE, unit tests, build servers.
Doesn't change that all of them are going to get justified for the first set of reasons.
* YAML DSLs, every attempt to deskill programming by inventing a YAML DSL so people can effortless declaratively write what their non-technical supervisor asked for.
The Honey browser extension stole $1 BILLION in affiliate marketing commissions
I don't see how #paypal 's reputation is going to survive this.
tired: greenfield
wired: 0-to-1
too true: greenfield to brownfield
In my current job as full time resume sender, easy-apply-clicker, interviewee, I kind of feel like I got imposter syndrome, this career as an unemployed person, it just isn't a good fit. I think I should pivot to being an employee as soon as I can.
#govtech North Korea hacks into gov't/corporate networks by taking remote jobs via a proxy in the US
More "this is why we can't have nice things"
I got a request from a recruiter to drop everything, study the Security+ and any AWS-* cert test, pass it and get back to them for a POSSIBILITY of getting hired February 1st. Oh, and do this on your own dime, pay for your own materials. Other recruiters are offering 6 months to pass.
I'm thinking, this is more like career advice than a recruiting call. If I succeeded in getting a cert, I'd apply to 10-20 companies asking for a cert.
My post on LinkedIn has been shown to 200,000 people. What a strange world that if you want a shot at getting a job, you need to be able to write a banger blog post that goes viral.
One quarter of a million views. Now I got minor stress writing new posts. "Is this post going to lead to a job offer if I get a quarter of a million views?"
What is a job application anyhow?
I search jobs and get likely possibilities (1000s! In the limit, all jobs).
Hiring managers search candidates and get likely possibilities (1000s! In the limit, everyone!).
The "application" just means you took advantage of a UI affordance that bumps your profile to the top and added a flag "this candidate said hi!"
If hiring managers are completely passive and don't search, then the application is important, it gets you in the search result (a very large one!). If the hiring manager is active, then they have their search results (possibly full of people with steady work) and the applicant search results (lot of weak matches).
Anyhow the scale makes me think the optimal strategy is different from what worked when applications were a stack of 20 sheets of paper.
Booz Allen stopped hiring dads because they are sick of hearing yet another obvious Booze joke. It's driving them to drink.
Virtue ethics is where you find all the words with good connotations in the dictionary and those are virtuous and good. Heroism! Bravery! Chile Rellenos! These are the quality that the nobles aspire to. Not poop, armpit or spittle.
I think virtue ethics was a word game, but it took 100s of years before philosophers started calling out word games as circular games of colloquial language.
Emojis are right to left stories. So backwards.
🏃🚶🧍
Fish are being chased right to left
🐟🐬🐠🦈
For anyone left here, periodic reminder I'm back on the job market. Here is me blogging about changing programming languages on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthewdeanmartin_changing-programming-languages-so-far-in-activity-7283137642328719363-IN4I?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Looking at the feed, post view counts from non-celebs are minuscule. This place is going to be like Threads, a bunch of big name brands and the content and interaction with the plebes will be gone.
My blog post on "Change Programming Languages" on LinkedIn.
This isn't going to get 125,000 views like my last post, but hey, it is not like I got any better billable work today.
Rust with life advice, dealing with anxiety. If you aren't getting Results, maybe you should `panic!`
I got an business idea, how much would you pay for a PhD to follow you around at the house and answer at length any question you could throw at them? Would you pay premium for a PhD you could dispatch to a research library before they respond?
Archived poll
1 voters
Devrel budgets for FOSS aren't what they used to be. In the good days you could get $0.00 for a conference, now you can barely scrape together 0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUsDk8wjRPs&ab_channel=KRAZAM
User driven design pitfall. You ask the user what they want.
customer: "I want substring searches across all fields. Also you're going to use OpenSearch"
me: "That is going to be really slow, it would be slow for any DB stack. OS has these features, that's really all you can ask for"
customer: "I want substring searches and fuzzy searches. I also want to be able to specify exact matches on any field"
me: "That will make it unbearably slow and the other one requires a different database (SQL)"
Anyhow, when technology choices get made first, the user driven design should be: "Here is a menu of what features are possible, pick some or all of them."
@Ardvaark That's how headless browsers are made.
Reminder, while I'm unemployed, my posts *do* reflect the official opinions of my employer and are endorsed in the strongest way possible.
Today's moment of job hunting zen:
Wanted, PhD lawyer to enforce sanctions, should know some Python
Good discussion of what mechanisms are driving the awful tech job market
A perfect storm of
- high interest rates
- glut of boot camps + masters programs + CS
- FAANG job "lock-in" where seniors lose millions $ if they job hop
- AI (doesn't matter if it works, it is discouraging co's from hiring)
- domestic and global remote-work outsourcing to India (and New Mexico, etc)
Hey #FediHire anyone got advice on breaking into a new programming language if you currently job hunting? Other than posting a github side-project, I got nothing.
Every language switch I ever made was in the middle of a job.
**Old conventional wisdom**: Recruiters earn their pay, they match you to a perfectly fine job.
**New conventional wisdom**: Recruiters are mostly useless to employers because there are 1000 apps per w2+benefits job. Recruiters carve out a niche snagging temp hourly workers who will be laid off in 3-6 months when the Jira epic is done.
Mostly informed by an interview with a company that does almost entirely short engagements and my last job.
Post on LinkedIn blew up because I posted in detail my thoughts about setting my asking salary. I thought I was going to save some time with recruiters, now I'm getting everyone's opinion.
In short, I think salaries are down 15% for your regular, experienced working developer.
You ever think, if we could get down to just one column of data, it wouldn't matter if it was tsv or csv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDr6_cMtfdA&ab_channel=KRAZAM
To price W2 hour work employers take the W2 with benefits and add in $10k and divide by something by about 2000. For 1099 they add another $16k and divide by 2000. But the unemployment rate for W2 hourly is going to be 5-10% and the unemployment for 1099 is 20-50%.
W2 hourly has a negative premium.
1099 has a negative premium.
I'm going to spend 3 months trying to get W2 with benefits before I give up and start taking just anything.
#rubyonrails job with single click apply
On the upside, being unemployed is #WFH5
#WakaTime is doing software developer centric twitter-clone
Washington, DC Area, Monday, January 6, 2025
Due to snow, Matt's Other Office* in the Washington, DC area is Closed. Maximum Unemployment is in effect.
* Starbucks and the library I guess.
People are buying up toilet paper. I think we're preparing for a shitstorm.
❯ rustc what do you think of me?
error: multiple input filenames provided (first two filenames are `what` and `do`)
I think it is avoiding talking about our relationship problem.
@AlSweigart (almost)Never used a named tuple sounds sensible...https://snarky.ca/dont-use-named-tuples-in-new-apis/
New year's resolutions
- Upgrade all my side projects to python 3.13
- Start using polyrepo tools
- Do a native code side project every month
- Use all of the bots and not just ChatGPT
- Use all of the social media platforms
- Make up some time limit rules for youtube