Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro • Hacker News Board

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#61

Post by bennybob » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 8:46 PM UTC

balabaster wrote: post #41

jdietrich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale of ambition is completely different. The Computer Literacy Project put a computer in every school and led to 141 TV programmes over a decade. At the highest levels of government, it was seen as an urgent priority. We wanted to be a world leader in software and we heavily invested to make that at least plausible on a per-capita basis. Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk…

The UK may have wanted to be a world leader in software and may have heavily invested in education, but then they failed to keep their programmers by creating jobs that paid those developers a competitive enough salary to stay in the UK. A huge portion of us left the country to take our software skills to countries we would be paid competitive salaries and have a high quality of life. Those countries are exploiting t…

Uk programmer here, late 30s, in the last year or so I've woken up to the fact that we re getting terribly salaries in the uk. Reddit is full of naive europeans who seem to be brainwashed into thinking the USA is some racist hell hole and that "cost of living is cheaper in Europe" (as far as I can tell this is complete nonsense). Or that paying high taxes will give them a good pension (not in the UK).

As I live in Scotland I pay 40 percent tax on everything I earn over 41 thousand pounds.

I take it you went to the States ? Is it even possible for someone my age to get there to work?

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#62

Post by balabaster » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 1:25 PM UTC

bennybob wrote: post #61

balabaster wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK may have wanted to be a world leader in software and may have heavily invested in education, but then they failed to keep their programmers by creating jobs that paid those developers a competitive enough salary to stay in the UK. A huge portion of us left the country to take our software skills to countries we would be paid competitive salaries and have a high quality of life. Those countries are exploiting t…

Uk programmer here, late 30s, in the last year or so I've woken up to the fact that we re getting terribly salaries in the uk. Reddit is full of naive europeans who seem to be brainwashed into thinking the USA is some racist hell hole and that "cost of living is cheaper in Europe" (as far as I can tell this is complete nonsense). Or that paying high taxes will give them a good pension (not in the UK). As I live in Sc…

I went to Canada. I won't lie, the immigration path is a pain in the ass, but it's doable, even as a late 30 year old. Toronto is one of the top places in the world for income vs. cost of living for a career in the development industry. Coming from the UK to the U.S. is troublesome, their H1B Visa Lottery for skilled workers from anywhere but India seem to be futile. I've attempted twice now and I've written it off as a waste of time. Perhaps there's another path I'm unaware of.

The U.S. may be considered a racist hell hole, but just like everywhere else, it's really the few loudest ones that make a bad name for everyone else. On the whole, Americans are wonderful people living in a system that offers them a reasonably high standard of living for a reasonable work/life balance. They've got some issues, just like any country.

They've got a shit political system that just occasionally manages to be a beacon of light and hope to the rest of the world; a shit debacle of a medical industry that somehow has a couple of shining examples that manage to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best hospitals in the world; and an education system that fails about as many as it helps, yet still somehow manages to pull out a few of the best schools in the world. Quite how this is, I'm not sure.

Don't let stereotypes and bad press colour your perspective of a culture you don't know anything about. Visit, go attend some interviews, spend time to find places there you love. Spend time with people. Form your own opinions. You may be surprised.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#63

Post by Lio » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

nmstoker wrote: post #52

Lio wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acorn was the manufacturer rather than the model. So the Acorn logo was on the back of the BBC computers, the Electron and on later Archimedes lines.

I suspect that telesilla knew that and merely missed out the word Electron by mistake (given the post it was a response to mentioning the Electron connection).

Yep that could easily be possible, I would hope my reply hasn’t come across negatively. Certainly not my intention.

I do remember from the time that referring the Electron simply as The Acorn (due the prominent Acorn logo on the top) was very common so my reading it as such in the parent post didn’t seem unusual.

I always assumed it was because the BBC Micro had such strong branding that people didn’t realise it was an Acorn product. The logo was there on the back but very small.