We aren’t, and we don’t. You are misinformed.

In Britain, the word ‘biscuit’ means a hard baked cookie, like a graham cracker. Since this is the normal use of this word in the UK, we don’t automatically think of the plain scone-type baked goods for which Americans use the word ‘biscuit’. US English is a different dialect of English, and there are many words which have different meanings from U.K. English (jumper, braces, suspenders, tap etc.)

What on earth makes you think we call bread rolls ‘puddings’? In the U.K., pudding is any dessert, not just the blancmange-stuff which Americans use that word for. It is correct in the U.K. to say “I’m having apple pie for pudding.”.

I’ve also ended interviews as a candidate on the phone myself. They asked a question that I didn’t’ have the answer to and I told them that I didn’t know. The next 2 questions were in that same direction, with them knowing that I’d already said I wasn’t particularly fluent in that area but they kept on. At that point I said, “Let’s just stop here. We both know that I’m not doing well answering your questions and to be honest, that you’re restating the same topic after being told that already I don’t know probably means we wouldn’t be a good fit.” Too many people forget that it’s a two-way street and they seems shocked that anyone would actually end their interview.

Company work hours by default don’t mean everyone has to work them. They only mean company business hours, when someone can come in. Small companies usually have the most flexibility in this regard, so it’s natural for people to assume that flexible hours is a norm for non-customer facing roles. Is this a helpdesk or sales position? Is it a software developer / network admin / another technical role? Two different treatment plans.

Regarding how to deal with this or similar situation (when employee requests a non-standard accommodation), you need to try your best to accommodate them. Talk to your boss, see what you can do. If you can allow some flex in work start/end time, do so. If after all this you are absolutely sure hours are strict, you must provide a reasonable explanation why this would be the case (unless it’s obvious to everyone, like a bank teller – need to cover a specific shift). In 2017 you cannot just reject them “because I said so”.

Gotta get some perspective on what matters. If incompetent, lazy and/or stupid people stress you out that much, you’re going to be dead at a very early age, because people who fit that description comprise the vast majority of all societies.

Also, realize that “not doing things exactly as I would or want them to be done, catering to my own timeframes and desire” is not necessarily being lazy or stupid. Do you cater to their wants the same way you want them to cater to yours?

It could very well be that you are simply surrounded by complete losers and idiots. Make sure, if you’re going to stress yourself to an early grave, that it’s really over them being lazy and/or incompetent, and not a case of you having a very self-centered life view.

To expand a bit on my comment on @KateGregory’s answer, the problem you face with using your own computer is “who owns what?”. How is a line drawn between things that you do on that computer for the company vs. for yourself? If you work on other projects off the clock, can the company make any claim to those? Does the computer have to comply with all corporate standards & policies, including antivirus, web filtering, remote scanning for unapproved software, etc.? Who owns the software you’re using? Who’s responsible for the licensing?

You are going to have to wait a couple weeks before you can make any kind of pitch to get a usable computer. Otherwise, you come across as the new guy who wants everything “just so”, and that will not earn you any points.

It is just shifting away from being the only major server-side scripting language to one of many, that is all.

It is true that it became out of favor for high volume sites and large-scale commercial infrastructures lately but it still remains really popular for small to mederate sized applications.

If Facebook was about to be developed today, probably it would not be developed in PHP, but that does not make the language irrelevant at all.

Fun

All of the above doesn’t leave much time for fun. To keep my sanity, I squeeze every bit of free time out of life to ensure that I’m not missing out on opportunities. Of course spending time with my family is fun, but for the sake of separation I’ll be excluding that time from this section (I feel I did the Family section justice). As part of my free time at home I enjoy building side projects. I love creating beautiful web applications that could benefit the lives of others. My passion is creating things for others through programming. I love the feeling I get when someone enjoys something I’ve made. I can’t get enough of it. I’ve started hundreds of side projects, “finished” a few (is a project ever really finished?) and am working on a promising one right now. I love it and can’t get enough, but I pace myself so that I don’t squander precious time with my family.

The biggest piece of advice I could give is to take a course in microeconometrics/labour econometrics as a part of your course. If your course coordinator won’t let you, beg. If they still won’t let you, then go off-line for a week or two and properly digest Mostly Harmless Econometrics (or if your stats isn’t too good yet, Mastering Metrics). If you want to go and work in health analytics, then replace what I just wrote with the equivalent for research design.

Why learn microemet? Basically, many of the big questions in business are of the form “what will happen if we do x”. Predictive models that aren’t informed by causal reasoning do *terribly* at this question–they answer the question “what do we see happening to y when we see x”. Inferring what will happen to y when you fiddle with x is a difficult task when all your data come from a world in which you did not fiddle with x. Too often we come across people with great technical chops who aren’t even aware they’re making mistakes when answering these questions. Don’t be one of these people.

The second biggest piece of advice would be to not become too enamoured by the sexy end of data science (especially predictive algorithms), but *do spend the time learning this stuff in depth*. Often the simple stuff done well is far more useful to real-world decisionmaking.

Third: read very widely.