Willow, 27, Tuscon Arizona
Personal Life:
Got COVID last week timestamp
- tested negative this
Has a kid in Tuscon, divorce just finished
Has an IT degree + some IT certs
Subsisting off severance pay, savings, and freezer meals timestamp
Has a "partner" timestamp
Rekt the partner's car earlier this year
- Early on in the relationship, things still going well
Partner is currently in the room
Career:
Usually IT, got laid off 3 weeks ago timestamp
- Has been applying to a jobs, about 10 applications a day, "getting kind of desparate"
Uber driving timestamp
Was using the truck but it broke "really bad" and couldn't the fix
"Very first drive got blinded by the sun and wrapped it around a pole"
Car was worth 4 or 5 grand, Ford Focus
- Mother gave money to bail out? And give partner?
Truck has since aged out of Uber
Financials:
401k $32'000
- "About to get split in half" (divorce)
Divorce Deets timestamp
20k legal fees
- Lawyer felt bad so no interest on a pay as you go timestamp
Caleb pretends he didn't notice this guest is transgender
"My ex-wife decided to kidnap my child across the country when I started hormones"
"She lied just long enough to establish residency in Tuscon and then I got served divorce papers"
Sold home in Michigan (a half-acre) for net $53'000
- Home was a gift from family?
"My ex does have to pay for a portion of my attorney's fees now which feels nice" timestamp
- About a third of them
Married for 4 or 5 years timestamp
Married because wife got pregnant
"A lot of pretty terrible things she did in the meantime which resulted in other bills I had to pay off"
- Psych ward visit "from her abuses that sent me going insane"
50/50 custody of the daughter, 4 years old
"Why was the divorce messy?" timestamp
"She got really resentful because she didn't want me to [transition] because she's Catholic and very strong in her belief that trans people aren't real"
"She wanted me not to have unsupervised access to my kid"
"During the divorce she accused me falsely of five felonies"
"Forging, child abuse, diddling the kid, and abusing her, and I forget what the fifth one was"
"That's why she has to pay a large portion of my lawyers fees, the judge was not pleased with that"
Wife is living with her parents rent-free, judge decided to count this free rent as income
Has until June 1st to get a job
Does not qualify for unemployment currently
Wife did have a job during the marriage
Used to have 3 cars, sold a Chevy 1 ton truck to help pay for the lawyer
More deets timestamp
Ex's mother is retired
Communication is "sparse" with a rude message from her here and there
Worked for 6 months of the last year? Intiaily timestamp
Got a job mid-last year but it was "an IT sweat shop"
Explanation of this - timestamp
Making $52'000, "much lower than what I made in Michigan"
Tried to start a business, "it didn't work out well, I ended up breaking even"
So where'd the money go? timestamp
"So first, I have a big stupid truck I love, that I keep fixing and I have a loan on it. It's lifted and-"
"So here me out-"
Self-scored 1 or 2, "it's pretty bad"
Credit Card 1 (Quicksilver) (9'167) timestamp
$334 minimum payment
$10 in transactions
242 interest accrued
$167 over the credit limit
30.7% interest rate
"For a while I wasn't allowed to touch the funds from the house" timestamp
Explanation of how he has this bill from needing to keep "both his cars"
Has another car in Michigan at his mother's house
"It's also very old and broken"
First car, it's always broken but he wants to keep it. "It works, mostly, there's always something a little wrong with it"
"I actually hate car-based transportation but I like cars"
Credit Card 2 (Wells Fargo) (7'270) timestamp
$73 minimum payments
interest free but not any more, now 30%
no new purchases
"I've gotten very used to losing money at this point."
- Caleb takes shots at the Reddit, guest takes a potshot as well
- Caleb takes shots at the Reddit, guest takes a potshot as well
Thinking about bankruptcy timestamp
Pretty reasonable thoughts behind this actually
Has already talked to a lawyer about this, $1700
Planning to pull the lawyer fees from his retirement this goes forward
Would take about a month or two for the proceeding
Mother has agreed to sign onto a loan if needed, already bailed out once while he wasn't able to touch the house funds
Credit Card 3 (Trio) (2461) timestamp
$49 interest accrued
$73 minimum payment
Does not plan on using credit cards again timestamp
Rent is $850
Tried applying other places, "Walmart, the gas station down the road" timestamp
Rejected from these
Walmart mentioned specifically as ghosting him
Car (Dodge Ram 1500) ($7'000) timestamp
From 2007
Bought in 2021 - 4 year term, cost 11'000
Truck deets timestamp
Thinks about $7'000 in repairs over the time he's had it
Uses for off road driving frequently for fun (based)
Repaired own front suspension
Partner bought him new tires
Thinks that it's worth more than he owes on it
1 payment late right now
RV ($20'000) timestamp
Bank this is from is "super shady" and won't give statements
Thinks 7% or 8%
10 year term
has had it a little more than a year
Thinks it's worse more than he owes but would be extremely difficult to sell
1 payment late right now
Caleb pushes back on the bankruptcy timestamp
Caleb suggests that he move to Phoenix for better job prospects and only see kid on weekends [timestamp]
- "That doesn't feel like an option - that kid has so many emotional problems from being taken from me, I couldn't do it to her"
Some pushback on whether ending up in this situation was actually out of the guest's control
Checking Account timestamp
Some eating out, oil changes, fair bit of amazon, google, a car wash for the '90s car
He gets maybe 5 more car washes for the '90s car - wanted to fix rust on it?
$64 worth of steam games
$45 venmo to Therapist
Got state health care? timestamp
Partner hops on timestamp
Did not know about this much CC debts
Dog barks because nobody's paying attention to it
Partner has "about 10'000" in CC debt
On marriage
"not happening any time soon" both divorcees
partner is 25
Dog had lime disease when younger
Don't live together, did briefly because guest was briefly homeless in January
Guest and daughter were staying in the apartment for a little while
"She doesn't know how to cook so she heads to McDonalds"
"She hasn't been applying to fast food jobs" timestamp
"Only thing I can't see myself being able to deal with is fast food - it just seems so overwhelming"
"She's neurodivergent" timestamp
Guest hates IT and wants to become a lawyer timestamp
- Thinks mother or grandmother might pay through school
Mention of a quarter million inheritance
Birds-eye view of the debts timestamp
Caleb thinks it's 2 years to pay off
Caleb cuts it there
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
lol i technically still have an A+ certification because i got it in like 2009 for a college job back when it didn't expire
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
If you haven't already, take it off your CV. I more or less will never interview anyone with A+ or MCSE on their résumé, and I think I'm not the only one.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Why tho?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
explained a bit here
I try to interview and hire people who have a brain and are eager to take something apart or figure out how build a new thing better (and who are not so neurodivergent that they can't explain their new thing), not just tinker around the edges of an existing system adjusting configuration parameters the way some cert prep book told them to. If your primary value is that you know all the details of all the AWS APIs, then you're worth less to me than docs.aws.amazon.com.
If you are young and just trying to get your foot in the door, I'm a lot more forgiving. Young people and people new to the industry have no idea wtf they are doing, but if you've been working for Infosys for 10 years and have a shitload of certs on your CV I probably have no interest in interviewing you.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I been told for years certs (good ones not those from bootcamps and shit like that) were more than a degree now, so what's the deal? should I show you my github with an emulator entirely written in mindfrick?
That's like 90% of what IT does IRL
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
This sort of goes to the point I'm trying to make: the people and teams I've worked with would have been insulted to be called "IT". To them, IT is like rebooting your router, fixing the printer, configuring the security settings for Microsoft OneDrive
. The good money and higher status is in "software engineering" not "IT" (note: they are not real engineers any more than a "sanitation engineer" is.)
Basically, if you want to have an interesting job and make bank, you want to be on the team that is building the new Google (or at least lies to some VC investors and pretends that's what they're doing) not the team that is installing printer drivers for accountants. You want to be someplace where coding is a profit center, not a cost center.
What I really look for is evidence on your CV that you've already done the kind of work we need you to do. Failing that, I look for secondary evidence that you're capable of doing that work. TBH, yes, if you'd written an NES emulator in Brainfrick that would be way way more impressive than a CCNA cert. But "github portfolio" is a meme, too. I only look at github for really new devs to double-check that they actually know how to code.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
If you mean startups I know the scene and its mostly rich kids who never had a job playing with the money dad's friends managed to hustle out of retirement funds that should be better than to put their savings on the hands of VCs who gamble on melted cheese and IoT juicers. Most of the time the pay is meh, you get offered stocks that will be worth nothing when the startup inevitably crashes and if you happen to be in the 1% of those companies that wont burn itself down you then learn you had regular stock that gets diluted to shit, unlike the founders and investors.
Jokes aside what kind of projects do tech interviewers like you find interesting in a potential hire?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Yeah, yeah, most startups are a joke. But the same principle applies, if you work at Amazon you want to be one of the people launching their new AI shit, or at least making S3 caching more performant, not the chump who installs MS Office on the warehouse supervisor's machine.
Honestly? Like I said, projects at your previous job doing the exact same shit you'd be doing with us. Right now, I'm tech lead for a data engineering "squad" that builds and maintains a bunch of data pipelines for data the business either needs or thinks they need, so like, ideally I want to see that your last job was writing data pipelines using the same cowtools that we use. But if not that, then something closely related: maybe you were a grad student who had to pull together shitloads of messy data for your thesis, talk to me about that. Basically, I want to see that you are able to do the job we need done, and you aren't so weird or antisocial that you'd be miserable to work with and impossible to communicate with.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I can understand now since it's retired but even like back in 2010ish and earlier?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
MCSE was the OG "I have no idea what I'm doing but memorized a test" cert. I don't know if I've ever met someone who had it who wasn't completely incompetent.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Which other certs you recommend avoiding?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Any that your employer isn't paying for
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Uh.. I was in college in 2010 so I was in no position to interview or hire anyone then.
Maybe it's partly snobbery or class bias, but in my experience certs are mostly a negative signal for what I might call the 'technician mindset', like the kind of guy who already had an HVAC cert and decided to get into resetting ActiveDirectory passwords because the money was better.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Oh I've never put it on my resume, I only have it because it was required for that one job (they paid for it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Xe stuck xerself in the MSP grinder desperate for money, not experience or neurodivergent freedom. The OVER levels are off the charts.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context