Much less because you can spin it as being for a fixed period of time. Not zero because there's always an implied mutual option of continuing even if the initial contract is for a fixed period of time.

Even if you can convince them that you quit, that's almost as big a negative because employers don't want someone who easily quits without a really good reason. And if you have a good reason of the sort that would play well to a prospective employer (and no saying that your previous employer was horrible is not a good reason) you can usually get reasonable managers to give you time off.

I have no intention of "quitting" before the contract expires.

I like the people, I like the work, and I'm still rather surprised to be where I am in the position I have. If the contract expires and that ends it all, that is the way it happens, and I hope it would be a "no fault" reason.

I know I like to take pot-shots at my last job, and I realize it reflects poorly on me, but it was it is. I started writing out a story about the place than figured it looked defensive. haha.

I don't think taking pot shots about your previous job on 2+2 reflects poorly on you.

It's not so much what I want to do with the time off; it's that I actively want to get away from my current job. I've been here 4 years so I'm not just quitting randomly.

They fired the most senior dev because he was seen as a threat to stability. He pushed a project that included a rewrite of one of our site's core group of modules (it went half a year over estimate). The site still works, but now its complexity has increased dramatically and some things that used to work now fail intermittently. A horrible bug overcharged a large number of customers by a large amount, he was pinpointed as the cause and let go.

Now I'm the most senior and the rest is falling on me. The site is unstable and complicated. Management no longer trusts IT. I feel that our company put too much effort in scapegoating the one guy instead of asking what conditions lead to the circumstances and looking for process improvement (we're falling into a pathological state instead of bureaucratic or generative (1)). I don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of anymore. They're bringing in some other programmers but their thinking is just bad (one suggested splitting our codebase, which serves five .com sites, into five different codebases so we would have fewer "if" statements - and he hasn't even seen the codebase.)

At the same time, management has ideas for big projects that they need soon, and they no longer trust IT, so they want to manage us closely by having us submit all 'projects' at the beginning of the year, which get approved or rejected and slotted into some timeline.

My work now seems insurmountable and pointless, even. I can barely do anything because I'm no longer motivated. I could be more open with how I feel and push for change harder, but after seeing the witchhunt that got the other guy fired I'm extremely reticent.

None of this I could explain to another potential employer, it just sounds like a 'it's bad lol' bitchfest.

1: Typology of Organizational Culture, Westrum, 1994

Had to know what you mean by this - but whatever happened, dual-booting is very unlikley the reason for anything going wrong, unless user error in configuring a bootloader or editing a partition table or something.

Whatever happened I hope you didn't lose any data.

It sounds like a very good idea (mostly because it sounds like something you want to do). Make sure you know the time you want to spend on it, set it aside and plan what you'll do. It's a little easy to slip into "do nothing" mode. Ideally you'd have a project in mind that you eventually want to finish in a functional way. Then you can schedule some time early to get up to speed and start working on the project.
That also solves any CV issues (I don't think a couple of month matter at all if you can exlain it but it's easier to explain if you have a github entry or "startup idea" you worked on)

I think to get going, you should pick a functional language and stick with it. If you come from a language with functional elements (JS, Java8, Python whatever) you can focus on doing stuff in a more functional way first but I'd probably still switch to a more "pure" language for learning purposes (a Lisp, Haskell, OCaml etc.)

I disagree with this quite a bit. There's a certain beauty in doing just one thing you find very interesting for a longish uninterrupted period of time with noone to answer to but your own curiosity.
People are wired differently. Some people enjoy travelling the world for a year. For me learning about something deeply for a year sounds much more fun (I enjoy travelling but a year would sap all energy out of me).

Not much, actually. You are just looked on as a contracting resource as employers know they can keep contractors on a short leash. Most employers that I know of will only let a contractor stay around for a max fixed period. Then they take them on as FTEs or send them on their way for a certain period. Microsoft lost a lawsuit in the late nineties from contractors seeking Microsoft benefits.

@DoWhileGimmick - this seems more like an opportunity more than a pitfall to me. You are the most knowledgable person about a code base that has complicated code that is buggy. What are they going to do, bring in more programmers that don't know anything about it and roll the dice with them? Ignore the noise about splitting up the code base and such. I get that you may not want to work on this code base anymore and that is fine. However, I have serious doubts you are going to be a scape goat anytime soon. One of the reasons they could get rid of the other guy was because they had you.

I think the two best ways to approach this are lay it out about the processes they need to implement, the risks they take if they don't. Mention why other companies adopt those practices and how they could have saved their bacon. Always work in a a risk factor when dealing with management. A second alternative would be to try and maneuver yourself into a high paid consulting gig with them.

Nah, I'm with DoWhileGimmick.
The points you listed are all valid, adios. But the amount of overbearing, control-seeking behavior is going to make staying on in such a situation a nightmare for most any knowledgeable developer.
When management tries to take tight control over development, you are going to run into petty, power driven in-fighting and internal politics right on the coattail of that. Unless you thrive in such environments - and there are people who do and, just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that, either - you're going to end up extremely miserable.

I mean that the HD with Win 7 on it went bad. Seems to be some data loss, but I haven't looked into it long enough to know the magnitude of the loss since I'm not interested in staring at the frozen circle thingy for the rest of the day.

It is a good thing I have an extra HD.

Yeah, I know a bunch of the big companies will only allow contractors for a fixed amount of time. So if someone doesn't want to go full time they'll often have to leave when the contract period is up.

I'm capped at $x, which works out to N months if I work a full 40 hours per week. Not entirely sure if they plan to offer FTE.

I was messing around with various stuff I found.

Enlightenment Desktop: I can see how people would like it, since it has a lot of eye-candy, animations, and a ton of customization, but I didn't like it.

Cairo Dock: Supposed to be an Apple-like dock. Super buggy, taking up 1/3 of screen real estate. Removed.

Dia Diagram Editor: This is the best piece of software I've used in quite some time. I'm using this to make E/R diagrams, but you can use it to make many more kinds of diagrams.

If they like your work and the project is on going they often will do a follow on. When project completes and/or management changes then be aware that your situation can change rapidly.

@kazana - who seems to be worried about being a scapegoat, just saying that it is probably qnot the case. I'm not saying he should stay but if he does ...

Scanning random leaked documents tonight for some entertainment and stumble onto this beauty.



Of course death was ineludible but funny that a year later apple is now on the program.
I'm not sure, if I should assume apple wasn't on before the death because of some unknown reason.

api.smoot.apple.com is where all the collection packets are being sent from my estimate on an os x running machine.
A simple block with little snitch or a modified host file may prevent outgoing packets but who knows if they just will do something else if you do that.

I applied for this internship at a startup and they sent me a link to hackerrank. I realize I hate that platform since I spend so much time trying to figure out how to grab from input. Something I am not used to... I'm used to coding questions where you take everything in through a function. Sigh.... failed it pretty hard, and the two questions were easy.

My fault for not practicing on leetcode instead of hackerrank.

This mass tweet collection is a good exercise. Had the script running over the weekend and discovered a networking exception that occurred which I hadn't thought off. Fixed and will write a bash script tomorrow to monitor the python script and restart it just in case that happens again for another reason.

I'm also losing the occasional tweet because write to disk can't keep up with the incoming stream. Didn't have the issue when writing to the internal SSD, the USB drive might be a tad too slow. It's something I might investigate (pretty sure I could squeeze out some extra trickery) but for now dropping a couple of tweets per day is fine with me.

Today I thought that I might want to add functionality to automatically start the collection process when the USB disk is plugged in but that's just playing around. Was also wondering if I couldn't just use a dedicated smallish box like a raspberry pi++ of sorts (pi with only 32 bit isn't a good choice+would want usb3 and as much ram as possible). If anyone knows of something fun to try in that department let me know.

Will be fun to actually play with the data in a week or so.

By "fun" I hope you meant "soul crushing at how ****ty people can be".

We use to do some demos with it, but had to stop because its just too likely you'll get some sort of offensive/racist/sexist/violent/whatever tweet showing up.

While working remote 90% of the time has some amazing advantages I honestly think it is starting to make me crazy. Like full blown can't deal with crowds of people crazy.

^ It's really essential to get out of the house at least for a few hours every day when working from home, otherwise you will go crazy. Pick up some group sport if you are not doing that already. BJJ rocks as balance for programming / sitting in front of the PC all day.

BJJ?

Brazillian Jui Jitsu.

Grue, working remote is code for travel the ****ing world, man. Don't you want to wear your underwear on the patio at 3am in January at least once in your life?

went ahead and applied for entry level job i have no clue if i'm remotely qualified for. made up a cover letter on the spot because I never really had to write one before. Probably not the best of decisions. Time will tell.