Yep, you get it. And it’s really hard to get people to understand the value in learning to do that stuff without the tools.

We do a lot of real-time control software, and just yesterday we were taking about how the newer folks are really good at using available tools and libraries, but they have less understanding of what’s happening underneath and they have problems when those tools don’t/can’t do what we need.

Apparently he wants everything written in COBOL

Usually, even with salaried positions, you’re taking about a 40 hour week-ish. If it gets a lot more than that, it’s bad management, though there will be spikes and lulls.

Most companies with unlimited PTO have some guidelines. Like at mine, once you hit 160 hours (4 weeks) there’s another level of approval. So you can guess that four weeks is easy, more gets more scrutiny, but certainly isn’t impossible.

Every company is different. These are very reasonable questions to ask your manager. “Hey, I just wanted to make sure I understand expectations about…”

I bet those guys go home more satisfied than almost any day of their lives.

My coworker who was on that flight was really anxious about it. I was pretty confident that it was just a matter of balancing the load.

In those days I was getting to take the helicopter for a meeting with every other week, and it was always the highlight of the week. Those things are just so damned fun. They can clearly haul a lot more weight than a cab full of people.

I used to fly on the company helicopter pretty regularly. It would go around to the different sites in the broader area, picking up and dropping off. One time, we stopped at a site and a very, very large man got in and sat in back on one side. He was about as heavy as you can imagine a person being and still walking around on his own power. The pilot went straight up from the pad a couple hundred feet, played with settings on the stick, dropped maybe twenty feet, played some more, up and down a couple more times, then flew away like normal. I’d never seen them do that before or after. I assume he must have been getting the settings right for the unusually unbalanced load.

I got around to reading 17776 today. That was fun, thanks for the recommendation!

I never said that being a driller is trivial. Do you think being an astronaut is trivial? That’s a pretty intensely technical job, which is why the bar for entry is so insanely high. I would put my money on those folks leaning how to drill better than drillers leaning how to be an astronaut.

Where I am in SoCal, it’s perfect right now. The lows are in the upper 50s, the highs in the mid 80s. The mornings are cool and a bit overcast, but it burns off to a sunny, warm day. It gets cool enough to open the windows just after sundown, them close them mid morning. Really nice. In a month, highs and lows will increase ten to fifteen degrees, so it will be a bit hot.

That’s super true. What’s worse is that it often turns out to be true of news as well. There have been a few times when I was familiar with events that made the news, and there were always inaccuracies in the articles. It’s made me look at articles on events that I’m not familiar with differently; they probably have the same amount of inaccuracies.

I’m software engineering in aerospace, so a lot of computer and space stuff is ruined, which covers a lot of content.

But everyone should smack their heads about Armageddon.

My MIL once brought a trash bag full of clothes for my wife, from friend who didn’t want them. Most of them were brand new with tags still on them. We thought it was strange, but they mostly fit and we didn’t think too much about it. Next visit she brings two more big garbage bags of new clothes, and one of the bags had dirt (like actual earth/dirt) on the outside. It turned out that the friend was a shopaholic and had been stashing the bags of clothes under the house so her husband didn’t see, but she was running out of room, and was trying to make space.

We stopped taking the clothes. It felt like taking advantage of someone’s mental illness. Never met the lady, but seemed sad.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. It’s not 5 comments, it’s 5 posts. I’m guessing they’re trying to limit spammers and people with an agenda. As I recall, some Lemmy instances either implemented or considered limits on total posts across communities because of spamming.

Ha! I hadn’t heard that - I’m glad someone involved called him out on it. I mean, I get that the real answer - to that and all my complaints - is that the movie doesn’t work otherwise, but it’s so annoying.

I worked on the space shuttle program, and I found Armageddon almost unwatchable. I mean, those things go up with the big solid rockets and an external tank full of hydrogen and oxygen, all of which get jettisoned during launch, then they come down as a glider. But in the movie they’re landing on asteroids and taking off again, smashing into things and still flying, etc. (remember how Columbia blew up because of a crack in the leading edge of one wing?). Plus the whole premise of it being easier to teach oil drillers how to be astronauts than to teach astronauts how to be oil drillers is a joke. Every astronaut I’ve met has been an amazing capable person - many are test pilots with multiple advanced degrees.

I hope that’s the case. Sadly, it’s not too different from some serious arguments I’ve seen.

Wait, so you’re just making stuff up and editing the dialog so that you can make him look bad and dismiss him?

A decent sized package of medium quality chocolate.

I should have mentioned what you just did: your passion doesn’t have to be your job.

Tangentially, as I get closer to retirement, one of the things I hear from retirees is that they planned on doing a lot more of their hobby when they retired, but found that the hobby felt more like a job when they tried to do it all day. So sometimes it’s better that you keep something you enjoy as something that you can just do when you want.

I end up having similar conversations with college folks (interns mostly). I usually say something along the lines of:

• If there’s something that you’re so passionate about that you’re going to do it regardless, it’s worth taking a shot at making a living at it. Things like writing, acting, and music are really hard to to make it in, but if it’s really a passion, you might as well give it a go. It’s good to have a Plan B though.
• If you aren’t super passionate about something, or you don’t have the starving artist mentality or whatever, next is to look at things you’re good at that you don’t hate, especially if there’s room to grow in them. If you’re good at math, for instance, you could consider being an accountant.
• If you don’t feel like you have any especially marketable skills, then you’re looking for something that’s more broadly available, like retail or whatever. Of you can find something that teaches a skill, that’s a plus.

Broadly, there’s a passion, there’s a career, and there’s a job. There’s nothing wrong with any of those, but people tend to be happiest in that order. I personally wasn’t super passionate about anything, but liked computers, got a CS degree, ended up as a software engineer at a rocket company, and now manage the software organization there. There were other things I enjoyed, but I figured programming was the most marketable, and that’s worked out for me.

What people tend to like or hate the most about where they work are the people and/or the boss, and that can be good or bad pretty much anywhere. Good to watch out for red and green flags when you’re looking.