It’s not shitty parenting. Kids at a certain age just don’t take correction from people who they don’t feel have a right to correct them. Sometimes that person is no one. My kid refuses to believe the sun is not a planet. She will argue until she’s blue in the face. She has argued that she’s a boy. Later that she’s a girl. She misgendered people all the time and wasn’t open to correction from anyone including me for a while. You think, “call people what they want to be called” is an easy lesson to teach. It is not. It took over a year to make it stick. Kids are just dicks sometimes.

It’s not good. Sometimes the only computer a kid has is a chromebook because their parents got it for them for school. I’m seeing more and people just don’t have computers at all. PC isn’t moving fluidly to the next generation as a result. I’ve told parents about steam deck hoping they’ll pick that as their kid’s game console, but it’s not as easy as when I was a kid where you just had a computer anyway and it was about if it could play the game you wanted to play. With the indie scene that concern when away a lot, but now a lot of kids just don’t have PCs

I don’t see why. I grew up with those systems as well, but Nintendo is actively hostile to videogame culture, so there is no reason for my child to develop a love of Pokémon or Mario. She can be nostalgic over new things.

I’m doing my part by never exposing my kid to Nintendo and capturing all my kid’s friends before they leave tablet gaming and convincing their parents to look into PC gaming and steam decks. It’s an easy sell to their parents once I show steam’s parental controls and how every game isn’t full price all the time. Plus remote play makes the initial cost low if they have a computer. Their kid can just play my kid’s games. I’ve already converted 6 kids. My kid just started first grade, so I expect to convert a lot more.

That is a difference people make in their mind. I don’t see a difference. The criticism is the critism. If you receive enough negative feedback on PRs after being hired, you will be fired for not be good enough.

The only way to take away the stress of an interview is to not care about the outcome. I don’t and interviews are stressful for me. I present myself as I am and if they don’t like it oh well, but that is a confidence I think most people don’t have. I have been like this since I was junior so it’s not the arrogance of experience. It’s not even the confidence of easily being able to get jobs because in my early career it would sometimes take months to get a new job. I’d ask for feedback if I could get it and accept or disregard it. Some feedback amounted to, “this wasn’t the job for you” and that’s okay.

I just don’t think it’s worth worrying about any particular job when hiring is like dating. You can be perfect for one job and an obvious no for another, so it’s not worth worrying about the outcome. They like you or they don’t.

Your post was about stress not anxiety and theu are different things. My point is that these these kind interviews approximate what you will actually do at work. If someone finds them stressful then they should think about if this is the career for them. Feeling anxious is another thing, but you can feel anxious while being confident because anxiety is about fearing and unknown outcome.

My point is that people should fine these interview styles stressful and that has always been my point and what I have been replying to since you never brought up anxiety until now.

The literal point if interviews it to judge. The point is to find people who will work in the environment you have. I have done work on codebases where bad code means people die, by indirect or direct results. This probably biases me. For example, I have coded in front of a group several times. This year in fact. Sometimes a problem involves multiple people thinking through it. That’s probably why I don’t care about panel interviews as well. I have had to explain myself in front of a group several times.

These are things that people find stressful, but they are part of my job and have been at nearly every one of the little over half a dozen jobs I have held. My current job isn’t even doing anything important. No one dies if I make a mistake and I’ve still experienced explaining myself in front of a group and coding with several people onlooking. I just assumed that’s how the job is as my friends in the same field have similar kinds of stories

People can be stressed I guess, but is normal and common events in your job are highly stressful, then I still say that’s a sign that it’s not the career path for you. For all we know, these jobs have these things because it’s common on the job and a candidate should really feel at ease doing it. That’s my opinion anyway. We can only form opinions based on experience and apparently, mine differs from yours.

I don’t agree at all. I’ve definitely been in lair sessions where the other person has been assigned to babysit me to the correct answer. It’s just an experience that mostly happens with juniors. I’ve babysat juniors to the solution myself.

There can also be zero trust between colleagues forced to pair, especially in debug sessions. I have worked a lot of jobs, so maybe it’s just my experience, but I would not say that if categorized every single pair session I’ve had in my entire career anywhere near half involved two colleagues who trusted each other and didn’t judge.

I’ve definitely been judged as a senior for dumb dumb moments and that’s okay. If you care about people’s opinions too personally as a software engineer, I’m not sure this is the career for you. It’s a career that involves a lot of negative feedback even as an experienced professional.

I guess my question why should anyone feel stressed from live coding? There are some jobs where this is legitimately a common occurrence at your job. Some jobs are big on pair programming. And I don’t think I’ve ever had a single job that at least a couple times a year didn’t have me living coding through a problem. It happened way more often when I was a junior and needed a lot of assistance. If you are stressed by being watched while you code, that’s not great because you are going to have to do it regularly or semi-regularly at your job. That’s whether someone is sitting right next to you or they are screensharing. It’s why I personally am comfortable with live coding. It’s literally a thing I do at work, albeit not with toy problems.

The problem with only hiring people you have met personally is that you miss out on a whole world of people who would be great to work with but had no chance of ever meeting you or your network. I agree that network recruiting is the safest route, but having diversity in your employees is great. If you only hire through your networks you’ll see quickly quickly how you only get one kind of person.

I have seem this happen a lot in smaller companies. It’s also the story of how I’m typically the sole woman in the department. I by happenstance happen to seed my professional network from college with a lot of men (because I accidentally picked a college that like 80% men). I’m a unicorn because many men’s networks include so few women since in IT they tend to be non-traditional and/or generally excluded from younger men’s social groups.

I get tapped via my network all the time. But if the company basically only does referral based hiring me and perhaps one other woman is there for the whole engineering department. It’s way more balanced at 20%-30% of the department at companies that don’t do this. There is some value in shotgun hiring even if it has a higher fail rate than referral hiring. Different kinds of people can bring fresh perspectives and considerations.

Here’s the thing: as a parent you had a high amount of control over what your children consume. Yes, there is peer pressure, but you can just decide to make your kid uncool or weird or quirky. My child basically doesn’t see ads. She travels with her own tablet and hotspot with ad-free services and ad-free mobile games. Tiktok and YouTube shorts is almost totally banned in my house, but she may watch a few videos specifically on my devices under my supervision if she wants to see something her friends send her. I don’t really have a problem with tiktok per se, more how it zombifies kids with constant dopemine hits. Youtube is a whitelist since don’t trust that algorithm at all.

You get the picture. I won’t say that my kid is watching things wholly appropriate for her at all times, but my mission as it stands is to keep her attention span solid and teach her moderation, so some games get banned before she ever get to play them (roblox), some get banned after me seeing the impact on her cousin (fortnite) and some get banned for impact on her (mobile games are evil). The fall out can be severe, but in this respect I’m an authoritatian parent. My word is law. Your feelings don’t matter. You’ll thank me later. Or not. You have a long adulthood play videogames.

Do we though? Alcohol the most commonly used addictive drugs is allowed for adults and even children in many states as long as the adults approve and do it in in private residences.

Parents need to be better about paying attention to games. I remember telling my aunt about a game my 10 year old cousin wanted. She was horrified and said absolutely not. She bought it for him when he asked when they were in the store because she doesn’t take any time to pay attention to game They’re for kids. Even though games are clearly marked with any objectionable material. She “blindsided” by what was in the game when her son booted it up dispite the game be rated as mature, marking objectionable things and me giving her a play by play.

There are a lot of additive things that we expect parents to use their judgment on. Sugar for example. Until someone is talking to me about how we need a bad on soda and BS like that because parents can’t be expected to parent their kids about it, I don’t really care about the most optional of activities that is games. Children have extremely limited access if their parents don’t allow it. Theu buy the phones/tables/game consoles and robust parental controls have existed for a while.

Kids can be addicted to all sorts of things and it’s still on the parents. Because it’s technology we for some reason stop believing parents can do a thing. Oh however would the person who controls the internet ans the devices control their child’s access to social media (another one I see whining about) and video games. As a parent myself, I’m just under the impression that at least watching in my circle, the parents who don’t aren’t paying attention or don’t actually care that much, they just don’t like the outcome judgment.

That’s because someone can easily track your address via a phone number. This is why I have a burner VoIP number to give out until I trust people.

Public school? You mean that place that children are mandated to be? Also you forgot government. It was a whole thing. So if you’re a Muslim and you want to be a part of the French government, then I hope you don’t have any attachment to those head scarves. There are other religions ornamentation, but the head scarves one was the last one I saw. And whether school or a DMV clerk, it’s dumb.

Also noticed I used two different labels for France rather than China. I think China is fascist with what they’re doing. France is xenophobic with what they’re doing.

Honestly, I feel the same about both: it’s absurd. With France I get the “freedom from religion” spiel from some Frenchman, but it’s veiled xenophobia to me. When you ban a kind of clothing but only for one group of people, that’s basically the definition. Here, it’s just fascism. At least the Chinese people are speaking out.

I’m 100% in agreement. I think that our school system fails deeply in expressing the point. What I liked about college was what even if it was tedious, etc my professors took the time to explain why I needed to do it this way first and what the dangerous of not having some of these skills were. Did I always believe them? No, but now that I’m out in the world working I definitely know they were always right and I’m glad I did it anyway even if I didn’t always believe them.

Grade school is a different beast and I spent so much time frustrated and bored and not knowing what the point was. If it wasn’t for the fact that I just really wanted to be a roboticist and there was only one school in my state I could so that at, I probably would have done the least effort thing all the time.

I did appreciate my calculus teacher who gave us word problems. It really helped me understand the point of calculus. Those words problems showed me there were scenarios where algebra was not gonna cut it. I wish more of my grade school classes explained the point of it all after it became less obvious from middle school onwards.

I say history is for analysis because honestly anything that would let you truly understand today isn’t taught. Yes you will learn about segregation, but my history classes barely touched my grandparent’s time, so it’s hard to connect that middle missing period to today. Sure. I’m the mind of person to go fill in that middle period, but many people aren’t.

What was useful to me was the analysis part. Seeing how bias was in sources. Seeing how different people had the same sources, but different conclusions. Yes, seeing how a past event caused a future event.

But, I don’t think many people in the US connect US history with why we have many things going on today. Grade school history isn’t going to give that. My college history lessons did though. I had a whole ass history class on nothing by lobbying and I really gained an appreciation for why lobby should exist, how Americans are ridiculous, and how writing laws to keep the good of something, but not the bad is really hard. But no, I cannot tell you anything about the history of lobbying to day I spent 3 months studying and debating about it.

Back to math for a bit. I think that the logic part of math needs to be brought more into focus again. I think that programming is only going to become more and more important and it’s a shame we’re not teaching any of the fundamentals to allow people to even do things by make fancy excel formulas.

Oral would suck for the transition students. It’s a completely different style and skill set of answering questions and no kid would have training or the mental framework on how to do it. It’s great if you’re the kind of person who can write a mostly perfect draft essay from start to finish no skipping around or back tracking, but if that’s not you, it’s gonna be a rough learning curve. This is before we ask questions like how does a deaf person take this exam? A mute person? Someone with verbal paraphasia?

This is fine and all and you have a point, but in the current system many times the subject isn’t about the subject it’s about the auxiliary skills you pick up along the way. My history classes in high schopl weren’t really about history. I mean if I retained those facts, fantastic, they were more about analyzing given evidence and multiple references to make a point. I’m an engineer and I use that skill all the time. Facts about the Civil War not so much.

Even in college I had classes like that. It’s why just programming the answer wasn’t always allowed although literally everyone in the university took a programming class freshmen year. That wasn’t always the point.

To always allow AI is like never taking the time to teach kids how to do arithmetic by hand. I mean, sure, we could do that, but learning arithmetic is not really about memorizing times tables and more about understanding the concept of a number and internalizing counting and so much stuff people don’t realize they use all the time the existence of a calculator or not.

I think there is some value in not allowing AI usage sometimes. Before you use a calculator you should learn how to do it by hand so you can have a sense of when you’ve keyed something in wrong. AI has entered my workplace and it’s so annoying. People who never knew how to write the things they ask AI to do can’t vet the AI output and the result is somehow worse to me than if they’d bumbled something by hand. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of in the future. I don’t think that AI is ever going to be perfect and kids have to know what output they’re looking for before they’re taking this shortcut.

Let’s just be simple about this: pensions and oth3r old age support. Who pays for those? Young people. If young people have to support a lot of old people, you’re gonna have a bad time. Everyone. The young people have have larger amounts taken out of their pay and old people who get less support because there are just literally not enough resources. And because old people outnumber young people young are pressured more and more under democracy to give more to older people.

That is only one terrible thing from demographic collapse.