This was in my Draft folder...from 2008. Let's review:
EveryBlock - no longer exists, got swallowed up by another company.
Amazon - well known to be a phenomenally shitty workplace.
Metaweb - acquired by Google 2010
SAS - I don't really think about them much anymore
Lego - nice and all but I'm not obsessed with Lego. You gotta be obsessed with that shit to get a job there.
Things are suboptimal in the career arena right now. I'd rather not indulge in livejournal-esque expansion on that topic now. Instead, in a true power-of-positive thinking inspirational move, here are some places I think would actually be great places to work. Maybe I'm naive or deluded. Maybe I'm over-reaching. Regardless, here we go....
EveryBlock
A Chicago-based startup that makes raw, often unstructured data meaningful via mapping. Find out where all the crimes are going down. Find out which restaurants have good inspection scores. Cool things about EveryBlock:
Chicago
Python
Django (plus the guy that created Django)
Lots and lots of data manipulation, scraping, processing, munging, mangling, and so on
Amazon
Google gets all the 'changing the world' press, but Amazon put EC2, S3, and SimpleDB out there before Google App Engine came along. At a recent data warehousing conference, a big-shot in the industry sang the praises of the incredible Oracle DBAs that work at Amazon. They'd have to be incredible. It'd be a place where I could tolerate being the (relatively) dumb new guy in exchange for the incredible learning opportunities. Or so the theory goes.
The SAS Institue
Because of my math background, my whole life (it seems) people have told me: 'You know what you should do? You should work for the SAS Institute.' Actually it makes sense for other reasons as well. SAS always shows up in the 'best employers to work for' articles in the business magazines. It's located in North Carolina, and I love North Carolina - even more now that Jesse Helms left the building.
Metaweb (the creators of Freebase)
Wikipedia is cool, but Metaweb takes the idea a step further, giving the data more structure and creating the cool MQL (Metaweb Query Language). Here's an idea that's in the rich early stages - the possibilities are endless. That and the tweet from the MetaWeb dude saying 'look for me at the conference, I'll be in purple hair and a Freebase t-shirt'. It'd be great to have co-workers like that.
Lego
It's Lego! It's located in the alleged happiest place on Earth (although this article cooled my jets on that idea in a big way).
Saturday, August 24, 2024
You Can't Force STEM pt I
I was at Bloomington's Makevention Maker Convention (hence the name, think Maker Faire but in a more independent way) last weekend and I spent some time talking to Joey who collects old calculators, and modifies them or makes and programs new ones, usually using the MSP430 microcontroller from TI. He's a member of Bloominglabs so I've followed his work for some time, but it was only recently I got a chance to look at it in greater depth after it was featured on Hackaday, and then in some of the presentation materials he put together for his display.
As a person who's worked in the IT world for some years I have some sense of what constitutes a difficult problem and good code to solve such a problem, and I'm very impressed with what he's done. He doesn't study computer science though, he studies Eastern European languages and cultures. I asked him the obvious question: have you considered doing this professionally?
The answer is he has given it consideration, but doing it for work is not appealing at all. He has no interest in working on projects with narrow constraints and very little about them that he finds interesting. In high school he had done some programming projects for school helping out outside of the regular class day, and even just 2 hour stretches of being in an office by himself coding were unpleasant.
It's great to find these things out before saddling yourself with crazy student debt. Before you know it you're there in your cube having a panic attack while looking at a photo of your kid, which makes it even worse. David Foster Wallace memorably described this scenario in his posthumously published novel about IRS employees struggling with boredom, The Pale King.
There is a whole lot of talk about the importance of STEM education for kids (sometimes they add in art, and it's STEAM. But not Alyssa Milano's early 80s TEEN STEAM). Suggestions include teaching kids to code or setting up makerspaces where kids can learn 3D printing and such.
I recently heard of a project where kids are required to wear 'business casual' and work in a simulation of a software development project coordinated by some well-meaning but ham-fisted 'the children are our corporate future' types. Business casual? Really? Everybody knows programmers, especially the really good ones, get to have crazy hair and tattoos, and wear flip-flops to work if they want to. We want to put kids on the treadmill to death before they've even had fun college experiences? We want Dilbert to be relevant to another generation?
Additionally, it's bad enough hearing adults talk about 'full stack web developers' or 'rock stars that are crushing it' or regurgitating some mangled Agile Argot they've patched together from blog posts and talking to other people fumbling their way thru 'Scrum Mastery' during the work day. Coming home to get the same noise from the kids would be pretty soul-deflating, so no thanks.
This is one area where Minecraft has the advantage. It appears to be a shared generational experience on the order of Woodstock, from what I can tell, only with billions of people instead of a couple hundred thousand tripping in a muddy field. Minecraft was made with, from what I can tell, exactly zero interest in promoting STEM education, or any kind of education, for young people. Most parents are probably ambivalent at best about letting kids on there, although at this point parents who don't let their kids play Minecraft may as well be keeping them in a bunker with a year's worth of canned goods as far as isolating them from their peers goes.
As a person who's worked in the IT world for some years I have some sense of what constitutes a difficult problem and good code to solve such a problem, and I'm very impressed with what he's done. He doesn't study computer science though, he studies Eastern European languages and cultures. I asked him the obvious question: have you considered doing this professionally?
The answer is he has given it consideration, but doing it for work is not appealing at all. He has no interest in working on projects with narrow constraints and very little about them that he finds interesting. In high school he had done some programming projects for school helping out outside of the regular class day, and even just 2 hour stretches of being in an office by himself coding were unpleasant.
It's great to find these things out before saddling yourself with crazy student debt. Before you know it you're there in your cube having a panic attack while looking at a photo of your kid, which makes it even worse. David Foster Wallace memorably described this scenario in his posthumously published novel about IRS employees struggling with boredom, The Pale King.
There is a whole lot of talk about the importance of STEM education for kids (sometimes they add in art, and it's STEAM. But not Alyssa Milano's early 80s TEEN STEAM). Suggestions include teaching kids to code or setting up makerspaces where kids can learn 3D printing and such.
I recently heard of a project where kids are required to wear 'business casual' and work in a simulation of a software development project coordinated by some well-meaning but ham-fisted 'the children are our corporate future' types. Business casual? Really? Everybody knows programmers, especially the really good ones, get to have crazy hair and tattoos, and wear flip-flops to work if they want to. We want to put kids on the treadmill to death before they've even had fun college experiences? We want Dilbert to be relevant to another generation?
Additionally, it's bad enough hearing adults talk about 'full stack web developers' or 'rock stars that are crushing it' or regurgitating some mangled Agile Argot they've patched together from blog posts and talking to other people fumbling their way thru 'Scrum Mastery' during the work day. Coming home to get the same noise from the kids would be pretty soul-deflating, so no thanks.
This is one area where Minecraft has the advantage. It appears to be a shared generational experience on the order of Woodstock, from what I can tell, only with billions of people instead of a couple hundred thousand tripping in a muddy field. Minecraft was made with, from what I can tell, exactly zero interest in promoting STEM education, or any kind of education, for young people. Most parents are probably ambivalent at best about letting kids on there, although at this point parents who don't let their kids play Minecraft may as well be keeping them in a bunker with a year's worth of canned goods as far as isolating them from their peers goes.
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