killface

Yup. The last album I bought was one where I couldn't rip a couple tracks and put them on my Diamond Rio (how's that for a flashback?). Then they came out with the "You didn't buy this song, you bought a license to play this song on one media type..."

And I've been digital since then.

I like how you're downvoted for pointing out something very obvious, but not 100% pro-israel.

You exhausted those a decade ago. Now other states are shipping water to Cali, and those states are starting to have their own issues.

blame the brits, not the americans.

I completely agree. This is tantamount to spying on users. It's basically equivalent to some random game reading your entire contacts list and sending it to the company.

That seems like an incredibly petty way to view it.

Apple's not out to get you. In fact, I'm glad they did this. That iHasApp looks creepy as hell, and it pisses me off that other devs were using it to basically spy on me. It reduces my trust in all apps.

That would be nice, huh? I've worked for plenty of places where the dev manager was a glorified scrum master and PM

Yes, if there's some place to move to get away from people who think they're the center of the universe, Orange County was definitely the way to go ;)

Always take quality of life into account.

SV has more opportunities for engineers/entrepreneurs, but then you're up against people who have done a lot more of that, plus the outrageous housing costs in the area. Oh, and the crazy traffic.

I was living in a 'burb and moved back to the city for quality of life. Being able to walk to things (grocery store, restaurants, bars) was more important to me than having a bunch of land. Also, my commute is now 5-10 minutes instead of 30-90. The cost of it was a smaller house on a much smaller plot of land, but we decided that's a sacrifice we're willing to make.

All great points. I work with a consulting company, and we have a lot of really great people. They come to us because we pay fair (good hourly rate on w2 (paid overtime) + benefits), we work with a wide variety of companies and industries, and we're not looking to sell out or get acquired.

But then you deal with the wage problem -- managers (especially ones without a tech background) are often of the "my reports make less than me" school of thought. More money = more power = more respect. So when a manager who makes $90k/yr is talking with a 30yo who wants $150k/yr, he might be insulted or put off. And let's not forget that a lot of developers probably should be in the 200-250 range.

The only thing to look for in a company, in my eyes, is how well they pay their employees. They can glad-hand all they want about open workspaces and ping-pong tables and catered lunches, but none of that matters. Show us the money.

Especially when a lot of the big companies are facing heat (and/or lawsuits) for artificially capping engineer salaries because they didn't want to pay more?

Because "diversity" is the catchphrase of the day when it comes to programming and most technology in general. Some butthurt people see a bunch of white males sitting on computers and making really good money, and wonder why we can't have moms do it at home part-time while taking care of kids (it's just typing, right?), or why we can't just hire 1,000 minimum wage people of (color|poor economic means|criminal backgrounds|dragon-kin) to hack something together.

Our industry is seen by outsiders as an old-boys club full of young boys who viciously hate and destroy any attempt at diversifying. Unfortunately, when these sjw types score a small victory, they see it as a big victory. The rest of us see it like a quota system -- we're forced to deal with less talented people just so somebody doesn't get butthurt that there's not enough females or black people or whatever.

You don't have anything to feel guilty about. Every company is out there to make money. None of us, individually, are as cruel as a group of people making a consensus decision.

My first job was writing code for a company that took advantage of poor and desperate people. I didn't see that for a few years. But, it was a good veneer -- help people who wanted to go to school to improve their lot in life. I genuinely thought I was doing something good.

But these for-profit schools ended up abusing government regulations and guarantees around student loans, which has largely led to the student loan crisis. However, I thought that I was buying stuff in my community, it bought my family a house and a reliable car, and we were paying a lot of taxes.

Every company has some variation on this. Starbucks has been great for coffee growers around the world and has exposed many people to boutique/single-origin coffee, but like you said, it's built on addiction. But any restaurant is doing the same -- they're doing whatever they can to bring you in and have you pay money for food. I mean, you have to eat, right? And restaurants are all about flavor and presentation and unique ingredients -- they're triggering your dopamine, which they hope will entice the diner to spend more money. Car salesmen are the same way -- everybody kinda needs a car, but they try to take advantage of our lack of information, and try to cover it with dopamine-based ideas: smooth leather, new car smell, perfect paintjob, fast car, get a bunch of chicks, people will really know you've done well in life, etc.

Everything in live is built on dopamine though -- it's why we do anything. To reduce it to dopamine trigger = bad for humanity is not fair.

My family has several addicts in it. Some recovered, some not. Whenever you ask them "why?," it's usually "because it makes me feel normal." This is the re-wiring. Your body just becomes used to the dopamine party, and you feel kinda crummy when the dopamine is gone. The only way to get back to feeling normal is to do the addictive behavior. Left untreated for a long enough time, this can be a big factor in clinical depression.

It's not that it's bad for the human race. Betting has been going on since "I bet I can throw this rock further than you". It's probably older than prostitution. Much like alcohol, there's this "yeah we can ban it, but people will still do it, so we might as well collect money and regulate them, and try to treat the addicted"

It's the same argument when it comes to legalizing cannabis -- people are just going to smoke it, no matter your personal opinion on whether or not it's a good idea. The state is better off regulating for safety, legitimizing the business, and collecting taxes to offset the perceived social harm.

I enjoy playing summoners war, but recognize it as basically a slot machine. There are people on there who clearly have spent a LOT of money. I've chatted with a few of them (the largest that someone admitted to was $5,000), and most of them claimed to be well-off enough that it wasn't an issue. One claimed to be the son of a successful investment banker. One was from China and said he doesn't even know how much money they have, but they always have plenty. Nobody I talked with has been all like, "yeah, i am hurting myself and racking up debt, but I just can't stop"

Of course, if you assume even half of those people are lying, that's where the addiction is. You'll tell yourself stories and tell others stories, so they don't see you as a weak person.

You clearly don't understand addiction. That's fine, but don't try to act like you know it.

that's because we already know about emacs and vim -- some of us don't like modal editors, or editors that try to be the universe. When you're checking your email in your text editor something is wrong.

What about doctors and lawyers? Their professions change day-to-day, and often at the whim of political leaders. Something as broad as "law" you can't be an expert in, but you can be an expert in patent law or family law or whatever.

There's a fundamental difference between knowing the language/framework of the week, and being an expert in something. Expertise does not necessarily imply broad-stroke coverage of available tools. It means you use the tools you have to their maximum potential, even finding novel uses for them.

I regularly use BiteSquad -- they make any restaurant a delivery restaurant :)

Seattle does this too. They want people to take buses downtown, but then ticket people who jaywalk or something to make their bus. It's like, if I have to wait 30 minutes for another bus because I didn't want to get a 200 dollar ticket for crossing while the red hand was flashing and showing me I had 15 seconds to cross the street, I'm just going to drive. I can run yellows all day long and nobody bats an eye.

To think that human history is maybe 50,000 years old, tops. Recorded history maybe 10,000 years. Then take these events that happened MILLIONS of years ago... There could have been conscious, intelligent life back then, but it just died out and all traces have disappeared in that time.

right, but they'll lose their resistance to our current antibiotics, so we can just go back and forth between those :)

dealerships are the reason I've only ever owned 3 cars in over 20 years of driving. My last car was a mitsubishi bought from a Chevy dealership, I think I got reamed on that one. My current car is a Toyota from a no-haggle dealership. Went there, they brought up Edmunds.com "true car value," we walked through it together, and they knocked $1000 off that price. I walked away happy. And that Toyota has been going on 6 years now. The only major service it's needed was to clean out a nest that some pack rats created in the engine bay (before chewing some spark plug wires and electrocuting themselves)

I genuinely prefer the no-haggle car sales process. It's ridiculous that some people pay hundreds or thousands more than others for these cars.

This may have worked where you live, but all the dealerships here are refusing to play that game.

They'll all give you a form letter "come in and talk with us" message. Apparently cost-plus isn't that appealing to them, and they'd rather lose the sale and wait for a higher-margin purchaser.

Shitty interviewers ask:

1. Anything related to trees 2. Big-O trivia and errata 3. Reinventing the wheel 4. Bit-twiddling operations

Seriously. If I go into your interview and you ask me to reverse a string, and it's not <string>.reverse(), I'm not taking your stupid job. I don't care if you want me to know the tricks for an in-place string reverse with no temporary variables, that just shows that you don't have a clue how to interview.

Good interviewers? The best I've found so far:

1. Ask people to do real-life problems 2. No "gotcha" questions 3. Let people use the environment they'll be using for the job -- this means an IDE, the internet (including stack overflow), and any library they want.

What I want to see when I'm interviewing is whether or not you have the ability to solve a problem. I'm going to look at how you abstract and break down problems, how you solve them, and at what point you say, "I think this is done."

Yes, I expect good engineers to know when to use a tree or a list or set -- but if you're explicitly quizzing for that, you're probably filtering in more terrible developers than you're filtering out.

yes, of course it's always the "creative types" -- they can't work in a team, they can't work anywhere except their own sound isolation booth, and they demand 22 continuous hours for 1 hour of flow, but they're somehow more productive...

I'm so sick of everybody trying to cater to these crybabies. They can go work for the government or something.