Heard back about the interview and they actually want to bring me in for an on-site. Definitely wasn't expecting that but I'll take it. Fwiw this place is like top 5 of the places I'm in talks with and is top 2 of non megacorps.

Also did a hackerrank assignment for a large grocery start up. They initially told me that it was timed for 12 minutes so I was expecting something that could conceivably take that long. But wow that was easy. Three pretty trivial lines of code. I'm not really sure how that question really does anything for their interview process.

I really never considered programmers to be the happy lot. They seem, both on online, in person during interviews and especially at places like Starbucks, more than happy to loudly explain how miserable they are and how much their lives suck. In contrast, I wake up knowing I'm going to earn $50 / hour on day X and I'm ****ting rainbows, but then again, I know what it's like to dig holes for $50 / day.

In person, I'm not a sad sack or debby downer. I truly despise complainers and stay as far from them as possible. Granted, I don't "shine," but also note that (see gender issue thread), culturally, grumpy people are open targets for manipulation and ass whipping. Just don't do that, lol.

In this particular case, I didn't have anything to lose or gain, so I just decided to be more open and honest about my general feelings. I never talked to a professional programmer face-to-face about being cussed out, dealing with junkies, hearing f-bombs and racist / sexist bull**** from an interviewer, etc.

But you are right, I don't really think this is the profession for me. Lately, I see it as a means to an end, and I'm putting all my energy into reaching back to what I'm really trained to do and make money that way, and you know, there isn't nothing wrong with that.

I don't think its attitude in terms of emotions (happiness/grumpiness/etc.) as much as you're difficult to communicate with. I don't really know how to improve that.

Totally agree that its fine using programming as a profession that makes money. I've never bought the "You need to have a deep passion for the professions" line. Lots of successful people that treat it as a job and don't invest any personal time into it.

You might be amazed at how many people struggle with programs that just require a few lines of pretty simple code.

If it matters, I didn't bother reading any responses to the last post I made in the gender thread. I want to apologize to you for being kind of a jerk or whatever. I think that it was fruitless to continue that, as I respect you too much to stir up bad blood.

I do sometimes feel like I'm talking through a wall at times. The backgrounds and experiences of people are very wide indeed, and regarding the lingo of bull**** which passes my head every time, I can only paint an honest picture of who I am in an interview. If I can't impress an interviewer with what I've accomplished, then so be it. He can call me a liar, but the truth lives in me.

I think part of the issue was that I was measuring my own self-worth against the rejections I was getting all the time. Contracting made me realize that the gate-keepers are just as dumb and fallible as the people they slam the door against, and it's nothing personal towards me.

But lately, I've been building out a store. It's not something I'm passionate about, but it feels sooooo much better to see orders come in, to be able to measure progress, and know that 15 hour days actually amount to something that bears fruit, and that sort of makes me passionate. If you asked me 10 years ago about selling stuff online, I'd tell you that you're crazy, but after years of doing under other companies, it makes a lot of sense, and in that strange way, it's something to be passionate about.

If you communicate in real life anywhere near how you communicate here it’s not difficult to see why someone would have second thoughts about hiring you. You thinking working for yourself is a better option than learning how to communicate with others is bang on typical for you.

Tbh most adults even when they "know" they have to change their communication style or however you want to call it have absolutely no chance. Working for himself is probably the best chance he has of being successful.

It’s possible but the first step is recognizing the issue, which can be harder than changing it...

I'm very different in person than I am on here. Also, I suppose a lot of my joky-ness comes out better in face-to-face conversations.

The most amazing, well-rounded, best communicators I've ever met are people who struggled like hell to find a job, said "**** it," and started working for themselves. I previously proposed that there is no such thing as an entrepreneur who actually wanted to do it, and I've yet to meet the counterexample.

In contrast, I've met people at meetups who, if you asked their name, would stumble across the appropriate words to use, and they were totally employed. Sadly, I can find many examples of poor communicators in the programming profession than I can in many other fields, but then again, if you are walking behind someone with a sharp knife, you can't be a bumbling idiot.

Dave, the gender discussion is really just one of many. And I don't even mean the style of how you communicate - so I'm not talking about things like socially awkward people that have a hard time looking you in the eye and not mumbling information or even the style of how someone communicates anonymously online.

I find that talking to you is challenging because it often feels like we're talking past each other and you're really not getting what the other person is saying. You also seem to interpret what people say in kind of strange ways that really hurt a discussion.

In a lot of cases that worse than just dealing with a poor communicator.

Facts are easy; emotions are hard.

I think this is more of an issue than anything to do with communication with others - it seems to me that there are too many things that trigger you emotionally and cause you to shut down and stop listening. When you're wrong about something, it's easy to correct your misunderstanding, but when an emotional trigger causes you to react disproportionately, it's hard to deprogram your mind because the very mechanism you'd use to correct yourself is bypassed by this trigger.

I'd argue in today's world, facts are hard too.

In an interview setting you pass around facts. There isn't or shouldn't be anything that triggers you. I even manage to keep my cool when I'm cussed out by a junkie, but I get a lot practice from that when walking around Hollywood Blvd.

There shouldn't be, but I'm pretty sure you're not emotionally neutral about the questions that are asked of you. It's a stressful situation where lots of people react emotionally - not all emotional reactions are outbursts.

Keeping your cool is different from not being triggered though - one of the more common responses to a trigger is shutting down, which makes it easier to keep your cool, when you don't need to respond at all, but leads to suboptimal responses when more intelligence is required.

Glad to see everyone is finally coming around to my view of how daveT handles himself.

I think it should be pointed out that my online self is not the same as my real-world self. I know from what few 2+2er's I've met, they are wildly different than I would have imagined, and I know that others have experienced similar.

You may imagine that I'm someone who just gushes words, when in reality, I'm very much the opposite.

(It's not really on me to be bothered by a junkie interviewing me. I wouldn't want to work at those places)

I can't speak for anyone else but I don't think your online behavior is particularly problematic or indicative of much - my comments are more based on your real life experience as narrated by you and in particular how other people in real life are reacting to you. I guess that plus some specific viewpoints and opinions you've shared, which imply that you're not taking in all that there is.

Sure, I do my best to describe and interpret what I experience. I don't pretend to be a great salesperson in an interview. I just present the facts of what I can do and who I am.

The positive of contracting is that it puts the power back into the hands of the worker a bit.

Did someone take a week to get back to me? Oh well, they aren't serious.

Coding test? Just show me what you got and I'll tell you if I can do it or not.

Do you want to go through a ton of processes? Not for a 4 hour job.

I think that's so much a part of it. If some company really has a need for an employee, they aren't going to make you jump through hoops for 2 months to get a job. I guess most programmers can fade taking an unwanted vacation for a few months, but I certainly can't.

When you are contracting, you find out really quick how serious someone is. Even when there is a "real need," they more often than not aren't that serious. If a "massive need" isn't priority enough to get done within 5 days via a contractor who guarantees success, then of course, when they interview for a FT role, they really aren't that concerned, so they are going to take a week to arrange a phone call, a week to arrange a coding test, another week to bring you in, another week to follow-up, another week for the next step, and so on.

What kind of contracting work are you doing these days? Maybe I missed out on some of those but curious to hear more about your experience. Is it more like working at a company but through a vendor or do you have your own customers?

It's a mixture of cold-emailing, using upwork, fiverr, craigslist, referrals, and queries from my blogging.

I don't work with a company. I've tried that road a few times but it's really much worse than just applying for jobs. Many more delays, interviews, sudden changes, and so on. Quite a few are super picky about who they bring in and I'm not at that level. Never got a contract from a recruiter.

Mostly I work on dogs and trashy code. I try to advise on better approaches, and if successful, I make the changes. If not, move on to the next one. I recently was up for an Arduino board contract but that one seems to have fizzled out (sad-face). I've also had to help with all sorts of database, Cassandra, Datomic, and other stuff like that, do Java, Ruby, Python, C, Clojure, Node, etc. Really, it's just a bunch of odd stuff no one really has the time or know-how to do, and other times, I'm working with customers who got royally screwed by some dev house or other IC.

I also mix in things like writing for websites, Amazon and eBay stuff, Shopify, and so on. It's all over the place, but hey, I got a strange background so why not use it? <- as an example, I was paid $100 to bust out a wall last week, but good exercise, lol.

But, for the most part, it's about the same as finding jobs in the real world, except that you can quickly get work (and bail when it's obvious it isn't going to work out). The downsides are that some clients disappear for a while; there is also the constant asking about the status of the project (they never will tell you without asking them); chasing down unpaid invoices; and constant pay negotiation; and what feels like a never-ending job-hunt. Of course, there is no 40 hours of paid work on any given week and the pay is all over the place. One week can be $100 (or zero) and the next can be $4000 (I'm guessing some people see higher).

The trade-off is that I get paid more often than being unemployed, but it's unlikely I'd ever reach the level of FT pay.

Weird thing i learned about java today (and i think other langs do this) -

I’m making a rudimentary file system for an OS, represented as a 4kb array of ints. The files can be named up to 4 chars, but the way I’m supposed to set it up is that the 4 chars can only be 4 bytes total.

This caused a considerable amount of confusion for me, because java reserves 2 bytes for a primitive char. But ASCII values can be written in 1 byte. So what I had to do is when I want to write a file name is unpack the integer into a 4 byte array, and type cast each byte to the char i want, then pack it back into an integer.

This was more complicated than the entire rest of the project combined. Why does java reserve 2 bytes for a char?

Also, i sent out my very first resume for a research position with a firm that is contracted by the department of defense. hope i get a call!

They didn't cover character encoding? 1 byte ascii can hold 256 characters (2^8) which is almost enough for English, 2 byte encoding can hold 65,536 characters (2^16) but they probably should have just defaulted to one of the Unicode standards which is big enough to handle many more languages and scripts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

I have only come across this stuff a handful of times but that looks familiar