391–400 of 491 posts
I wrote a doctorate in Applied Mathematics. The process totally transformed how I think about problems, helped me develop a lot more mathematical maturity, and got me my first job in a then obscure field called "machine learning". It's certainly not the right choice for many people, but it was for me.
Nott that this was your situation, but do you have any recommendations for learning advanced math as an adult hobbyist? I sort of missed the boat on doing advanced math in college, and while I likely won't be able to go back to school for it, I'd like to invest a lot of my free time in learning to better think about problems.
Emotionally detaching. I was a workaholic from age 16 until 33 and this was my primary identity. I used to always be proud of the work I did, no matter how lame the company or how many times I was screwed over. Then one day my father died, and I was fired from a company who I truly believed in and for whom I had sacrificed. This sounds cynical, but it's really peaceful. With the emotional energy and sheer time saved…
Circa-2000 I was in my final year of university and working as a Windows service desk monkey in the SysAdmin team of a Sydney-based company that developed a platform for hosting (legitimate, regulated) gambling websites. Sun Microsystems happened to be across the road from us. My mind was blown the first time I saw the value of the invoices for servers and Solaris licenses that we bought both for ourselves and on beh…
Ive used linux for years, I develop on a chromebook running an all cli ubuntu chroot and have loved working this way for the past two years. Im very interested in devops (Im a fullstack JS freelancer) and enjoy working with servers and the cloud a lot. But Ive never considered myself “learn-ed” in the ways of linux.
I have the time to devote to linux sysadmin training, and intend to do so.
Specifically: What areas of linux knowledge are most useful from an employer’s standpoint that would make a candidate attractive? Is it mostly experience architecting systems in production?
I think devops as a realm of work is very interesting, and would like to gain experience doing it professionally to find out if I’d want to pursue it longer term.
Beyond joining a team and learning from real world applications, is there anything useful you would recommend I look into? There are training courses available online for these things (AWS certs and linux foundation training comes to mind), does anyone have an opinion about the usefulness of such material?
Moving from permanent to contractor. I made the jump 5 years ago and have worked for a number of companies since, on 6-12 month contracts. The money has jumped each time, such that I’m on what I consider to be silly money now for the job I do — Ireland, not US. The work is always interesting for at least 6 months and I learn a ton of new stuff with every contract, much of which I use when building my own products (Do…
I was a contractor for 4 years before going back to perm mainly because of health insurance costs (I'm in the US). One of the troubles I had switching back to perm is that my future employer looked at my resume and saw me as a "hopper" since most of my contacts were 6 months to a year long. Luckily I had a friend already working at the company that put in a good word for me. But this experience made me think twice ab…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Taking a chance and joining a very large corporation. I have two questions if you don't mind answering. How large is the company you are referring to? 10K people? 100K, 250K, 500K? What type of company is it? A company that builds and sells mostly software, or a company that uses software to sell something else (e.g. automobiles?). Amazon+AWS is a an example that is a hybrid of both.
Its a mega corp in terms that it is comprised of several large enterprises. If the "arm" I worked in was spun off as its own corporation it would be Fortune 30 by revenue. Worldwide I think we have about 40k of the 270+k total employees in the corp group. The group as a whole is in the Fortune 10 and serves the health care industry. My part of the corp is all software. Product development both "commercial enterprise"…
>My part of the corp is all software.
I was hoping you'd say this.
Out of all the places I've worked, two of them were/are huge (250K+ people). For the first, I was in the business side of things as a data scientist/software person, and now I'm in the the software org as a data scientist.
In theory I should have been doing the same job; using code to to address business problems using data science. Both companies were investing heavily into cloud and analytics, and were theoretically moving in the same direction.
My experience in the non-software org was a nightmare because nobody understood what it meant to build or engineer anything. Now that I'm in software org of big company and I'm MUCH happier because people actually understand what it takes to solve a technical problem.
Lesson: if you are a software person who likes to be technical (coding or not), work in a the software org of a big company!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IME another benefit of this is you can attract a more reasonable class of people at work. When you can be manipulated by guilt and "the VP wants this tomorrow, it's high visibility", the most manipulative people in your org are going to latch onto you and praise you. If you are emotionally detached from this type of behavior, other people who are emotionally detached will be more willing to associate with you because…
That hits close to home for me recently. I was very attached to the company I work for that I sacrificed myself for it. I've, in a way, lost who I am as a person, and became more-or-less a tool that produces code. Not a human at all. About a month ago, I put in leave for the first time in 4 years. I rarely take the day off, so this was a big deal. And, I felt kinda guilty doing it. Even though the rest of the team to…
If you happen to fall into emotional attachment and feeling guilty again, don't beat yourself up for feeling those things. There's a big gap between not taking time off in 4 years/feeling guilt and being able to emotionally detach. Sometimes it takes years to reorient your life and values away from feeling guilt for asking for what you want. Many times the people who have manipulated you will refuse to accept you are trying to change and this will make it much harder.
Moving from permanent to contractor. I made the jump 5 years ago and have worked for a number of companies since, on 6-12 month contracts. The money has jumped each time, such that I’m on what I consider to be silly money now for the job I do — Ireland, not US. The work is always interesting for at least 6 months and I learn a ton of new stuff with every contract, much of which I use when building my own products (Do…
If it works for you, great, but there's a lot more to it than people in the business will say.