EnderMB

My biggest gripe with Freenode is that a lot of popular channels are silent. Hundreds of users, but all lurking with very little conversation going on.

For me, the best channel was always #csharp. Every time I logged in, there was always a group of people talking. Any time I had a question, I could ask it and a handful of people would either give you the answer or would talk you through the problem and help you come up with an answer. That kind of guidance is often lacking from modern programming forums/q&a sites.

What seems to work for me is alternating between a mouse and a trackball when at home, or when my hands start to ache.

It doesn't happen much any more, but I tend to use a trackball at home and a mouse at work, and my wrists feel fine. When they don't, I can use a trackball at work, or a mouse at home.

Rejected at the CV stage. Oddly, the only company where I've had anything close to a phone call is Facebook, although they reached out to me rather than vice versa, mainly because my CV had a range of different languages that I had worked with in the last few years.

Initially, I thought it'd be something to do with my CV, but that wouldn't explain why I don't struggle to find work in Bristol - if anything I get hounded on LinkedIn a few times a day by recruiters in the South West.

It depends who you ask, I guess.

There's a definite shortage outside of London, although few companies seem to want to up their salaries to attract experienced talent. One of the reasons I switched stack was because I would get recruiters emailing every day with new roles, but rarely anything that paid over £45k in Bristol.

In your experience, as a Londoner, is there a demand for experienced devs? I would've thought that big companies would always be looking for developers.

I'm not sure what you mean by DS, but I would strongly disagree that work in one stack is irrelevant to work in another.

Two years ago, I took a role in a tech stack I've never used before, and in less than a month I was productive in Node and Rails. I work with half a dozen developers that switched from one stack to another, and regularly do so to use the best tool for the job, and it's not as hard as some companies make it out to be.

Nope, this would be to move to London. I'm in the nice position where I can afford to move/live there, and since most top companies are limited to London it makes sense to go there if I want to maximise my earnings.

So, this would be a developer with ten years experience looking for essentially "any" developer role in London. Easy, right? Apparently not. In the time it's taken me to reply to these messages I've had another rejection from JPMorgan Chase...

As an aside, I've done the commute from Bristol to London a few times for work, and while there are people that do it every day it's a killer, and you'd be lucky to get from Bristol Temple Meads to Liverpool Street at 9am if you get the first train in.

How is that possible if you have any professional experience? Do I list my CS degree from a decade ago and only my most recent job? Similarly if I am applying for a .NET role (which I've got eight years of consecutive experience in) - do I just focus on those years and have a two year gap in time?

While I appreciate that there's a need to filter candidates, surely it proves that there is either no shortage of experienced developers out there, or that companies would rather hire less experienced devs with more relevant experience? If the latter is true, then companies shouldn't moan about a shortage in talent when there is obviously demand for more senior roles.

Even if you don't like him, I recommend reading Russell Brand's autobiography, titled "My Booky Wook" - a reference to A Clockwork Orange.

It's an interesting dive into a much-misunderstood character, going deep into his days of substance abuse, his convictions, and his relationship with his parents. It amazes me that someone with so many problems in their life has managed to find fame, friendship, and happiness.

In my current experience, it depends on so many factors that it's hard to say whether it's simply down to a shortage in experienced developers.

If I wanted to get a senior-level job in my local area, I can do this pretty easily. I have experience with the .NET framework, so those jobs have been available to me for years, and usually an interview is a week away from an initial application, or from one of the many recruitment emails I get. The same goes for Ruby jobs, since I have been using Ruby for about a year with public projects I can refer to.

Now, let's move that to larger companies outside of my local area. I've recently been looking at roles in London for larger companies, since I would like to move to NYC in the not-so-distant future. If I apply for a role at a big tech company I'm almost guaranteed to be rejected (FAANG, Twitter, IBM, Oracle, Adobe). If I apply for a role at a larger multinational company - the likes of JP Morgan, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed, Deliveroo, WorkDay, any investment bank based in London, IBM, Squarespace, the list goes on - and I'll be rejected. In fact, in the last month I can count over thirty rejections. This is for a developer with ten years experience, albeit at startups and agencies, but someone that has put time in.

IMO, it boils down to a handful of things:

1. Companies want to hire developers that match their criteria perfectly. I can apply for a Java role with recent, but limited, Java experience, and be rejected. This is because I'm not a Java developer. The same goes for Python, despite the fact that I've worked with Python and Django on a project last year. I'd be rejected by most companies because I'm not a Python developer, despite...you know, knowing enough Python to get up to speed quickly.

2. Companies would rather interview someone nearby. Bear in mind that I can get to London by 9 if I get the first train in from Bristol, so travel isn't a huge issue, but in my experience a lot of companies would rather interview someone that can interview on-site in a week, and usually someone a few hours away will want time to arrange something.

3. Somewhat against the first point, many companies will happily hire a less experienced person because they are cheaper. If they cannot get someone that matches the first criteria, they'll get the cheapest person.

4. Most posts on job boards are bullshit. Out of the thirty rejections this month, a few of them were for companies hiring in my exact stack, while also saying they sponsor visas. Those ads are still up on Stack Overflow Jobs, or have been renewed, but they weren't interested in me - even when my stack and experience almost perfectly align with theirs.

If you were to ask me a few months ago whether I thought finding another job as an experienced developer would be hard, I'd say no, because I am in demand in a reasonably big tech city in my country, but after the last month I'm not so sure. Many of these roles obviously get filled, so either there's something about my specific experience that turns people off, or this experienced developer shortage is down to companies wanting one (or more) of the above criteria to be met before considering a hire.

The quality varies wildly, and a lot of people have preferences with their kebabs - chilli sauce, garlic sauce, mayo, chillis, etc.

It's pretty hard to mess up a pizza, especially if one of the main foods you deliver is pizza.

Plus, if you're a veggie/vegan, or you have gluten intolerances, pizza is still an option - as long as they get it right. I once had a nightmare scenario where a pizza place gave a vegan pizza to one of my co-workers with coeliac disease. When this person fell ill, the chef said "I thought they were just fussy".

I have a CS degree, and while I agree with the general idea that you don't need a CS degree to be a successful programmer I'd say the biggest barrier to entry is in the start of your career - both getting a job and keeping that job.

I've worked with loads of self-taught developers, mostly from tech/coding bootcamps, and I've seen a lot of people burn themselves out due to a number of factors:

1. Bootcamps are hard, but suddenly these developers find themselves in a harder environment where 12 weeks of coding experience might not be enough to get them out of a problem.

2. Bootcamps cost a lot of time/money, without the option for a student loan, so many people put themselves into debt to switch careers, and that added pressure is a lot for people - especially when they've been sold a lucrative career and find that a company has hired them because they are cheap.

The CS knowledge aspect is largely irrelevant, because many developers can get by quite happily without ever using a linked list or priority queue, or knowing anything about quicksort, merge sort, etc. For most projects where you need to merge k sorted arrays, concatenating them and running the standard language sort function is good enough.

IMO, the problem has never been one of skill, because many industries have developed skills on-the-job or with time spent in industry. Where a CS degree comes in handy is in giving a student a structured approach to learning over a respectable amount of time, and offering a step above the entry-level barrier of entry.

I'm surprised by all the negative comments here surrounding how Windows Server or SQL Server makes this more complicated, or whether the license costs are prohibitive.

I worked as a .NET dev for nine years, and although I've never had to deal with upgrades at this level before, I can appreciate that at the kind of scale that Stack Overflow operate, and considering they run on physical boxes (a rarity in any stack nowadays) any kind of upgrade between major database and OS versions is going to result in its own issues.

While I don't work on the Microsoft stack any more, I've always appreciated the way that Stack Overflow build their software. Their engineers and DBA's seem to be a who's who of talent, and they both build great services and put out great content, at scale. It's doubly-surprising when so many people used to give Jeff Atwood so much shit for not delivering anything of note when Coding Horror was one of the top programming blogs on the web.

The stack might be very different to anything done in 2019, but the fact that I can't think of many times where Stack Overflow went down shows that they're doing a great job, and hopefully they'll continue to document the journey for years to come.

I couldn't agree more, and this list pretty much lost me right from the start.

If you're fresh out of university, GitHub is useful because it demonstrates relevant non-academic code you've written outside of your studies.

After you've got your first job, I don't care about your GitHub profile unless you've got some impressive stuff on there. As an employer, I care about your ability to work on non-trivial problems in a team, and unless you're contributing to OSS (which few CS grads do) you'll never have this on your "portfolio".

In my experience, your GitHub profile is only noteworthy if you have:

* Breadth of work. Loads of projects in a load of languages that demonstrates you're a tinkerer * Depth of work. At least one project with 5+ stars that solves a non-trivial problem.

Otherwise, that profile is usually some boilerplate code for a MOOC course or to try a language for the first time, and when hiring that's not an indication of anything.

I like this idea, although I would also like to see a push towards the improvement of their tech team.

IMO, these issues are rarely down to the people in the trenches, and more to do with a lack of budget or care from management. I would push for independent auditing, with a view towards the auditors ensuring that the team in place is capable of continuing this work.

I'm not too bothered by the number, but am worried that a company will be able to talk their way out of punishment through misinformation.

You only need to look at the latest Zoom vulnerability, and the Panera Bread data leak to see how companies will happily tell its users that everything is fine, while doing absolutely nothing to publicly resolve the issues being raised. To make things worse, a lot of people will blindly believe this, or take their side to be contrarian.

As you've rightly said, regulation needs to change corporate behaviour, and while a hefty fine will do that, it's also a minor risk to a firms ongoing reputation. It's a cost that can be offset elsewhere - more than likely onto the customer. I would rather the fine be halved or even quartered, if it meant that BA had to publicly accept full responsibility, and to push for independent auditing of all of their software.

The sad thing is that Zoom will probably get away with not fixing this, or fixing it much later than they should.

If you look on Twitter, anyone that has complained about this (huge) vulnerability is being redirected back to their blog post.

To make things worse, most non-technical users that have caught onto these posts are replying to say "thanks for sorting it out!"

This wouldn't be the first time a company sweeps a data leak or vulnerability under the rug. I remember when the Panera Bread stuff kicked off, and all they had to do was bury their head in the sand and wait for the storm to pass. There's currently a lawsuit in progress, but will that happen for a vulnerability like this?

I'm glad to see a solid fine given for a data breach.

I've worked on projects in this sector before, and it's a common story to others - client cuts cost as much as possible, until the risk of an inferior product has grown too high to handle. It's a race to the bottom, and security rarely comes into consideration outside of a basic pen test being mentioned (if it happens).

Still, I'm quite annoyed at the lack of follow-up against what is blatant bullshit from BA. When your business is so heavily reliant on taking payments online, their security procedures should be airtight. I can understand that it's quite a clever hack, but it's security 101 to know what third-party code is doing on your server.

The fine is good, but it would be nice to enforce rules where a company caught in a data breach has to accept liability and not contest the severity.

Hmm, that's probably also a big part of it. A good professional-grade laptop can last for years. I've had my 1st gen Surface Book for about three years now and it's as fast as the day I bought it. Unless something breaks, I have zero reason to upgrade to anything different.

I'm in the same boat as you at work. I've got an older MBP, and despite a dent in the screen and some trackpad issues I would rather stay with this model than upgrade to a newer, inferior one.

Would you say that this is because the alternatives aren't as good, or because your workflow is tied towards using Mac?

In my case, I think it's definitely the latter. For Ruby dev I could switch to Debian tomorrow and probably be fine, especially since most of the stuff I work on from day to day uses Docker. That won't stop my workplace from buying MBP's, though..

I'd be interested in MBP sales figures from the batch of MacBooks with the new keyboard/touch bar.

From my perspective, despite a whole host of issues, very few people seem to have actually moved away from Mac's. I hear a lot of grumbling, but you only need to look at this thread to see people claim that the MBP is the best professional-grade laptop available today, when the issues with the OS, the keyboard, and the touch bar indicate that this hasn't been the case for years.

I assumed that for this reason Apple would have stuck with their design choice, and would iterate over time - unless there has been a significant enough drop in sales.

I've always wondered about tools like this. AutoCAD was another tool we had around the house, and my dad always seemed happy enough to use that. In a similar vein, he's always been tied to his emails and teaching portals, but he's always struggled with those - maybe due to web UI's being wildly different wherever you go?

In the case of tools like CorelDRAW and AutoCAD I've always felt that they're complicated, but optimal. Once you know what you need to do, it's easy for power users to do what they want with minimal fuss. It reminds me a bit of git, which most would say has a complicated UI, but makes sense to those power users that have dedicated time to actually learn what is happening under the hood.

My dad was a D&T teacher (woodwork, electronics, that kind of stuff), but had a background in carpentry and construction.

The Corel suite of design products were his tools of choice, both in industry and when he became a teacher. To him, CorelDRAW was a leading product, and even now we've got a few old CD's of Corel products lying around the house. It was also amazing to me how someone with limited computer knowledge can use a software tool so well. He still double-clicks links on web pages, but he can create a full building plan with ease in CorelDRAW, so they must've been doing something right!

Despite being long retired, he'll occasionally work part-time when needed, and when he needed to cover for a few months I helped him get the latest Corel suite, and he really struggled to get on with it. I remember playing with it as a kid, and feeling the same way when I tried it out, so to get his work done I had to hunt down an old copy of CorelDRAW.

Corel seems to be a shadow of what it once was, and its software reflects that, so hopefully this acquisition results in better software for the future.

Safety. I always use my dad as the perfect metric for this, because he fits the elderly tech stereotype perfectly. I can give him Windows or OSX and he'll usually butcher them into a mess. Their Mac is an absolute mess of toolbars and bloatware, whereas the Windows machine has zero issues after several years.

Speed. Windows always used to have issues with installs getting slow over time. I've had the same base installation of Windows 10 on my Surface Book and it's as fast as it was the day I bought it, despite several hundred gig sitting on the hard drive, numerous VM's, and several IDE's.

Stability. My Surface Book hasn't crashed in years, and my other Windows 10 machines have crashed so infrequently that I forgot what a BSOD looked like nowadays.

Cleaner UI. I think toolbars are still a bit of a mess on Windows 10, but they dud a good job to get away from the mess that was Windows 8, and I'm yet to meet someone that struggles with Windows in the same way they struggle with other OS's.

These aren't headline features, but they're the key points where Windows improves and where OSX seems to struggle. I still love the OSX UI, but I fear that we're not far away from things becoming more iOS friendly on the desktop, and parts of that fantastic UI being torn down.

For me, it's a mixture of a few things:

1. Improvements on OSX have stagnated, and any new features that have been added over the past few years have been a side-product of iOS. With all the talk of the OSX team at Apple being scrapped for a unified OS team, this kinda makes sense, since iOS is their cash cow, but it's not great for those that rely on a modern OS.

2. With every release there are new bugs, and Apple takes their sweet time fixing them. A prime example is the bug where a huge white block appears over your menu bar if you've got two monitors plugged in, and you're using an Electron app. I'd understand bugs like this on Windows, since they've got to cover thousands of different hardware types, but OSX is on one set of hardware. This should be a trivial bug to fix.

3. Finder seems to get worse and worse with every update. Nowadays, if I drag too many files from one place to another I have to kill it. No such problem on Debian or Windows.

4. Sometimes, Spotlight just "forgets" its index, and any time I try to find something I get unreliable results.

They might seem fairly minor, but I feel less value from OSX updates than I do from Windows, and that perception is a dangerous thing.

A few years ago, I was holding out for a new MBP for ages, and when it didn't come I decided to bite the bullet and buy a Surface Book.

I own the first-gen Surface Book, and it's probably the best laptop I've ever owned, Windows or otherwise. The keyboard is great, the screen is fantastic, and while the trackpad isn't as good as the MBP it's a close second-place.

The touch-screen and pen are nice, and they work well, but I never use them. I'm not much of a tablet guy anyway, so it was never going to appeal to me like it would to others.

In terms of OS, Windows continues to improve while OSX deteriorates. I used to do a lot of work with .NET, so my opinion is probably biased, but I'd consider Windows to be a better development platform than OSX, especially with WSL. It's still a pain in the ass with some languages like Ruby, but it gets better every year, and if OSX continues to get worse I can see people ditching it and going with Linux or Windows.

That's true, but I guess you'll get a feel of what that person values after working with them for a while, whether it's money, freedom to choose their projects, the ability to work on tricky sub-problems, etc.

In my experience, it's always been down to what that person values. At my last company my "boss" was a contractor, and although he was given the ability to build a team however he saw fit, he didn't want to sacrifice his freedom. Before that, my CTO took the role because she believed in the team and the projects we had - and we did some fantastic work. The roles were almost identical, but the people were different.

My hiring experience is limited to developers, so I've never been a part of the actual hiring process, but I've bonded with a handful of people that were offered the role, and it's always been down to belief in the long-term vision and whether they'd value that role over what they value from their current role as a contractor.

Another big reason is money.

I've done some Salesforce work n the past, on a booking system that needed to read/write with their Salesforce instance. Their Salesforce dev spent a lot of times in our office during the build, and after a few drinks we were chatting about prospects as a Salesforce dev.

He pretty much echoed what you said - it's a different world to standard dev, and you can go quite deep into their ecosystem, but the work is always there, and a good Salesforce dev is worth his weight in gold so companies will bend over backwards to accommodate you - including paying your named price. It's depressing to write, but he probably earned 3-4x my salary for doing work that seemed pretty easy to him, and a quick glance on LinkedIn shows that he's still doing Salesforce work now.

Alongside the other posts, they also offer basic ISA's, albeit rebranded through another company. I imagine they take a small cut or affiliate fee through this, though.

There's nothing wrong with offering a contractor a full-time position. I've worked with CTO's that started out as contractors, who turned down the extra money to work on a project and business they believed in.

If they say no, you've got nothing to worry about. Use them as a contractor, as you do already, but ensure that you're prepared for them to walk away if a better offer comes along. It's shocking how so many businesses are not prepared for the day when a contractor gives in their notice, and ultimately a contractor should be handing their work off to an available employee to take over.

Yep, he's very well-known in certain circles, having started working on singles with solo artists alongside the previous duos mashup work.

If this resulted in substantial data loss, it could be really bad.