If there's any 20-somethings here that make 6 figures, listen carefully:
1. Max out your 401k, and invest all of it in a target date retirement fund. (Some companies are douches and will assign you mostly their own stock, which when it tanks, there goes your retirement... so check your allocation)
2. Get an HSA and max that out. Invest it all in a target date retirement fund. Do not use any of it, pay for medical expenses with cash and save your receipts. Get reimbursed for the receipts when you retire.
3. Contribute to an IRA and max it out (or backdoor roth when you make enough that that's necessary). Invest it all in a target date retirement fund.
4. Keep 6-12 months of living expenses in a high yield savings account.
If you start when you're 23, and you make $100k/yr, you can retire at 45. That may sound very old right now, and you might think, I'll just save later. But consider that when you turn 45, you may realize you have 20 more years of this shit job before you can retire.
> Algorithms and data strictures are important — to a point. I don’t see pharmacist interviews test trivia about organic chemistry. There’s something fucked with our industry’s interview process.
Pharmacists have to get a special degree before they can even get an interview, and I've heard that the education is heavy on organic chemistry. Then you get a job as a cashier selling pills.
> Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless.
You got me.
> Once, someone asked me who I looked up to and I said Conan O’Brien [...]
He wrote for SNL and studied literature at Harvard, so there's probably plenty going on up there.
This genuinely looks like that I wrote it...until I saw that LISP line, definitely not me. But do agree with a lot of items in the list, and I happen to be a DE, too.
I am a big fan of learning LISP, at least once. Going through SICP after more than a decade of writing code for a living was probably the single best thing I did to deepen my understanding of a lot of compsci concepts, data structures, and how to think about software. For me, at least, it was very much a seeing the matrix for the first time kind of moment. My LISP use has quickly declined, but I've dabbled in dozens of programming languages since then, and I do attribute not feeling lost to that experience.
Lost me at dynamic languages. Don't build anything of any significance in dynamic languages! ;)
Some good points. Laughed at TDD is a cult. I mean a lot of software orgs/cultures are cultish (Agile, Scrum, whatnot). At work I often feel I'm part of a cult.
On the contrary, I find "The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me." is exactly my sentiment too, with a caveat. I really like gradual typing, like python has. And not like ruby has (where it's either RBS files and it's tucked away, or it's sorbet and it's weird).
One rebuttal to that is that with the benefit of hindsight, to a first approximation zero percent of the code I've written in my career turned out to be "of any significance" really.
A lot of startups are cults. Tesla maybe the final form of a culted startup where the stock owners don't care about anything anymore.
That said, the people who change companies aren't the ones that believe that management ever had the best ideas, or are able to push back on the cult thinking with clarity. Unfortunately, though, it's not necessarily evidence that wins arguments, it's charisma, which is how the cult is started in the first place.
“a new job in two weeks.” heh, yeah everyone was opining expertise back then when employees had control of the market.
> Max out our 401ks
If there's any 20-somethings here that make 6 figures, listen carefully:
If you start when you're 23, and you make $100k/yr, you can retire at 45. That may sound very old right now, and you might think, I'll just save later. But consider that when you turn 45, you may realize you have 20 more years of this shit job before you can retire.It's incredible how out of touch this place is sometimes.
> Algorithms and data strictures are important — to a point. I don’t see pharmacist interviews test trivia about organic chemistry. There’s something fucked with our industry’s interview process.
Pharmacists have to get a special degree before they can even get an interview, and I've heard that the education is heavy on organic chemistry. Then you get a job as a cashier selling pills.
> Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless.
You got me.
> Once, someone asked me who I looked up to and I said Conan O’Brien [...]
He wrote for SNL and studied literature at Harvard, so there's probably plenty going on up there.
This genuinely looks like that I wrote it...until I saw that LISP line, definitely not me. But do agree with a lot of items in the list, and I happen to be a DE, too.
I am a big fan of learning LISP, at least once. Going through SICP after more than a decade of writing code for a living was probably the single best thing I did to deepen my understanding of a lot of compsci concepts, data structures, and how to think about software. For me, at least, it was very much a seeing the matrix for the first time kind of moment. My LISP use has quickly declined, but I've dabbled in dozens of programming languages since then, and I do attribute not feeling lost to that experience.
Lost me at dynamic languages. Don't build anything of any significance in dynamic languages! ;)
Some good points. Laughed at TDD is a cult. I mean a lot of software orgs/cultures are cultish (Agile, Scrum, whatnot). At work I often feel I'm part of a cult.
On the contrary, I find "The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me." is exactly my sentiment too, with a caveat. I really like gradual typing, like python has. And not like ruby has (where it's either RBS files and it's tucked away, or it's sorbet and it's weird).
You can just as easily take a static language dynamic - in userland.
I've interop'd with JS from Haskell and you can just go full dynamic property access. And gradually add phantom typed APIs around it.
One rebuttal to that is that with the benefit of hindsight, to a first approximation zero percent of the code I've written in my career turned out to be "of any significance" really.
Please elaborate
A lot of startups are cults. Tesla maybe the final form of a culted startup where the stock owners don't care about anything anymore.
That said, the people who change companies aren't the ones that believe that management ever had the best ideas, or are able to push back on the cult thinking with clarity. Unfortunately, though, it's not necessarily evidence that wins arguments, it's charisma, which is how the cult is started in the first place.