Typewriters are wonderful. When I was in High School, was into buying any typewriter that an antique shop owner would say was 'completely broken and worthless' and getting it back to a functional state. A typewriter is both a very complex and simple system. The complexity really comes from the weird ways you have to contort the components to get them in and out of the frame. Since the older models were all built by hand, there's always a way to get access to something for repairs. The 'fun' part, however, is always determining the way that that part can be removed. There's always a way, but often there's only one.
Ended up with a completely anachronistic skill, but there's so much that you can get out of doing this kind of apparently pointless repair work.
In the context of a lot of Reddit alternatives, the argument of 'not literally illegal' isn't always what is being made. Sometimes it's more along the lines of 'stop interfering with our law breaking' or 'let us openly promote real workd violence'. Sometimes people have migrated to sites where the administration is either legally insulated by strong local laws (ie: Voat in Switzerland), or otherwise ambivalent attitudes towards actually following regulations (Chan sites, self-hosted forms). The incel communities, and many other violent communities come to mind right away.
Some can, Selenium or other browser automation is sometimes used in bots. Really, any headless browser can be paired up with some automated QA toolkit and turned into a rather effective bot. All that has to happen is for the bot to load the page in headless mode, then issue the keystroke events to the specified elements.
Quite possibly. I do know it's common to the point of being a trope that some graduate students are just in graduate school to defer having to enter the work-force. Some see it as a way to put off having to make major decisions or processes like job hunting. Not like there's no real reason some opt to do things like that. It is markedly easier to accept scholarships and do the grad school circuit than find a job if you have mid to high grades.
Another thing with a PhD is that it is no guarantee that you'll even be hireable. I know of a number of PhD candidates who have trouble interacting in a professional setting outside of the of 'I deserve deference because I have a PhD, you don't necessarily even deserve respect' mentality.
I find sometimes a PhD can come with very ingrained attitude issues. I recall working for a company with a new-recruit development program where really the only way to fail out was through attitude issues. One of the people who oversaw the program mentioned that she's only ever seen people with PhDs and higher fail out over this issue.
Performance under pressure can be better at times, but there's diminishing returns. Applying pressure is good, but if the pressure is too great, then you start to get the reverse effect. When the pressure leads to anxiety rather than focus, then you've lost any possible improvement that stress can lead to.
A deadline is useful to help ensure work gets done. If the deadline is set to 3 hours from now, however, and realistically you need 4 or so to get it done, the pressure is going to have the inverse effect. It would likely just demoralize the team.
Interesting take that self-directed development is a 'heresy' of academia, even more so, it's considered hokey and invalid. I've noticed that's somewhat the case, there's an attitude that Formal Education is the only education. I didn't even go to a 'bad college' like another commenter suggested would have an attitude like this.
I've had students try to tell me off (with great vitriol too) for not being a 'real developer' since I lack a CS degree or a Software XYZ degree, despite having worked as a developer for a while. Even professors were skeptical about being able to break into the industry. I did manage it, and it was surprisingly easy to do, which made me scratch my head about where those beliefs came from in the first place.
Absolutely... in the situation where the systems are actually legacy systems and not new installations or adoptions of obsolete technology. What I was trying to get at, and realize I expressed poorly, was that they are sometimes looking at implementing (today) things which are obsolete. That's what I meant by 'would be legacy anywhere else'.
This, I guess, would be a consequence of legacy bureaucracy, given that the people making the calls are not very aware of the new technologies and their advantages. A reluctance to adopt Python for example out of a distrust of FOSS comes to mind.
I'd tack onto the first point: obsolete technology everywhere. Worked in the public sector for a short while and the amount of outdated tech being used is astounding. Some of the solutions being discussed as "new" have been outdated for decades.
Having to deal with overwhelming bureaucracy in exchange for working on what everywhere else would be legacy systems really killed any desire to stay.
I thought the take-away would be something along the lines of "it is difficult to focus on the content with distracting material jammed in". Like I said, not dismissing this, simply saying it is difficult to take an article seriously when it's got extra fluff like this.
The furry art in it makes it difficult to take the article seriously. I'm not sure why people inject stuff like this into an otherwise serious opinion piece.
Ended up with a completely anachronistic skill, but there's so much that you can get out of doing this kind of apparently pointless repair work.