I'm amazed that you came back. I almost never track down what happens when I post anonymously. Also, I know almost nobody here, anonymous or not.

I miss those days. Bill Gates got started by selling a traffic counting program to city governments when he was in high school. It helped that his parents were loaded and had connections, but a high schooler would be extremely lucky to get revenue from such a simple program now.

No, I think I understood correctly. One of the things I want to build is a controller to go to a $1000 piece of machinery. I looked at how much it would cost to get the parts, and I can't really spare the $100, not to mention the risk of damaging that $1000 device. I don't have a whole lot of use for a $50 Raspberry Pi With Blinking Lights.

That's what's insidious about privilege. It takes a lot of effort to understand somebody who's in a drastically different life situation.

I have over 15 years of experience with installing and running Linux on workstations, servers, and routers, and also 15 years with audio-video systems. Before that, I used Classic MacOS, even as a router for a while. It worked surprisingly well. I've also programmed in various languages for over 20 years; however, my father was on the wrong side of history (he actually liked PL/I), so I'm counting only the last 10 years with modern programming languages.

I play the numbers. 100 applications leads to about 10 summary rejections and about 3 screening phone calls. Maybe 1000 applications to get to the second interview. It is an extremely inefficient process, but I have no industry contacts, and my part-time work frequently overlaps the industry's party times.

Prejudice much? I did take algorithms in college, and I read algorithms papers. So far, only 1 company got as far as discussing the algorithm, and they were impressed. But they're busy doing a death march, trying to get a particularly complex product into the market, and in the end they were spooked by the lack of "qualifications." That was 1 month of stringing me along for nothing.

Yes, well, I already have a bookshelf full of books and scientific papers to read. Sedgewick also has a very interesting MOOC on algorithms (that doesn't give you a qualification). It's just impossible to concentrate on studying when I'm in the wrong level of Maslow's Hierarchy.

I don't need more books. I need money.

Actually, it might not, because I don't have any ideas right now that would lead to money, except for some ideas that would require me to immediately spend money that I don't have. That's a downside of working at a charity-type non-profit: You tend to look for solutions that don't involve money. There's not much difference between self-employed with no revenue, and unemployed.

Ugh. "Don't give up." As if I had a choice.

Your advice is evidence of your privilege. At the moment, between my part-time job, my tech-related volunteering, and my job applications, I don't have a whole lot of time to contribute to open-source projects. I've been avoiding buying gadgets because my part-time job doesn't pay enough to afford it, and also I don't have time. I like what I do, but my employer is non-profit and doesn't have a lot of respect in the technology industry, for good reason.

Those are all qualifications that you're saying I should pay for myself. I barely have any money. I can't afford to invest right now, and I was really hoping that my 15 years of experience would be enough at least for an internship. But so far, nothing.

Just today, I received an email about a Clojure developer job. I replied that I used Clojure and wanted the job. The recruiter then called back and wasted 15 minutes of my time, saying that because I used Clojure for a personal project and not commercially for a client, then it didn't count, even if it was on Github.

Maybe there is a good employer out there, but applying to jobs is extremely tedious and I haven't found that employer, yet. So far, I have over 50 distinct logins for taleo.net, 10 for silkroad.com, 10 for ultipro.com, 10 for brassring.com, and 5 for apply2jobs.com; and I've been finding JobScore, lever.co, and greenhouse to be extremely tedious. I bet it's tedious for the hiring managers, too, so I don't expect them to find my resume on their own. What I really need are industry contacts.

Haha, yeah, I'm a bit ambivalent about whether I should classify myself as the youngest Gen Xer or the oldest Millenial. I was a teenager when I made this account. I'm also a third-generation computer user.

What I'm hearing, for example from Carol Dweck, is that self-esteem is not a noble goal by itself. Certainly, we shouldn't be trashing people's efforts, as Microsoft discovered after they canceled Courier; at least, I'm guessing that's the client who called Dan Ariely (video) for help. (Text summary.) In general, good work is intrinsically rewarding. I'm sick of this culture of fake cheerfulness.

Another problem is that very few companies want to invest in their workers. They want somebody who already has the skills that they need, and will be performing the same role for the extent of their employment there. No wonder there is so much job hopping among the people who are qualified. Never mind that even qualified people take weeks or months to get up to speed in a project of any complexity. Everybody's asking for, "Hit the ground running."

My problem is that my last 15 years of education, work, and hobbies, they just sweep it away as "Not qualified." Heinlein's Specialization is for insects? Doesn't exist as far as recruiters are concerned. You've been a network admin but haven't used OSPF? Fail. You've been a Clojure programmer but haven't used it for a commercial client? Fail. You've run a helpdesk for dozens of clients but haven't supported thousands of clients? Fail. Well, you recruiters fail, as far as I'm concerned.

I am a largely self-taught millennial, and I have been experiencing the hardest time getting a technology job right now. Almost every job I apply to, when I do get a response, I get a form letter: "Blah blah blah, we're impressed by your skills and experience, but we're going to concentrate on other candidates who match our needs more closely right now. kthxbye." A few of the companies make me jump through hoops, the coding challenges, before sending me the same form letter. This is in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, where you can supposedly just walk across Market Street and get a new job.

All these Learn to Code, Hour of Code, Computer Science for Everyone are doing is giving false hope. You learn to code, but you got no qualifications. You have to pay one of Dice's commercial partners out of your own pocket to get the qualifications. That's what every employer is holding out for: Qualifications that they're not paying for.

I suspect that I will have to start my own company, just to create my own qualifications. This job market sucks.

No, you are ignorant of What is free software. I repeat: It's about freedom.

I think this applies to my script, for which I am the only user and the only person who has a copy.

Fine. How about this: To recover data from an SD card, I wrote a Python script to read each sector and dump them into an SQLite database. I'm not publishing the script, so it's not open source. But I made it for myself and can do anything I want to it, so it's free software.

Free Software has always been about freedom, not the price tag. You don't need to go to the Church of Programming to get software. You don't even need to dodge the malware on C|net. You can make your own software. The GNU Manifesto is about coming together and making an entire operating system that ensures individual freedom.

A problem here is that the useless English Department administrators somehow managed to make 4 years of English a requirement for graduation. Doesn't matter if you already have skills in English; doesn't matter if you graduate without any skills. You're all getting stuck in the same class, which for lack of anything relevant to learn, ends up being a discussion about whatever fits the fancy of the teacher. Who majored in English for Teachers, so knows nothing useful.

It also doesn't help that a lot of science teachers don't care about language. They majored in Science for Teachers, and don't understand the importance of communication.

If running Linux is the goal, then I would be tempted a lot by the Purism Librem laptop. Finally, a high-spec laptop that's actually built with Linux in mind.

Of course, I would not get the base configuration. Hard drives are for suckers. And at this point, I would wait for actual hardware to ship so reviewers can touch on the other stuff, such as keyboard, trackpad, build quality, battery life, and fan noise.

So buy based on other factors. In my experience, the entry level laptops are driving people into getting Macs, because they suck so much.

Screen, keyboard, and trackpad. Does she need to squint, because some random application doesn't do HiDPI correctly? Do the color shifts of a cheap TFT give her headaches? Are they still making 15" 720p screens, where you can't show much content on screen because it's all too blocky? Is the keyboard reliable? Does the trackpad make her want to go on a murder spree? All these questions and uncertainty go away when you get a Mac.

And then the waiting. All the cheap laptops have hard drives. Bad choice. Especially on a development system, seeking all over the place to touch the headers or other important files.

I guess aesthetics and battery life are important. Especially fan noise.

Of course, if you have an opinion about Mac vs Windows, then Apple's the only vendor selling Macs. I feel that MacOS is nicer, but that is always open to change.

I can think of a couple edge cases.

First, software that you make for yourself and don't let others use. Not even through services. Google and Facebook are considered non-free in that regard. But if you make it for yourself, then you're exercising your freedom and not hurting anybody else.

Second, software that is isolated in a coprocessor and cannot be modified. Then it can be considered part of the hardware, and Free Hardware is not a priority of the Free Software Foundation. That's the approach being taken for the GTA04 OpenMoko phone.

I ran into this problem when I was trying to upgrade Windows XP computers to Windows 8 a couple years ago, while simultaneously upgrading from HDD to SSD. The download program wouldn’t allow this uncommon upgrade pattern. And, evidently, Microsoft is too poor to afford the bandwidth to provide the ISO (sarcasm).

The solution was to download from the kindly strangers who have volunteered their bandwidth via BitTorrent. The retail RTM ISOs are readily available, with checksums to ensure that they haven’t been tampered with. The installer was still ornery; I had to install a dummy copy of Windows XP onto the SSD so the program would deign to reformat and install Windows 8, but otherwise it worked fine.