Some ( pro-facebook?) people in this thread appear to have very little empathy for people, like me, who were not able to pull themselves away from the designed-to-be-addictive social media platform, without deleting it completely.
Yes. Having an account sitting around, with all of my friends attached to it, was too much of a temptation for me. Purging the entire thing from my life was the only thing that worked.
I like to make things easy on myself: I don't keep booze around because I drink it like a fish. I don't keep weed around because I smoke it like Snoop Dogg. I don't keep junk-food around because I eat it. I live right next to my gym to make it easy to get to. I don't keep facebook around because I browse it.
> I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumption to make...
That is a terrible assumption to make!! Why would you think that everyone thinks the same way you think?!?
I deleted my facebook and to answer your question: Yes, it was that difficult. I have tried multiple times to do what you did, just leave it alone, but I couldn't. So I deleted it, have not missed it for a second.
I wonder if psychopathy has anything to do with the phenomenon of "cute aggression", and being unable to restrain yourself from urges that everyone has.
It's a memory hog, but HTLM+JS+CSS are the best way to make beautiful and responsive applications quickly and cheaply. Period. Electron provides a reasonable wrapper for doing these things.
I feel that many people miss one of the big advantages to open offices is that they are CHEAP!
"Open office" is double speak for "cheap, stadium seating style office." The goal is not to have an optimal workspace. It's to cram as many workers into your as possible.
Of course, people come out of the woodwork to say that "Hey, it's not THAT hard! All I had to do was work hard and everything worked out!" while ignoring the privilege / wealth / community they were fortunate enough to grow up in.
Even having the OPPORTUNITY to achieve is a massive amount of privilege.
Grow up poor and talk to me about coin flips. Have a lazy alcoholic chain smoking father and talk to me about coin flips. Be sexually abused for years on end and tell me about surviviorship bias.
Have your parents asking you for loans because you are the only person in the family making any money, instead of your parents being a source of stability in your life, and talk to me about coin flips.
Basically be total trash surrounded by the extremely privileged developer community and talk to me about how hard work and dedication pays off.
The coin flips are more than just you running your business and the thousands of hours you've put in. It's the environment you've grown up in, it's your wealth and stability, it's the early education you were lucky enough to receive, it's knowing that if it all goes to hell you can always crash on your parents couch and get a job doing something similar somewhere else. Not all of us won that coin toss. ;D
If you really want to work there, and feel like you will get great experience from it? Sure. I've seen plenty of developers stagnate at a job, and then struggle when moving to a new job.
My motto is "Don't let them waste your time." If you've stopped learning, and are staring at a screen for 8 hours a day feeling bored, get out as fast as possible.
If a junior position is going to be extremely educational, sacrificing pay for learning experience is something I have done, and recommend.
I come from a small town, less than 2000 people. My high school class was 20 people, and we had one section for each class. There were no AP classes or gifted programs, just teachers from the same home town, who graduated from a nearby community college, doling out worksheets and having the class read aloud from text books to fill up class time.
We skipped evolution in biology because the teacher "didn't believe in it." Our home-economics teacher parroted lies about the effectiveness of birth control and suggested it was sinful. Most of the people in my class did not attend college.
I graduated high school with an 8th grade education. When I told my high school guidance counselor I was going to school for Computer Science, he suggested that maybe I should do something like nursing at the local community college, because "CS is for smart people."
When I got to college, it was absolutely brutal. I consistently barely passed "easy" classes with a C / D average. I felt dumb and demoralized.
The one place I did excel in college was my CS classes. Most of my free time pre-college was spent making mods for various video games. I was not happy with any of the modern consoles I had until I rooted them and had SNES emulators playing on them. I worked my way through a C++ book with a wizard on the front of it, and dabbled with python. I talked wistfully with my older brother about growing up and making video games together in our own little studio. I learned programming by doing things I loved, and today I have a very successful programming / IT career.
I graduated with a CS degree, and I keep current by pursing opportunities that are challenging and push my skills forward. My dream since I was a kid was to be a video game programmer, but dreams have a funny way of falling to the wayside when you grow up poor and struggling and you have the option between a $30,000 paycheck and a $60,000 paycheck.
But I am STILL BEHIND MY PEERS. I still feel unqualified to work at a major IT company ( Google, Microsoft, Apple ) because my math skills are so poor, and honestly, I didn't really learn much in college since I had to support myself with a 40 hour a week job, which left basically no time to do anything besides rush to get an assignment done, cram for tests, and occasionally cheat to get a passing grade.
My point?
Education is profoundly broken. I have a term I use: "Child jail." Most schools exist to keep the little hellions from running riot in the streets.
I believe education like the OP posted is absolutely vital, and where education needs to go in the future. This school sounds amazing. It empowers students, and shows them that they can solve real problems if they put their head down and work at it. It allows them to explore what they enjoy doing on a day to day basis. It teaches them practical skills.
But, this is still a private school that is probably absurdly expensive ( IMO, totally worth it ). Quality of education is absurdly uneven.
My bad experiences with education have lead me to work at a little education startup, and our motto is "learn by doing". I like to think that there is a kid like me out there enjoying the software I've written.
A lot of people HAVE to voice their dislike of articles criticizing Go instead of just not reading the article.
See what I added to the conversation there?