Unfortunately for those who have those values, not all paid positions involve acting on those values.

Random brain dump incoming...

Most businesses pay money to solve problems so they can make more money. You can solve their problems - but not in the way that you may be thinking.

This is a generalisation that is not strictly true, but I say it to illustrate a different way of thinking: Businesses do not undertake penetration testing because they want more secure software. They do pentesting so they can stay in business in the face of compliance and bad actors.

To find a job, you want to start learning what people pay for. People pay contractors to come in and fix things, then leave again (politically easier, sometimes cheaper). People pay sotfware developers to develop features (to sell more stuff).

Start looking up job titles and see which ones interest you (DevOps, frontend dev, backend dev, embedded...). Don't get too stuck on the titles themselves. It's just to narrow down what kinds of business problems you find interesting.

Other random questions:

• What specific projects are you interested in?
• What types of problems do you like solving?
• Do you like digging in and finding those tricky bugs that have been bothering people for years?
• Do you like trying out new frameworks which let you think about the system differently?
• Would you rather implement a database or GUI toolbox?

Once you're deep in the belly of the beast, you'll find ways to exercise those values. It's hard to know in advance what this will look like.

Ah yes! That is a great trick that kept me going doing software dev professionally.

Instead of trying to get the system I was working with to interact correctly with some shit enterprise system, I would find common protocols (or related protocols) and implement that well. Then I would discover more specifically where the shit enterprise system was behaving badly, and point to something politically neutral (like an IETF RFC) to help get us out of a rut.

It made debugging so much easier. Those specifications and open-source implementations have had much more engineering talent put in them than what I was usually dealing with.

how can a writer be so ignorant.

They probably know exactly what they're doing. Singling out Japan makes for a "better" headline to a mostly North American audience.

It's also a bit of a clever headline. Compare the original headline and this one: "All major automakers continue to produce sports cars". Both headlines could technically be true.

But the original headline lets you get away with stirring up some emotion e.g. "Japan alone is keeping the sportscar industry afloat, European, American manufacturers don't care, sportscars are dying". Life, death: strong words! It's misleading and shitty journalism.

Changing that much was probably a bad thing,

I'm a generalist and this gets me too.

For many jobs the ones doing the hiring are thinking of their domain, so more experience in the domain means a better worker. But a software developer who has developed CRUD apps 50 times on-budget and on-time over 20 years is almost certainly going to be a fantastic candidate alongside the dev who specialised in the health insurance (or whatever) domain for the entirety of their 5-year career.

Now I'm aiming for more software-focused companies and consultancies since I think I'm more likely to meet people who appreciate that broader experience.

are you saying that this is not creepy at all?

Definitely creepy that it phones home in the first place.

But it's not necessarily creepy that it keeps trying; it could just be sloppy programming. Hanlon's Razor comes to mind. Microsoft Teams behaved in a similar way apparently. If you blocked it phoning home at the network level it would buffer gigabytes of data on disk until the disk was full.

I've never heard of Skiff. Beyond studying the protocols and system design, here's a couple of things off the top of my head to help:

• Follow the money. Are they charging enough to not be tempted to sell data about their users?
• Who is in charge? Have leadership demonstrated respect towards their user's privacy in the past? See their About Us page
• Read their privacy policy
• Keep up-to-date. Lots of services start out with good intentions, but over time they get acquired, acqui-hired, big investments.. and policies change.

Fascinating insight about those brain dump services.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Massive respect for you to have done 30 years in this silly industry!

From Audi 2022 fiscal year:

Revenue rose 16.4 percent to a record €61.8 billion while operating profit climbed nearly 40 percent to an all-time high of €7.6 billion.

The brand is strong relative to Chinese competitors but I don't think it will stay this way forever.

I think they want to move fast, but they simply aren't able to do so.

They want to move as fast as they can maintain their profits. I think major shareholders would ideally like to see more tangible results from their R&D division. But it was clear at the time that it didn't matter enough for real action. Middle management I interacted with were actively hostile to me when I spoke about, for example, making source code visible between teams. There was constant calculated behaviour to keep things the way they were and delay completion to maintain funding.

It’s that pesky root user, right? There’s loads of their files on my system. I can’t edit any of them. Don’t know why they are so protective.

Using old.lemmy is really quick on my Thinkpad T480 (approx. 5 years old). I'm running OpenBSD; Javascript performance is pretty bad and makes the fans spin up. I'm in Indonesia at the moment so preventing any excess heat is paramount ;)

I've managed to create an entire career (almost 10 years in now) out of the transparency in the tech community. Especially in open source. I'm hoping that paying it back like this inspires and provides the same opportunity to others!

How do they typically go? They don’t ;)