LeftistMuslimObama posted:

it's not really stockholm syndrome. if you guys don't mind entirely too much real talk, i feel like i need to explain myself since i come off as waffling so much.

these are the facts of my situation:
1)i have no official computer science degree (my degree was major in poetry composition with minors in philosophy and photography).
2) my wife and i have >75k in student debt and own a house here.
3) my first 4 years here were as a technical writer and its only via epic paying for tuition that i was able to transition into the programming role for the last year.
4) if i leave epic before 3 years after a tuition reimbursement, i have to pay back that tuition reimbursement. we have practically no savings because as i mentioned above we had worthless jobs before and lots of debt. if i were to leave now, i'd owe them $5500.
5) my 5-year sabbatical is coming up, which i'd gladly give up for a better job, but they make you buy the plane tickets and hotel rooms in advance before they'll reimburse you the cost, which is already done, so now ive got $4000 worth of airfare and hotel rooms paid for that i cant get refunded on if i cancel the trip and meanwhile ive already been taxed for the reimbursement from epic.
6) im transgender which severely restricts which markets i feel safe looking for jobs in because, frankly, people like me get beat up and murdered constantly in some places and in others they want to put me in man jail for going peepee in the ladies' room.
7) my wife's job is also in madison so she would basically have to quit and find a new job if we had to move.

so i have a loving shitload of insecurities weighing me down on the one side. on the other side, i make $80,000 a year here, and when the transfer eventually happens i will be looking at $110,000 as my new base salary. talking to some folks via PMs, even the bigger companies won't compete with that for someone with my rather limited experience.

on top of that i then have the fear demons in my head going "what if i move and have no idea what im doing and suck and get fired and i gave up a safe job to try to be an engineer on the west coast and now my whole life is hosed".

some of these problems are my own fault (being stupid in college, but who isn't?), and some of these are obviously carefully constructed by epic to make me feel trapped here. but the result is it feels really difficult to try to make a leap to another job unless it's going to pay really well and be fairly okay with the inevitable long settling-in it will take for me to get up to speed with tools and ecosystems that aren't total poo poo.

i'm basically trapped in a position where i can't take too big a risk or the big pile of debt will crush me. this is how corporate america controls its workers, and its working wonders on me.

anyway, back to funney computer, sorry for the dump.

Luigi Thirty posted:

because junk downloaded at ~3kB/sec and I didn't get the difference between 56kB and 56000bps

Lutha Mahtin posted:

the fancy PL features i tend to use are boring safe ones like generics. my thinking is that if i get real cute with something i will probably forget how it works, so the choice is between writing a big wall of documentation for the cute bit or just doing it a dumb regular way

Shaggar posted:

since .net doesn't have anything to do w/ office and the users are devs, its mostly ok. there are still significant problems with .net (ex: MSBuild, EntityFramework), but only developers see them so nobody cares.

Bloody posted:

like worst case be interviewing and take free regular trips to frisco

Bloody posted:

can i interest you in a recruiter contact who will definitely get you interviews at real good companies in the bay area regardless of your background and whose bonus alone for taking a job through them (nevermind any additional signing bonuses, which you can trivially negotiate, especially to cover something like tuition repayment)

MALE SHOEGAZE posted:

i watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzA2YODtgK4 and learned how to create links into files with org mode and holy poo poo this is going to change my life.

VikingofRock posted:

spacemacs

VikingofRock posted:

drat I think it's time for me to switch over to spacemacs.

anthonypants posted:

this is pronounced like the doctor in 30 rock

Luigi Thirty posted:

i wonder how slow trying to access my LAN on my Atari connected to my PC via PPP and a 19.2k serial link would be

Bloody posted:

like worst case be interviewing and take free regular trips to frisco

MALE SHOEGAZE posted:

do it. i made the switch from vim less than a year ago and it's great. evil mode is great. emacs is great.

eschaton posted:

just wait until you try not using archaic modal editing

leper khan posted:

modal editing is good^[

eschaton posted:

also when LMO comes out here for an interview maybe we can have another Bay Area goonmeet

(and you too Bloody, and others)

Jabor posted:

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

what is modal editing? is that the thing in vim where you switch between "typing stuff" mode and "enter commands" mode? cuz that always struck me as simply a necessary design choice to make a terminal-based editor with lots of options nonpainful to interact with. all that stuff would be in menus and dialogs (with appropriate hot keys for power users) in an ide

Bloody posted:

also hard tabs are good and your operating system is a piece of poo poo

hifi posted:

org mode seems cool but nothing in my life is important enough to write down

hifi posted:

i like emacs. xah lee recommends not binding caps lock to control and instead you hit ctrl with your palm.

mekkanare posted:

Everyone doesn't do this already since having Ctrl in the corner