That is how communism fell in Eastern Europe. The ruling elites realized that they would be better off if they just gave up on the ideology and kept their property. Everyone else was so poor by western standards that meaningful investments had to come from abroad, the ex-communists mostly just changed shirts and kept their social "leadership" roles. Reagan and Kohl just talked the talk, the important part was the willingness to give up power, that was how bad the economics of socialism were. Some people still remember socialism as if it was something awesome, a thing to be proud of. One time border guards celebrate anniversaries never pausing to think about the fact that for 40 years they were employed to stop people from LEAVING their country. THAT is a sure sign your country sucks.

First piece of advice. "Clever" code is usually bad code. If I saw that line of code in a code review, I would have to have words with the programmer.

More seriously, it depends where you are. There area lot of jobs right now. If by no professional experience you mean no internship experience, that can make things harder but isn't a huge obstacle at all (the experience itself doesn't often count for much, it's really more of a "why didn't you get an internship?" sort of thing). A good way to start in that case is to look for contract-to-hire positions, possibly through a recruiting/placement agency (look for ones that specialize in engineers). They generally know what they are doing, and will work hard to find a good place for you and they are genuinely on your side. We like to use these where I work because you can hire someone on a three month or whatever contract, and if it doesn't work out, it's a relatively painless separation for everyone (ie, you weren't "fired" you just finished the term of your contract). It's easier to get your foot in the door through a CTH, and then you just have to diligently and prove yourself.

As for preparing for real work (the actual coding part), that's harder. Since you really don't know what you'll be doing, it's not easy to prepare for it. You really have to learn software engineering on the job, and companies hiring entry level talent know that. That said, if you have a particular field in mind, looking for *good* open source projects along the lines of what you want to do and studying the source is good idea. Exposure to real-world, non-academic code is very useful. Getting involved and maybe becoming a contributor is a great idea (and looks good on a resume and gives you something to talk about in an interview). Working on personal hobby projects is a good thing too (though not as good as working on larger projects with other people), which again, gives you something to talk about in an interview. Keep your hand in. Have something to talk about at your interviews.

There are some good books. "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Hunt/Thomas is an excellent general-purpose programming practices book (more about mindset and approach and good patterns than technical details), and I can't recommend it enough. There are some others, but they escape me at the moment. Google is probably your friend here. If you can find a second hand set of Knuth for a reasonable price, buy it up. It's not even remotely worth actually reading, but it looks good on a shelf.

Good luck and don't sweat it. You have a degree that makes you very employable. You'll find something that you like without a doubt. If you're lucky it will be your first job, if not, no big deal--move on to the next thing.

What killed a federal job guarantee in 1945? Jim Crow.

Check out page 7.

"The Full Employment Bill had potential to change the prevailing system of racial and labor relations premised on the subordination of African Americans. Consequently, the bill faced opposition from business and farm lobbies, who sought to replace the bill with one that was less threatening."

Also, get a load of its details:

“all Americans able to work and seeking work have the right to useful, remunerative, regular and full-time employment. And it is the policy of the United States to assure the existence at all times of sufficient employment opportunities to enable all Americans [...] to freely exercise this right.”

That's part of what I mean when I laugh at the notion that policy proposals by Sanders/Corbyn are "radical". A federal job guarantee was accepted mainstream in 1945, yet a living wage is considered pie-in-the-sky utopian madness in 2017.

I've delivered many prepackaged, human remains to airport cargo terminals. Some airlines will ship your remains free if you were employed by the airline. Talk about perks!

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

As much as I love Steve Hughes, and as much as I hate taking a comedy bit seriously, he's pretty much wrong about every single point in this video.

Oppressive health and safety? Oh please can we return to when employers could order me to endanger my life just for a paycheck.

PC? Been down this road a million times, but it's really easy for a straight white dude to talk about not being offended.

Smoking? I give zero fucks if you want to smoke, just don't do it around me. Oh, and I was in Ireland when they banned smoking in pubs. It was fucking great, and yeah, it encouraged a bunch of people to quit.

Anyway, as I said, it's a comedy bit and it's funny. Just don't go actually believing it.

I enjoyed the strategy employed at 4:06 myself. If only it had detonated at the right moment...

I understand where you're coming from, but I stand by my previous posts.

Full disclosure, I never got professionally employed as a programmer / coder / software engineer. However, my Bachelors Degree was in CS, and I have many friends working in the field.

In the show Silicon Valley, Richard Hendriks is working for a large corporate entity but has an idea / personal project that he ends up spinning into a new company. He is trained as a software engineer (CS), NOT with any business or management background (MIS), yet he becomes sort of the de-facto boss / CEO (at least early in the show). He hires a small team to help him develop his product.

Given that scenario, I think the show portrays things very accurately or at least completely plausibly. He's a coder, not a manager. Programmers may understand the importance of formatting and style standards, but at least tend to not have the correct personality type to be comfortable with formally dictating those standards to a team (an activity which would generally be more in line with an MIS background).

Also, his company is small -- just a few other programmers. They are all specializing on different components of the product. So they generally aren't working on each other's code. Standards for function arguments / helper functions / etc. would have to be agreed upon to get their individual components to interact, but that is a separate issue from tabs vs spaces. It would be wise to set a style and naming convention standard and have everyone conform to it, I agree completely. But Richard isn't built for the manager / CEO position, so he either fails to recognize that or doesn't feel comfortable dictating standards to his team.

One more thing to consider is that he (Richard) essentially is the product. He's the keystone piece, the central figure. He's John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, or Steve Wozniak. Even in a very large team / corporate environment, I'd wager that more often than not the style standards that end up getting set tend to fall in line with whatever those key guys want them to be. Don't touch an id Software graphics engine without conforming to Carmack's way, or the Linux kernel without conforming to Torvald's standards. Especially if they are building something new from scratch -- which is again true in the Silicon Valley show scenario.

The show isn't a documentary on how to properly run a startup company in the real Silicon Valley, but it is generally accurate enough that it has a lot of nuances that people with a programming background can pick up on and be entertained by (even people that don't actually work professionally in the field like me). And more important, the general feel of the show can be entertaining even for people that know absolutely nothing about programming.

I gather you are talking about Paul Manafort, A lobbyist and insider for decades who worked for anyone any government for a fee. Two faced Trump saying drain the swamp and have Manafort ( and Roger Stone) on his team- sure. But that still does not mean there were collusion with Russia.

If I were an non politician it would be prudent to employ some heavy hitters who know who is who and what is what and how to win would be a good thing. Doesn't go with the whole draining the swamp message.

Time and investigations will tell.

Only her last employer (Trump) thought that her doing her job was inappropriate.
Obama thought being warned his plans were unconstitutional before he implemented them was a good thing, as was having subordinates that we're more interested in serving the law rather than serving the president.

I'm still waiting for the smug look to disappear.

She has an interesting line of reasoning, but is it her place to question the constiutionality of something and implement decisions based on that questioning such that it hinders the functioning of government? Her employers certainly didn't think so.

A common tactic employed by those who wish to suppress the truth is to become dismissive, devalue and attempt to marginalize the individual. It works as effective propaganda on the masses who need to believe atrocities and genocide could not possibly take place on american soil. But hey! texas released a text book that called slaves hard workers. Some could argue that is more insulting then using the n-word.

No court cases found? was an attempt even made? Let's make it the next X Prize.

@Asmo @Phreezdryd

i get his arguments using historical precedent,and i actually agree,but i dont see how c-160 in its current form can be used as a bull whip.there would have to be heavy complicity from the judiciary to abuse which in essence is simply an addendum to an existing human rights statute.

and as i stated,or thought i did,i really enjoy his arguments for free speech and the usage of language in cultural and societal dynamics.

if you take away the more rabid of protesters who rallied against peterson,without really even listening to his lectures.a.k.a muglypuff.those people are true believers,and their minds will never be changed,because they refuse to even allow a discourse to even transpire.

the only actual abuse i saw was by his his own employer:university of toronto.

many of the protest i saw against him were fairly tame in comparison to other supposed "anti=sjw",because if you listen to peterson he is nowhere near an anti-sjw.

in my opinion,it was the decisions of the university of toronto that created this false image in regards to peterson,and for those who are unfamiliar with dr petersons take on free speech,and the misuse and abuse of the current trend of pronoun-political-footballing you really should give him a listen.

he certainly has a libertarian lean to his lectures,but his arguments are sound.

thanks you two for clearing some things up for me.
much appreciated.

A snippet from Lord Beveridge's "Full Employment in a Free Society":

The proposition that there should always be more vacant jobs than unemployed men means that the labour market should always be a seller’s market rather than a buyer’s market. For this, on the view of society underlying this Report — that society exists for the individual — there is a decisive reason of principle. The reason is that difficulty in selling labour has consequences of a different order of harmfulness from those associated with difficulty in buying labour. A person who has difficulty in buying the labour he wants suffers inconvenience or reduction in profits. A person who cannot sell his labour is, in effect, told that he is of no use. The first difficulty causes annoyance or loss. The other is a personal catastrophe. This difference remains even if an adequate income is provided by insurance or otherwise, during unemployment; the idleness even on an income corrupts; the feeling of not being wanted demoralizes. The difference remains even if most people are unemployed only for relatively short periods. As long as there is any long-term unemployment not obviously due to personal deficiency, anybody who loses his job fears that he may be one of the unlucky ones who will not get another job quickly. The short-term unemployed do not know that they are short-term unemployed till their unemployment is over.

Quoting Sniper007:

" A child is put at a tremendous disadvantage when they are taught that they can not learn anything except through formal schooling."

-- I completely and 100% agree with this, except . . .

" This is the inevitable life lesson all children are taught in schools (public or private)."

-- Reeeeealllly? Can I get some kind of cite on this? FWIW, I attended public schools -- good and bad -- and never came away with this lesson at all. Nor do I know anyone else who has. In fact, I'd say my view is the polar opposite of your own: as a self-made man, the most valuable lessons I've learned have come from experience (better known as The School of Hard Knocks).

"But for those who do wish to so delegate the sacred honor of teaching one's own child to a third party government agent(...)"

-- So you can't do both? You can't have trained educators teaching your child important fundamentals like math, science, languages and arts while you teach them social skills and whatever form of ethics and mores you want to instill them? To do the first is the cede the second?

Here's a little anecdote on my experience with home schooling:

My sister, now 30, was home-schooled by my parents. Her entire work history, up until now, has been a disaster. Lost jobs, conflicts with managers and co-workers, absenteeism -- everything shy of stealing from her employer. Why? Because she expected the world to revolve around her once she had her GED. She thought she was smarter than everyone else because she never had the social experience of encountering different levels of competence. Because home schooling catered to her needs and wants, she figured employers should do the same. Because she never had to learn classroom structure, she never learned to play nice with authority and know her place and work within it.

This is an anecdote and therefor does not equal data. But I think had my parents decided to send my sister to a public school, she'd be a lot farther ahead in her work-life than she is now and she would have had an easier road getting there.

Your mileage may vary, and hopefully will.