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A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

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Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#241

Post by samatman »

ticviking wrote: post #238
samatman wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of universities have their own power plants, especially of a certain age. The U of M in Ann Arbor has a plant and uses the waste heat to keep the relevant sidewalks free of ice and snow in the winter.

We could always see where the steam tunnel broke from the sidewalk and went into the building because there was a patch of bare grass growing in the heat the steam gave it underground.

Yep.

The steam tunnels were somewhat notorious for awhile there, played a role in the Dungeons and Dragons chapter of the satanic panic of the 80s.

Still, there were always a couple ways to get in. Fond memories.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#242

Post by rsj_hn »

viraptor wrote: post #214
rsj_hn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really an unhealthy and flawed understanding of what is a necessary part of life. The problem is how to find good people, and the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence, the more people need to rely on personal recommendations. It's not that people wouldn't take a stranger for a job, but when there is a lot of uncertainty, they can't absorb the risk of the stranger not being qualified. So th…

> the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence I'd really rather go with "the more society discovers that we don't know how to obtain objective measures of excellence". We really don't have good tests that can fit in the interview slot for a lot of software engineering jobs.

You can say this over and over again, but that doesn't make it true. It is just a wish of how you want reality to be, and the US is sufficiently wealthy that people can indulge in these delusions and still put food on the table. For a while - there is a lot of wealth and human capital to destroy before things start to break down. These types of delusions are what makes it harder for newer people to enter fields and so inhibits human capital formation. Getting rid of grades in schools or giving different races different grades, getting rid of standardized tests, etc, this all destroys information and human capital. It also makes the nation less competitive when it competes against the (majority) of the world which does not suffer from these delusions and is more interested in acquiring human capital than destroying it for the sake of some equality myth.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#243

Post by anonomousename »

tmjdev wrote: post #233
tmjdev wrote: post #231

This resonated with me. I actually took that road construction job as a flagger. I stood there turning that stop sign back and forth, directing traffic, for a whole summer. I felt, and still feel it was the lowest point of my career. My brain was starved in the truest sense of the word and it gave me new fire to complete my college degree. Which was Electrical Engineering. I didn't learn that I really should have gon…

I should mention that coding had been an early interest of mine. In middle school I put custom firmware on my PSP so that I could use a homebrewed version of YouTube to watch a series of "Learning C++ From Scratch" videos at night. Had somebody noticed that interest I could have been encouraged early on that that interest could actually be a profitable job and not just a hobby.

Given you were so interested in programming as a kid, how did you rationalize a career in engineering? I'm only asking because I'm doing something similar - I was mostly interested in computers/programming growing up, and am now in my second year of Mechanical Engineering (w/ CS Minor, which doesn't mean much) and wondering if I should just bite the bullet and switch over to CS all the way.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#244

Post by anonomousename »

ggambetta wrote: post #41

What a nice story :) Reminds me of how I got my first job! It was 1994 or 1995, I was probably 14, I had outgrown the ZX Spectrum and had a 486 at home. My dad and I were in a computer parts shop, and near us was this guy my dad's age having trouble with his own computer. He was having random crashes, and nobody at the shop seemed to figure out what it was. My dad suggested I offer my help. We approached the guy, an…

After my sophomore year in high school, I had a summer job doing some IT work for a very small company that organized medical research. I was very familiar with Excel, which was a huge strength, but also my weakness. I hadn't truly programmed before, but was an expert at throwing together absurdly long, chained together formulas in Excel that could sanitize some data - After a few weeks of work, I ended up making a really poor Excel VBA code that had a time complexity of O(n!). It would take a few hours to churn through the dataset.

I went back this year to visit some of my old coworkers - some of whom I'm still good friends with - and saw they were using the same macro from years ago. I sat down, wrote a small Python CSV script in about 5 minutes that did what I was trying to do back then which ran in about a minute or so.

I was incredibly surprised that they were still using that from so long ago, but they explained that they just hadn't had anyone bother to fix it because they didn't know it could be done better. I'm sure your DOS program was the same, and that they didn't know any better. I wouldn't be surprised if that system was in use for another 10 years or so.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#245

Post by tmjdev »

anonomousename wrote: post #243
tmjdev wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should mention that coding had been an early interest of mine. In middle school I put custom firmware on my PSP so that I could use a homebrewed version of YouTube to watch a series of "Learning C++ From Scratch" videos at night. Had somebody noticed that interest I could have been encouraged early on that that interest could actually be a profitable job and not just a hobby.

Given you were so interested in programming as a kid, how did you rationalize a career in engineering? I'm only asking because I'm doing something similar - I was mostly interested in computers/programming growing up, and am now in my second year of Mechanical Engineering (w/ CS Minor, which doesn't mean much) and wondering if I should just bite the bullet and switch over to CS all the way.

It was that 'carrying the family flag of engineering' thing. This notion that engineering was a safe bet and I should do it if I could. Very little to do with my actual interests. Not to say I don't enjoy electrical engineering. I just don't enjoy the work.

After creating many tools for the companies I worked for it became clear to myself that I should have done that in first place. My advice to you would be to take more CS classes to see if that's really what you want to do. A small price to pay now and will give you a better idea of what you want to do.

That being said, my experience (electric utility manufacturing, military truck electrical systems) was very valuable to my broader understanding of how software is consumed.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#246

Post by WalterBright »

dotancohen wrote: post #234
grosswait wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll have different resistance. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t.

I came to post this. The offset ears on the bulb base are used to specify either a dual-filament bulb, such as tail lamps and brake lamps combined, or high-resistance, low-wattage parking lamps that are designed to not run down the battery while the alternator is not charging.

That makes sense. The cheap bulbs I bought were just slightly dimmer. So they must have had more resistance.

But heck, even a parking light will flatten the battery if left overnight.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#247

Post by pieteckhart »

rags2riches wrote: post #160
brazzy wrote: post #73

Apparently this is the "story time" thread, so here's mine, of how I hacked the Linux kernel without ever having written more than maybe 50 lines of C code. This was in early 2001, I was an exchange student in Japan, and I'd bought a really cool gadget in Akihabara that almost nobody had heard about: a hardware MP3 player. For storage, it used MMCs (precursor of SD cards), affordable ones held 32MB. To get music onto…

That's like a scene in some old TV series about a startup I only vaguely remember. It's important demo day, but a bug is threatening to ruin everything. Everybody is trying to find the bug. Somebody yells out "I found it!" and everybody rushes over. For a long moment, they all stare quietly at a big red flashing line of code on the screen. Then somebody blurts out "delete it!" and the person at the keyboard deletes t…

Does anyone know this TV series? Seems like something I would enjoy :)

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#248

Post by mlac »

unnouinceput wrote: post #186
JackFr wrote: post #36

Under questions you’re unprepared for, years ago at a Wall Street job a couple of weeks after a re-org my new boss calls me into his office and asks me what sort of bonus I was expecting. Caught completely off guard I quoted him the real number I had been expecting. He smiled and said great, which let me know I had absolutely left money in the table. A trusted colleague then told me if that situation ever came up aga…

Probably you meant 20%. So that's X * 2 * 1.2. Or X * 2.4. Or make it easier and say 2.5. And 2.5 is 10 /4. So another way to say this is "take your reasonable expectation, multiply it by 10 to become really unreasonable then make it reasonable again by divide it with 4".

$10,020.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#250

Post by viraptor »

rsj_hn wrote: post #242
viraptor wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence I'd really rather go with "the more society discovers that we don't know how to obtain objective measures of excellence". We really don't have good tests that can fit in the interview slot for a lot of software engineering jobs.

You can say this over and over again, but that doesn't make it true. It is just a wish of how you want reality to be, and the US is sufficiently wealthy that people can indulge in these delusions and still put food on the table. For a while - there is a lot of wealth and human capital to destroy before things start to break down. These types of delusions are what makes it harder for newer people to enter fields and s…

You wrote a lot about the issue in general without actually addressing the claim. We don't have an objective measure while interviewing software engineers. Any too specific test will fail on some good hire during an interview. On the other hand generic tests need to adjust as you interview so they're subjective.
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