I got a new job and finally getting ready to move out of my parents' house, but my god rent is comically expensive where I'm at (like everywhere else). There aren't many places to look for roommates outside of craigslist (which I'm trying to avoid). It's looking like I might have to spend close to 40% of my paycheck to afford a 500 sq foot studio

They say you throw away communism when you get your first salaried job, but I think it's making me a third world maoist. Fuck all landlords

  • crime [she/her, any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    if there's an actual course or something called learn2code (not just a meme) that isn't what i did, i studied computer science in college — but yeah i do make a lot of money especially compared to my friends in other fields. I dont think software engineering is particularly hard especially if you like puzzles and systemic problem solving and have a high tolerance for slowly being driven insane from spending every day either gazing into the abyss or building things that don't physically exist except as an arrangement of electrons across a piece of silicon in an amazon datacenter in oregon

    • ButtBidet [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The maths part of CS hurt though. Fuck calc 3 and discrete maths.

      • crime [she/her, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I don't think I've used any calculus since I completed calc 3 ten years ago, unless you count "knowing what derivatives are so you can click the "derivative" button on the disk space monitor and understand you're getting the rate of the disk filling up" as calculus lol. Yeah the math stuff is a little painful but there really isn't much of it in most software jobs and you can succeed without knowing/remembering it

        • krakhead [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          How important is it to learn Data structures and Algorithms if I wanna land a job?

          • crime [she/her, any]
            ·
            3 years ago

            That's one of the more important ones I'd say — in particular because many technical interviews are focused on DS&A.

            For practical purposes in my experience as long as you have a sense of what's going to be slow in your program and you know how to use a hash (aka hashmap or dictionary) and an array (aka list) and know what a binary tree is you'll do just fine on most jobs.

            I've never sat down and tried to figure out the big-O notation of anything I've been paid to write — it doesn't matter cause the slowest thing is always going to be a web request or an expensive database query, and that's going to be true for basically any web engineering jobs (which are the plurality if not majority of jobs these days)

            • krakhead [none/use name]
              ·
              3 years ago

              have a sense of what’s going to be slow in your program

              How do I get this sense? Practice?

              • crime [she/her, any]
                ·
                3 years ago

                yeah, mostly — this chart helps a bit: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

                I wouldn't worry about committing the exact numbers to memory, or remembering the order of some of the low-level operations. Basically "reading something in memory is fast, reading something from disk slightly slower, reading something across the network even slower than that"

    • emizeko [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      best encapsulation of working as a software engineer I've ever seen