- candidates have zero penalty for applying to something they know they aren't qualified for

- there's constant noise about getting one of those well paying "tech jobs"

- everyone who has ever logged hello world to the console thinks they are the best programmer in the world

- people are desperate and will lie

- the ratio of unqualified to qualified candidates must be 100 to 1

It must be like dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean. The one thing I love about this, though, is the "senior developer" who hasn't read a book in a decade and has to get a new job. ahahahahaha. The moment when that mountain of BS collapses underneath them must be ga-lorious.

Also though, I get the feeling it's a different job market than it was in 2010. I'm still trying to understand what I think I see.

Languages seem to be able to cover multiple platforms now. Programming I don't think is as technical as it once was. At the same time everything seems to be a mess right now. Everything's broken. There's a million and a half frameworks for everything. ...It's like programming as a field has become much more broad, while simultaneously lowering in quality, with knowledge that was once spent on technical mastery now being traded for either lower wages or domain knowledge. So if you went to school and got a degree in programming that was once pretty impressive but now you're just some dude who can "code".

I've been programming professionally for eight years. I just have so little interest in doing anything with computers anymore. For me programming has become a continuous stream of problems. For example, if you try to install software A you'll run directly into something like "error 12394: can't read stream. blah blah blah" and then you have to Google that and eventually find out it's because SQLite isn't installed or it is but it's global. You know, stuff like that. Maybe you get a mystery error that you just have to Google your way through and by the end you've tried so many things you don't even know if it was JUST the last thing that fixed it. Stuff like that.

But maybe what I find the most frustrating is the subjective nature of what "good" means. Like it's all in head-space. You can write something absolutely brilliant and no one has any idea unless you sell it to them and at that point it's just about selling it to them. For example, I've been doing woodworking as a hobby and with that there is a physical object that people can see. If you don't do your cuts right it's obvious. People can see. Your work speaks for itself.

I could go on but basically, programming has changed for me. I used to feel being good meant knowing the most and at some point the people who knew nothing changed what the important things to know were and it's been backwards ever since. I'm just tired of sitting behind a computer screen all day. All day! I swear I'd rather plow fields but that pays like $4/hr.

Anyone else feel like this? Just looking to see what like minded people have to say about this. Thanks.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924862

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

I can survive for maybe six months so this could be a chance to retrain myself. But I'm like super socially awkward and spending 9 hours in an office is hell for me. I don't want to go back to an office.

I do have an interest in AI and could possibly learn enough about that to get some kind of job if I trained for it full time for the next six months. That is, I know probably enough math to start learning. But that's just going to put me into a higher class of office workers who will eventually realize I'm nothing like them and inevitably start to hate or disrespect me.

I've been getting into woodworking but as I understand it it's pretty hard to make a living doing woodworking. Honestly, at this point in my life what I want is to be my own man. I want to be independent. I don't want to go to some work place where people tell me who I am and how I am supposed to behave. I've done that and it hasn't worked out for me. I need to try something new.

My work experience is in web development and a little mobile development in Xamarin. I've done some VR projects in Unity. Like I said I do know a little math. I'm comfortable on Debian. Blah blah blah.

I'd really appreciate your suggestions about what direction I might want to head in next. Thanks.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19863996

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Yes. Any algorithm designed to be resilient to common processing steps will pass this test with flying colors. Also, EXIF data is not used in steganography, by definition.

I can encrypt the hard drive. I can encrypt a text file to a binary encrypted file. I can encrypt a text file to a text file with something like pgp. But none of those are what I would call user friendly. But through the magic of steganography you could do all that and save it to an image file. Now we have something that people might be comfortable using.

As for secure chat idk. I wouldn't trust Windows, iOS, Android, my ISP, my VPN, the NSA (and whoever else), the spyware my mom has installed on her computer that neither of us know about, etc. I'd probably just google for something but I wouldn't be under any illusion that it's totally secure.

Storage capacity IS a function of the algorithm and the image. That's simply a fact. For example, say we are just bit flipping a 512x512px image and we take up all 8 bits in each color channel in each pixel. That lets us write 512 * 512 * 8 * 3 = 6291456 bits or about 6Mb. ...I can see how it looks like I was talking about real time communication because I said messaging. That was a mistake and honestly I have been playing around with the thought of if/how steganography could be used for chat but that really was not how I meant it to sound. I was thinking about how steganography might be able to make encryption more user friendly.

> I agree with you, but couldn't you say the same thing about using end-to-end encryption in a chat program as a substitute for messaging that's just encrypted in transit?

I just want to point out, again, that this is not an argument that I tried to make.

Steganography alone is just security through obscurity? I guess I'm not sure which algorithm you are thinking of but regardless it's very easy to encrypt your data before writing it to the image so in any case, that is a non-problem. The same goes with your sentence about the use of steganography detection. Maybe it's possible for some algorithms, I don't know, but I have very strong doubts about that and again, it's encrypted.

The amount of data you can write to an image using a steganographic algorithm could be rightly called its "storage capacity", yes? Or do you believe that for each image there is an exact maximum storage capacity regardless of the way you encode data to it?

I'm not saying either approach is better. Maybe one is better, I don't really know.

I think steganography is an excellent way to deliver encrypted messaging to consumers. It has so many inherent features that I'm surprised it isn't already widely used. Let's see:

- easy to recognize but hard to detect

- can pass through any channel that accepts images

- massive storage capacity (10MB+ depending on how you roll)

- encryption easily baked in!

- many additional use cases (store your kids ssc or passwords, store encrypted notes, anonymous communication by just posting an image online somewhere).

Everyone should know Facebook encryption is about as good as free (or maybe most) VPN encryption. But with steganography all you need is an open source application that you can trust or a popular codec.

If anyone is interested I have a stalled steganography project that I'm waiting to get back to (once I finish a ASP.NET Core book) https://github.com/smchughinfo/steganographyjr. I'm making it as easy to use as possible (UWP, iOS, Android, a website, Web API, Nuget, and possibly a native app for Debian if I get the time) Most of that work, though, you get for free with .NET Standard + Xamarin but it's still a lot of work.

The biggest part of my problem is a total lack of commit discipline but there are times when I'm working on a branch where my commits don't tell a clear story (changed something then changed it back because I decided to do it a different way). That's when I most wish for better ways to tell that story.

I feel like an idiot for not knowing rebase could solve some of this for me. ...will definitely try it next time.

One fairly easy additional thing you could do is make it a Nuget. Add tags like (image filter, neural net image filter, tensorflow frontend etc.).