I can confirm that pretty much anything that can be done in VSCode can be done in Emacs from my seven yeas of experience. I guess the only hurdle would be having to spend some time to configure some things, though for the most part installing packages in Emacs is very hassle free. A lot of companies, probably to promote their product, will create VSCode extensions. These never seem to be absolutely necessary.
To me the biggest thing would be company politics. There's some companies that have a policy to use a certain editor (to share config and whatnot).
I prefer to use emacs but it just doesn't fit well for the kinds of work I do the last few years. I am often switching between very different projects, usually for a short period to accomplish a specific goal. The per language (and per version, and per framework etc) config is just too much when I'm likely only going to be working in a specific codebase for a few weeks or even days.
VS code (or whatever jetbrains thing) works well enough with almost no config where emacs works better with a lot more config. Worth it for some kinds of work but not others.
That's my daily slimnastics, I often have to explore projects in languages I don't typically code in, and I have no problem running 'M-x packages' in Emacs and installing some packages and enabling some modes as needed. Even though my package manager is set in such way that it ignores these "temporarily installed packages" after the restart.
What's great about Emacs that I don't have to restart or even save anything - I can enable/disable things on the go, even installing and using lsp-servers. I typically experiment in my scratch buffer (it's persistent between the sessions), and when my experiments prove worthy adding to the config, I move them.
I have VSCode and I run it sometimes, often when I'm working with someone who doesn't use Emacs. It almost invariably requires more attention and inflicts more annoyance. it-just-works™ rarely feels working for me there.
Huh, I guess my 401(k) has already been mistreated. I made most of the money I have for retirement when I worked at Intel, and seeing the lawsuit is really interesting/concerning.
Guess it's time to roll over the 401(k) to my new job and take a more active role in managing it - I want it almost all explicitly in the market (and not in private equity) at this point in my life.
Thanks for posting this, my retirement funds are a big deal to me and I hate that people less informed will probably be screwed by moves like this.
This reminds me of my first internship, I was running a test suite and filling out a web form every week. It was never mentioned in any meetings or other comms.
After about 3 months of doing this, I asked my manager why I was doing this if no-one cared or noticed. He told me to stop and see if anyone said something. I stopped, interned another 15 months and it wasn't ever mentioned.
3 months later a showstopper occurs and heads are rolling. The poor release manager wants to pinpoint when this breaking change occurred, but the last test suite ran was almost 2 years ago. They didn't care until it was too late. As fitting for American culture.
Not saying you were wrong to drop, but multiple people dropped the BL there if there how they are treating their testing.
Another reason to at least learn the default tooling is that often I find myself SSHing to another machine which has only the barest of default packages installed (often busybox, sometimes just a stripped-down docker container).
If I didn't know how to use "find" and "grep" (though I prefer rg) then I'd be at a disadvantage in these situations. Also command-line git.
It's why I learned to use Vim well, though I daily Emacs.
IME it's not that bad. My entire network failed when I was looking for work: either everyone was still at my old employer whom I didn't want to return to or they were also out of work. I don't have much online presence, because that's my preference.
I did ~11 applications (on company websites, tailored resume), of which like 9 were moonshots (NVDA, Valve, etc). I heard back from everyone, and then interviewed and accepted an offer with a smaller international company located locally. This was during the 2023/4 downturn (Dec '23 to be exact).
Caveat: I have 15YoE and work in embedded (especially embedded Linux); it seems this specialization has suffered less than others. I also don't have a degree. I had to accept a slight paycut and hybrid - but I was in office before... and hardware generally just requires you to be present sometimes.
Don't be afraid if you don't have a network, the advice is good, but it doesn't apply to everyone.
I think that's relevant if you have a highly specialized skillset like embedded Linux. People don't make embedded Linux job postings to "test the waters" or "see if the perfect candidate applies." If the listing is up, they're probably hiring an embedded Linux developer, and while there will be a lot of resume frauds applying, they actually need to make the hire.
If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a completely different situation.
My experience is the network typically fails, but it can sometimes work.
Remember with networking there is often only one person in your network of hundreds who can do anything so you need to find that person. Often it will be the guy you just barely talked to who won't think of you at all unless you remind them, but they then know enough to know you are good enough for some position and then they are not interviewing they are convincing you to take the job.
Those cases where the network ensures you are the only candidate are one of the reasons why they work well. My current company doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter how good you are, all I can do is put your resume in the HR stack (unless it is for my department in which case my boss might ask me about a couple resumes). I'd be considered a conflict of interest so I couldn't interview you.
I would say the extended parts of my network are still getting the interviews, but I have people I directly literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm with turn
me flat down for work, which was a real slap in the face. I’ve been applying since April 2020 (with about 7 interviews so far and 2-3 upcoming interviews total) and I’m getting kind of discouraged at this point.
> but I have people I directly literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm with turn me flat down for work, which was a real slap in the face.
Since referrals became the meta-game, companies have adapted their referral process to be more selective. Most companies I've worked for have required people to enter some basic information about how and where you worked with the referral, why you're referring them, and a statement that your referral means you are vouching for that person's work performance.
It cuts down on the number of people referring people they know by happenstance, which defeats the purpose of a referral program. I doubt your friends meant it as a personal attack. They probably just had referral programs that were more rigorous than putting names into a queue.
They said they hadn’t been happy with the last three months of candidates, and that I was probably going to be it and then rejected me with no feedback and hired some ex-SpaceX person as a contractor. It may have been the investor playing a role.
Honestly in this market there is really only so much your network can do—at least at a “submit my resume for me” level. I’m starting to think I might get a bit more aggressive and bold with my network and have them deliver paper copies to the hiring manager or something. Because even referral submitted applications are black holes at this point.
Hang in there and take what you can get. The market is super shitty and you are absolutely not alone. It ain’t you. The market will pick back up again… it always does.
The market can remain depressed for longer than you can remain solvent.
We should be encouraging people to look at alternative careers to tech. Life after tech.
We should also be making it clear to students that while there are exciting things happening in tech this is not going to translate into large scale demand for people.
Large parts of technology are mature, indeed moribund. This is not a message that the technology industry wants to hear.
>The market will pick back up again… it always does.
It will, but this time it's probably going to be several years. It's the covid lock down train wreck. Most people underestimate the cascading damage done by the lock downs.
If they won’t pay for traveling for on-site interview or relocation is that a good sign; when they’re demanding three days a week in the office hybrid?
> My entire network failed when I was looking for work
That's been my consistent experience as well. Conventional wisdom is that you only get good jobs through referrals, but about half of the companies I've worked for have been through referrals and half "cold" through monster or linkedin, etc. and BY FAR the worst working experiences of my life have been the internal referral ones. The last time I was looking for work was 2017, though - I get the impression that things have gotten really, really bad in the past year or so.
11 apps to one job last year, huh? With a 100% response rate. Wish I could have had even a tenth of that luck. Heck even during the best booms my response rate was hovering around 30%.
I'm just exhausted with the search. I finished yet another programming take home only for the company to stop hiring at the turn of the quarter.
But yea, my network also failed me. Mostly becsuse 80%+ of them were laid off themselves.
Remember when 80% are laid off, they are all looking. Whoever finds a job probably has found a place that is hiring more than one person. So keep in touch, they don't have anything today, but they may have leads. Sometimes it is here is a job that you are a closer fit for than me so I may as well point you at it even if it hurts my already low chances.
Indeed. And my luck continued to fall through the cracks.
Had 3 interviews through contacts that bounced back. Failed two interviews, one technical, one cultural. Third one never really got off the ground; talked to a recruiter and then nothing ever really got arranged. Not even a call.
One got a job at a place I previously worked at and had no interest in returning to. He's on a different team though so I can't say his experience will mirror mine.
One was asking around about any open roles days before he got laid off himself.
Asked a few others and no positions are really open as of now.
Funnily enough me and another colleague applied to the same job and he got it. Right before they invoked a hiring freeze.
And those are just referrals. The nightmares from jobs I just found myself get even better. I'm just tired. This market suuuuuuucks.
There have been ups and downs for decades. I'm sorry it is happening to you, glad it isn't me this time (so far!). I've been there. Hang in, there are always jobs though sometimes you need to become a handyman or something to get any money for a year.
Yeah, no worries. I'm stable for now, just not full time stable. I just gotta survive until the market bounces back.
I work in games so I was pre-programmed far in advance to expect shakey times. Just not times where I'm ghosted for over a year with no sign of anything opening up (quite the contrary, still plenty of gaming layoffs!).
Try getting a single board computer such as a raspberry pi, and see if you can get it to do stuff! Hook it up to some SPI or I2C peripheral boards to read temperature or light. Stream data to a cloud.
Another big part of embedded Linux is managing the OS itself and updates. Things like Yocto handle building an OS image
I got hired by directly applying via a company's website; it was my 11th application and my first that wasn't a moonshot (nvda/valve/etc). It was in late 2023 (very bad market), and I didn't have any connections to the company at all. I also have no online presence. Online applications are not fully dead.
Of course this is just my experience as a senior engineer in embedded, so likely doesn't apply to others. But if you're looking, it's worth your time to apply...
I have a suspicion that your experience is representative of a general attitude in embedded engineering compared to other software disciplines. Embedded engineers usually still keep to proper part numbering, testing before shipping and working with greater platform limitations, all virtuous activities that are harder to find in other fields. I like to think this culture bleeds into other parts of the business such as implementing reasonable hiring processes!
I'd chalk it up to embedded not being a field you can hop into after a 4 month boot camp without prior Computer Engineering education. Of course, there are exceptional people who manage to do that, but they aren't the norm
<Warning - rant ahead>
Contrast that to the overglorified code monkeying that is present-day software development... You got react monkeys hard-coding every single width and height for every button and div in a webapp... And they get paid for it... And then someone like me will have to clean up this shit and explain to the client why the billion features he wants won't be ready in 3 months.....
Then you have AWS monkeys coding everything in lambas and amplify, instead of "if conditions" you got "Step functions" and instead of a function you got a lamda, and instead of async/await you got SQS queues and shit.
</Rant>
As a result, legit Engineers/excellent developers resumes get swallowed up in the raging ocean of noise, and a ton of those noise-resumes aren't distinguishable from legit-resumes due to resume generators being dime a dozen.
This is me, I'm a renter and my complex will never install chargers. I've tried, it's a no-go.
That said, 50MPG vehicles are common these days. My '07 Prius gets 48, measured, a newer Camry/Accord/Sonata hybrid will get ~50MPG as well. Add an openpilot driving system and it's almost like a private train car.
I drive 80 miles round trip, 5x a week for work. That works out to ~$2000/yr for gasoline. That's really not that bad at all! Just don't drive a crossover or truck as your daily.
I'll probably never buy electric, because I don't want to buy a house (just not for me) and I don't think apartments will install a charger-per-spot (personal requirement). That's OK, hybrid is pretty great.
On the heat pump side, I only have to heat 700 sqft - it requires little energy and is so little cost-wise I don't even track it.
I'm a simple man, and did something similar but with bash+mosquitto+imagemagick running on a Kindle. That's boring/been done, but what I want to talk about is screen burn-in.
I've been displaying slight variations of the same image on an old Kidle paperwhite for a bit over 5 years! I've noticed NO burn-in at all. I'm doing partial updates every refresh (30 second refreshes), so the display will go 1+ years without a full refresh (~1 million partial refreshes a year). There's some retention when I first work with it, but clearing the screen and showing a full-screen pattern is enough to remove that retention entirely.
Pretty impressive, and I am also impressed the old firmware stays attached to wifi for the whole time as well! Sometimes it can have trouble reconnecting (power outage, dog unplugged wifi, whatever), that's when I'll see if there's burn-in, probably once a year(ish).
I unfortunately stopped daily driving gentoo right as core counts in consumer machines started to go above 1. I have played around w/ it a few times since, and was blown away by how much faster emerges go when you add ever increasing numbers to -j in your make opts.
Building large software is consistently the only useful thing I can do that will fully utilize all CPU resources. Seeing all the bars in the red in htop on a box with a lot of threads doesn't get old.
There’s a few threads linked in the top discussion (you may need to expand the massively downvoted responses, and some are deleted), but Mazda is known to use tracking data to deny warranty claims and share that data with insurers.
I was also stunned to learn salespeople’s commission is denied if they don’t get you on the app! Absolutely wild.
I find when I use vscode that most features have an emacs equivalent.
Am I missing out on something in that set of “stuff I don’t know I don’t know”?