I felt the same way. I quit. I'm still unemployed.
I will admit the job I had wasn't nearly as dreary, but I was still plagued by the fact that what I was doing was utterly pointless and had zero value.
In retrospect, I wish I had just grown the fuck up and accepted the simple fact that the chances of any person on this earth making his or her life meaningful outside of his or her own family are astronomically slim. The machine we contribute to is one that takes in money, spits out more money, and creates very little value in the process.
As a matter of fact, giving one's own family its proper value (the most) is one of the problems of our society. And one of the problems with our 'leader-based' culture is that 'ordinary' people (those who are not leaders, who, by mere statistics must be the vast majority) find little support in it.
So, I guess we all need to develop a 'family-centered' philosophy or life more than a 'work-centered'. I find this rather compelling, albeit difficult to tackle (because it is likely you spend more 'conscious' time at job than with your family).
So, as you say, it is a problem of a fine-tuning of one's own values.
Not that I am suggesting 'crap jobs' are good for anyone. But that one has to value 'family success' much more than 'job success'.
I'm not quite as cynical as your last line, but I fully agree with the outlook growing up.
And honestly, does any of this sound unique to programming? Do you think carpenters are all happy just making what people will buy from them? Do you think musicians all just want to make music people will buy? Mathematicians of old just being glad they could reliably hit ships with a cannon? Electricians constantly just plugging in similar wirings into similarly bad houses? ...
> Do you think carpenters are all happy just making what people will buy from them?
An anecdote to highlight your point.
I'm a web developer, but I've built furniture four our new house last year. It was fun, I've learned some new things and, most importantly, it's still there once the electricity goes out. It provides, in my opinion, a lot more value than nth iteration of some corporate website re-design. I thought in a parallel universe I could become a carpenter and live a great life. Then I've imagined the parallel universe in which a frustrated carpenter dealing daily with stupid client demands, building the same table over and over again, physically tired and risking dismemberment on a daily basis, comes home. He wants to make him a website to reach to more clients, so he picks up HTML and CSS and Wordpress, builds it and it's fun, it works, you can interact with this creation from anywhere in the world! He goes to sleep thinking "I should've become a programmer instead...".
I think about quitting every single day, but this fear lets me grind through the day. Being unemployed is just no option if you're not alone/have family.
Look at it this way, if programming were fun, people would do it for free (and many people do) but if you want to make money at it, you are going to not enjoy everything. That's the trade you make, they give you money to do something which you might not enjoy.
The problem is, there are lots of ways to learn that programming CAN be fun (and this site is a great place to learn about places that seem to offer exactly that).
It's not that I do a job in a field that I hate. I have a crappy job in a field that I love. I'm convinced I could resign much more easily if it were the former case..
Yeah. Sometimes I feel like a bum for grinding out a not-so-amazing-but-nice-paying day job, but then I remember my wife and son. To them, I'm a hero. And that's a really big win right there.
I dunno. Quitting pointless jobs is still a net positive if you see the bigger picture I think. Pointless jobs should not be done and the fewer people willing to put up with it, the better. Bosses dealing out pointless jobs will soon learn to either raise pay or solve their problem differently. Sure, sucks when you're longing for that pay check but overall I commend people doing what you did.
Plenty of people have very meaningful lives outside of their family and it is nothing to do with chance. It does however require a level of effort that a lot of people just aren't willing to give.
This behavior is explicitly defined in the godoc for io. I don’t see why the author should be "stunned" by a function doing exactly what it says it does.
Absolutely not. I have been quite impressed with each and every female participant. It is incredibly obvious that no one in the batch was a pity case. But even if you don't believe this anecdotal evidence, consider that the ratio is worse this time around than any other batch. Since the facilitators are acutely aware of the batch balance (and other statistics), it clear to me that this decision was deliberate, and that it reflects a very strong male applicant pool this time around.
As for my speculation, given the rejection statistics, I'm guessing the HS facilitators could have chosen to admit many more females before this would have even been an issue that should have borne consideration.
Male and female applicants are judged by exactly the same standards. From our blog post when we first offerred grants:
"We're not going to lower the bar for female applicants. It frustrates us a little that we feel the need to say that, and we think it underlines the sexism (intentional and not) that so pervades the programming world.
But we want to say that now, so people don't have to waste time asking or debating the point. Women will be judged on the exact same scale as men. We think to do otherwise would be insulting and counterproductive. We care a lot about getting more women into Hacker School, but we won't do it at the expense of the quality of the batch."
I will admit the job I had wasn't nearly as dreary, but I was still plagued by the fact that what I was doing was utterly pointless and had zero value.
In retrospect, I wish I had just grown the fuck up and accepted the simple fact that the chances of any person on this earth making his or her life meaningful outside of his or her own family are astronomically slim. The machine we contribute to is one that takes in money, spits out more money, and creates very little value in the process.