122 karma · joined September 19, 2013
Secondly, the process I went through back in the 70s, the position should be advertised for some length of time and if there is a qualified US applicant that person should be hired instead.
I turn 68 next month. 7 years ago I was cold-call recruited (they called, not me) and offered by three companies all wanting embedded systems expertise. All at the same time. Never rains but it pours, eh?
Two were boring embedded Linux. One was fun gaming console OS. Audio SDK and DSP, specifically (although I was not pointed there for a good year after hiring). I'm still there. And the interesting bit is - I had never coded Audio or DSP before. They liked my technology surfing history, that wide 'T' shaped profile on LI. And, clearly, age had nothing to do with it. Experience, proven adaptability, and quick at learning new stuff did. Is my theory, anyway. But that is not something one can decide to add to the CV in a panic after the fact of layoffs. It starts in ones' teens and never stops.
But then, this is an established Japanese company in Seattle. Two major differences to SV start-ups.
Fascicles is a new effort by Knuth and is more hardware oriented.
I cannot read this article. It reflows differently every time I scroll the page and the text I was reading goes .... somewhere. It is painful. iOS 8.4 Safari on iPad Air. - may be OK on desktop browsers. But I only go there for work these days.
So in that sense it is a self-referential demonstration of the problem with ADHD focus. Also a downvote on reflow logic these days. HTML5 has got too clever. Reflow on scrolling? wtf!
(edit). OK. I got around it. Last paragraph says it all for me. That hits what NT's cannot grasp: it's not a character defect, its not a "simple" matter of will power. FWIW, I have hit upon a way around some of the will power issues, the important ones like giving up smoking and losing weight to get out of pre-diabetic region: a form of mental Judo based on visualization and meditation. It's slow - can take a year - but it works. This after 20 years of trying using conventional will power based methods. I have a stack of Smoke-Ender certificates to attest to that.
DOORKNOB!
Why not C++? you might ask. The year was 1988. I needed to run on Macs as well as PCs. The only company advertising C++ for Mac at the time was AT&T (the purely Preprocessor implementation). When I called them to order a copy they said "Really? C++ for Mac? You're only the sixth person ever to ask for it, so we have not done it yet". At the same time, Objective C was similarly not available in Windows.
Habits around when I sleep, wake, eat, and what I eat. Interruptions to habits result in drop-outs, things get forgotten watch, lunch bag, keys, appointments, ...).
Medicatio: be careful exploring what works nd what does not. Ritalin, Adderal, Concerta, are basically Speed, albeit our different brain chemistry reacts to it differently than neurotypical brains. Aderal puts me to sleep. COncerta turned me into an a-hole with an obsessive focus on coding. Three months of hyperfocus. I did an insane amount of coding, and it worked too, but ... Btw, if you use that phrase with your doctor, check his spelling. My record turned out to have "obsession with codeine" in it. Got it caught soon by my therapist and corrected OK, so hopefuly no harm done.
Ritalin is working, after a while spent varying dosage to find a sweet spot. It is good for that, fast acting, fast to clear out, and tiny dosage tablets at 5mg. My sweet spot is two a day, one starting work and one halfway through. At three, my wife complains I tap and grind my teeth too loudly.
Therapist. Alternitvely in ADHD cse know as Life Coach. My saving. I had spent 63 yers developing random baroque and unconsciou compensations to cover up my embarraassment t not even knowing what it was I would get accused of - normal social epecttion for example. I have time blindness - can't plan, don't anticipate, don't remember, or if I do there's no timestamp. It is so bad my compensation for that was to become very very good at "making it up as I go". Including in programming. No good for college, makes me rather useless for the typical line programmer job, but there are a few niches that really need it, where there are no existing patterns or known solutions, for example. As a result, a 50 year career doing stuff nobody else has done before. Always inventing. Almost allways - a few times when I was not doing that, ranging from boring to painfully hellish.
Other than that, what pretty much everybody else has said. For making money, you are best off finding work in which you can easily enter and enjoy hyperfocus. For us folks on this forum, that would probably be programming in some form.
I have been very lucky also in employers and cofounders who, while maybe not knowing about the ADHD (I didn't myself, after all, until recently), had enough confidence in my results to let me get there in my own way, displacement behaviours and all.
Simon Lavington wrote a book about the Elliott Brothers company, one of the earliest UK computer manufacturers. They did a lot of stuff. I worked there for a couple of years at their end-of-life (ICL mergers) on the 4100 series, and some prototype peripherals.
http://www.amazon.com/Moving-Targets-Elliott-Automation-Comp...
If Klein bottles catch your fanvcy, there's another and very different artist doing metal and glass algorithmic artwork in 3D printers: Bathsheba (at http://bathsheba.com). I had Cliff's bottle sitting on top of her laser etched known universe cube at work. Each contains the other. Too bad nobody there gets the joke. But I saw the same combo in a documentary about String Theory, in one of the scientists' office, so I'm not alone :)
So, YMMV.
I'm 67, wrote my first program in 1963, been employed in computers since 1967, traversed the entire stack from hardware through designing 4G graphical programming languages, with a focus (if it can be called that) on embedded Real Time dataflow systems. A classification that maps well onto many kinds of products. I've never been tempted into management. Yes, I don't have the first ten years in my resume. But at the same time I've never got a job by submitting my resume through the front door. Never. Even my first (at a computer manufacturer, as a commissioning tech) was by referral. My current one via an internal recruiter who liked my generalist CV on Linked In and called me. Others by coworkers who moved on and called me along. You need to be visible, to be found, to be reckoned good, and to develop some kind of rep. In my case, at the junction between hardware and software. The other thing you need is to always keep learning.
Good luck!
No-one. Well then. Creds are perhaps in order.
So, now - 50 years experience, still working, very senior level tech equivalent to management, hardware and software designer from transistor days through graphical programming platforms. I started at the bit level and grew from there alongside the technology, all the way. Still surfing it.
At this age I think that stands for something. If I were no longer working or able to cut it you might have a point, but I've never got a job by sending in a resume - always by reference. I am still a valuable player today. My paycheck tells me that. Stuff in the field tells me that. Everyone I've ever worked with tells me that - and back it up with investment and salary. Two industries know my name (Datacomms and Music). To my surprise I built up a solid rep and no longer need to keep quiet abut stuff.
Consequential emergent philosophy of the Art.
I also think there's a difference between a ramble and an attempt at linearizing a parallel multi-dimensional thought. English is not good for this. Nor does ADHD help.
Knuth's works are also a multi-dimensional parallel linearization. Similar to though differently presented than Minsky's Society of Mind. Though they are both far better than I at doing that. The value comes after internalizing them, where your mind rebuilds the multi-dimensional structure and the interconnections become useful.
This might come as a surprise, but programming is also a multi-dimensional, parallel, multi-threaded mental activity. Internal knowledge organization of similar form is essential. It is fractal too, no depths too detailed or un-needed, no heights irrelevant, all present at the same time.
If you disagree about the need to know the fundamentals, well, good on yer, but you limit yourself. Tell me how it went when you are 67.
Hoping for Moore's Law to save your performance is not the way to do things.
Knowing about what goes into an ISA, about how operations map onto the hardware, about cacheing, memory virtualization and architectures, about in-order and out-order execution, multi-processor scheduling and synchronization, communications basics (on top of which all other protocols are built), distributed processing gotchas, etc etc, all play their part in writing efficient and effective code wherever.
Languages are tools, all are Turing Complete and can do no more than any other; which to choose for any function is a matter of convention and convenience. And what coding style to use is convention, and how to integrate with other programmers, how to manage projects, "Best Practices" and Patterns, all are conventions, and the degree to which they make the difference is a function of the quality of the involved programmers abilities, not a function of the style chosen. Hence my characterization of all the above as "Elaborations and Decorations". Most of the earlier hardware list also fit into that characterization, but the idiosyncrasies of each ISA and core architecture can have enormous impact on the final products' performance and need proper attention.
It is sad that after 50 years in the business I still know how these things work, and how to make them sing. It should not be so. But the technology has only gotten smaller and faster and has more immediate storage available and faster I/O and more elaborations and accelerations. No fundamental changes. Not that it doesn't blow my mind every so often, that what was a mere pipe-dream in the 60's is today mundane, or even so ubiquitous its underpinning have faded into the background. But it was pretty much already all down on paper in the 60's, just waiting on the capacity of technology SOA to catch up.
The list presented contained very little if any fundamentals. And without the fundamentals, the knowledge garnered is rote, founded upon shifting sands. Thus, I posit the books from which one learned those fundamentals should occupy top place in any such list. The knowledge garnered shapes every future thought on the subject, shapes every problem solving approach, shapes how you think about computers and computing at an internalized level.
In 50 years of commercial (if not commerce per se) experience (and continuing), every hire I've had the pleasure to work with has them, and every hire that frustrated and produced bad, unreadable, buggy, and inefficient code, did not.
That we have today billions of transistors in the space once occupied by one, and clock cycles thousands of times higher, and communication rates trillions of times higher (potentially anyway), is no excuse for not understanding how it all fits together. Today we need to do more with what we have, and so resources are always limited. Possibly a derivative of Parkinson's Law at work. Instead all too often I see bloat and the hope that tomorrows' machines will fix things. Tomorrow never comes, it seems.
As IIRC Piccasso (Dali?) is reputed to have told one young hopeful: "Come back to me when you can show me you can draw a straight line. Then I might believe those squiggles mean something".
Somewhat unintuitive too, but there it is. Low filter threshold and hyperfocus co-existing in the same brain. I'm waiting for the fMRI results on what is going on here.