braindouche (u/braindouche)

braindouche commented on If landlords get wiped out, Wall Street wins, not renters bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/bkohlmann

folkhack · 6 years ago

This is exactly it. The notion that they easily shift that ownership of the mortgage onto their renters saying "stuck paying someone else's mortgage" feels like mental gymnastics as it 100% is your name on that debt and not your renters.

braindouche · 6 years ago

A lot of landlords don't seem to really understand that their rental properties are a business and an investment, and thus inherently have risk. Fewer still really comprehend that the little landlords generally are carrying a lot more risk than the bigger property management companies. They just keep being shocked and offended when they seemingly discover this risk for the first time all over again.

braindouche commented on Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far boilingsteam.com/proton-b... · Posted by u/ekianjo

vernie · 6 years ago

I believe that they got rid of the grace period in Windows 10. Now you can run Windows without a license key indefinitely, albeit with certain personalization features (e.g. color scheme, wallpaper) locked.

braindouche · 6 years ago

wait a darn tootin' minute there, are you telling me that paying for a Windows licence has become a cosmetic microtransaction?

braindouche commented on Health Care Provider Suspends Chloroquine Prescription for Woman With Lupus buzzfeednews.com/article/... · Posted by u/bryanrasmussen

dawnerd · 6 years ago

So title is silly. They explained the drug builds up in the body and lasts ~40 days. Kaiser goes on to explain why it's necessary, steps to take if you start feeling worse, and that it's only expected to be temporary.

I really don't see the problem here. If you really can go 40 days then why not let people that critically need it have access?

braindouche · 6 years ago

The problem is that the drug doesn't stay at an effective level in the body for 40 days (it also takes more than a month for the drug to take effect), and the consequences of allowing lupus to flair include accumulating permanent damage to, for example, heart, lungs, kidneys and joints. Additionally, there's no good information yet on how an immunocompromised patient in a flair will react to coronavirus infection, beyond the general notion from our rheumatologist that putting your malfunctioning immune system into a state of dysfunction and then getting the virus that puts your immune system into a state of dysfunction is probably really bad.

source: my partner has rheumatoid arthritis and takes hydroxychloroquine, and we've been concerned about exactly this sort of thing happening for a while now.

braindouche commented on Ask HN: How do I escape webdev? · Posted by u/valleyforge

catacombs · 6 years ago

> thirteen years of beginner experience

My God. I'd love to learn more about your background. How, if you've worked in web development since 2007, consider yourself a beginner?

braindouche · 6 years ago

Can't speak for the OP, but my background is exactly the same, self-taught web dev, started in 2007, worked for myself for a decade (no college degree, either). I understand where he's coming from. I'm also now a senior front-end engineer at a fortune 500 company, so I figured out how to transcend as a programmer.

As a self-taught, self-employed coder, I can tell you that you can get extraordinarily far without knowing a single fundamental. Just having a willingness to dig in and tinker will put you miles ahead of what most people are willing and able to do, and you can absolutely build a career out of a can-do attitude and google. Over time, however, what seems to end up happening is that many people in this situation (myself included) learn systems without learning technologies.

At my place of employ, we distinguish between Application Developers and Software Developers, and I think that's a thing a lot of large companies do. Both are valuable, but they're fundamentally different. You can have a very advanced Sitecore Application Developer who writes Sitecore code all day, but if you hand him an IDE and ask him to write up a CRUD, he'll flounder, whereas a software engineer can more or less invent something new on the fly from scratch, but isn't going to be particularly fluent in any given third-party system.

I think, overall, these long-term self-taught web developers hit a wall like they do because they're really application devs and not software engineers. Sometimes, it's actual apps (I'm looking at you, WordPress and Drupal), and sometimes it's libraries or frameworks like jQuery and Bootstrap. I certainly did. It's basically the same sort of fluency one often finds in bootcamp grads, just with much more practice.

I managed to get over the hump by basically starting over after 10 years, relearning the basic fundamentals of browser development and really mastering development with vanilla html, css and javascript, learning the fundamentals of node, local automation, and just enough computer science to be dangerous. With that, I took those skills and started working for other people again, as a developer on a team. I can't tell you how valuable it's been to simply have other human developers to compare myself to. This is what I learned:

1: There are a lot more shitty developers with CS degrees out there than I realized. However mediocre I may be, there are loads of my peers out there being just as bad.

2: You'll advance faster than your peers once you enter industry. Junior developers can usually program, but senior devs use old age and treachery to get shit done. You've done the hard part already by gaining experience -- now you just have to catch up with technology.

3: You'll find the software engineers around you are generally more specialized than you are. People who work for themselves for a long time get very good at doing everything all the time and learning new things quickly because clients are needy and think you're good with computers. This is a superpower. This is what tech leads are made out of.

I mean, look, I couldn't re-implement quicksort of you put a gun to my head, I've never written my own compiler, and my networking fundamentals are complete shite. But I can negotiate for the resources my team needs, I can bash a misbehaving legacy codebase in a language I don't know into submission fast, I can sniff out an overengineered solution at 30 paces, I can architect a front end, I can delete code at a furious pace, and I can sit on juniors until they start making simple solutions instead of elegant ones.

I'm 40. I've been doing this for 14 years, and I'm exactly where I should be in my career. That's enough for me.

braindouche commented on The care and feeding of software engineers, or why engineers are grumpy (2012) humanwhocodes.com/blog/20... · Posted by u/1900jwatson

to11mtm · 6 years ago

> So my work in "Digital Transformation" is a two part challenge of teaching management to think of their IT department as a source of creative energy and not bricklayers, while trying to get the engineers out of the mindset of bricklayers themselves after many years of being shoehorned.

You're doing the work of a higher order function there. You have my thanks.

I've worked in environments where this type of change has been attempted. It's not easy and does run the risk of running VERY awry.

braindouche · 6 years ago

how did that change go for you? because I'm living through that transition right now at my company and it's not been smooth.

braindouche commented on We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring blog.interviewing.io/we-r... · Posted by u/leeny

jki275 · 6 years ago

I suspect you'd have had far easier success with a BSCS on your resume. I can't imagine trying to get into this field without having had a degree -- it is a hard industry to get into.

I keep hearing about gender discrimination, and maybe this is a market segment thing, but everywhere I've worked is actively recruiting female devs. Also the places I've worked as a dev typically require a CS degree though for what that's worth. Many of them even require an MSCS -- I've actually been turned down for one job because even though I have an MS it wasn't an MSCS (gov contracts get very specific).

braindouche · 6 years ago

Oh you're almost certainly right, it would have been easier with the degree. I don't have any degree, and programming is a second career for me, so in a world where 26 year old senior developers are a thing, it's just one more thing putting me on my back foot. My biggest regret is not starting down this path 10 or 15 years earlier, honestly.

I am absolutely willing to believe it's a market segment thing. I live in a smaller city full of colleges, so the handful of large companies hiring want all of their jr devs to be right out of college, and that's straight from the recruiter's mouths. I was forced to apply to all the small companies.

And, for what it's worth, my current job and the two before it "required" a degree. From what I can tell, that requirement is to filter people on the low end of years of experience. Old age and treachery counts for a lot more than you may think.

braindouche commented on We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring blog.interviewing.io/we-r... · Posted by u/leeny

commandlinefan · 6 years ago

> one of them is definitely gender discrimination

Definitely? As in, you have actual proof? Or even some evidence? Because if you do, that’s illegal, and ought to be reported to the DOL.

braindouche · 6 years ago

The only evidence I have is response rates, and about 12 companies that responded to a man's-name resume that did not respond to an identical resume with a woman's name. I have consulted with a labor lawyer, who told me that this might be actionable if I can get enough women together to also perform this experiment and gather together in a class-action lawsuit. I don't live in a particularly large city, and I believe it's almost impossible without astroturfing.

braindouche commented on We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring blog.interviewing.io/we-r... · Posted by u/leeny

jki275 · 6 years ago

There are certainly people like this. What you generally find about them though is that they are highly motivated and deeply interested in the concepts of computing. They don't grow on trees -- they're quite rare.

Oddly enough, I've never met a single one that was female, though that's only anecdotal of course. The only female devs I know have CS degrees.

The focus on CS is important. Developers who don't have it are generally not educated in how to write good code. Many people do get into the field without the degree, but many of them are very bad at programming. I've had to rewrite O(n!) algorithms written by some of them, and they really didn't even understand why the algorithm was bad even when I broke it down to them.

My CS education absolutely gave me many of the tools I need for a career in software engineering. It didn't give me everything to be sure -- there's a lot of learning that still goes on in the job, but having a solid foundation is crucial to being a good engineer.

braindouche · 6 years ago

Hello! Now you've met a female dev with no CS degree. There may be a reason we're thin on the ground, too. My "training" as a software dev consisted of 10 years of self-employment as a freelance web developer, and when I decided to transition to working for a company, I faced massive hiring discrimination. I couldn't pay someone to interview me! And I did demonstrate that it was discrimination, too. My resume was getting something like a 2% response rate with my name on it, but I put a man's name on it and sent out a bunch, and suddenly I was getting a response to more than 80% of them.

Anecdote is not data, and it's only my individual anecdote, but it's my experience that breaking through into the industry to be incredibly hard. Since then I've made up for lost time and advanced faster than a college grad would expect (junior dev in a shitty agency to enterprise lead dev in about four years), and I attribute that to spending so incredibly long as essentially a junior dev freelancer and just being older.

So it can be done, certainly, but I strongly suspect there are several filters working against self-taught developer women making that transition into the industry, and one of them is definitely gender discrimination. And no, aside from sending out resumes with a man's name on them, I don't know how to fix it.

braindouche commented on Girls’ comparative advantage in reading can largely explain the STEM gender gap pnas.org/content/116/31/1... · Posted by u/barry-cotter

t0ughcritic · 6 years ago

Why aren’t there more Female lawyers or politicians then... Not sure if this totally holds up

braindouche · 6 years ago

female law school graduates have outnumbered male law school graduates for a couple of years now. The future is here already, they're just in junior positions.

braindouche commented on Think young people are hostile to capitalism now? Wait for the next recession theweek.com/articles/8711... · Posted by u/howard941

Will_Parker · 6 years ago

> So, why are you troubled that you can't debate this particular thing, when I'm sure there are things you shouldn't debate about your colleagues?

I'm troubled by the top-down nature of what is decided to be beyond debate vs not: it feels like it is leading to a scary kind of authoritarianism I don't want.

For fun, I'll throw you a specific plausible hypothetical. If an app has a gender identity field, and a user enters "Apache Helicopter", should this be treated as valid data or not?

braindouche · 6 years ago

Of course it's valid. Look for patterns. If 100 Apache Helicopters sign up for your app, congratulations, you just uncovered a new and very specific marketing segment to target.