I was in the Army on a training exercise in Louisiana preparing to go to Kosovo. We were in a flight unit (helicopters) and loading up a convoy to the airfield. We got the call over the radio about it and thought, at first, that is was part of the training exercise. We get to the airfield, setup comms, and get chatter about it not being an exercise. Since they grounded the birds pretty much all week we basically stayed glued to the tv in the hangar for the duration.
It was an odd time since we were technically in peace time and suddenly thrown into this situation. A year later (Mar. '03) we were watching jets fly over Iraq on tv while we preparing for a funeral detail for one of our Blackhawk pilots.
I was 6months from MEPS. My Major dad told me to GTFO. I'd planned on going Army my entire life. That threw a real wrench in my plans. Thankfully I was able to get out of it since I hadn't signed at MEPs yet.
I lived in Norfolk VA and IIRC we had 3-5 carriers moored. They all dispersed away from the shipyard when it happened. 20-25k Navy just vanished from town.
When I play guitar or mandolin my mouth often moves in some sort of way as if keeping time. I recorded a video one time and noticed it. Now I'm a little self-conscious about it but it's a bit relieving to hear it's pretty common / innate.
That's exactly what I am talking about :-) In my idiolect, it's a he; in your idiolect, it's a they; our idiolects are perfectly understandable to both of us; and yet, instead of simply recognising a variation in my speech, you feel an urge to change my language.
Remarkably, it's exactly the opposite of the public attitude towards regional dialects. Where previously it was common to correct speakers of non-prestigious dialects, it is now required to be accepting and tolerant.
I think many (most?) people hearing or reading that would make an assumption from your use of ‘he’ that you expect that professors and students are usually male. Perhaps that you believe they _should_ be male. If you really mean them to be gender-neutral, you are not communicating clearly. I would argue that this has always been true - but even if I’m wrong about that, it’s true for modern English usage.
The hypothetical "someone" in my sentence (a professor or a student) is indeed probably male if I look at him closely. I pass no comment on whether professors or students _should_ generally be male; but at the same time, have no qualms with imagining them as such. I understand that many think differently, and have seen plenty of texts where an imaginary character of unspecified sex is introduced with a third-person singular feminine pronoun (a random example: "For a Product Owner to properly adapt a product, she needs some empirical evidence, something to inspect", from "The Professional Product Owner" by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham). My argument is that if should be perfectly fine for a writer to use the default gender that he is most comfortable with.
I've lucked into some great places being cool with part-time work. That said, just yesterday I spoke with a recruiter for a 40hr gig and they had deep concerns that I've had work overlap (my part-time business + 40hr contract work) on my resume. I've pulled out of consideration for that role because of it but am thinking of adjusting my resume to not show overlap. I would've thought it showed drive but I guess - at least in some recruiting circles - that it causes concern.
Should I remove my business from my resume? A lot of my exciting experience comes from my business whereas the 40hr stuff is just standard work I've been doing for years.
You correctly identified the red flag of a place looking for side-gig work that actually hates any sign of side-gig work. So for starters, great job there, you don't want to work for those people. As much as I hate to just recommend "find better recruiters", that does sound like a pretty terrible recruiter. I wouldn't remove the interesting stuff from your resume because a non-technical chump doesn't understand how technology gets tinkered on.
Keep it if the work was interesting and you feel like it bolsters your experience. Sometimes I remove dates from my resume as they’ll always be doing the mental math of assembling your timeline and notice all the concurrent items. Duration is a happy medium for me. That frees you from the linearity that resumes often follow, so maybe consider adding a section entitled “Recent Projects” or something similar with the other section called “Employment”
It’s a white lie but I’ve often explained those periods as “consulting” instead of freelance / “entrepreneur”. Then when I discuss it I always make it about the project and work. I never talk about the client except maybe the industry as a lead in to the problem. This way it sounds temporary or something. If they think you have an active client list you’re maintaining, that is always going to be concerning for them. They don’t know if you’ll be distracted or will make the clients the priority. They want to be your top and ideally only priority (sometimes even over family).
If they really press you they’re probably trying to understand how you managed so much project work while being employed full time. This is when you force a step-back from the details and say, “I do occasionally take on a project outside of work, it helps me work with emerging tech and things I’m interested in. I view it as a form of continuing education that is required in many professions. It’s never effected my performance at my job and I ensure to never causes a conflict of priorities. I find I can be 50%+ more productive due to having less meetings and organization overhead.” Or something with that gist
I find this extremely helpful, thank you. Presenting the situation the way you mentioned in the last paragraph is honest and presents it in a very positive way. I also like the idea of project/employment sections. Much appreciated!
Yep, I write comments to figure out what I'm doing, and then the code writes itself. It's gotten to the point where it's hard to code without writing the comment first, and usually the comment gets rewritten multiple times before I write a single line of code (thus saving me rewriting dozens of lines of code multiple times.)
That's not necessarily a trick I meant, but definitely a good piece of advice. Do you keep them in the codebase after implementation or is it just for you while developing to sort things out?
Confluence is absolutely terrible. Their accessibility user experience is abysmal. It was designed for people who operate user interfaces with their mouses rather than their keyboards. Not only that, but it seems to be quite unreliable. Seems every other day some random component is not working, like uploading screenshots.
Couldn't agree more! Confluence is a steaming pile. Worse, it steals key strokes used by the OS. If I want to search the page, I do Cmd-F and instead of bringing up the browser's search page function, it brings up its own broken "search everything except what I need" function. It's the worst.
Same here - the default search seems woefully inadequate at least as far as I use it. If I do a partial search sometimes I get back docs I want but if I type in more specificity (more through muscle memory while typing, not necessarily trying to narrow down the results) then what I'm searching for disappears from the list even though it's more precise.
A colleague just bought a new desktop and set it up last weekend. He ran into Microsoft wanting him to login to a MS account _on initial install_. He ended up having to go into the BIOS to disable networking so he could force the installer to let him initially setup a local account. I don't know if this is for every install and is just my anecdotal perspective.
SEEKING WORK | Boston Area | Remote
Email: scjackson@linux.com
I'm a software developer (MS CS) with the bulk of my professional experience in PHP, Drupal, and the related stacks. I've been solely a remote developer for the past 10 years. I'm interested in anything remote, part-time, and love to work mostly on back-end tooling although in my day-to-day I work on everything from the backend to the frontend.
Experience with:
PHP, Drupal, Laravel, React, LAMP, Golang and various other tools (buzzword and otherwise) over the past 13 years.
I had this same issue as a teen in the late 90s with an old 1984 Pontiac Phoenix. If it sat longer than 2 hours it would start just fine or if I started the car within 15 minutes of last using it. In that ~2hr gap if I needed to use the car I would have to spray some carb cleaner into the engine to get it started.
It was an odd time since we were technically in peace time and suddenly thrown into this situation. A year later (Mar. '03) we were watching jets fly over Iraq on tv while we preparing for a funeral detail for one of our Blackhawk pilots.
Still hard to believe it's now so long ago.