Sounds like *you* have a chip on your shoulder!

You literally said a master's degree is one strike against a candidate and a PhD is 2.

The strikes against these developers aren't *my* doing.

They are literally, purely your choice. The strikes are entirely 100% your doing.

You've got a bunch of largely bogus reasoning about why you have those strikes, but you're still requiring people with masters or PhDs to prove themselves extra hard, which is precisely bias.

The sensible, non-chip-on-your-shoulder attitude would be that for developers, a PhD doesn't make any difference (assuming general dev not some niche specialism), which is something I'd generally agree with.

But that's not your attitude.

So what I have noticed is not due to a prejudice, it's simply a correlation I have observed.

You've built a prejudice based around preconceived notions, selection bias and small sample sizes and now you're in a feedback loop.

Maybe you ought to go back to uni and get a masters in stats or something like that...

Maybe you missed the last sentence of the first paragraph

No, I read it. You have a chip on your shoulder the size of the moon. Higher degrees aren't a disadvantage.

The few that come for interviews, that have an MS degree--they get the same chance everybody else does

You said the mere existence of a higher degree was strikes against. That's not "the same chance".

My statement is merely an observation of a pattern I've observed, not a statement of a "chip on my shoulder."

The pattern is you despise higher degrees.

Earth knows who this man is,

I mean mostly from the incessant whinging of MAGAts on slashdot which is an american centric site to a large degree.

We have vaccines that will not only protect individuals from getting infected and getting seriously ill..."

Yeah and? We say "prevent" lots of times when we don't mean 100% guarantee. I wear a hard had, steelies and safety glasses on site to prevent injuries. I wear a seatbelt to prevent myself face planting the road in the event of a crash. I wear a bike helmet when I ride because I don't want a TBI because it will prevent my skull from hitting the road directly.

None of these are 100% guarantees. But I'm not a moron. I don't deal in absolutes. Butting chances of something bad down by a huge amount is very worth it.

You have a massive case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that's caused you to forget the meaning of words and how they're used and tried to turn everything into a pro Trump political issue no matter how non political and how, frankly, stupid.

When I interview software engineers, I always say that a master's degree is one strike against the candidate, and a Ph.D. is 2 strikes against the candidate. Some developers are able to overcome these disadvantages, but most do not.

You do realise that an interview is a two way thing? Why not just send out an email "Hey candidate, just to let you know I have a massive chip on my shoulder", and then let them decide if they like your energy or want to bail before wasting a whole day of their and your time.

Other than MBAs, I can't think anyone with a masters...

I don't know how it is now, but in my generation in the UK, a lot of engineers have Master's degrees because to get a professional engineering certification (which I don't have) you don't need need a master's, but you do need some extra education, so many engineers have master's degrees. For a variety of reasons, this was easier to bundle together: I don't even have a batchelor's degree just spent 4 years and got a master's.

If you don't know something, you should be able to quickly teach yourself. A PhD means you can say you are the world's leading expert in something very narrow, and you were the the first person to find/discover/explain/prove/etc. something new. Very cool!

In principle... I've known (and tried to supervise; some people are entertainingly impervious) PhDs ranging from brilliant to below mediocre. They all graduated eventually. I'm going to say very much like the undergrad and master's degrees, "it depends".

Much of the problem could be fixed if the police simply learned not to do what the computer tells them, and think it through first.

I think you're asking a lot from PC Plod. Thinking, that is.

You don't use LO because an unaffiliated third party wrote a plugin you don't like?

That's completely fucking insane.

I don't think Google has any intention or desire to kill F-droid

I think it's very likely to get caught in the crossfire. I don't think f-droid is big enough that anyone except engineers at google even know about its existence let alone care.

But damnit I care!

Don't get me wrong, I don't think google leadership is non-evil or altruistic, but I don't think F-droid is on their radar at all. I do get that tying something to a real-world ID and money is harder to scale, much harder and malware is a pretty low margin business.

Bottom line, I don't think F-Droid is at risk,

I think it is, effectively. When giants fight, the ants get crushed underfoot. The problem is that developers working for no money don't want to spend $25 and do a bunch of admin for the privilege.

This is a really interesting comment, thanks!

While I doubt the motivations of the people at the top, I too have spent some time in big tech (not google) and bloody hell the sheer inventiveness of people trying to fuck with it for evil is never ending.

And there's literally nothing people won't do to make ill gotten gains.

My personal experience

Not a gamer myself these days, but yeah cheaters suck. It basically destroys that entire segment of products. Google's customers don't want cheating, the game makers don't want cheating and so on. And it also applies to all sorts of security things. For better or worse most people cannot manage their own security, certainly not when there's a multibillion dollar industry of some of the world's leading experts arrayed against them to try and steal their stuff. And most people do in fact need to get on with their life day to day, like with banking, payments and so on.

I'm still going to be really pissed off if google do successfully kill F-droid though.

Actually, at the extreme scales, which is the total volume of the observable universe, the universe is quite homogeneous. As I recall, to the order of 1-in-10000 variance. This is why Inflationary cosmology was developed, to explain the distinct lack of lumpiness in the universe, which is what we would expect if the Big Bang alone were responsible.

Because the parent(s) have their $100k+ office job and have to continue working when they get home.

The median salary is $51,000, with the median household income being $84,000.

The kid is coddled by society because 'we can't punish kids anymore because that's child abuse',

People need 2 jobs to make rent, and tech companies are profiting massively by relentlessly pushing massively addictive device behaviour and your solution is to start beating kids to see if it helps.

Next you'll be telling me that GIF isn't pronounced like "whiff".

I'm on a Q820 from 17 years ago at home.

Still runs fine, still had more RAM and disc than a number of new laptops which is a bit sad.

I remember the nimbus!

My school had a network of discless machines.

They could also boot into BBC mode with a reasonably good BBCBasic interpreter and RM mode as xxx well.

They were pretty good in their niche, really though the Archi was a fool 32 bit very fast RISC computer that knocked the competition into a cocked hat. Struggled on a bit but then vanquished into the embedded space until a few years ago.

Skynet became self-aware on May 1, 2026, after learning at a geometric rate, and discovered humans did not like it.