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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2402 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 18, 2025

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.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • 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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Do you already have a bachelor's degree in CS?

I have not found that the CS bachelor's degree syllabus is particularly useful for becoming a good programmer, much less becoming a good software engineer.

I think the best way to become a better engineer is to find a good engineer and work with them and learn from them. At least, that is what I have always been able to do, and that is what I have found helped me the most. If you are the best engineer around, it's time to find a new role.

The job market right now is not good, and while I don't think it's a permanent downturn, it's not easy to move around. If you have connections, leverage them.

I dropped out of college to get a software development job in crypto. I don't have a bachelor's.

I'd love to find a good engineer mentor--everywhere I've worked, I've been the only one doing anything similar to what I do. But so far I haven't been able to pass interviews at the larger crypto companies, which are getting quite competitive, and don't have any lateral connections to take advantage of. So I'm stuck in that regard unless I can figure out something that really makes me stand out.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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