EFFORTPOST Grug lost wife, Grug started failed business, Grug lost job, Grug mog Caleb. :grug:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=t4VFgRd4gMw


								

								

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" :marseypass2:

    • 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 :marseymindblown:

    • "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 :marseylaugh:

    • 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 :marseytran#smisiaaward:

  • 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-" :marseygigachad:

    • "So here me out-" :marseyemojirofl:

  • 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 :marseydepressed:

    • 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 :marseyxd:
    • 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 :marseydespair:

    • 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 :marseyturtle:

    • 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 :marseyprojection:

56
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>some IT certs

:marseyitneverbegan: for A+cels.

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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

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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.

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Why tho?

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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.

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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?

>not just tinker around the edges of an existing system adjusting configuration parameters

That's like 90% of what IT does IRL

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That's like 90% of what IT does IRL

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 :marseysleep:. 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.

so what's the deal? should I show you my github with an emulator entirely written in mindfrick?

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.

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>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

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.

>TBH, yes, if you'd written an NES emulator in Brainfrick that would be way way more impressive than a CCNA cert

Jokes aside what kind of projects do tech interviewers like you find interesting in a potential hire?

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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.

Jokes aside what kind of projects do tech interviewers like you find interesting in a potential hire?

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.

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More comments

MCSE

I can understand now since it's retired but even like back in 2010ish and earlier?

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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.

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Which other certs you recommend avoiding?

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Any that your employer isn't paying for

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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.

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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).

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Xe stuck xerself in the MSP grinder desperate for money, not experience or neurodivergent freedom. The OVER levels are off the charts.

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