I grew up (career wise) on CTOS systems with 286/386 processors that could address the full 16MB in protected mode without memory extenders or expanders that were available for DOS back in the day. Also premptive multi tasking. It was a great OS to learn on. more info - https://web.archive.org/web/20080828190425/http://www.byte.c...
I worked on an (now obscure) OS named CTOS back in the 80's. In an error message file, the error message that would be delivered in the unlikely event that the correct error message could not be found was "Pressed Rat and Warthog closed down their shop". This was an even more obscure reference to a Cream song that Ginger Baker sang lead on
if they know you. I recently visited the town my dad grew up in, deep in the bowels of WV. Every single person there, at the stores, restaurants and gas stations said to me "You're not from around here, are you?" When I told them my name there was some modicum of welcome. If I had just been a regular tourist I would have just left because of the rudeness
I would posit that it is a strategy as well, sort of like calling a bluff. If you have committed a crime, let them charge you. If you yell 'lawyer' and they leave, it is likely you are not chargeable, at least at that time. Might want to google 'lawyers' in the interim though....
I question the ethical culpability of big pharma. Taken from the article
"Drug companies had bombarded West Virginia’s rural towns with record numbers of narcotics, according to court records: 300,000 tablets of hydrocodone to the mom-and-pop pharmacy in the town of War, population 808; half a million oxycodone pills to Kermit, population 400. During a five-year period ending in 2013, a single drug company had shipped more than 60 million doses of hydrocodone into a state with fewer than 1 million working-age adults."
I would prefer to use the term 'criminal liability' but I suspect there is none for this crime
edit - IANAL - to be defined as a crime it would have to violate a criminal law, and while this is ethically odious, it is most probably not criminal
I've worked most of my career in cube farm configurations and had little reason to complain. At my last job of 15 years, the 26 yr old newly appointed manager announced that we were moving to 'an open, war room atmosphere'. Exit imminent, fortunately I ended up working from home. Privacy, natural light, open ended schedule to be productive. Best thing to ever happen to me
I don't participate in virtual currencies because I am not smart enough to understand all the nuances, or at least I don't take the time to try and understand them. Plus, I don't have money to throw away. However I find the discussions about the DAO fascinating because of the intersection of technology, law, ethics, morality and government.
For years my wife was a stay at home mom - if people asked what I did, I said I was a "go to work dad". When pressed further, I often said techie, or nerd or worked on computers and electronics.
I've been a CTO twice (at relatively small companies) but if I ever said that, people might get the impression I'm one of those MBA guys (can't have that).
Formally uneducated developer here. Due to the circumstances of my youth (foster homes, boys homes), I did the usual service level jobs (construction, restaurants) until I stumbled into a data entry job back in the day and managed to leverage myself as a unix sysadmin, then C, perl, Java dev with some fairly prestigious companies. Pretty much all self taught. Despite my adverse origins, I managed to not freak out or commit a felony. That being said, I do think I would be a better developer if I had access to some formal education, and I think that the bar is higher today and it's not as easy to sneak your way in like I did.
I'd have to think from an employer's perspective that someone without a degree who has made their way through gainful employment has proven themselves to be as reliable as any college graduate. However, the fact that college graduates are more frequently hired may be a result of the fact that there's way more of them than there are the people who worked their way through life, at least in the white-collar sector.
Some employers believe they have the competence to directly evaluate job-relevant skills. They will lean heavily on practical interviews and discussion of actual work experience.
Other employers are much more credential oriented because they can't tell a good developer from a bad one. Sometimes that's because there aren't many technical people in the company. More often, it seems, it's because hiring is done by people who are not working developers themselves. (E.g., HR screens resumes, interviews mainly done by non-techincal hiring managers.)
Since I'm of the former sort, I look especially hard for developers who don't have the "right" credentials. Not only are they more likely to have certain valuable characteristics than people who take the prescribed path, they're also likely to be overlooked by organizations that value credentials, and so easier to hire.
> That being said, I do think I would be a better developer if I had access to some formal education
That might be true, but there's a very limited number of courses on a typical computer science degree which actually do help. I think on mine it was mostly just data structures, theory of databases and concurrency. Possibly math.
Many others were interesting but I wouldn't say that I ever used them.
> I think that the bar is higher today and it's not as easy to sneak your way in like I did.
I think this is a significant factor in the skew from 'experience is king' to 'you need a degree'. The industry is much less of a 'wild west' now than it was even 15 years ago, so people with more than 15 years experience have a much higher chance of being self taught than people with 1-5 years.
