I've been writing code since I was 12, and I'm 57 now. I majored in Computer Information Systems back in the 1980s. Honestly, I got a lot more out of the other aspects of going to college than I did from the coursework related to my major.
There's some important development that happens at traditional college student age. Some of that can be fostered by attending college. Some of it happens organically no matter where you are.
Your son seems atypical: he knows what he wants to do, he has solid skills, and he is probably already better self-educated than the typical graduating college senior would be in software development.
So at this point what he needs is not necessarily the education, but the magic piece of paper -- the diploma -- that makes him hirable in more places.
A business degree with a minor in a development-oriented course of study might serve him better than spending $160K on what essentially would be a mix of formalizing his learning / reviewing what he already knows.
Because, after all, isn't the point of an education to learn something you don't know already?
So back to that important development: your son needs to become more well rounded. He seems to have excellent aptitude for programming and data processing. How are his social skills? What is the status of his business acumen? Does he aspire to work for himself or start a company someday? To what is he going to apply those skills he's got?
The answer to that is what he should go to college to learn. A generalist degree in something like business might serve him very well. Wasting four years of his life and $160K on stuff he already knows probably won't do much except help him refine his skills in beer and girls. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but maybe not six figures worth of value, either.
I would encourage him to either go to school and round out his learning, or just jump into the working world and find where his skills are deficient and let that inform a future college decision. Just my $.50
You can do it on the cheap with CCRs and estate sales. My Kenwood HF unit was bought for $250, I made wire dipole antennas. I'm surrounded by Baofeng equipment as I type this. Total outlay for all of it probably on the order of $1000.
Not in the USA. We still have 50,000 watt clear channel stations. On a clear winter night, local lore has it that WJR-760AM Detroit could be heard in Mexico. Crystal radios still work...well, not fine, but as good as they ever did. AM frequencies are low enough they skip off the ionosphere.
I remember a family road trip from Chicago to South Carolina in our '77 Impala wagon, when my whole family was listening to a DePaul basketball game on WBBM Chicago. My dad was a big fan. It was late at night, and the game came down to the last shot in the last second or so. The station was barely coming in, so we pulled over and heard DePaul win on a buzzer-beater... then the station blinked out. It was perfect.
I always think about this when I see another story about AM's demise.
My take: the people voting for right wing candidates don't believe in "redistribution" which IMO is not a proper function of government. The left really wants to take the nation's wealth and give it to people it deems to be deserving of it; the people voting for the right wing disagree wholeheartedly. As do I. Get your hands out of our pockets.
I spent 15 years with HP in their services division. I liked the work I was doing, even though I was slightly underpaid for it. I would have stayed there but they cut me loose back in 2014 with 50K other employees. They did give me a decent severance package (3 months pay with health insurance) but it was shocking how easily they just cut me loose after years of dedicated service. In the end they did me a favor; I've spent the subsequent 10 years doing interesting stuff for four different companies in that time. I'm in my mid 50s now and thinking about optimizing for a decent retirement sometime in the next 10 years. I don't know if I'll be forced to change jobs again or not.
Yes I regret being with HP for 15 years; I had a lot to learn to be marketable again after being there for that length of time. But since I'm working toward retirement now, I will probably try to stay as long as I can where I am.
I switched from Gmail to Proton last December ('23). So far it has worked okay, but there are some complaints.
First, the Android app is simply not as good as Gmail's. It doesn't allow a read message/delete it/move to the next message. This interrupts my workflow as I deal with large amounts of mail.
Second, I'm frequently running ProtonMail via web on two separate PCs. The two seem to get out of sync. If I bulk delete emails from my inbox on one machine, the other machine sometimes doesn't reflect this. Sometimes the emails reappear on the machine I used to delete them.
There have also been edge cases where I have lost an email I was composing on the PC under circumstances I've had a hard time narrowing down. When it happens it's incredibly frustrating, and there are no remnants saved as a draft. I wish I could tell you how to reproduce it for certain. It is usually happening in a dual-machines running scenario.
All in all the solution overall lacks the polish that Gmail has. I wish it wasn't so.
Hi! Thank you for your feedback. Regarding the Android app, we've recently rewritten it from scratch and the rewritten version is now available in beta to all of our users (just join the beta via Google Play Store). Once it's out of beta (which should happen in the coming weeks), we'll start adding new features to it.
I was laid off in March, 2023, a victim of the startup shakeout after the SVG banking collapse. A year previous, I had a small bidding war for my services. When I was let go this March, it was in the midst of the Facebook and Amazon layoffs.
It was terrible. The market had flipped 180 degrees away from where it was in 2022. I did not, however, have problems getting interviews. I got lots of them. I also got ghosted regularly after third and fourth interviews as the companies interviewed dozens of candidates looking for the very best deal they could find.
Now, for some perspective, I am a 30 year veteran of the IT industry, with well over 20 years of programming experience under my belt. You guessed it, that means I'm in my mid-50s. Did I run across ageism in my search? Not overt, but undoubtedly, yes.
Were companies overwhelmed by the number of applicants? Unquestionably. I had one recruiter tell me they had over 150 applicants for a single programming job, and they planned to only talk to 10% of them. 10% is still a LOT of interviews to find the right candidate.
So yes, the job market is bad, although not for traditional reasons. The economy seems to be chugging along, even though it's rumored to have one foot on a banana peel. Companies are hiring. But there's a lot of competition out there for posts, and companies have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the number of candidates to choose from. They don't know how to act.
So if your resume isn't in as-expected format, forget it. If your interviewing skills reveal you're an introvert with poor social skills, forget it. If you don't respond quickly and professionally to every serious inquiry, forget it. If you're not making your job search a 3-5 hour DAILY effort, forget it.
In other words, you have to bring your A-game right now, where you might have gotten by in previous years with just having good coding skills and a halfway decent resume.
The good news is that everyone can bring their A-game with some practice and effort. I got hired after two months. It was hard-- gut-wrenching, even -- but after dozens of interviews I finally landed a good job that met my requirements.
If you are working right now and you aren't saving your money for a rainy day, you're being foolish. Fortunately, I had been saving, and my bank account wasn't destroyed. I feel bad for people in this market who don't have savings. Be prepared to weather a six month outage. And keep upskilling. Complacency will get you laid off.
There's some important development that happens at traditional college student age. Some of that can be fostered by attending college. Some of it happens organically no matter where you are.
Your son seems atypical: he knows what he wants to do, he has solid skills, and he is probably already better self-educated than the typical graduating college senior would be in software development.
So at this point what he needs is not necessarily the education, but the magic piece of paper -- the diploma -- that makes him hirable in more places.
A business degree with a minor in a development-oriented course of study might serve him better than spending $160K on what essentially would be a mix of formalizing his learning / reviewing what he already knows.
Because, after all, isn't the point of an education to learn something you don't know already?
So back to that important development: your son needs to become more well rounded. He seems to have excellent aptitude for programming and data processing. How are his social skills? What is the status of his business acumen? Does he aspire to work for himself or start a company someday? To what is he going to apply those skills he's got?
The answer to that is what he should go to college to learn. A generalist degree in something like business might serve him very well. Wasting four years of his life and $160K on stuff he already knows probably won't do much except help him refine his skills in beer and girls. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but maybe not six figures worth of value, either.
I would encourage him to either go to school and round out his learning, or just jump into the working world and find where his skills are deficient and let that inform a future college decision. Just my $.50