I actually think Linus has had some of his rough edges smoothed out over the years. This was not nearly as combative as it could have been or may have been in the past!
My private hypothesis here is that we're doing a better job as a society of encouraging "disconnection" from being "always online," which is documented to aggravate mental health issues[0].
It stands to reason therefore that the people who remain online to comment may have lower levels of mental hygiene by virtue of their ongoing exposure to the internet and social media, thus resulting in a gradual decrease in sentiment over time.
I made a safe-to-wake light for my son out of a Raspberry Pi. It serves up a responsive website on the local network so you can manually change the lights or update the schedule.
Been running like a champ for over 3 years now, which has been the most pleasant surprise. I'm used to ecosystem entropy causing things to break.
For the first job, I bill hourly for the time I spend working. Here, I develop web applications to validate machine learning models for a company; I help organize results in a way that allows ML engineers to easily "spot check" the results of ML runs on data through a web interface.
The second job I have is in the "web3" space developing applications that run on a specific blockchain in which I've specialized. Compensation here is based on milestones and paid out in cryptocurrency.
In both cases, I am transparent about the progress I'm making and compensated accordingly. The hourly rate I charge as a contractor brings in an equivalent salary to what I had as a full-time employee in about 900 hours per year, which works out to be about 18/hours per week if you assume 2 weeks off.
I transitioned from full-time employment to contracting in April 2022. I am currently over-employed and working two gigs simultaneously.
All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field.
Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through.
Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but I'm working fewer hours per day and working on more interesting things. A lot of that has to do with transitioning out of management, I think. I don't miss it :)
It took learning another language (Japanese) for me to finally make sense of my native language (English)'s grammar.
I still remember the day I learned the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs in Japanese and had that "ooooHHHHHH" moment in my head where all verbs everywhere finally made sense.
What a luxury to work at a place where tickets are defined and work is scoped out for you :)
If you're chafing there due to the lack of autonomy, I promise there are places hiring people whose strong suit is tackling ambiguity in addition to software development.
I think the real advantage is scripting with a REPL in your IDE. Whipping up a script becomes trivial because you can test every data transformation (heck, every expression!) with a keystroke. There's no great way to do this in a language without s-expressions.
I wonder how much of this changed due to public sentiment driven by pop culture? Movies like Fern Gully[0] and TV shows like Captain Planet[1] definitely had a hand in shaping my generation growing up.
BlackSky | Remote ;; Seattle, WA ;; Herndon, VA | Full Time | US Citizen
BlackSky is building the premier global intelligence platform. Our Platform delivers timely, relevant, and actionable information allowing our customers to make swift and informed decisions. In other words: we launch satellites and set up AI/ML pipelines on the torrent of data they send down. It's really cool.
We're especially looking to staff up our Platform team, which is responsible for building the software that delivers the data and insights our customers need. We have open positions for front-end, back-end, and full-stack developers; our language stack includes Java / Python on the back-end, and JavaScript (React) on the front-end.
We're a fully distributed team; the company is just over 150 people now, and we've got teammates in over 20 states. 100% Remote is 100% OK. Due to ITAR requirements, we are only hiring US citizens at this time.
Typically, there's a "cliff" after the first year, at which point it switches to quarterly.
So you get nothing the first three quarters, but after quarter 4 (your first year at the company), 25% of your 4-year grant is immediately vested. Every quarter after that is another 6.25% of your initial grant.
I believe the point they were trying to make in the article is that, instead of quarterly grants following the pattern of:
I'm not sure I would classify that as "talking plainly." Words like that would put anybody on the defensive, and being on the defensive does not make people receptive to positive change.