@alda As a nuclear engineer, I have never been asked to show my portfolio of reactor designs I maintain in my free time, I have never been asked to derive the six-factor formula, the quantization of angular momentum, Brehmsstrahlung, or to whiteboard gas centrifuge isotopic separation, water hammer, hydrogen detonation, or cross-section resonance integrals.

There's something deeply wrong with an industry that presumes you're a fraud unless repeatedly and performatively demonstrated otherwise and treats the hiring process as a demented form of 80s-era fraternity hazing.

@arclight @alda @jwz Repost of a post I made a few years ago on another instance:

I am a systems engineer with over 25 years of experience. I am the ultimate generalist, known for being able to quickly size up almost any situation. I've logged into maybe a hundred thousand individual servers over the years, usually in anger. I have my own utility Linux distribution which has been downloaded millions of times.

I just did a spot check of my Mastodon posts, and they're about 65% McRib fanfic, 32% general shitposting, and 3% tech.

I'm happy with those proportions.