No idea on the current market myself. You should absolutely start looking at the rate you are being paid right now though. Just don’t get discouraged about the resume gap, it’s a rare field where you can make your own backfill for those gaps.

I’ve done a lot of low rate or entirely volunteer work for small, often non-profit organizations in the past, and don’t fall into the trap. It can be thankless and it can be soul sucking.

However, obviously if you want to eat and if this is your only income right now you’ll have to stick it out a bit. So I hope we are talking like you are virtually working no hours for that rate, leaving you time to expand your resume on your own.

I have often been asked in the past by friends or acquaintances how you get a good career in programming, and the answer typically is either luck, or a lot of your own hard work.

I don’t know what the job market is like these days, but historically your papers mean very little to getting a job. A link to your Github goes a long way to demonstrate your abilities and provides a much higher degree of confidence you know what you are doing because they can actually look at your work, and if you are contributing to other projects, that you are a team player. As one speaker said at a Google Q&A I watched when asked if a PhD would increase their chance of getting hired: “well, we won’t hold having a PhD against you”.

There is also a lot of free course material out there to various degrees of difficulty.

Programming is becoming more and more competitive, and the ones that succeed have made it their passion, which does mean a lot of unpaid work. So either find projects you are happy to provide your time to to sharpen your skill, or start your own project that you can get satisfaction in building. Actually programming something is always the fastest way to improve your skill.

I have had concerns about this since I joined. Personally I don’t mind that the votes are public and can see a case for it, however the wider community is doing a very poor job of informing the users how this all works, and that will result in very bad outcomes.

Lemmy (the wider community) privacy does stink (and how to change that)

Thanks! I’m for mass adoption and want admins to succeed. That starts with keeping users educated (and admins covered).

This is largely assumed by someone like yourself or I who understands the implications. I am finding it evident that a lot of people are not aware.

There is also a distinction to a potential screenshot, a scrape or archive no one visits, and a federated copy on a widly used instance you have lost access to.

I edited my comment above to include a project I am working on to hopefully help admins get this across and educate users on how to appropriately engage to their comfort level.

This keeps on being asserted but it is far from true. If defederation happens or your local goes offline, posts/comment history/profile/votes will remain on other widely used instances and out of your control.

A large instance has already defederated with 2 other larger instances. If you run a personal instance I feel it will become very, very common to be be locked out of managing your data.

You can expect defederation to happen all the time as that is a deliberate part of the open federated model.

And that is to say nothing about federation simply breaking sometimes.

I already have been locked out of content that exists on other instances that will remain forever and I’ve only been around a short while. I don’t care personally, but people keep asserting this claim that only bad actors or scrapers will dupe your data. Federated data is very different than a non-federated copy for many reasons and that matters to some people. Everyone should understand deleting your account, or modifying your content will often not remove your content outside your instance, and many people engage outside their local. It will likely exist in federated, Lemmy searchable form forever in some capacity (in the current iteration anyway).

Not trying to spread FUD, but if we want to maintain users they have to be educated as they will find out eventually and not be happy.

I have some working drafts on policies for admins to help them navigate and explain their responsibilities to their users.

It is a bit of a weird read outside of the context, but this is an optional primer I have drafted that will hopefully help explain the distinctions:

https://github.com/BanzooIO/federated_policies_and_tos/blob/main/optional-privacy-policy-intro.md

Due to the nature of such an open policy in sharing information (how open federation actually functions) could be frightening for someone uneducated on what privacy totally means, I have created this optional privacy policy introduction that will prime the user for what they are engaging in.

Personally I think everyone should be walking around with no pants, but I’d rather we talk each other’s pants off than scare off, or find our pants removed by surprise.

https://github.com/BanzooIO/federated_policies_and_tos/blob/main/optional-privacy-policy-intro.md

You’re right. Apologies.

There are many other models, some discussed in this post. All come with their own set of upsides and downsides.

For a small community, which Lemmy original was, straight up votes work great. Unfortunately it doesn’t scale. Reddit is a perfect example.

You’re right, there is only up/down vote systems with a user base that is in no way verified or otherwise restricted to a single vote/real person, or corporate algos.

There are plenty of different models. Do I fault the Lemmy devs for using it? No. Is it ideal for content discovery? Not really.

Definitely the easiest to implement, and huge concerns with black boxes making recommendations. But I think we are going to see some serious problems with it here given how accepting most instances are to federating anyone combined with the lack of tools to differentiate legit users and a bot brigade.

The idea is to gauge community interest/relevance and facilitate content discovery. I feel it is becoming a bit dated method of accomplishing this and easily gamed.

Only PostgreSQL at the moment. I also don’t believe it currently supports SSL connection to Postgres so you’ll want to run it on the same machine or have a tunnel to your DB.

There is zero chance you’ll get it running on anything else without significant code change.

The analogy works to some extent, but it is a gross oversimplifications in most regards. But yeah, keeping up with maintaining a small mail server if you expect not to continually end up in SPAM is a royal pain.

Will be interesting to see how it develops. Could see a movement towards RBL type block lists, but with the lack of tools available at the moment I think most admins are going to end up having to take some pretty drastic actions at times.

I’ve been looking to do the same for the many pros I’ve seen posted here, but maybe someone can give me some clarity on a very big downside to me.

From my understanding most instances are pretty liberal with federating anyone, then blacklisting bad actots or problematic instances. However as adoption grows is there not the potential for larger instances to move towards a whitelist, and possibly move towards only federating with known, established instances or ones with established conditions? Possibly flat out banning personal instances due to moderation overhead?

Perhaps my understanding is incorrect, but seems to me that there could be a big future risk your personal server turns into an island and all of your past engagement is no longer in your control.