The Maverick Debugger

(Est. Reading Time: 4 min)     I've been out of a job for over a year, and I have been applying to over 1000 jobs during that time. I lost count, seriously, but I noticed a trend. When I see less job postings, I get more job ghosting when I apply. Alternatively, when I see more job postings, I get more rejections. During this time, I had over 16 different companies I've interviewed with, and almost all have been setup by recruiters. The thing is, recruiters are not doing well in this job market, either, and there are a lot of scammers out there messing everything up. So, to even the score a bit, I wanted to inject more humanity into my hunt. Job applications today are a form with 5 to 10 blanks, half of it being demographics questions at the end that I've answered so many times, that I can almost recite them word-for-word from memory. How do you add more humanity to that? Add a "Are you a robot?" captcha to them? No, I needed a "cover letter" to add to m...

(Est. Reading Time: 5 min)     Do you value yourself? What about your time? Have you any value in your friends? Family? Pets? What about the company you work for? Not everyone has the luxury of valuing their employer, but do you? And do they value you? Oh, and what about money? Is that valuable to you? I hope you answer yes to these questions, because there isn't an upside to answering no. Think about that. When you don't value any one of those things, what does that mean? Well, that thought process is exactly what led me to define strict guidelines for interviewing. When I am talking with a hiring team, I am not just being interviewed, I am also interviewing them. Fit goes both ways. And fit, to me, doesn't compromise my values. So here are my rules: 1) I must be compensated fairly. This one is about them valuing me and my time. Fair is not even a specific amount. It's based on my experience and skill set (which is always growing), versus the job that I will be doing, ...

(Est. Reading Time: 18 min)      ( Don't have time to read? Listen to the Podcast version ) It is a quiet Monday evening, and you are up late, worried about finding your next job. Everyone else is asleep, the house is a little dark, and you are curled up under a blanket and cozy on your sofa doing one of your least favorite pastimes: job searching. When all of a sudden, you hear absolutely nothing. Crickets. Wait, what kind of ghost story is this? Hold on, it gets scarier. You don't hear anything for days, weeks, even months. You come to realize you are never going to hear anything at all! You've been ghosted! AHHHHHH! Unfortunately, if you have experienced this, you are not alone. A ghost job is a job that a company posts with the intention of never hiring for the role. Ghost jobs quite often lead to ghosting, which refers to never hearing back from a company after applying or interviewing. To be fair, there are ghost jobs that you actually hear back from, too. " Alth...

(Est. Reading Time: 12 min) Look around. How many tech devices do you see? If you are nerdy like me, it might be a slightly higher than average number of devices. Smart TVs, the phone or pc you are reading this on, smart assistant speakers, gaming consoles, all of those are obvious ones. What about your car? Your lightbulbs? Oven? Smoke detectors? Check and check. Tech is everywhere, and more and more things are getting "smartified" each year. Who builds all that? Hardware people, software people, and a whole slew of supporting cast members. So tell me, when more and more of these tech things are going up, and more and more apps are getting created, and all these billion dollar investment deals keep happening to build the next breakout startup around AI, who is going to do all this? Well, if you said AI and a bunch of "vibe coding" non-developer types, you are very wrong. Those people smell success, but can't see the future problems. They don't understand t...

(Est. Reading Time: 5 min)   ( Don't have time to read? Listen to the Podcast version ) The higher the level of the role, the more that technical interviews start to become insulting. And now I cannot wait to read all of the comments explaining how wrong I am. I have over 9 years of Python programming experience, almost 10. Asking me to do a "coding challenge" is an insult to my experience and skill level. But I have to put up with it, because that is the unfortunate norm in Software Engineering today. To dig into this deeper, though, we need to talk about Software Engineers. An engineer is a problem-solver who applies scientific and mathematical principles to design, build, and optimize systems, machines, and processes that improve daily life. Whether inventing new technologies, refining existing ones, or ensuring safety and efficiency, engineers combine creativity, technical expertise, and strategic thinking to turn ideas into reality. What separates engineering discipl...

(Est. Reading Time: 3 min)      Have you ever done a test, like the kind of test that could change your life, and you don't get the results back for several days? Job hunting is like that, repeated weekly. You spend all week doing applications, interviews, studying, practicing, putting on the best performances while stressed out of your mind, and then pause on the weekend. And when you need a job, badly, and you don't want to stop working toward getting one, you've got to remember it's not a solo exercise. Not all silence is bad though. Glass half full, think of silence as not receiving a rejection email. It's still possible. They could still be moving forward with your candidacy. They might be still thinking about you, trying to get the stars aligned for you and the process they have for you. None of that is bad. That kind of "good" silence is still bad, though. Oh, the contradiction of it all! We know the obvious reasons why silence is bad: ghosted, they...

(Est. Reading Time: 2 min)      So, here I am, tinkering with ChatGPT and other LLMs for over a year now, learning to leverage it for success for software engineering. It needs to be called out. LLMs suck at code. If a chat gets too long, they start to introduce artifacts and oddities into the code. For example, multiple unconditional return statements in a single function, adding a new one every time it "helps". It does have its good moments, though, as it helps discover bugs, sometimes. Ask it how to do something you've never done, and it will give you a basic understanding to work on. But it does not have the same logical mentality to actively participate in writing code. It gets worse. OpenAi researchers found that, beyond face value simple code, LLMs (even the unreleased frontier models) suck at code. Once the code starts to grow beyond a few classes, or a little complexity between different functions, it cannot hold the context in a way to provide meaningful output...