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Discussion on: Skills That Everyone Thinks Web Developers Have

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Thomas Leon Highbaugh

While awaiting the whims of business side to grace me with a full time Dev job, one of the ways I e made money is by repairing people's computers and sell their spare e waste on ebay (the bay area is expensive what else can I do? I got a dog to feed). Most of my clients are developers and yeah boo hoo it's no fair PEOPLE EXPECT YOU TO BE BASICALLY COMPETENT FIXING THE MACHINES YOU LOAD WITH BROKEN, POORLY DOCUMENTED GARBAGE. Its not a challenging trade, I get plenty of spare rigs for the Homelab cluster and I can charge half Geek Squad's prices (and not saying I did but I COULD charge a fourth of the "genius" premium at the pretty Linux I mean apple store) still walk away highly enriched, especially because devs throw money at things and hope they will go away. Its a systemic affliction in California that laze and carelessly obtained money make for quagmires of funding that have very real human tolls that neither developer nor whatever idiot in LA wants to look at, but run the risk of becoming themselves. Decadence in tech, as it exists in the Silicon Valley at least, is because boom times sweep through from time to time at present and like the fat cats in 1927, seems no one thinks the winning will end and they might need not only to install their own GPU with their flabby little arms, but even something so horrific as building maintaince or cooking an animal they themselves killed, without any halcyon to fill the void within.

I mean come on, you really should be able to troubleshoot (think debugging) basic hardware-software monstrosity courtesy of Microsoft. Its not like HostAPd is reading Hebrew script and if you have a degree you should know a little C regardless. Snapping pieces on and off of rigs is easier than the Legos set you'll be building Xmas Evening.