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I mean, I dunno. I attached my name to these things because these are opinions I do really hold. I could have easily done this under a pseudonym, but I didn't, and if I am going to attach my name to it (or an alias easily tied to m), then I can't really get upset that people associate these opinions to me.

Some of these opinions are ones I don't really hold anymore so deleting isn't a big deal. I will admit that some of the ones I am deleting upset me because I still do think that way.

I actually do appreciate the advice and blunt feedback, because you're right, I'm a little tired of affirmations. I honestly forgot about the tweets from years ago where I was pretty burnt out. I will be deleting those shortly.

The posts on LinkedIn should probably go too.

Yeah, none of this is bad advice at all.

In my normal personal life I tend to be pretty sarcastic and self-deprecating. My therapist says it might be a defense mechanism to avoid actually confronting problems; if you make a person you're talking to laugh then they usually think everything is fine and stop worrying about you.

I try not to do that during interviews. I don't think I'm coming off like I'm trying hard to be smart or brag, but it's very possible and likely that some level of my normal insecurities are bleeding through, and that happening even subtly might be enough to poison it for me.

I just think it has to be soft skills in a few particular cases; I always check my work after the interview to see if I got the questions right, almost always by writing a PlusCal spec and checking against the invariants that they specified. Sometimes my answer is wrong and doesn't satisfy the invariant and there's edge cases that I didn't consider, and when that's the case I'm not really surprised when I'm rejected.

But when I get the technical questions correct and TLA+ seems to agree with me, that's where I get really confused. I'm not typically interviewing for management positions, I'm interviewing for engineering jobs.

I used to be a lecturer and I did notice that that really helped my public speaking; I tend to talk really fast and being a lecturer forced me to learn how to speak slower, so it wouldn't surprise me that being a waiter or waitress would be helpful for this stuff.

I've always found it very irritating when I felt people were trying to force saying my name in a conversation, but I think you're probably right and I'm just a weird case.

Salary requirements are a valid point; in this most recent example my salary requirements were smack in the middle of the listed range so I don't think it was an issue for this particular one but it's possible that they feel I'm too expensive.

Yeah, at some level I know this; I've given interviews before and seen people get declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, and I usually give people this same advice when they're down.

Dunno, it's just hard not to take this a bit personally sometimes. As I said, if I felt like I knew what I was screwing up, then that would be something I could work on. It's not hard to buy textbooks and learn more about concurrency theory or distributed systems or something, or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that. It's extremely hard to solve a problem if you have no idea what the problem even is.

You're not wrong with anything you said though. I just need to keep applying and go from there.

Due to sleep apnea, I've avoided any alcohol for the last couple years.

I've never really had much of an issue saying what's on my mind, so I don't know that alcohol would really help me much, generally all alcohol does is make me louder and sleepy; according to my wife I don't really talk different when I'm drunk.

Oh I have a bunch of anecdotes about interviewers from BigCos that knew absolutely nothing about concurrent programming but thought that they knew a lot about concurrent programming and "corrected" my answers during the interview. There's a lot of confidently incorrect people at the staff level of big corporations, and it's a little concerning.

Before someone thinks I'm being cocky about me being right and them being wrong, after every interview involving concurrency I always write a PlusCal/TLA+ spec with my answer and use the model checker to make sure that my answer actually solved the problem correctly. This is why I can be confident that my answers were correct; I'm not smarter than anyone really, it's just that I try and verify my work.

> don't act on wild conjectures.

The issue is not just this one company. I have been at this for months with similar stories for a lot of them.

Sometimes I get the technical questions wrong, so that's fair enough, I understand why they'd decline me for that and as I said that's something that I can at least work on for myself by reading through textbooks and/or building sample projects to understand a concept a bit better.

A lot of the time, though, I won't get the technical questions wrong, and it's this recurring thing of "I really don't know why I'm constantly being declined".

Mock interviews are a pretty good idea though.

I don't think that the talk has been released on public YouTube yet (and they made it clear to not share the unlisted links publicly), but here is the posting: [url-redacted]

And the slides are available here: [url-redacted]

I'm afraid that my humor isn't really reflected in the slides, but imagine everything here is said kind of snarkily.

Java can be mostly as nice as Go, the BlockingQueues and Virtual Threads can get you pretty far, though they're not quite as nice as Go channels because there's no real way to select across multiple BlockingQueues like you can with Go channels.

Overall though, I think Java 21 is actually not too bad. Shockingly, I even sometimes have fun writing it.

It's actually more recent than I thought, looks like it was 2018. I would have sworn it was earlier but I can see the "sent" timestamp on ProtonMail.

I actually still have the email.

Here's what I sent:

    Hello! 

    I don't have a lot to say to you, but I just wanted to say that about a month ago, I started the transition away from Google, and the most obvious thing to switch was search.  

    DuckDuckGo has improved substantially since the last time I used it (around 2012), and it's to a point where the results are comparable, and sometimes even better than Google, so changing was pretty seamless. Now the only Google-thing I need to remove from my life is YouTube. 

    As a somewhat technical person, I was curious about one thing; I saw that the primary language for DuckDuckGo is Perl.  Without making any judgement here, was there a particular reason for that choice?  Also, are you planning to move to Perl 6? 

    Anyway, I appreciate you reading my email.  DuckDuckGo is a great service, and I hope you guys keep up the good work!

    -Thomas Gebert. 

Here was his response:

    Yes, though, the primary language is Perl. It was out of convenience and interest since that was my primary language when I started the project. There was/are a lot of libraries useful for text processing / web crawling. Now Python and other libraries have been similarly built up.

I always forget that DDG is written with Perl, even after I emailed yegg a million years ago asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which was nice of him.

I hear Raku is fun, I haven't used it, but I sort of swore a soft oath that I would never touch Perl again about a decade ago after having to debug some regex magic someone did. I'm assuming that once you get past the "hump", Perl becomes fun?

As someone with no credentials or official training, and someone who also works at a big megacorporation as an engineer, imposter syndrome hits me fairly hard, especially during interviews. It's really hard to compete with the people who actually have proof that they know what they're doing, and I'm usually interviewing for a job that has a strict requirement of a "bachelors in CS, Math or Physics, Masters preferred".

I've managed to pull it off somehow, but I rarely go a day where I don't wonder if I really should have as good of a job as I do.

Sure, you can email me at [email-redacted] (yes, really).

I built a basic YouTube clone in Erlang that I currently only use in my home network. I've often wondered how much I could make if I came up with some flashy logo and name and tried to monetize it.