We’re working on promoting that Stem Bolt. It recently got an excellent recommendation from Admiral Janeway.

Indeed. Lactose tolerance is a powerful mutation. The rest of us should fear them for their superior genes.

Edit: Queue rocking 90s X-Men cartoon theme song.

I can imagine it would be hard to maintain lactose tolerance with a dairy allergy.

“millionaires tax” is such a ludicrous misnomer.

This is a tax on people with over $1 million income annually. It’s very hard to sink as low as becoming a mere “millionaire” on $1 million annual income.

A person making $1 million in income would need mutliple expensive hobbies, multiple nasty drug habits and to recklessly sink a few yachts, just to drop as low in net worth as a humble jeans-wearing crime-avoiding salt-of-the-earth “millionaire”.

An average chap who spent 40 years owning a small lawn mowing business is a millionaire. This tax doesn’t touch his money, at all.

I guess “multimillionaire” and “decamillionaire” don’t roll off the tongue, in headlines, though.

At least he still outranks Ensign Kim.

“Follow my path and you’ll be fine.”

Later, at a Republic Tribunal:

“… and obviously no sane pilot on a training mission would ever consider attempting to navigate those obstactles without weeks of study in advance. And so I exhort the jury not to consider leniency, but to find the defendant guilty of first degree premeditated murder of their wingman pilot in training. The prosecution rests this - quite frankly open-and-shut - case.”

“When… This song… Is gone…!”

I think my favorite tale from this book is the one with the two belligerent assholes (who confront Luke and then ObiWan), being various forms of belligerent and assholes in other contexts. It’s surreal, but fitting.

Was reading this to my SO, and was given a correction for Quark: gets Rom to pay Quark for the privilege of returning Quarks cart.

Those are both excellent points.

Hiring people is a big risk. Anything you can do to mitigate that risk (evidence that you’re someone they should hire) will increase your chances of being hired exponentially.

That’s a great summary. Well said.

Let your mentors know you’re looking for work, and how many hours you can work per week.

New programmers provide negative value, so there’s not a lot of demand.

I’m very good and studied hard, but my first couple of programming roles I got entirely because a mentor of mine recommended me to someone who took a chance on me.

Also keep adding code to your public GitHub. Two of my top developers today I originally hired directly away from their retail roles. One had a ton of academic coding experience and had just not yet landed the right job. The other was just getting started, but posted a ton of low quality homework code to GitHub so I could read it and know who I was hiring.

Edit: In contrast, one of my other top developers has one of the top CS degrees in the world. So that works too.

And more than one of my top developers have IT help desk experience. I have had excellent luck when hiring folks with IT Help Desk experience.

Edit 2: As someone else mentioned - your long term goal is to connect with an IT Recruiter that you trust, and work with them to get your resume, and GitHub, and/or binder full of code you wrote into shape. I’ve hired more than one candidate who admits the simply presented themselves exactly as their recruiter coached them to. And I’ve hired candidates I would have skipped, because their recruiter was someone I trust and they asked me to take a second look at a candidate who made a poor first impression.

Edit 3: Since this is for newbies, some information about recruiters: we pay the recruiter in addition to what we pay you. The recruiter’s typical pay for a rookie hire is around $50,000.00, if you stay for a full year. Half up front, in case you don’t stay.

A few things you should know about recruiters: they only need to make a few solid placements each year to earn a living. As a rookie, you’re the hardest to place, and the lowest layout when placed. But, programmers that are easy to place don’t move often, so recruiters may still have plenty of time for you.

The recruiter is probably mainly placing you the first time in hopes that you come back later when you’re worth big money. The initial payent is nice, but the real payment will be if/when you have 5 years experience and still work exclusively with them.

Hiring managers like me have recruiters we trust and reuse. If you can get recommended to a great recruiter, they will get you interviews at better places to work.

In contrast, there’s lots of mediocre recruiters out there. Don’t be afraid to switch to a new recruiter, if you have the opportunity, and your current recruiter isn’t getting you interviews.

What I think makes good programmers is having the ability to bash your head against your desk while debugging, but still walking away at the end of the day loving the job and problem solving.

Just quoting you for emphasis here, in case any of our newbies missed it. Well said!

What a fantastic redition of those tradgic orphans!

I’m sure it would bring great joy, if their story was any less unfortunate!

I don’t hear about “The Vorkosigan Saga” anywhere near enough for how good it is.

A scientist gets trapped on a planet with only a barbarian idiot warmonger to help her survive.

Eight or so books later and we get to read about the not quite scandal across her space empire when she takes a new lover and her star romping space knight sons can’t quite figure out how to handle their new stepdad.

And a lot of star empire drama, ego, heroism, and compassion in between. It’s so fun, y’all.

Kindness can be learned. The difference between being genuinely kind and just constantly successfully mimicing what a kind person would do is - no difference at all, really.

Ultimately, I think people who started as natural assholes make the best kind people - beacuse we don’t just do what feels kind, but we have to examine the results of our attempts at kindness, and adjust if needed.

I’ll wait to get my hopes up until we find out if anyone can replicate their results.

I love that episode!

… But… Yeah. It’s not good. It’s kinda great. But not good.

I am, hopefully, exaggerating on the 11 count. I don’t know the exact number, and likely no one does - but it genuinely is shockingly small, considering how critical usability and accessibility are to everyday use of code.

Anyone can study the principles of usability and accessibility, but the number of experts we have really is far too few, and I suspect it’s is why we have so much reuse instead of innovation, right now.

Lots of other very pragmatic solutions also seem ridiculous.

Every problem is going to cost either clock cycles or highly skilled programmer time.

Currently, in the world, all eleven competent user interface element developers are occupied with more important tasks.

Until one of those eleven finds some extra free time, the rest of us get to slap electron into everything, and he thankful we can spread our atrocious CSS anti-talents to one more problem-space.