I have been a professional programmer for 44 years and have NEVER had "job market anxiety". Why? Because I sincerely believe that there is zero correlation between the job market and my ability to find work.
I don't pay attention to what anyone says about the economy, the market, or anything else macro, especially on the internet. And I have gone through times that were much much worse than now.
I never worried about losing any job because I was certain I could find another. The longest I've ever been out of work was for a few weeks.
A few tips:
- Have x months expenses in the bank. Take the pressure off.
- Have multiple resumes ready to go, programmer, analyst, sys admin, manager, even data entry.
- Stay in touch with your network. Not to get a job. Just to stay in touch.
- Keep your skills fresh. Always have a side project.
- Remember we're not in energy, education, or manufacturing. Their cycles are killers. Our in tech are not. Everyone else depends on us.
- Fuck anxiety. We build stuff out of nothing. We're stronger than bad news.
Thanks, Mister_Snuggles, for reminding me I'm not the only one left.
I HAVE to code in PICK.
"Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it." - Charles Burkowski
(Funny, they named the current support company "Rocket".)
Here's the link to the current Universe trial version (free and good until 04/2025. Get it, install it, and make something with it. Please don't let that part of you die.
1. Don’t exercise to be strong. Exercise to be healthy.
2. The best place for ideas is where ever works best for you.
3. What she said. And carry and pencil and pocket-sized notebook everywhere. People say I have a great memory. It's a hack, not a gift.
4. In relationships, the most important thing is love. If you have it, no problem is too big. Without it, who cares?
5. If sex ever becomes hard work, become a hooker. You might as well get paid.
6. Consider a pet before having anything else.
7. At any age, if you take care of yourself, you will not experience irrational weight gain. Nothing happens out of nowhere for no reason at all. There are no rewards or punishments, only consequences.
8. Sometimes in life, the best thing to do, is to <insert whatever works for you>.
9. In a long term relationship, be either "all in" or not. If you're "all in", be "all in".
10. Learn the difference between issues and details. Issues matter. Details don't.
11. Allow aquaintances to come and go. True friendships are so rare and precious, never lose them. (I learned that the hard way too many times.)
12. Give every "no show" one opportunity to apologize. After that, ghost them. No matter what happens, it will be for the best.
13. Never allow anyone to "make you feel" anything. You must always decide how to feel yourself.
14. If you're too stupid to use a condom, you get what you deserve. Unfortunately sometimes your child gets what you deserve too.
15. The more you know, the lower the percentage of everything there is to know will be known by you.
16. Don't pick the phone up in the first place. (There, you just eliminated the need for 4,528 "put your phone down" rules.
17. See #14, #15, and #16.
18. See #16. See how easy.
19. Apply #16 to social media. Except Hacker News.
20. If you're older than the author of a listicle, you have automatic permission to build upon it with your own listicle.
OP, thanks for the nice list, and the opportunity to play along with good clean fun. :-)
Nice catch, ExtraRoulette! You're the first to notice.
This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics.
It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs.
Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day.
So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore.
I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore.
I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.
Yes. I see it more and more these days, especially among recruiters and HR departments.
I believe there's an inverse correlation between the value one places on green squares and their understanding of what it actually takes to build software...
Thanks mda, for the great feedback. (The greatness of feedback is not correlated with its positivity or negativity.)
I sort of anticipated this. I wrote the comic below just for times like this. Please stay in touch and let me know if any of this grows on you. I sure hope it does. That's what helped me get through it all.
I added a "Show SVG Markup" button toward the bottom of every page so you can see how I did it. This may be a little less overwhelming for some people that View Page Source.
Fixed. Sorry about that. Please try again and let me know.
It's Sunday. I should be drinking beer and watching sports but I'm married to my fantasy project so these things happen.
I didn't think rss was important any more. Thanks for setting me straight.
And thanks again for the kind words. Please drop me an email (on my hn profile or in the footer of every eddiots webpage. I want to stay in touch with any hn friend who uses the word "fantastic". :-)
Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)