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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   1750 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 21, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'll disagree with most of the replies.

My general observation is that for people of ordinary ability/motivation, boot camp attendees seem to be more likely to get jobs. I am not entirely sure why but I think it's because "boot camp -> entry level" is now a recognized entry pathway and therefore you don't pattern match as "weird". Plus many employers have a plan to allocate N interviews to particular boot camps (perhaps including yours), you may get one of those slots, there is no equivalent plan for weirdos who learned from the internet.

Also you should absolutely attempt to navigate the DEI stuff while hiding your power level. It's a compliance ritual of the modern workplace and it's often hard to avoid, so getting practice with it in a safer environment is useful. This is something I very much wish I had when I came to the US. Instead, I awkwardly tried to understand WTF people were talking about based on what I knew. "So it's like reservations, what is the quota?" Guess how well that went (and it's probably worse now).

I have no recommendations of particular boot camps beyond Bloom School (formerly Lambda) and I've only been to PDX once.

Damn, I think you're right. I've searched and searched and found nothing that has the kind of setup they do. I was having nightmares about it, because I'm a pretty socially anxious person, but I don't know that I have a choice. It's this or the trades, and starting a trade at 36 is rough.

It's a compliance ritual of the modern workplace

There are still many tech workplaces not occupied by DIE fanatics. Bigger companies may require you to click through a "anti-harassment training" or something like that but no more than that. Of course, in some places it's worse (and getting worse) but it's not yet all lost.

It's also a matter of getting through the interview. One current trend is to put the "diversity questions" (read: ideology test) as part of the interview process even if the job itself might not have anything to do with it. Once you get in you can often just do your job + click through ideology powerpoints (with a mandatory "you clicked too fast, please interact with the powerpoint for 14 minutes before we'll let you take the test").

And unfortunately, even at some companies not fully captured, it's still best to hide your power level. Recall that the OP will be a fresh non-college grad with minimal skills to start. 1 fanatic on a 5 person team + manager not paying close attention = good chance of a bad peer review.

with a mandatory "you clicked too fast, please interact with the powerpoint for 14 minutes before we'll let you take the test"

I got unexpected amount of fun recently managing to hack JS on one of those to let me blaze through it at 50x speed. It wasn't really hard but turned out significantly more fun than listening through the PC drivel they were supposed to feed me. Now I look on these with a different eye.

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