I've probably dabbled in that many too, but I'm not that great a coder and I'm certainly nowhere near as I thought I was at 19-23. It may be your soft skills getting in the way. "I'm right, you're an idiot," is sometimes an accurate viewpoint better kept quiet. This is especially true at big companies.
I'll tell you that I've known about ten unbelievable programmers, and five of them would never have said, "I have programmed in over 20 languages." Of the other five, I am absolutely sure two are regularly unemployed and the last three aren't unbelievably famous.
Of course, you're welcome to call me an idiot all you like. I majored in Philosophy, I can take it. AND I work primarily in VBScript, meaning I have developed balls of steel from being kicked in them again and again and again.
As a side note, your resume is impressive, and if you moved you would have no trouble finding more interesting work. Not many do software development in Medford. I can think of three or four companies offhand in downtown Portland that would be completely happy to have you. A few tips on the resume:
"Minor Tech Support for legacy apps I have written," should probably not be on your resume. Don't tell anyone about things you will end up doing in your own free time. Are they supposed to pay you for it?
Life goals make poor career objectives. Pick something you'd like to do (in your and my case, "Work with a small, tight knit team to produce revolutionary technology grown out of the extensive background I have developed with a lifetime of computer work and training," might be appropriate, except I omitted the lifetime of training)
Some of your wording can be compressed. A good resume is MAX 2 pages long, and your HTML one seems to be about four.
I'd suggest dividing your resume differently - put a summary of your skills at the top, then divide it by important project.
Classes are great to have taken, but they don't mean much elsewhere. Link to source code if it's particularly brilliant, in an addendum to your resume called, "More interesting code projects."
Link to projects if possible, or make the source code available. This can be done in an Office document of any type you choose. Throw some code samples in text format on your website. Remember to document these samples a whole bunch.
Overall, your resume reads a little like a tech reference book; this is kinda bad.
As a disclaimer, I don't know what kind of companies you're applying to. Generally, you tailor your resume to the position you apply for. They want Java? Write a resume that shows all the things you've done with Java. They want C-based driver work? That's when you say, "I loves me some math." But don't complain when people pad their resume; just live up to yours in your interview.
Gah. I have so much karma to burn that it's amazing, and I like to think it has nothing to do with how fast I post. I'm delusional, yes, but if you really want to get that 'first actually well prepared post' in, you might as well just shell out twenty bucks and do it for a while until it gets old. Eventually, you just shrug it off and say, "Man, someone's gonna say THAT."
I only karmah0 when I'm really tired or bored, now. Which is good, I shouldn't be doing it I should be doing the physics lab I'm avoiding.
Hrm. Well, I did RTFA, and it appears that the guy who wrote the article was the complete nutjob. WTF is the deal with not going to the source of this commentary in the first place? I mean, I read the article and immediately thought, "Gee, so.... Um... This is the side of the guy who might get his certification revoked. Where's the other side?"
I can't tell who you're calling a nutjob here because it's obvious to me that anyone who thinks / cares that weathermen have their climatologist certificate or not is already a complete nutjob. In fact, there's a whole bunch of nutjob to go around here, and I don't know why I wrote this comment, except possibly because I've caught it... Oh noes.
It was inevitable, I guess. And suddenly I've written the most disjointed comment I've written in weeks. I think reading that article actually managed to make me stupider.
Nah. It's been proven that learning things like SQL flat out increase mental instability.
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Anyone that uses VB for much more than a GUI with a little data interface is clearly off their rocker. I'd only do such a thing under extreme duress and an exceptionally large pile of money. And I'm absolutely certain that I'd end up with some monstrosity I never wanted to see again. VB is the right tool for certain extremely limited jobs. Not much more, can't be much less. But it's not completely useless, otherwise noone would use it. It comes bundled and people cobble their own manky crap together out of it inbetween having two people trying to communicate and a department having enough budget to buy a third party tool. It's easy to pick up and learn, and it comes built right on in.
Those are all the advantages. Whatever its problems as a coding language, it's still there and it is still going to be there long after anything 99.999% of the coders on the planet write bites the dust. This is not a quality, this is a fact. And getting used to it is a sad, lonely, disheartening road. Paved with easy jobs that pay a lot better than inbound phone support.
Um.... He didn't say he was competent in the language at the end of that time. In fact, I'd bet that by the time he had learned to pick up languages quickly he was capable of basic communication within a few weeks at most.......
The point was that most Americans are irrationally fearful of picking up additional languages, and should not be. Nothing more. I agree, and I bet you do too.....
As an exception to the rule, I think I should mention that if you go to another country to teach English, you will not learn anywhere near as quickly. It is much easier to slide along if everyone knows you're in the country to teach people to speak your language.
I met a man whose German was worse than mine despite having married a German woman.... It was weird.
If the collaberation features were easy, they would be extremely well-used in the department I work with. My guess, though, is that they will go unused in most situations. The complexity factor is going to be a bit weird to deal with.
The amusing thing is that eMusic has been around longer than the iTunes store, as far as I remember. Different business model, too. Quite impressive.
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hrm. Well, I seem to remember an article at Joel Spolsky's Site about why he thought VB was a decent tool in ways. Remember, it has no memory management; I've done memory management, and I never want to do it again unless rains of fish will occur. It's not that it's hard, it's just that it's silly for me to do. How can you possibly feel differently?
Additionally, if VBA didn't exist you'd have to write C++ to do simple macro'ing in Office products. It's profitable, but it bites the big one as far as interesting programming jobs are concerned. Trust me on that one.
Um.... If you have a phone for only outbound calls that are free anywhere it works, you still need a land line, and in a place like SF where you've always got WiFi, there's not a whole lot of dropping.
Make it so it 'just works' when you're around your peers and 90% of the rest of the time, and the blocks to the technology working elsewhere will iron themselves out. Sell it on the music sharing side - and make that work like a charm - and then add in phone functionality. Phone part is pretty much free, to be honest; it's just more networking software. Use Google Chat if you don't like Skype. I mean, make a versatile device then diversify into less complex-working equipment. The polar opposite of Apple's development model, but it could work.
Don't get everyone else to buy in, just do your own thing and go from there. Pick companies that are making money and working against hurting anyone. It's not like the market is an extremely limited commodity and there are only twenty stocks included. Buffett made his money picking companies that did things he could understand extremely well. Saying, "Oh gosh, this moral judgment thing is too hard and we can't figure it out despite having billions of dollars," is a complete cop out, and a statement about exactly what kind of approach it apparently takes to acquire said billions of dollars. While I'm completely aware of that being the way the world works, I don't feel that saying, "I think buying myself a clean conscience should be easier than it is, please stop pestering me about flaws in my plan," is a valid response to the assertion that you may be doing more damage than good when using the 'tried and true' methods you used to make money...
I stopped believing in the market being rational years ago. Approximately 1999, to be exact. All I've got left is my naivete and knowledge of basic economics; give people money and they will continue doing what they are doing, don't give them money and they may try to impress you.
That's BS. Companies watch their stock, and if more people are willing to buy it it goes up. Socially responsible investment means there is more demand and value for the stocks in the market which are responsible, and less for the companies which aren't. Passive and blind investment means that you are actively assisting in the misanthropic things going on.
People trying to do good things can make money too, why not invest in them? It will end up helping them out, just a little, and you won't profit from destruction. I am amused by the idea that big companies are just too stupid to see everything they are doing, but it's partially an incentives thing - if you are going to lose a huge investor and the stock takes a 5 point hit because some nimwit dumped oil in a pond, you're more likely to fire him and prosecute to make an example.
And one would think that the power of being the largest endowed charity in the world would cause those in charge of it to question their results. I'm disappointed, but not surprised. How much of a surprise is it, really, that it requires a different personality and approach to be a good humanitarian instead of a good businessman? Business is complex, but there's an impartial judge at the end, in little black numbers at the bottom. People, generally, do not live by little black numbers. Successful businessmen often do, and one of the fundamental problems with our system is that living this kind of life does not mean you play well with others.
It is quite possible that the Gates Foundation, by being a completely passive investor with so much clout, will do more damage than good. Enough passive investment leads to completely profit-driven organizations, which tend towards running amok all over the people they get involved with.
I now consider this a foundation built upon unstable, rotten ground.
If the hard drives were available, this would be a possibility.
Amusingly enough, once you install Skype on a little device like that, and go to Starbucks, your device no longer needs that silly old cell-phone provider. Sure, it's not that reliable, because you can't get wifi everywhere, but if you want to find an iPod killer, there it is. Apple's too big to gamble it all on a completely open device like that. If a small company just built it, and damned the torpedoes, (the MPAA would have fits for the next decade) they could sell millions of them.
It's coming, but it's not going to come from big corporate because that would entail too much of a fight. Yet another reason for me to despise large companies - they won't make me what I want, despite the fact that I'm willing to spend upwards of a week's income to buy it. That's a decent sized figure, considering.
Look at it this way - the first guy to figure out how to hack apart the iPhone and make it 'iSquirt' back and forth with no limitations gets to sell this software for 20$ to every schmoe on the block. That's 20 million a year, if Steve-o is correct.
But it is a race. And it is going to be won by SOMEONE. There is zero chance that phone is not going to get modded. The question is how long it takes for someone to do it properly....
Oh, no, I don't LIKE the interface, especially as crippled by Verizon. I do like the voice activation feature. Which qualifies as part of the interface to me.
Other than that, you're right. The rest of the interface is going to be blown away by Apple. Easy, hands down, no question.
I spent 350$ on my iPod. 150$ was spent (woo Christmas) on my Razr. If a device manages to combine the functionality of both pieces of equipment, it's worth it.
The iPhone does both more and less; it probably beats the snot out of my Razr. However, it also has less than ten percent the storage capacity of my iPod. Ergo, I will not be buying an iPhone until there is one that has 80gb of space and an interface as good as my Razr's. That includes, of course, voice activation; which was not included in Jobs' speech. Perhaps that's coming, but I didn't hear about it.
I'm a contractor because I don't lie that well about my motivations. On the good side, I get paid a little more for my insolence. I just have to figure out how to provide my own benefits.
Lying in general is pretty endemic, if you ask me. I'm referring to the people out of the 50% who weren't lying that honestly are trying to get the job they think they are qualified for and just don't quite have it yet. I think I'm in that part of the group, but not completely sure. I know I don't lie on my resume, and I know I get interviews where the interviewer wishes I was a little smarter in way X. I wish they'd either say, "Look. Go get a full CS degree and we'll beg you to work for us," or, "You know, if you just took courses X, Y, and Z on theory, we're pretty sure you'd do just fine around here," or even, "Look. You were in the dotcom's, and you were probably a decent programmer as a kid, but you're a little too old now and would be better off just sticking with boring-ass QA until you finish your engineering degree - good luck with that, by the way, seeing as we think you're probably a moron." Instead I never hear from them again and end up frustrated.
But I certainly know that when there's a job I want and know I could grow into just as fast as someone with more experience than me, with twice the motivation, I'm undeniably bitter when I just hear, 'no, yeah, quit calling us we don't think this ONE is the right one,' from the sterilized mouthpiece which is a professional recruiter.
You don't owe anyone anything. Period. However, you are missing what I like to call, "Enlightened Self Interest." If someone is headed in the wrong direction, and beating their head against the wall, and you can see it in the course of a half hour, it is a very good use of your time to spend five or ten minutes pushing them in the right direction. They, since they want a job from you, are likely to listen to you. If they are 'not anywhere near there,' and really motivated, they may just get in gear. And come back a few years later to thank you and prove themselves.
The only situation I can imagine where I would be so bitter about someone wasting my time when I asked them to do so is in the case where they lied to convince me to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've probably dabbled in that many too, but I'm not that great a coder and I'm certainly nowhere near as I thought I was at 19-23. It may be your soft skills getting in the way. "I'm right, you're an idiot," is sometimes an accurate viewpoint better kept quiet. This is especially true at big companies.
I'll tell you that I've known about ten unbelievable programmers, and five of them would never have said, "I have programmed in over 20 languages." Of the other five, I am absolutely sure two are regularly unemployed and the last three aren't unbelievably famous.
Of course, you're welcome to call me an idiot all you like. I majored in Philosophy, I can take it. AND I work primarily in VBScript, meaning I have developed balls of steel from being kicked in them again and again and again.
As a side note, your resume is impressive, and if you moved you would have no trouble finding more interesting work. Not many do software development in Medford. I can think of three or four companies offhand in downtown Portland that would be completely happy to have you. A few tips on the resume:
"Minor Tech Support for legacy apps I have written," should probably not be on your resume. Don't tell anyone about things you will end up doing in your own free time. Are they supposed to pay you for it?
Life goals make poor career objectives. Pick something you'd like to do (in your and my case, "Work with a small, tight knit team to produce revolutionary technology grown out of the extensive background I have developed with a lifetime of computer work and training," might be appropriate, except I omitted the lifetime of training)
Some of your wording can be compressed. A good resume is MAX 2 pages long, and your HTML one seems to be about four.
I'd suggest dividing your resume differently - put a summary of your skills at the top, then divide it by important project.
Classes are great to have taken, but they don't mean much elsewhere. Link to source code if it's particularly brilliant, in an addendum to your resume called, "More interesting code projects."
Link to projects if possible, or make the source code available. This can be done in an Office document of any type you choose. Throw some code samples in text format on your website. Remember to document these samples a whole bunch.
Overall, your resume reads a little like a tech reference book; this is kinda bad.
As a disclaimer, I don't know what kind of companies you're applying to. Generally, you tailor your resume to the position you apply for. They want Java? Write a resume that shows all the things you've done with Java. They want C-based driver work? That's when you say, "I loves me some math." But don't complain when people pad their resume; just live up to yours in your interview.
LED's are better than Fluorescent lights anyways.
Gah. I have so much karma to burn that it's amazing, and I like to think it has nothing to do with how fast I post. I'm delusional, yes, but if you really want to get that 'first actually well prepared post' in, you might as well just shell out twenty bucks and do it for a while until it gets old. Eventually, you just shrug it off and say, "Man, someone's gonna say THAT."
I only karmah0 when I'm really tired or bored, now. Which is good, I shouldn't be doing it I should be doing the physics lab I'm avoiding.
Hrm. Well, I did RTFA, and it appears that the guy who wrote the article was the complete nutjob. WTF is the deal with not going to the source of this commentary in the first place? I mean, I read the article and immediately thought, "Gee, so.... Um... This is the side of the guy who might get his certification revoked. Where's the other side?"
I can't tell who you're calling a nutjob here because it's obvious to me that anyone who thinks / cares that weathermen have their climatologist certificate or not is already a complete nutjob. In fact, there's a whole bunch of nutjob to go around here, and I don't know why I wrote this comment, except possibly because I've caught it... Oh noes.
It was inevitable, I guess. And suddenly I've written the most disjointed comment I've written in weeks. I think reading that article actually managed to make me stupider.
(Stupidity is the most painful thing in my life. Your sig is completely wrong.)
Nah. It's been proven that learning things like SQL flat out increase mental instability.
Anyone that uses VB for much more than a GUI with a little data interface is clearly off their rocker. I'd only do such a thing under extreme duress and an exceptionally large pile of money. And I'm absolutely certain that I'd end up with some monstrosity I never wanted to see again. VB is the right tool for certain extremely limited jobs. Not much more, can't be much less. But it's not completely useless, otherwise noone would use it. It comes bundled and people cobble their own manky crap together out of it inbetween having two people trying to communicate and a department having enough budget to buy a third party tool. It's easy to pick up and learn, and it comes built right on in.
Those are all the advantages. Whatever its problems as a coding language, it's still there and it is still going to be there long after anything 99.999% of the coders on the planet write bites the dust. This is not a quality, this is a fact. And getting used to it is a sad, lonely, disheartening road. Paved with easy jobs that pay a lot better than inbound phone support.
Um.... He didn't say he was competent in the language at the end of that time. In fact, I'd bet that by the time he had learned to pick up languages quickly he was capable of basic communication within a few weeks at most.......
The point was that most Americans are irrationally fearful of picking up additional languages, and should not be. Nothing more. I agree, and I bet you do too.....
As an exception to the rule, I think I should mention that if you go to another country to teach English, you will not learn anywhere near as quickly. It is much easier to slide along if everyone knows you're in the country to teach people to speak your language.
I met a man whose German was worse than mine despite having married a German woman.... It was weird.
If the collaberation features were easy, they would be extremely well-used in the department I work with. My guess, though, is that they will go unused in most situations. The complexity factor is going to be a bit weird to deal with.
The amusing thing is that eMusic has been around longer than the iTunes store, as far as I remember. Different business model, too. Quite impressive.
Hrm. Well, I seem to remember an article at Joel Spolsky's Site about why he thought VB was a decent tool in ways. Remember, it has no memory management; I've done memory management, and I never want to do it again unless rains of fish will occur. It's not that it's hard, it's just that it's silly for me to do. How can you possibly feel differently?
Additionally, if VBA didn't exist you'd have to write C++ to do simple macro'ing in Office products. It's profitable, but it bites the big one as far as interesting programming jobs are concerned. Trust me on that one.
Um.... If you have a phone for only outbound calls that are free anywhere it works, you still need a land line, and in a place like SF where you've always got WiFi, there's not a whole lot of dropping.
Make it so it 'just works' when you're around your peers and 90% of the rest of the time, and the blocks to the technology working elsewhere will iron themselves out. Sell it on the music sharing side - and make that work like a charm - and then add in phone functionality. Phone part is pretty much free, to be honest; it's just more networking software. Use Google Chat if you don't like Skype. I mean, make a versatile device then diversify into less complex-working equipment. The polar opposite of Apple's development model, but it could work.
Don't get everyone else to buy in, just do your own thing and go from there. Pick companies that are making money and working against hurting anyone. It's not like the market is an extremely limited commodity and there are only twenty stocks included. Buffett made his money picking companies that did things he could understand extremely well. Saying, "Oh gosh, this moral judgment thing is too hard and we can't figure it out despite having billions of dollars," is a complete cop out, and a statement about exactly what kind of approach it apparently takes to acquire said billions of dollars. While I'm completely aware of that being the way the world works, I don't feel that saying, "I think buying myself a clean conscience should be easier than it is, please stop pestering me about flaws in my plan," is a valid response to the assertion that you may be doing more damage than good when using the 'tried and true' methods you used to make money...
Hey, we should just throw massive amounts of money at all our problems then. Like we're succeeding so well with in Iraq.
I stopped believing in the market being rational years ago. Approximately 1999, to be exact. All I've got left is my naivete and knowledge of basic economics; give people money and they will continue doing what they are doing, don't give them money and they may try to impress you.
That's BS. Companies watch their stock, and if more people are willing to buy it it goes up. Socially responsible investment means there is more demand and value for the stocks in the market which are responsible, and less for the companies which aren't. Passive and blind investment means that you are actively assisting in the misanthropic things going on.
People trying to do good things can make money too, why not invest in them? It will end up helping them out, just a little, and you won't profit from destruction. I am amused by the idea that big companies are just too stupid to see everything they are doing, but it's partially an incentives thing - if you are going to lose a huge investor and the stock takes a 5 point hit because some nimwit dumped oil in a pond, you're more likely to fire him and prosecute to make an example.
And one would think that the power of being the largest endowed charity in the world would cause those in charge of it to question their results. I'm disappointed, but not surprised. How much of a surprise is it, really, that it requires a different personality and approach to be a good humanitarian instead of a good businessman? Business is complex, but there's an impartial judge at the end, in little black numbers at the bottom. People, generally, do not live by little black numbers. Successful businessmen often do, and one of the fundamental problems with our system is that living this kind of life does not mean you play well with others.
It is quite possible that the Gates Foundation, by being a completely passive investor with so much clout, will do more damage than good. Enough passive investment leads to completely profit-driven organizations, which tend towards running amok all over the people they get involved with.
I now consider this a foundation built upon unstable, rotten ground.
If the hard drives were available, this would be a possibility.
Amusingly enough, once you install Skype on a little device like that, and go to Starbucks, your device no longer needs that silly old cell-phone provider. Sure, it's not that reliable, because you can't get wifi everywhere, but if you want to find an iPod killer, there it is. Apple's too big to gamble it all on a completely open device like that. If a small company just built it, and damned the torpedoes, (the MPAA would have fits for the next decade) they could sell millions of them.
It's coming, but it's not going to come from big corporate because that would entail too much of a fight. Yet another reason for me to despise large companies - they won't make me what I want, despite the fact that I'm willing to spend upwards of a week's income to buy it. That's a decent sized figure, considering.
Look at it this way - the first guy to figure out how to hack apart the iPhone and make it 'iSquirt' back and forth with no limitations gets to sell this software for 20$ to every schmoe on the block. That's 20 million a year, if Steve-o is correct.
But it is a race. And it is going to be won by SOMEONE. There is zero chance that phone is not going to get modded. The question is how long it takes for someone to do it properly....
Oh, no, I don't LIKE the interface, especially as crippled by Verizon. I do like the voice activation feature. Which qualifies as part of the interface to me.
Other than that, you're right. The rest of the interface is going to be blown away by Apple. Easy, hands down, no question.
I look at it this way:
I spent 350$ on my iPod. 150$ was spent (woo Christmas) on my Razr. If a device manages to combine the functionality of both pieces of equipment, it's worth it.
The iPhone does both more and less; it probably beats the snot out of my Razr. However, it also has less than ten percent the storage capacity of my iPod. Ergo, I will not be buying an iPhone until there is one that has 80gb of space and an interface as good as my Razr's. That includes, of course, voice activation; which was not included in Jobs' speech. Perhaps that's coming, but I didn't hear about it.
I'm a contractor because I don't lie that well about my motivations. On the good side, I get paid a little more for my insolence. I just have to figure out how to provide my own benefits.
Lying in general is pretty endemic, if you ask me. I'm referring to the people out of the 50% who weren't lying that honestly are trying to get the job they think they are qualified for and just don't quite have it yet. I think I'm in that part of the group, but not completely sure. I know I don't lie on my resume, and I know I get interviews where the interviewer wishes I was a little smarter in way X. I wish they'd either say, "Look. Go get a full CS degree and we'll beg you to work for us," or, "You know, if you just took courses X, Y, and Z on theory, we're pretty sure you'd do just fine around here," or even, "Look. You were in the dotcom's, and you were probably a decent programmer as a kid, but you're a little too old now and would be better off just sticking with boring-ass QA until you finish your engineering degree - good luck with that, by the way, seeing as we think you're probably a moron." Instead I never hear from them again and end up frustrated.
But I certainly know that when there's a job I want and know I could grow into just as fast as someone with more experience than me, with twice the motivation, I'm undeniably bitter when I just hear, 'no, yeah, quit calling us we don't think this ONE is the right one,' from the sterilized mouthpiece which is a professional recruiter.
You don't owe anyone anything. Period. However, you are missing what I like to call, "Enlightened Self Interest." If someone is headed in the wrong direction, and beating their head against the wall, and you can see it in the course of a half hour, it is a very good use of your time to spend five or ten minutes pushing them in the right direction. They, since they want a job from you, are likely to listen to you. If they are 'not anywhere near there,' and really motivated, they may just get in gear. And come back a few years later to thank you and prove themselves.
The only situation I can imagine where I would be so bitter about someone wasting my time when I asked them to do so is in the case where they lied to convince me to do it.
Actually, I think YOU do. His cost-benefit analysis is pretty accurate from my data too.