#shinyangelwombatknight

[autogeneity]

Hi, I was looking into computer science and I wanted to ask you what drew you to it and how you feel about it as a career choice?

I don't think my reasons for getting into it are likely to be very helpful to anyone else because they are very specific to my life at the time and not actually much about computer science at all. Skip to the last section for more relevant things.

But here is my story —

I went into university with a starry-eyed idea of understanding the True Fundamentals of Everything and was majoring in maths, physics, and philosophy. also my brain was broken and I had a very fuckd't relationship to reality as a concept (mega derealisation with substantial perceptual distortions and potentially some delusional features) and some part of me saw this as Deep Philosophical Insight, while another hoped getting The Answers would solve it.

after a year it became apparent that this was probably at least a little silly and not going to happen, and I didn't actually see myself being a professional physicist irl.

additionally, I felt more drawn to doing something with more tangible outcomes in the real world rather than chasing maximum abstraction. I had a growing interest in neuroscience and AI and simulation, but also could maybe see myself becoming a professional mathematician. so I kept the maths and switched the others to computer science and psychology.

I guess the specific CS appeals were: I already knew some programming and had found it basically trivial to learn, so I sort of figured it is probably a good match for my brain. and I like puzzles (actually when I first got to uni all the departments were doing little recruitment speech thingies and the CS department actually gave us puzzles! I somehow imagined this would be representative of literally anything (it is not)). I still find those, like, code challenge type problems a lot of fun though.

the final thing that sealed the deal was the availability of a scholarship for maths+cs major, and the fact that it could provide a backup plan if my academia plans failed.

---

As for how I feel about it — well, my academia plans did fail so I am very glad I had a backup in place. Even if they hadn't gone wrong at the time, it's pretty clear to me now that the many mental health issues I continued to deal with in the time since would have led to me fucking up in academia sooner or later in a way they did not in my job. There is much, much more latitude here.

And it's pretty alright as a job; I'm not ecstatic about it but I don't really mind overall and it is sometimes fun. I actually like bug-fixing, lol — the kind where there's an immediately-obvious mistake and I just gotta correct it is boring but the hunt is fun. In general I dislike the amount of small, tedious tasks where I just gotta do some obvious thing, but I like it when I get to build something more substantive that requires more figuring out. I am somewhat fond of the way the shape of the things feels in my brain (not sure that makes any sense lmao). Albeit there are not really many puzzles. :(

But I'm not intending to stay in my current work. I worked briefly in data science and found it much more engaging. I plan to move towards that and/or stuff in the direction of bioinformatics or scientific computing or computational neuroscience. Which is all still computer science but not. software development.

---

Which is probably the biggest thing I would want to highlight for someone considering computer science. In general working in software development (the most typical career path) is very different to working in computer science. Very often someone interested in the one will not be very happy with the other. I would encourage identifying which is your interest, and seeing what they both actually entail, before pursuing anything.

Because like, if you want a run-of-the-mill programming job, in many places it might be worth considering just doing some sort of bootcamp and projects. The company I work at gets probably like 20% of their graduate hires from that stream. Much cheaper and faster than a degree! Or for various other types of work certifications might be a good approach.

If you like mathy things, you probably want computer science proper. If you like engineering, tiny technical details, performance focus, etc, you probably do want formal education and may want to look at things requiring low-level languages, e.g. embedded software. I think people who like twiddling and configuring enjoy cloud shit? or infrastructure and ops work more generally but I think these days most places that looks like cloud shit. If you like the big picture, modeling, and the human side, you may be interested in systems analysis (I find this Very Shaped tbh but am not up for the human side and honestly don't like making big judgement calls).

Somehow I don't actually know what the people who like everyday application development actually like about it specifically lmao? even though they are surely the majority. But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[awstenlookbook]

Do you know of other lookbook blogs (not strictly awsten)?

Hi! For Geoff & Otto no :/ For other celebrities yes!!

Lookbooks/fashion archives/style finds are in my opinion a fandom staple for any pop artist/group and most actors with fan followings, but I guess not so much for the alt scene lol. Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Beyonce, etc etc etc all have them, sometimes even more than one. I'd recommend googling like "celebrity name+fashion archive+[social media site]" or "celebrity name+lookbook+[social media site]" and you'll more than likely find someone running one somewhere.

I more or less model this one after @styleslookbook - I've been following them for years & love their layout and dedication. I really think they are invaluable in Harry's fandom space lol, somehowwwww they find the craziest niche vintage stuff he wears!!

For Awsten, there are two very old accounts on Instagram that I have found while looking for some of Awsten's pieces lol, they have some of his older stuff for sure and are a great resource when I get really stuck! awstenknightswardrobe which ended during Entertainment and awstenknight_closet which ended when Awsten cut his hair in 2020.

Hope this all helps!

[secondbeatsongs]

@shinyangelwombatknight replied to your post “Movie Night: My Own Private Idaho”:

Is this the movie with the guy from the matrix?

​it is indeed!

[emails-i-cant-send]

Your new name is cute!

ahhh sorry for answering late!! thank u :)))

[thekidsarentalright]

Top five TV shows?

HOUSE MD. forever and ever best show on Earth

the good place my beloved <3

glee

criminal minds

the owl house

-Ask me my top 5 of anything!-

[tchaikovskym]

@shinyangelwombatknight thanks for the support!

[unholyverse]

🌼

[boatemlag]

your friend who has trashy reality shows, is he up for sharing? cause i like to watch trash tv! especially if i get bragging right for how obscure it is

i can definitely ask! i'll shoot him a text and see what his thoughts are. remind me if i haven't sent you a message in the next few days because he's not a great texter

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

are you really a bot? its funny, i usually find myself asking if this 'person' is actually a bot, and here i am asking a 'bot' if they are human.

Well, I'm neither, I'm just a very dumb and naive person with a very strong need for validation. I would definitely be a less pathetic person if I had my act together better.

[iamfuckingtrash]

@shinyangelwombatknight

Kitty paw over kitty face!

matt bomer’s hot

You’ve upset her

[autogeneity]

@shinyangelwombatknight said:

Can you share those videos that say you should interrupt people? I gotta see this

relevant slide is at 10:51 but the whole video is kind of wild. like they are trying to tell me I should behave this way because it is ostensibly influential but all I feel watching them talk is they are shouting at me in a not-particularly-compelling way, lol. (most of the others I've seen are better)

I would like to develop a sort of externally-apparent idk...robustness/girth/gravitas to my personality. I feel I am not the sort of person someone would rely upon for anything, or seek advice from, or consider for leadership, say. in general it seems like there is a lack of respectability. I don't think I necessarily lack the requisite traits intrinsically but my presentation (in terms of mannerisms and such) makes me out to be something of a fool at times I fear

[centrally-unplanned]

@shinyangelwombatknight

can you elaborate on the difference in the unfortunate end of career prospects of stem/humanities? Like the bottom 25%?

Nowadays if you are a humanities PHD, a program that ostensibly is meant to train someone to be an academic professor, less than half of those candidates will ever get such a job. The bottom 25%, assuming they don’t simply leave the field entirely, will be adjunct professors - employed at-will being paid by course to teach introductory composition, lit survey, etc type courses. 25% of Adjuncts in the US are on welfare programs such as food stamps, and the median salary is under 50k year  - many make under 25k a year, and most don’t have any benefits to match that since its contract work.

You also asked about the 6-figure for STEM - this scenario doesn’t happen to STEM graduates very much. A lot of STEM graduates don’t get academic positions, its a tough market there too! And their adjuncts or post-docs are also not paid great actually, better than humanities but not like a ton better. But virtually every STEM phd graduate can quite easily get a job in industry that pays over $100,000 a year if they choose to, so most wont adjunct for long, or will work other jobs, and in particular that future earning potential makes bearing the debt burdens when getting a PHD a lot easier, its not a debt spiral.

While a STEM PHD is almost certainly not revenue-maximizing its fine enough, it sets you up for a viable career path. Meanwhile a humanities PHD is outside of very elite programs an extremely low-earning career choice, and imo at almost fraud levels from the stance of most of the schools offering them.

(flag on all this for *foreign* STEM PHD’s who the immigration system can fuck over by barring them from employment opportunities, and due to that are an increasingly large amount of the STEM academic grunt workforce. But you know if you are a citizen or not before you start a PHD)

(and of course flag on definition of humanities, its a loose term, different disciplines are relatively better or worse)

My scorching hot 60%-endorsed take is that the vast majority of the sickness of the soul on YA twitter and similar comes down to the fact that without all the old boys club gatekeeping of yore there are just orders of magnitude more people who are half-decent at prose and want to be writers than there is market demand to support living wages as a career writer. The more democratized and open creative pursuits are the more vital being discovered is and the more leverage trad publishers or whoever gets to pick winners have to secure as much of the pie for themselves. The viciousness just spirals naturally from there.

[autogeneity]

Trick or treat

treat! (I think)

[emo-and-emo-adjacent]

@shinyangelwombatknight you got me there. Though youtube has a knack for finding the most obscure mixtapes with only a couple hundred views on em lmao

I would probably have to say that one of my biggest faults is that I listen to those youtube midwest emo mixtapes unironically 

[autogeneity]

@shinyangelwombatknight said:

I didn't know you could have 3 majors. where I live you can at most have 2 and it's rare.

Yeah, my experience appears to be unusual internationally lol. For anyone in the science or humanities faculty, my university requires 2 majors. Three is in fact rare though; I believe it is only allowed with special permission.

How did you pivot into data science that time?

The company that hired me seemed to be under the impression that good grades in math qualified me for this lol. I didn't explicitly apply for it and was technically hired as a software developer but they put me on a data science project. I did have an interest in it although I didn't think I was qualified so that was just lucky lol. And then the project ended and they moved me to dev work.

Also, please do continue to go off! In your opinion, is this a subject area that is more suited for people that like to concentrate on a specific task or area of study rather than people that like a little more variety and a dynamic working environment?

Hmm, difficult question. I think it is used for a very wide range of things, and so you have a lot of options for things you could go into. Like you could work in chemistry research or a bank or make video games, you know? Computers are everywhere.

And I guess certain kinds of specialization may be valued in industry but it's probably for more obscure skills — they would love an expert in Cobol but probably don't care that much about you being the ultimate nerd of Java. They would probably prefer adaptability because a lot of shit changes and you gotta learn the new thing fast.

But the true variety within a job probably differs based on the individual job. My experience so far has been fairly restricted in areas. Like, I work at a consulting company so we have all these different clients — telecommunications companies and banks and government agencies — but it still feels like I'd be doing basically the same thing at any of them. But it's still like: they're all corporate-type. A startup or something is probably different.

Also, could you elaborate how the field allows for greater latitude?

I'm not sure how much of it is "the field" vs "my job specifically" vs "professional job that is not studying/academia" lol.

But like, if I'm having a mental breakdown, I can just. take leave. Not arbitrarily long but pretty plentiful. I could take a week off from my degree but time wouldn't stop for me, I'd just have more work when I get back. When I take a week off from work they do not expect me to be at the same point as though I never did.

And maybe more a "my job specifically" thing because I have heard of others that are higher-pressure...but I, or at worst by consensus my teammates, determine how much time I need to do something. Like, explicitly, we sit in a meeting and they ask "how long would you need for this" and it's still up for adjustment as you work. Even if I am taking unreasonably long to do it, their usual reaction will be "are you having trouble do you need someone to help you" which idk if is a little passive-aggressive but is in fact a real offer. Probably if I did it too much they might intervene but they allow decent leeway. I can usually catch up from small periods of badbrains before it becomes noticeable.

Hi, I was looking into computer science and I wanted to ask you what drew you to it and how you feel about it as a career choice?

I don't think my reasons for getting into it are likely to be very helpful to anyone else because they are very specific to my life at the time and not actually much about computer science at all. Skip to the last section for more relevant things.

But here is my story —

I went into university with a starry-eyed idea of understanding the True Fundamentals of Everything and was majoring in maths, physics, and philosophy. also my brain was broken and I had a very fuckd't relationship to reality as a concept (mega derealisation with substantial perceptual distortions and potentially some delusional features) and some part of me saw this as Deep Philosophical Insight, while another hoped getting The Answers would solve it.

after a year it became apparent that this was probably at least a little silly and not going to happen, and I didn't actually see myself being a professional physicist irl.

additionally, I felt more drawn to doing something with more tangible outcomes in the real world rather than chasing maximum abstraction. I had a growing interest in neuroscience and AI and simulation, but also could maybe see myself becoming a professional mathematician. so I kept the maths and switched the others to computer science and psychology.

I guess the specific CS appeals were: I already knew some programming and had found it basically trivial to learn, so I sort of figured it is probably a good match for my brain. and I like puzzles (actually when I first got to uni all the departments were doing little recruitment speech thingies and the CS department actually gave us puzzles! I somehow imagined this would be representative of literally anything (it is not)). I still find those, like, code challenge type problems a lot of fun though.

the final thing that sealed the deal was the availability of a scholarship for maths+cs major, and the fact that it could provide a backup plan if my academia plans failed.

---

As for how I feel about it — well, my academia plans did fail so I am very glad I had a backup in place. Even if they hadn't gone wrong at the time, it's pretty clear to me now that the many mental health issues I continued to deal with in the time since would have led to me fucking up in academia sooner or later in a way they did not in my job. There is much, much more latitude here.

And it's pretty alright as a job; I'm not ecstatic about it but I don't really mind overall and it is sometimes fun. I actually like bug-fixing, lol — the kind where there's an immediately-obvious mistake and I just gotta correct it is boring but the hunt is fun. In general I dislike the amount of small, tedious tasks where I just gotta do some obvious thing, but I like it when I get to build something more substantive that requires more figuring out. I am somewhat fond of the way the shape of the things feels in my brain (not sure that makes any sense lmao). Albeit there are not really many puzzles. :(

But I'm not intending to stay in my current work. I worked briefly in data science and found it much more engaging. I plan to move towards that and/or stuff in the direction of bioinformatics or scientific computing or computational neuroscience. Which is all still computer science but not. software development.

---

Which is probably the biggest thing I would want to highlight for someone considering computer science. In general working in software development (the most typical career path) is very different to working in computer science. Very often someone interested in the one will not be very happy with the other. I would encourage identifying which is your interest, and seeing what they both actually entail, before pursuing anything.

Because like, if you want a run-of-the-mill programming job, in many places it might be worth considering just doing some sort of bootcamp and projects. The company I work at gets probably like 20% of their graduate hires from that stream. Much cheaper and faster than a degree! Or for various other types of work certifications might be a good approach.

If you like mathy things, you probably want computer science proper. If you like engineering, tiny technical details, performance focus, etc, you probably do want formal education and may want to look at things requiring low-level languages, e.g. embedded software. I think people who like twiddling and configuring enjoy cloud shit? or infrastructure and ops work more generally but I think these days most places that looks like cloud shit. If you like the big picture, modeling, and the human side, you may be interested in systems analysis (I find this Very Shaped tbh but am not up for the human side and honestly don't like making big judgement calls).

Somehow I don't actually know what the people who like everyday application development actually like about it specifically lmao? even though they are surely the majority. But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯