I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#231

Post by anticsapp » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:09 PM UTC

elorant wrote: post #56

The dot com burst was way worse than today. One reason is that back then the industry was 10% of what it is today, or even less. The other reason is that social distancing is creating the need to start selling online for a lot of small brick and mortar shops. Most of web development companies I know are overwhelmed by the demand in the last weeks. So we might be one of the few industries that benefits from all this m…

The dot com bust was awesome for me, although it was the first time I had ever been fired from a job. I internalized blame for a while but then my girlfriend, who had been laid off before me, was like fuck it let's have fun in NYC and collect funemployment. We saw so much culture and had so much fun. Then that buttlock Bin Laden had to ruin it all.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#232

Post by electricstate » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

__s wrote: post #213

seisvelas wrote: post #207

I started during the 2008 recession. I think the people who hurt the most back then were the people who'd just attended 6 week Ruby on Rails bootcamps and gotten 70k/year jobs (which was a cliche at the time). Suddenly, that was no longer realistic. And even among them, the passionate people found a way. I got into tech with no education during the recession just on psychotic passion alone. I was working at but hacki…

> I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth. I've experienced this too, & entered the profession in 2011 without completing post secondary Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you…

> Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year.

This is very true. Life is like poker, not chess. On that front everyone should read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#233

Post by somewhereoutth » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:14 PM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #151

Retric wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am hopeful we can suppress this disease before herd immunity develops in cities. But, once that happens they stop acting like dense areas in terms of disease spread. It’s really a question of regional R factors under various levels of social distancing, population, and herd imminuty.

I have a pet theory that what we're essentially doing is running a huge experiment where we select for the least dangerous strains of the coronavirus. People who get a mild flu or no symptoms at all are less well quarantined and are significantly more likely to pass it on to other people. People who get the worst symptoms are tightly quarantined in hospital, reducing their chances of passing on the worst forms of the…

Apparently, due to having its own proofreading mechanism, the virus is very stable genetically. I heard that over all the different strains that have been sequenced worldwide, the maximum difference is just 15 base pairs!

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#234

Post by andreilys » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:19 PM UTC

seisvelas wrote: post #207

I started during the 2008 recession. I think the people who hurt the most back then were the people who'd just attended 6 week Ruby on Rails bootcamps and gotten 70k/year jobs (which was a cliche at the time). Suddenly, that was no longer realistic. And even among them, the passionate people found a way. I got into tech with no education during the recession just on psychotic passion alone. I was working at but hacki…

“ I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked”

Also known as survivorship bias.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#235

Post by seisvelas » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:23 PM UTC

scraggz wrote: post #225

seisvelas wrote: post #207

I started during the 2008 recession. I think the people who hurt the most back then were the people who'd just attended 6 week Ruby on Rails bootcamps and gotten 70k/year jobs (which was a cliche at the time). Suddenly, that was no longer realistic. And even among them, the passionate people found a way. I got into tech with no education during the recession just on psychotic passion alone. I was working at but hacki…

What kinda dev work? Would definitely be interested.

If you'd like more details, the recruiter I'm thinking of is https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelsuarezr/. They probably have stuff elsewhere as well. I just started a position in security (which I found here on HN on the last Who Wants To Be Hired thread!) so I didn't follow up but I know they are looking for Python people.

Good luck!

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#236

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:23 PM UTC

dmd wrote: post #221

__s wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth. I've experienced this too, & entered the profession in 2011 without completing post secondary Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you…

> if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. "actualllyyy" you've got a 2 in 3 chance of landing it each year. 1-((1-(0.3/100))^365) = 0.66 EDIT: stop upvoting me, he's right. The question isn't "what is the probability of at least one success in a year", but rather "how many trials, on average, does it take to get one success" - and the answer to THAT is in fact 333, from the geometric distribu…

[deleted]

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#237

Post by icedchai » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #119

Programming for the web is my primary career. I first got into it late 1997. I am astonished at how incompetent it is. The fact the OP made a career out of it and made some money is hardly amazing. For the level of talent required contrasted against the average compensation I am surprised not everybody is trying it. You too could be earning 6 figures in a low cost of living economy after completing a boot camp and 2…

I started around a similar time frame, and was around during the dot-com boom. One dot-bomb company was "growing so fast" (lots of hype, almost no revenues...) that it would hire almost anyone off the street.

We also hired a lot of good people who had their skills misapplied for developing a product that made little sense. $millions were wasted.

People today would be astonished at the tech interviews back then. It was literally show up, BS for an hour, here's your offer letter. One dude even typed up the offer letter while I was in the interview. Whiteboard coding was unheard of.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#238

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

rpiguy wrote: post #135

If you can’t read a hopeful, personal story without screaming “Survivorship Bias” and plunging headfirst into self-victimhood, good luck with the rest of your life!

Guilty. That is, in fact, exactly what I screamed--but in my head, so as to not disturb anybody.

Thanks for the good luck wishes. I could really use some.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#239

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

socketnaut wrote: post #230

dmd wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. "actualllyyy" you've got a 2 in 3 chance of landing it each year. 1-((1-(0.3/100))^365) = 0.66 EDIT: stop upvoting me, he's right. The question isn't "what is the probability of at least one success in a year", but rather "how many trials, on average, does it take to get one success" - and the answer to THAT is in fact 333, from the geometric distribu…

“actualllllyyyyy” he’s saying something different. If you take a 0.3% chance for N days where N is large, you’ll land it 0.003N times, or once every ~333 days. The chance of landing it within any particular window of K days is a different concept (which you showed how to reason about).

[deleted]

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#240

Post by CydeWeys » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #114

arcticbull wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed but as virulent as it is, and with so many people having zero symptoms or mild flulike symptoms, we're all going to get it. The question is whether we get it first, or the vaccine is developed first. Either way, this will sort itself out shortly.

Both social distancing and herd immunity reduce the R factor. Thus nearly everyone may end up with the disease in NYC, but in less dense areas it can stamped out with vastly lower infection rates. That alone could make the difference between 70% vs 30% of the US population getting even with minimal precautions.

There's enough social distancing going on in NYC right now to prevent the majority of people from ever getting it. It doesn't seem likely that the social distancing will be let up enough (and subsequently not clamped back down) to the point of allowing most people to get it.