Tell me when they stop hiring 80% of their devs from the same 5 top CS schools.

Not "FDEs," not solution architects, not SREs, not BD/"Echos," not tech support. I get that it's a consulting org with a "boots on the ground" mentality. Tell me where their devs come from

Specifically CS7210 is demanding because of its assignments. The assignments come from UW's CSE452, have very little direct connection with the course lectures, and require you to implement a Paxos-like system correctly, basically in one shot, in an environment that is very difficult to debug. So the projects turn into 60-80-hour slogs where students change parameters semi-randomly until something starts working. CS7210 shares that aspect with a number of other courses in the program.

is there a decent list of omscs courses to avoid on this basis?

Has anyone tried the courses in the ML or core CS areas? What'd you think?

The ML course is interesting. Some of the lectures are a bit chatty and the official course text book was written in 1997, but it’s a great survey of many different ML models, including Neural Networks. It’s a good segue into Deep Learning where you explore more advanced NN architectures, beyond Feed-Forward NNs.

For core CS, I found Graduate Intro to Operating Systems very rewarding.

You've been trying for a long time.

What do you do if the job that makes you an offer doesn't excite you? What if the house that feels like home needs more repairs than you can afford? What if the program that accepts you has crappy funding? What if the person who chooses you has red flags?

Do you say "screw it," cross your fingers, and walk through the door that kind of sucks? Or do you keep looking as long as your resources last you?

Maybe consider that we are all calibrated to standards that are this hodgepodge of other people’s messaging of what standards should be, and they communicate them for a variety of reasons, very few of which are truly designed for your reality, your situation.

So when you say, ‘kinda sucks’, perhaps ask if the opinion is grounded in (your) reality?

Once recalibrated to accept that what we are in, is inescapable true life, then we stop looking for something better, and instead focus on the challenge of making it better than it should naturally be.

Happiness I believe, is a decision, we choose it when we feel it’s a sustainable perspective. I think it’s sustainable to allow ourselves to be happy, whenever we achieve marginal improvement on what is natural.

Every situation is different, and none of us can reliably predict the future. Sometimes dealing with a bad job until you get a better one is the right move. Sometimes it's the wrong move.

Specifics, about the job and yourself, matter. If you feel like sharing, this is a pretty good community with good instincts.

The magic in "all it takes is for one to work out" is in the strength it gives you to keep trying. Trying something that might fail is hard, even when we know that trying is the right thing to do.

My point is that, at least anecdotally, certainty is rare. Most of the time, for most people, the experience is less "yes!" and more "I guess."

More widely applicable advice would be how to deal with compromise, not how to hold out for "the right one."

There is no certainty, not about the future at least. In my experience, being able to face uncertainty without despair is one of the most important skills to have.

The interesting thing about "all it takes is for one to work out" is that it helps you face uncertainty. No matter how many times you've tried, you maintain the faith that the next time might succeed.

And it is all about faith, which is probably why it is so hard for us analytic/logic-driven people to adopt. But the opposite of faith isn't knowledge--it's nihilism. If the universe is an uncaring and even hostile place, and if there are no guarantees that everything will work out, and if the only certainty is eventual death, then why even bother, right? Nihilism is seductive because it is the philosophy most compatible with reality. It is what you're left with after entering the Total Perspective Vortex.

The only antidote to nihilism is belief. Belief that things will work out. That it's worth fighting for things, even if we often lose. That striving to be the person we want to be is worth something.

I know I've drifted far from your original point about how to deal with compromise. Again, I feel the answer depends on the circumstances. But I think a general answer is to decide what "the right one" means for you and nurture the belief that you will get there eventually. Once you know where you want to be and have the conviction that you will get there, everything else is simple.

Simple, but not easy. Maybe you've compromised for your current job. What will it take to get "the right one"? Is it more skills? Is it connections? Is it money? Is it courage? Maybe you don't know--that's okay. What's the next job that will get you closer to your goal? What do you need to get that job?

I guarantee that one of the things you need to do is simply try. Try to apply for a new job; try to learn a new skill; try to make a new professional connection.

That's when you remember "all it takes is for one to work out". Try and fail and try again.

Often the "one" you need isn't the ideal, it's just what gets you into the market. I'm thinking a job that gets you some experience and much needed pay or a property that lets you build equity while prices continue to climb.

These are not final decisions, get something going is better than nothing. You don't need to be locked on a job, or a house, or a degree. People have more time in their life than they seem to think. Sure, you might spend a few years on something not ideal, but the alternative being nothing is much worse

Right. All it takes is for one to work out, if you have several suitable options. If some of the options are only vaguely suitable, or it comes to light through the process that some of them are not suitable at all, then it takes more than just one working out. That's what I was thinking while reading this.

You might think so, but a lot of people can tell when you're ELIZA-ing them to death, and they will learn to avoid you.

There are a lot of people on HN who want a technical manual for how to party, and a lot of them keep telling each other that the art of conversation is about attentive listening. Can you imagine a conversation between two people practicing attentive listening on each other?

Yeah if an awkward person does it they can be called out as if they are interrogating or interviewing. I actually remember trying these tactics when I was teenager... and that is how it came off. I tried so many weird things because I was so unhappy with my social performance.

Usually safer way is making observations rather than directly asking or at least continously asking things over and over as if to desperately try to keep the conversation going.

But even then if you are awkward, it will still come off awkward and people will try to excuse them out of that situation no matter how much theory you might read online.

The "will learn to avoid you" part is what I was getting at in my warning at the end. This only gets you through a few interactions.

The point of small talk is to get to medium talk. It's not directionless. Medium talk just means you've found a topic that both of you are interested in enough to talk about it for five to ten minutes without getting bored. That you both know the host is one of the few things it's culturally safe to assume anymore. Both of you met the host doing something you like well enough to associate with a person you met doing that thing when you're not doing that thing, so if either of those things happen to be an appropriate subject for medium talk, great. Now you're out of small talk and just "talking to this person I just met at this party about a thing we both like." If you're lucky, it's something you both actually like a lot, and then you have a basis for large talk, and large talk opens the door to casual friendship.

If you don't happen to draw a medium or large talk topic out of the gate, that's when you poke around the edges of the small talk, looking for things that could be fodder for medium talk. If you try looking for three or four and aren't getting anywhere, you've still filled the appropriate 5-10 minutes not to seem like a jerk, and now you need a snack, or a drink, and a new conversation partner.

It helps a lot if you're genuinely interested in a wide variety of things, enough that you can ask intelligent questions about them, because it increases the likelihood that you can find a shared interest with this person you've just met. That's not just "attentive listening." It's "finding out why someone cares about something interesting to them because you sincerely want to know."

If the other person isn't engaging with you at all, isn't trying to find one of these topics with you, they actually just don't want to talk to you. That's how people communicate this. It's not usually personal. They haven't known you long enough for it to be really personal. They may not even consciously realize they don't want to talk to you, but it's still true, and you're doing them a favor when you recognize that and excuse yourself.

The weird vibe people are picking up from this essay is because half the phases are about customer service.

As in, the author was working as a waiter or a coach at the time.

A waiter's job is to keep your butt in the seat, get you to order some stuff, and then leave a tip. The waiter may or may not give a shit about you as a person, but it's secondary to their job. That simulation is the creepy vibe.

I've probably never eaten at the kinds of stratospherically high-end restaurants the author writes about. I've eaten at restaurants with Michelin stars. I've never had a waiter flirt with me, daydream with me, or offer ad hoc therapy. And if I ever do, I suspect I might find the charade off-putting.

Well, he'd have adapted to your vibe anyway as he wrote about learning that.

I eat at Chinese restaurants where my waiter is a QR code. Please pour olive oil in my lap, hold my hands, and tell me I'm special.

OP's son programs confidently in 6 languages and develops toy compilers and custom hardware on his own. If he is "dreading the intro classes" already, imagine what two years at a typical community college will do to his momentum and enthusiasm, all to save a bit of money.

I thought of another possibility: if he enrolled at a university that will allow him to skip or test out of the introductory CS courses, then this will also save time, though he’d still likely need to take non-CS intro courses such as calculus, physics, and a variety of liberal arts/humanities courses.

There’s also the possibility of applying to universities where even the intro level CS courses are quite rigorous and where there’s an expectation, tacitly or explicitly, that CS students have prior experience. Berkeley’s CS 70, for example, is ostensibly an introductory course on discrete math and is required in the EECS program, but it’s much more rigorous than the standard introductory discrete math course taught at most other universities.

I would CLEP / test out as much as possible then.

It's saving 60k almost and a degree is half bs Gen eds anyway. Why pay so much to take intro to econ, Calc and English classes at an expensive to school?

Totally! The other day I was at the Web3 + AI soiree at the AWS GenAI Loft and met up with an awesome CTO prospect that I could pitch to a buddy's blockchain startup, we grabbed a few beers, amazing dude!...

...is this really the openness to chance that anyone (other than LinkedIn influencers) has in mind? Friendship is super flipping far from making business connections. We want people who sympathize, care, make themselves available, so we can be the same to them.

My mind while reading your comment’s first paragraph “please, please, please let this be satire”

The AWS GenAI Loft is real. The Web3 Soiree is real. I'm not sure which part is satire.

I was referring more to the seemingly transactional social interaction in a thread about friendship, but I guess good to know about GenAI lofts and Web3 soirees as well :)

To the OP, as a participant in one of your previous reading groups and an organizer of similar groups:

What are your goals for these reading groups? How completely are you meeting them? "Goals" in a broad sense, anywhere from "motivating myself to read more" to "building a community of experts and friends."