[PLUG] FreeGeek...

[benjamin barber]

An internship at FreeGeek will not teach you anything relevant to your
computer science degree. If you would have looked at the trends, you may
have noticed that programming jobs are shrinking.  Furthermore building
websites is a possibility, but there is a plethora of easy wordpress and
wix templates, and alot of the rest of the work has been outsourced and
offshored.  If you have the said degree and have a github of your work, you
may be able to get a job with the said experience. Most of the (good) jobs
in the webdev industry are "software as a service", for example jobs that
automate some process, or provide a service to people willing to pay for
it.

Also knowing how to program is the basics, you also need to have an
understanding of the tools, and how to properly implement the tools.
Network security is one of those jobs where programming is less relevant
than understanding the tools. That is unless you intend on designing the
tools, in which case you may need more than a bachelors, and you will need
to know all sorts of protocols intimately. For example do you know how to
use a software defined radio, in order to spoof a cell phone tower, and try
to MITM the traffic as its being sent, or how you would know you're being
MITM'd?

On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Michael Christopher Robinson <
michael at robinson-west.com> wrote:

> If I do a 3-6 month Internship at FreeGeek, what is the minimum number
> of hours needed to put it on my resume and become employable?  I have a
> CS degree, but I don't have work place experience and can't get a job
> anywhere in the Portland area.  I want to specialize in network
> security and I want to work on Unix and Linux based systems.  Another
> option is learning how to build web sites that are fancy and properly
> encrypted.  I'm trained in programming, but without training I can't
> break into the industry.  Nobody in Portland seems interested in
> inexperienced computer scientists.
>
> One problem, I have recurring costs where FreeGeek can't pay anything
> to their volunteers.  The longer I work at FreeGeek the better it
> looks, but the less time I have to earn money.  I can drop
> Comcast Internet and use my father's DSL, but that's about it.
> I need my smartphone, $40.75/month, and I'm paying for a burial policy,
> $11.20/month.  Once a year I incur significant cost paying for
> robinson-west.com hosting at Eskimo North, the domain name through
> register.com, and the security certificate.  I also pay for a VoIP
> phone once a year through Phonepower.  That should be coming up in
> May.  I have about $10k in student loan debt on income based repayment,
> I've been paying about $100/month on it even though I don't have to pay
> anything for a while longer and I can apply for more IBR deferment.
> This is enough complication, but I'm engaged and hoping to get married
> seven months from now.  I probably need to be taking home a minimum of
> $2000/month to live on my own in Portland.
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