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I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

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Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#171

Post by pdw »

serf wrote: post #116
thegeomaster wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is his resume really skimpy? I thought it was rather good, but I have no reference points on what is and what isn't considered good enough.

I don't think it's skimpy, but maybe wrongly ordered and perhaps some stuff should be omitted. Example : Accomplishments (at the top) : High school dropout Education (at the bottom) : Member of MENSA. seems obvious to me which one of those two should be getting played up more. His site has been personally very helpful to me, and I hope that he has a run of better luck.

According to his autobiography, he moved as a teenager from Taiwan to Paraguay, then to Bolivia and finally to Canada. That's a very different story than simply "high school dropout". http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#172

Post by ForHackernews »

DanBC wrote: post #93
hadoukenio wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad. Almost everyone (including people on that Python mailing list thread below) has jumped on him calling him a troll while (not to their own fault) missing that this guy has mental health issues. He needs professional help not money.

Some people are just assholes and do not have mental health problems. Unless you're widening the definition for MH problem to include things like anger or Asperger's syndrome.

Those people could certainly benefit from working with a counselor. There's a wide range of "personality disorders" that are maybe not "mental health problems" requiring medication, but are still issues that take external help to solve.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#173

Post by vidarh »

pistle wrote: post #66
digitalzombie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who would hire a 45 year old programmer? Certainly good as dead. Have fun at the laundry. That's... age discrimination. This is illegal in California. He could get hire if he can past interviews or have notable projects.

But difficult, if not impossible, to prove and costly to try to attack. The age difference is often not even really a conscious thing. It is expressed in "cultural fit" by most young interviewers. Older devs simply are detached from core pieces of younger culture. Whether that's music, integration into workplace rhythms, lanugage, etc. It's important to specialize some, get broad technically (don't only know everythi…

> The age difference is often not even really a conscious thing.

It can even be as simple as a work schedule that is hard to meet for anyone with children. E.g. shifting the start and end of the work day one hour later can be enough to make childcare a nightmare to secure many places.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#174

Post by saalweachter »

Reading the blog/comments I don't think a development job is what he needs/wants. I think what he really needs is a patron.

So why not Patreon?

Some people find value in the content he creates, and his needs are modest. It is not implausible that enough people are willing to chip in to keep him going, and Patreon provides a way to do that.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#175

Post by mercer »

seren wrote: post #114
mercer wrote: post #90

Cases like this, when the talented person in question is a geek who "doesn't interview well," always frustrate me. Most of my professional success is a result of social skills and a lot of experience with wildly different social environments and cultures. While I do work hard at being actually good at what I do (because that's just more fun!), I could get pretty far as a cruddy developer. And that just feels unfair,…

Do not underestimate social skills. A SW project is rarely (never?) a one man's job, you have to deal with other team members, business, client expectation, testers, QA, etc. I have worked in company where people had generally good social skills, were helpful, able to listen carefully and receive feedback and criticism without going mad. On the other hand, have worked in environment where most people were passive-agg…

> Do not underestimate social skills.

Absolutely! I didn't mean to imply that social skills are unimportant. If I were to hire a programmer to work for me in a team context, the better choice from a business perspective, often, would be to hire the less-competent but socially-skilled.

But that sucks. Because the best way a socially awkward or socially underdeveloped individual will learn the very essential skill of being more social is through acceptance, a safe environment, and constructive feedback.

Furthermore, it's often not the real problem. A big problem in almost all companies I've worked for is that the managers (who usually are very socially capable non-geeks) were just not skilled at dealing with their developers. And in my opinion that's a core element of their job, to learn how to handle introverts or those less skilled in the social things.

Some of the developers I've worked with were very socially awkward, but if you figured out how to talk to them, they had no trouble communicating what needed to be communicated. To a degree, I think the ones who are socially skilled should use their strength to help those who are not. And if you're a manager, I'd say you're partly paid to do exactly that.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#176

Post by rafekett »

Xah needs to seek help for his mental illness. Look at his posts on comp.lang.emacs for evidence. He's been spending all these years on $3 a day trying to figure out a more "ergonomic" keyboard for emacs, but many of his suggestions are really just based on what he wants and are less ergonomic than standard emacs.

EDIT: comp.lang.emacs doesn't exist, it's been many years. gnu.emacs.BLAH

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#177

Post by loup-vaillant »

nkozyra wrote: post #170
loup-vaillant wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you did: > I think there's a lot of room for boisterous, outspoken and even aggressive developers, but you really gotta prove you have the chops to earn that. This sentence of yours strongly suggest that you think Xah Lee didn't prove he has the chops to earn being outspoken. You may even think he probably did not earn such a right at all . Even if you don't think so, the suggestion is there for all to read. Besi…

> This sentence of yours strongly suggest that you think Xah Lee didn't prove he has the chops to earn being outspoken. I didn't say nor did I suggest this. I'm simply saying that if you're going to walk into a room and act like Linus you'd better have a track record like Linus. I didn't say Xah Lee does or doesn't, particularly since I noted above that I didn't know much about him. I'm simply pointing out that if th…

Oops. Sorry. I retract.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#178

Post by DanBC »

cmiles74 wrote: post #143
15thandwhatever wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he still hasn't learned his lesson. he's actively asking people to send money to him in a way that skirts the lien the irs has filed against him. if the irs notices this and gets pissed, it absolutely puts his 'helpers' in harm's way. by continuing to not file taxes, the probability of irs aggression only increases with each passing day. i'm all for giving people a 2nd chance, but he still hasn't realized that it's h…

He feels confident that he doesn't owe the IRS taxes since he has never earned sufficient money to file (less thank $1,000). It turns out, according to the present rules, that he is incorrect: self employed and earning more than $400 a year requires filing income tax.[1] It does not appear that he is purposely evading taxes. I agree that it is his fault that the IRS is pursuing him, on the other hand it seems pointle…

He says that he has earnt less than $1000 per year. Later on he says his monthly rent is $1300 per month.

I'm not sure how to resolve that.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#179

Post by michaelochurch »

mercer wrote: post #111
nabla9 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is known as annoying Usenet troll by many. I don't classify him as pure troll, however. He don't troll for the sake of trolling and he can be helpful. He is very opinionated and argumentative and don't adjust his thinking very well. He might have mood disorder. http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html

Indeed. I know a few people who have a (strong) mood disorder, and one characteristic they all share is that they tend to be more abrasive and 'rigid' in general, even when they're in a good mood.

When you're bipolar, you spend less time in the emotional midrange, where social skills are built, and develop a social deficit. (Some people recover in their 20s, because a 20% social deficit is catastrophic at 20 but not at 40-- being "socially 16" at 20 is devastating, but at 40, it means you're socially 32, which is not a big deal-- but some don't). You also spend more time than most people in intense states, which makes you more creative. So bipolar people have a paradoxical age-skew where they seem socially younger but, in some critical ways (creative maturity, ethical insight) tend to be substantially older and more experienced, because they've spent more time at extremes.

From this, there's a tendency (out of resentment?) for people with BP to discount the experiences and skills of normal people as trivial "small talk" and turn emotional and ethical extremity ("I've really experienced life") into a virtue.

Bipolar, I'm convinced, is a different thing from being manic-depressive (which would, in 2014, be called hypomanic-depressive if the term were still used; but to save keystrokes I'll use "manic" even though modern psychiatry only uses "mania" for extreme highs that even most bipolar people never get.) Manic-depressive is present pathology, a symptom profile that few bipolar people have all the time. On the other hand, bipolar (as I'd define it) is a type of mind (creative, judgmental, ethically rigid) that has advantages (if the manic-depressive symptoms are contained) and drawbacks, but that never goes away, even if the manic-depressive symptoms remit. Well-treated bipolar people tend (contrary to stereotype) to be unusually conscientious, loyal, and self-aware. The flip side of it is a sort of extreme moral mysophobia.

It actually makes sense. If you're bipolar, little things have gigantic consequences. A night of heavy drinking can have you suicidally depressed for a week. Simple excitement about an intellectual interest can become socially harmful (you don't realize that others don't share the interest). If you live in a world where you're punished (by internal and external causes) severely for small mistakes, you tend to become intolerant of others who get away with much more.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#180

Post by chaired »

1 ) Perhaps this could be the start of Xah Lee learning some social skills. If so, good on him. He'll go a lot further with them.

2 ) Surely someone in this community can offer him a job writing documentation, at the least? Think of it as charity if you must, but he will probably deliver good value, and he would probably be happy to work cheap, if you're into that sort of thing.

3 ) I will donate $, since that's what I can do from where I am.

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