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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I agree. I think we elevated Computer Science’s importance early on in the industry, and that has stuck around. If you’re a University researcher trying to make a better compression algorithm or whatever, then yeah you’ve got a lot of overlap with mathematicians. But if you’re out in the industry building CRUD apps to fit some business use case, all that theory isn’t going to matter much in your day to day.

    It’s still just one of those mostly-bureaucratic hurdles where you need a CS degree to get your first job, and you need to be good at math to get the CS degree.

    That said, there are definitely crucial moments where regular projects can still hit scalability boundaries, and a solid understanding of math and CS fundamentals can get you through that. Every single developer doesn’t need to know that stuff, but it’s occasionally good to have access to somebody who does.




  • Depending what you don’t like about math, it might or might not be an indicator. If you like problem solving and understanding why math works the way it works, but hate the rote repetition a lot of schools use to teach it, then you’ll fit right in. That’s how I was at that age. (Disclaimer: I’m old now. They’ve changed the way they teach math a few times I think. I’m not sure if my experience is directly comparable to kids in school these days)

    Similarly, don’t look at schools that teach Computer Science and conflate that with what it’s like to be a developer. Most real dev work is totally different. CS fundamentals help at times, but aren’t as big of a deal as CS programs would have you believe. (Again, I think there’s a wider variety of educational options these days too. In my day you had to get a CS degree just to get a recruiter to talk to you, even though it was mostly inapplicable).

    Why are you interested in learning lisp? Some hobby that requires it? A potential career? Tell us more about the career and maybe we can share knowledge about how mathematical it is.


  • Also, there were some candidates who managed to get 95% and above — but would then just be absolutely awful during the interview — we would later discover that they were paying someone to complete the technical test on their behalf.

    Yeah my company shot itself in the foot by replacing technical interviews with an online test and hiring a bunch of cheaters. After a while we started doing a zoom interview where we’d go over the code they supposedly wrote and ask them to explain it to us. Even that simple step made it obvious who had or hadn’t actually written the code they were talking about. I’m pretty sure a few candidates had somebody talking in one ear and/or typing to them on a separate screen.




  • I think the problem is that unions are famous for fighting for equal pay across the board for the workers they represent regardless of individual competency or market demand. For this example they’ll give COBOL developers a raise to 120K and give web developers a pay cut to 120K.

    Or best case scenario they give the COBOL developers a short-term raise to 150, then raises across the industry stagnate in coming years to offset the fact that employers feel like they’re overpaying for some people. But sure, a few years later the union can come in to look like a hero arguing for a fraction of the raise the web devs could have already gotten.




  • I use a “real name” domain. My last name ends in the letters “in”, so I bought a .in domain, such that the domain name is my last name with a dot in it.

    Can’t honestly recommend that approach. It’s a cute gimmick, but when non-technical people ask for your email address and it doesn’t end in a TLD they recognize, their heads explode. I usually give out my gmail address.







  • My salary, I guess.

    Everybody on my team is required to do on-call once they have enough experience (except for the low budget offshore contractors who I wouldn’t trust to do it anyhow…)

    We have 2 people on call at a time, 1 primary and one backup. You do a week on backup, then the next week you’re primary.

    There’s no set time limits etc, but if you get sucked into some fire, people are reasonable about letting you take some time off the next day or whatever.

    All in all, there are very rarely fires that happen inside or outside of normal working hours. Making the whole team be on call helps incentivize everyone to write more stable code since it’s your own ass on the line.