throwaway8291

Topcoder, leetcode, SPOJ, Projecteuler, ...

I do not any degree, but I do have things on my CV that lead to interviews and offers:

* community contributions - I do not find it special any more, but I learned that it is not the default: I have basically millions of people using text and code I created. Again, it's a side effect of the work, but it's also social proof, probably more so than a degree, since the results are tangible. Some people are immediately amazed by this.

* open source: as said above, have some kind of portfolio - it so easy today - in fact, if I weren't that busy right now, this would be the part I would focus on in my position - have well defined clear fun portfolio projects with tangible goals and a somewhat coherent story, maybe around current topics like devops, AR or ML (which are full of unsolved or tedious problems btw)

* be a great generalist: you need the first job or jobs to find some direction you want to go in; but for an entry it's great to be a generalist; me, you can throw frontend-fixes, search engines, ML data pipelines or web API design tasks; documentation or presentations at me - I'll work it out and help you win. Not sure if that helped, but I see people specializing in niches, and not really learning much beyond their focus field is a bit dis-encouraging

* attend meetups and talk to people; many meetups today are hosted by companies and you can have informal chats, which I find much more relaxing than interviews and whiteboard coding questions

* stand out - be in top 10% of kaggle or any other competitive programming site and I would bet jobs would hunt you, not the other way around

The other way to look at it:

Find work at a place, where other programmers won't go. Many orgs are desperate for a software literate IT guy, maybe you find some entry in such way.

Tl;dr

The software development world today is totally different; you can go out and program something useful and get it into the hand of millions of people simpler than ever. It takes some courage to start and put things out there, polish and nourish them. Good luck!

As a thought experiment: Imagine all that data was open and everybody could query and use it.

Because my gut tells me, it will be in a decade or two.

> Text only.

I have a good experience reading news and blogs via links.

Example:

links -dump "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/science/hermit-crabs-weal... | less

I'm lucky to be European. I can sleep well, since almost everybody got their basic health care need covered by our system. About 15% of my income goes into healthcare provider - once I am registered, I can use almost any facility available (doctors, dental, traditional or even some alternative medicine approaches, ...), if required.

The system is not even that complicated. I am not sure what holds the US back to have a humane care system.

We use IRC at work and it's just as useful and fun as ever, there are IRC clients that consume a few megabytes (hello Slack). SET autolog ON, then keep all your chat history grep-able in your home folder (again, only consuming megabytes - oh hello Slack, again).

Archived: http://archive.is/p3ZK7

It's interesting that open source lives off transparency and equality (e.g. with git, anyone can at least start to put a patch together), whereas many other vital parts of society like finance, business, politics only work, when you explicitly do not share, what you know.

I'm in the camp of moving my stuff out of GitHub (thankfully so many nice options, like GitLab, gitea/gogs, and of course sourcehut) because the only reason I do not hate Microsoft is that I was able to avoid any of their tech successfully for the past 15 years.

In it for the money, and gone if there's nothing more to capture. Simple story. That's exactly how something like a community does not work.

These metrics are signals. Interestingly, we already have an extreme information asymmetry between platforms and users. The softened version of these moves is to make the experiences more authentic, the less soft version is to increase the information asymmetry even more.

You as an individual will be a bit sharper, if what you do is not just herd behaviour - but more coming from your true self, you know.

Anyway, the idea is still ok and the site looks nice, congrats on putting it out there.

It's funny to imagine the year 2024. There are millions of small fake worlds consisting of streams of events, videos, and conversations - a beautiful algorithmic balancer will keep each of these quasi-communities humming, guiding their participants through their day with lots of - engagement.

There's a weirdo movement of people, who are not following one of the 50000 synthetic celebrities, that live and breath and adored by many.

Content generation will be semi-automatic, at least. And ads and non-ads will just merge more. The most targeted ad is one, that I do not even recognize.

I feel detached (not bad) today - I will feel alien (maybe bad) in ten years.

If I ask to convert my EUR into USD, the US bank will hold more EUR, less USD. Less USD decreases my liquidity, which is what's on one end of the table in the repo market, no?

A shot in the dark: It's European capital buying US dollar denominated securities en masse, as Europe is couple of basis points less attractive than the US at the moment. Strong dollar as side effect, which started at around Spring 2018.

People get all jazzed up about the Fed, but Banks have to play along Basel III.

Not saying a new crack will not break the system in 2020, but the Fed injection is somehow a side twist in this play.

Germany had boom times and 1/3 of a few regions already voted for a right wing, borderline fascist party. Imagine what will happen (in a few years) if economy tanks and people seek to punish previous governments even more.

There's a company in my town, hiring devs for a fully robotic kitchen setup. Ingredients are deposited, machines cook meals. A single person can take care of the joint. You can replace a $100k/month bill on personel for a mid-size fast-food outlet with $10k/month for a few guys helping the machine. No strikes, overwork, just ingredients, meals and a bit of maintenance.

Imagine, you are a 50 joint franchise, that's a whopping 50 mil per year in savings (and few hundred people desperately looking for jobs).

It seems very clear to the man on the street, the fights are getting more fierce. Assets prices increase and the bottom 80% are getting squeezed out of many things, slowly but surely: education, housing and with that also out of participation in society.

There is literally nothing, that hints at progress at this point: Tech and internet will has turned into permanent surveillance, the home surveillance is rolled out, the internet of things and workspace will be next, allowing for google analytics on labor.

And if workers complain too much, increase investments in software and data tools and replace a bunch of wet ware with some tool; heck, half of the "knowledge workers" today might be obsolete already.

The average person won't have much to laugh for the next few decades. We live in a sad time, where the most miraculous things man can create (machines that "think") will be the prime weapons of the owners against the non-owners. I fear this will be a costly battle.

TL;DR: 80% of software companies which IPO do not make profit (higher than in 1999), too much cheap capital has distorted the market.

> There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass.

You do not need to have a single platform, though. All you would need is a single, in the best case open, index of meetup sites and descriptions. For that to work, you would need a simple protocol, e.g. myownmeetup.com/meetup.json, which the aggregators can crawl.

Technology gets better, alright. And there so many things, I can do today, I could not do just a decade ago.

Hardware is fantastic, it's fast, almost never fails, it's lightweight and just works.

The software side has been a great disappointment, on the other hand. Software spies on you, makes you a marionette of a corporation, it's getting more brittle in many parts. Many people in business do not care about security or some basic ethics and it's mirrored in the apps and tools we use.

Imagine a world, where software respects every users privacy, most connections are safe by default and people feel ok about updating things, because things most of the times get better. It sounds like a utopia today.

I really wanted to like software as a thing, but the current and the next decade do not look bright to me. On the contrary.

We'll have many more abandoned devices, abandoned software, that some poor guy will depend on, more chaos, more junior developers who do not understand basic things, let alone caring about ethics or the consequences of what they are building. It's sad.

I have no advice, just a anecdata: Me and people I know got into consulting, because we were interested in certain technologies; really interested, researched all stuff, tried to answer all questions on those matters, engage with people online, organizing events.

And all of the sudden, people come to you with business cases, questions and consulting gigs. I see consulting for money an extension of something, that you are already passionate about (I mean professionally passionate, you don't have to pour your identity into it).

The idea is not that hard, it's just that you have to have enough energy and sitzfleisch to see these things through.

Language is a sensible thing, and draws all kinds of demarcations. A single word can shift the perception of a person. A circle might identify an outlier by just a slip of tongue.

If you are from another socioeconomic stratum (or somewhere else in the capital quadrant), you might never learn a certain language, that provides a common ground. There are unspeakable things, I can think of, that I would never ever bring up in a conversation with a random person.

These exclusions and inclusion have already been there, it seems like some fights are more naked now, uncovered, harsh and sometimes meaningless to someone not involved.

I was a top SO contributor and very much enjoyed the site - and still enjoy finding answers. I fear, I will be policed at some point for something - but maybe not, because I am usually agreeable - but who knows: only time will tell.

Edit: I am usually not that impartial, but there is a discourse (where this particular thread might belong to), where I am not able to take sides - because my gut feeling says: you cannot shift the responsibility you have, when you interact with another person, to some abstract law, entity, or something else - it has to be you, to show respect and to allow for a common room for everyone - which does not mean, that the room is just there of one.

Throwaway account.

Although I studied CS and did most of the coursework, I do not have a formal degree.

I do have public profiles, top ranked on a popular programming site, dozen open source projects and I wrote a book.

In short: I had all the time in the world for a degree, if it weren't for all the other activities I am involved in.

In the world today, you can contribute to a project easily and get hired. Building a portfolio has never been easier.

In fact, my current job came to be because of a small tool, that I put online.

And I do have hundreds of ideas for portfolio (and fun) projects, which I would be sure would get me hired at places. If I only had a few weeks or month off to get them off the ground.

In short: Find some technology or problem you are interested in and try to find a way to contribute in a friendly, and recognizable way.