bignavy

My first wifi network post-college was “viruses_and_goat_porn”.

It still didn’t stop free loaders….but in their defense, there were no viruses. 👀🐐

Holy shit...we automated our shitposting? 🤣

Well done.

That sounds brutal man; do you mind if I ask what stack/language? What kind of company were you at before?

We’ve been hiring (for real) but only for more senior positions. Fintech.

Have you tried contracting? Especially if you’re asking them to consider you for junior level positions, that might be a good bridge into something more long term; keep the lights on and let you keep searching and in the meantime some company gets an amazing deal on your talent.

Make it a CON save and watch the whole world freak out.❤️

Or every front-liners favorite dump stat - INT!

Playing dumb is fun until you realize…you’re not playing.

Good advice already in this thread, but I'd add: ask smart questions, and when you're engaging with a senior/mentor, build the picture for them. Everyone (including your mentor) expects you to have questions - they want you to ask questions, rather than just spinning your wheels for days and days. But they also want to know what you've tried and what you've looked at for resources. And despite appearances, they don't always have the entire code base committed to memory. :)

For instance - suppose you'd been asked to, using the UI, return a piece of information from an external API and display it within the UI.

Bad question: "Hey, so I tried to integrate that third party API, but I'm not getting a return."

"Okay - what kind of code are you getting? And what do the docs say?"

🤷‍♂️

Good question: "Hey, so I tried to integrate that third party API, but the return I'm getting from it is a 401 error. That should be an authentication error - but just in case, I pinged their server from our server, and they can reach each other. The documentation says that I have to use our key to get a JWT, but hitting the endpoint it says gives me a 401 error. I double checked our token; I've got the right one. And I'm sending it in the header as 'auth' like the documentation says. Where else should I look?"

"Oh yeah, that's a tricky one - you have to encode the token before you send it; let me see if I've got an example where you can see what that looks like....."

One of the things that will happen over time, based on the questions that more senior SDEs ask, you'll be able to 'rubber ducky' problem solve by asking yourself the questions that they would usually ask you, and it's shockingly effective to help you sort your own problems out and clear your own blockers.

This probably isn't the right place for my original comment, much less a sprawling debate about US vs. Rest-Of-World doctrine in regards to air superiority, but....the AC-130 is more so than just about any other airplane in the inventory very exposed to enemy fire, and can only be used in a totally permissive environment. Flares are a 'defense' against some surface to air missiles (smaller heat seeking MANPADs, specifically), and theoretically against air-to-air heat seeking missiles as well - but even though C-130s (and C-17s and C-5s) have the capacity to deploy flares, they're a tactic of last resort. A C-130 (and by extension, an AC-130) is going to be totally defenseless against even a very bad, very old fighter jet (like the MiG-17 or MiG-21), will be a sitting duck against any sort of AAA (like a ZSU-23), and even particularly vulnerable to a 'bad guy' with a MANPAD, because it literally flies circles around whatever it's shooting at. Position yourself in its 'orbit' and pop off a Stinger or SA-24, and it's going to be a very bad day for the AC-130 crew.

Any airplane configured for CAS (i.e. flying low with a large bomb load) is going to run into the same threats. But the AC-130 has no other mission. It's a SPECOPs weapon because it's for punching down - it's incredibly useful against dudes on the ground with rifles, and maybe some lightly armored 'technicals'. It has almost no other uses - in Vietnam they assisted in Search and Rescue missions to recover down crew, but that's about it. It doesn't have the survivability of an A-10, nor the multi-mission capability of an F-16/F-15E/F-35/F-18. I guess it's faster than attack helicopters - but if you've seen how short of a life span they can have in a non permissive environment, well...even more so for an AC-130. An AH-64 or AH-1 can duck behind a tree line. Where the Hell is an AC-130 supposed to hide?

I should've just giggled - yes, 130 is an incredibly high armor class! You'll never hit it with an attack roll unless it's a critical! Ha!

But I sort of do have a problem if the AC-130 is your 'favorite' plane. Unique? Sure. Cool? Maybe - there's definitely nothing else out there flying around with a 105 mm howitzer. Ingenious? Sure.

But if you have any conception of the missions that AC-130s have been flying for the last 50 years (and maybe no one here does!) it's an awfully strange choice for 'favorite' airplane. It's designed to turn 'bad guys' into chunks of meat. It does it cheaply, with a high degree of precision, and with very low threat to SPECOPs operators or friendlies.

In many ways thats what every piece of military hardware is for - and that doesn't stop me from being impressed with F-15s or B-2s or a whole host of interestingly engineered aircraft. Maybe they all fit into the conception of America as a bully, blowing up dudes with rifles that hate us because someday they might get a missile or a rocket. 🤷‍♂️

If that's how you get down - cool! Maybe the mistake was on my part; I could've just downvoted and kept it moving and thought how morbid it is. And next time I will, I guess.

You know what I don’t like about them? They’re kind of a symbol of American arrogance and bullying.

It’s only useful where there is zero AAA and zero threat from enemy fighters. It’s a cargo plane - it packs a wallop, of course, but you use it when “the other guy” is a bunch of dudes running around on the ground with no chance to fight back.

The fact that we have them in inventory says a LOT about the types of wars we’ve been fighting for the past 40 years.

(Super unpopular opinion - the A-10 is not much better, but at least it has some genuine anti-armor capabilities.)

The Spurs in many ways created modern load-management ideas - and they also had a big three (Duncan, Ginobili, Parker) that managed to all stay productive until they were almost 40. Shutting Victor down after two summer league games, where the games literally do not count, is very on par for them.

As for the Britney Spears thing - I mean, it’s a good example of why getting Victor some time off is a good idea. All of the Spurs/Vic statements, put together, are maybe two lines of text. Britney, who admittedly has had a rough life and a weird relationship with her fame, is the one that keeps releasing statements and videos and trying to drag out this interaction. It was clearly a low-stakes misunderstanding, there’s been no charges or lawsuit, and EVEN IF TMZ had gotten word of it not from one of the like, six people that were there, it could’ve been squashed very easily by releasing a statement that there was miscommunication, everyone apologized, life goes on. We’re still talking about it three weeks later because Britney keeps posting about it and talking about it to stay in the public view.

Welcome to the NBA Wembanyama. I bet he’s so weirded out by the whole thing he just wants to go hide in a gym and work on his step back three. Which from the Spurs perspective, is perfect.

2+ YOE as DevOps, looking for Software Dev and DevOps-y roles since, say, February.

Not really looking, per se, but was listening and responding to head hunters and treating it as a learning experience and maybe some leverage to get a pay bump - I’m classed as a junior but run rings around the mid-career and seniors we’ve hired recently, who all make more than me.

Anyway, I had a ton of interviews (probably 15 or so), several next rounds (maybe 5?), but no actual offers and nothing that would make me move through about May, and then….everything just went radio silent.

I almost posted this week to ask if I was doing something wrong or the market was that hard right now.

Maybe this is because I'm still relatively junior (2ish years), but my favorite question to ask is, "What are some of the characteristics you're looking for in someone in this role?"

I use it as a vibe check, especially at the end of interviews. If they start reading my resume back to me, or listing the things we've talked about during the interview....well, that's a good sign. If they start describing a bunch of stuff that we didn't talk about, it's a chance to throw a 'Hail Mary' pass and show them how that's me, as well - maybe we didn't talk about something that was important to them, but I have relevant experience or a background.

If they start describing somebody else....well, that's not great.

This was my first thought.

I do this for a living and it’s literally built into Linux.

Set their permissions carefully, ensure that the permission set does what you want (and not a bunch of stuff you don’t want), and keep on keeping on.

I hated everything about this comment, thanks.