I am a linux administrator/software developer. I left IT in 2016, went back to school nearly got a PhD in History before returning to IT in 2022. I enjoy being a Linux admin and missed that, but I also missed the income that I can get in IT. If I started right out of High School I could have probably made History work over the long haul, but starting later in life I just couldn't afford the deep cuts it entails.
I applied a while back. Made it through months of tests, interviews, all the way to an interview with Mark Shuttleworth. I respect what he has built, but the interview only really focused on what I had done in high school. I graduated 36 years ago - I just don't see the relevance. I am glad he passed on me given all the news coming out since.
As I recall, high school was a big focus of the essay questions when I applied, too. Like you, that was a lifetime ago, and my growth since then is much more important. If I was a lawyer, I might try to round up a few grayhairs that have had similar experiences for a class action suit.
I left after over 25 years. I love programming and love working with Linux, but the jobs always came down to "help us steal peoples personal information so we can slam them with spam for products the neither want or need." It was unfulfilling. I went back to school and got an MA in history. I teach humanities though I still teach a couple of programming classes. I miss it a little. I would go back in a heartbeat for the right position, but I am through getting mauled in tech interviews which turned into combat trivial pursuit. I love technology and I still create applications mostly for myself or to help automate my school. I get new ideas from HN.
> I am through getting mauled in tech interviews which turned into combat trivial pursuit. I love technology and I still create applications mostly for myself or to help automate my school.
This. Something has definitely changed in the last ~10 to 20 years since the end of the dotcom era of interviewing in the tech industry. Before it was as simple as reading the AUTHORS file in an open-source project like Linux to vouch for a programmer applying to somewhere like Red Hat or Mozilla. But now we are expecting them to write a proof of quicksort's worst-case runtime complexity or to explain the Diffie-Helman public key exchange mathematically on a whiteboard to "see how you think" and "prove programmer ability" which is unnecessarily academic and they either don't use it directly or search on Google for it anyway.
That's just the onsite interviews, pre-interviews are riddled with Leetcode, Hackerrank and Codility tests which can be cheated or the solution can be found on Google. What a shame that these flawed tests still exist.
Interviewing is going to drive me from the industry. I'm skilled - I've consistently provided high value at my jobs - but I'm not formally trained (don't have a CS degree) and I don't have the time anymore to sit around grinding leetcode just so I can land my next gig.
That or waste a day or two of your weekend on some trivial app to be nitpicked on some nonsense not in the spec.
I had a go at our manager recently after letting two people do our tech test then say they were too inexperienced. We could have worked that out before wasting their time.
the #1 reason i think about leaving is due to the interviews as well (also not formally trained). im about 6 years in and its just getting worse and worse. the thought of spending my free time studying for interviews is so miserable. on top of that, i realized recently i have a lot of childhood trauma and interviews are very triggering due to the often combative, critical nature.
it's kinda depressing in a way, because coding was at first, something that pulled me out of the slump i was in due to a shitty upbringing. i really like writing code, but the industry sure does know how to suck all the fun out of it.
I just recently went on a vacation that included two 14 hour days of travel. I setup a Raspberry Pi as a Wifi hotspot for the car, added a 128GB USB thumb drive, loaded it up with movies, attached it to a 20,000mAh battery pack. My wife and son were able to watch movies on their iPads using the VLC iOS app for the whole trip.
I have tried a number of methods and workflows. The one that works best for me is Sublime Text and markdown with Marked 2 (http://marked2app.com/) setup as a build system in ST for previewing the markdown and exporting/printing the markdown file in a number of formats, eg. PDF, HTML, DOCX. I use DropBox for note portability and then I use ByWord (https://bywordapp.com/) on my iOS devices for editing and previewing.
That's definitely true. Basic SSL hardly amounts to verification beyond the ability to find a valid credit card, yet browsers will accept the generated certs without a question.
To the OP's point, I'm perfectly happy to generate self signed certs, but I find that browsers make using them more inconvenient than necessary. That's the part that seems a bit conspiratorial to me. It wouldn't be hard at all to pop up a very clearly worded message "this is a self-signed certificate with fingerprint xxx, would you like to accept it [once] [every time]". Safari and Firefox aren't too far far from this, but I find chrome and IE to be obtuse at best.
Mobile. I can't emphasize that enough. Mobile is getting smaller and more capable with every generation. Technology that everyone agree's has huge potential in this space, like augmented reality and geolocation, have yet to produce any clear winner must have products, so the market is wide open in this space.
