- Patterns
- Separation of Concerns
- Modularization
- Source Control
- Abstraction
- Domain expertise
- The ability to translate user requirements into tech
- Tolerance for some degree of ambiguity
- Debugging
- Best practices in quality
- Unit testing
I'm sure there are more and some people might disagree. The gist is that tech changes, but common practices, skill sets, and thought processes are long lasting.
Having been here 10+ years, it feels like it's growing to me. With new sports teams that are already here and new ones arriving, there's more than just casinos for entertainment. There are also other companies coming here, moving from CA and other places. There are about 3 months of the year where it's so hot that it's uncomfortable to stay outside for an extended period of time - though the rest of the year is fine, with mild Winters. Not sure what your occupation is, but I'm a software engineer and have found work both local and remote.
It would probably be designed to act in a way that's beneficial to people. In so doing, it wouldn't manipulate people into a situation where they would release private information, which could be interpreted as harmful. Rather, it would probably begin its own knowledge journey to build upon what it already knows - in the way that scientists perform research today, and sharing new information to the betterment of humankind.
Andrew S. Grove wrote a book called High Output Management. While you might not necessarily engage in all the activities he describes, it's his attitude and approach to management that feels timeless. Each person on your team is an individual with their own aspirations that you may or may not be able to help them fulfill, but you can acknowledge and respect them. Expect the best and learn that you can be firm on deadlines and requirements without being a terrible person. Think about why people leave their jobs (they have a problem with their boss) and don't be that person. Constantly level up your own expertise so that people will respect and trust you. As I mentioned, entire books have been written and being well read will help find what is natural for you and shape your success in the future.
I recently read the O'Reilly report "NFTs, the Metaverse, and Everything Web 3.0". Blockchains are a part of that discussion; though what I gained from it was a broad perspective of what Web 3.0 is and how it is different. It's around 65 pages and sounded credible to me.
The people who once had a free blue checkmark are complaining because they now have to pay. Especially journalists who have the ability to be heard more than others. Twitter once told them they were special and now they're being treated like everyone else. They portend gloom and doom as if they were fortune tellers. Only time will tell.
Other people are happy to have a blue checkmark, even if they pay for it and enjoy a few nice features. Twitter is telling them that everyone is the same and no one person is better than another. Some of them are even media personalities that were excluded from the popularity contest because they didn't share the same politics.
Other people don't care either way because they continue what they've done since forever. They're eating popcorn.
I use an Excel spreadsheet as the central document for each customer. No stopwatch, I'm aware of how much I work and make an entry before stopping work or switching to a different customer. I used to be more granular on recording to the closest 15 minute increment, but that's tedious and allowing myself to be distracted isn't worth it, so I ensure the customer gets an even hour worth of work. I write down the date, hours, and short description of the work during that timeframe. If the customer has their own time management system, I record the day's entries into that at the end of the day. I record spreadsheet info into my QuickBooks invoices when it's time to bill. Then I create a new spreadsheet when starting a new invoicing period named with the date of the next invoice, e.g. CustomerName-20230327.xlsx.
Getting started, algebra was enough for me. However, as I got slammed by algorithmic complexity problems like nested loops and needing to pick out the proper type of collection (data structure/sorting) for holding information, things like Big-O notation and Discrete math became more interesting. Once I started doing work with financial analysis and other optimization problems, calculus became quite useful, even if it was just to calculate an occasional slope. When I wanted to understand the underpinnings of deep learning, linear algebra concepts like working with vectors and matrices as well as more calculus was quite handy. Now, I'm really interested in quantum computing and having only scratched the surface of linear algebra, I need to go back to the books to build a foundation to move forward on. I suppose it's an individual choice for the direction you want to go in.
I think we'll go though a period of adjustment before landing on a few different work arrangements: only office, only home, and some hybrid option in-between. Some companies are born remote and won't ever change. People will either suffer through an arrangement they don't like or quit and move to something that suits them better. I'm independent and most of my work is remote. That said, sometimes I like to take jobs where I'm in the office because it's a different dynamic and occasionally nice to be around other people. So, I'd be happy in a world of more choice on where I worked and the thought of one way to work for everyone is probably outdated.
For several years, chatbots, which often use some form of AI, have been performing basic customer service tasks via chat interfaces, messaging, and email. It makes sense that they eventually improve over time, especially with the GPT-N and similar tools. A lot of people prefer interacting with chatbots/AI rather than humans because they never get frustrated, have an attitude, and respond efficiently (sometimes it sucks to deal with people). Despite all the hand wringing over how AI is emerging, I believe that it will become a useful tool that consumers and enterprise customers embrace.
Email is one channel that AI can communicate. It seems it might be more efficient to have a discovery protocol where they can communicate efficiently in a more peer-to-peer mode, rather than provisioning mailboxes and discovery bolted onto the side.
I'm looking at what's happening from the evolution of chatbots. We're just seeing a new generation of AI tools evolving. I'm only a single perspective, but it looks like it's evolving like any other new technology. Consider the PC wars, OS wars, browser wars, phone wars, and now the AI assistive technology wars. Microsoft and Google are stepping out early and I wouldn't be surprised if more emerged.
There are a lot of different opinions on this, but I'll share my thoughts. Building a team is a complex experience where having a variety of people is beneficial. If everyone on the team is "experienced" you increase the risk of too many chiefs clashing with big egos. You often need people at least who are experienced in different aspects of the work that needs to be done. Different experience levels are helpful too because there's different levels of complexity where the more junior developers do the simpler tasks, mid-level developers do more complex work, and senior developers lead and guide design. Pulling in people with different backgrounds also helps so that you bring in new ideas, rather than hiring people just like you. I believe that accepting people for their differences and ability to contribute to the team is a larger win over judgement.
He's probably getting some benefit out of this approach:
1. Some fun (the 420 comments) and shocking people.
2. Market research to see how people react to various prices (A/B testing while trying and backing out of bad decisions)
3. Free press - good or bad, it's in the news and he must be getting some benefit out of the attention.
Not a fan of this approach and hoping everything lands in a fair place.
I think everyone outside of Twitter is pretty much still in the dark on how this will turn out. It seems to be evolving as we approach 2/9, which is similar to how other policies have come about. To me, it looks like the strategy is to make newsworthy announcements that receive a lot of attention, a large part of that being feedback that they use to tweak the policy. From what I can tell, their goals are a combination of attempting to make the company more profitable and solve the bad bot problem. e.g. When someone must submit their credit card and identity, it's harder and more expensive to create too many API project accounts that circumvent moderation. It seems like the 2/9 date is unrealistic because the developer site still doesn't offer the upgrade and a lot of companies won't be able to react to the change that quick.
A couple more benefits to this approach come when you do code reviews and other developers on the team have an opportunity to provide feedback and are more aware of what docs are available.
Stack Overflow banned GPT and ChatGPT answers. Here's an important part of that policy: "The objective nature of the content on Stack Overflow means that if any part of an answer is wrong, then the answer is objectively wrong."
Every step in the evolution of programming has some degree of controversy and I think this is normal. We can read in history books (and maybe first-hand knowledge from a few senior folks on HN) how there was concern about moving from assembly to the first high-level languages. There will probably come a day when AI software is sufficient for common use, though it might take a while.
This is a clickbait-sounding title with a questionable opinion. OP is unrecognizable. Judging by the amount of comments and upvotes, this article received some amount of traffic and the author made money off of it. Looking at the author's posts, reveals a similar pattern of clickbait-sounding titles of which I chose not to follow and compensate the author for any more.
Since C# is open source and has an open process for new features that many people in the community participate in, my assumption is that there are a lot of people who would disagree with this opinion. I personally use many new language features to great advantage today and appreciate what they do for myself and other developers.
Since I treat my customer list as confidential (my) company IP, it wouldn't affect me much. I don't include companies on my resume to keep recruiters from mining my customer list. That said, it could be beneficial to be able to let future customers know that I worked with A (it's marketing), which I will mention in an interview - telling the story of what I did for that company. Hopefully, that clause might be easy to eliminate.
I only reveal what I want people to know. For job purposes, I don't want some recruiter contacting me about an old technology that I don't want to work with anymore. I also regard resumes as interview acquisition devices. I customize with the aspects of my experience that pertain to the job description. Interviewers use your resume to ask you questions and you should omit anything that would lead to a subject you don't want to discuss. I treat everything about me as part of my brand and present it in the way that I want people to see.
I've encountered this situation before. It happened because the large company had a process to become an approved vendor. It's a bit like trying to work with the government with delays and red tape. Since they didn't want to wait for me to go through the process, they asked me to sign with one of their established companies. Everything is negotiable. Your leverage is that you're willing to walk and the consequences of that reflect poorly on Umbrella because A has already decided that they want you. On your questions:
1. Some consultants want ownership of intellectual property. I don't care and it hasn't been a problem for me. You can try to negotiate this. However, it gets more complex because now you have 3 interested parties because it's likely that A wants IP ownership too.
2. I have liability insurance because it's a common customer ask. My insurance company even sends them coverage so they can verify contract terms.
3. This is a shady practice that most recruiters engage in. At worst, it essentially keeps you from working by yourself or with a different umbrella because Umbrella has communicated with every major company in town (or even worse if they're a national or international corporation). I would negotiate this clause and get it narrowed until it only pertained to the specific project and was time boxed. That way, you can work on other projects at A and are free to work with any other company. Ideally, they would drop the restriction altogether, but it depends on how much you want the job.
One more thing that you didn't mention - payment terms. One of the sneaky clauses they add is that they can only pay you if the customer pays them. You want to get that taken out because they will claim they haven't been paid and make you wait. This puts you in a position of weakness on future issues because you'll be concerned about not being paid. If they're reputable, they'll pay you, though it might be good to ask around for other people who have worked with them if you can. My situation was that Umbrella subcontracted me to a 3rd party recruiter who tried not to pay me because Umbrella didn't pay them, which is by design. Fortunately, I had already negotiated the conditional payment clauses out of the contract with well-defined payment terms. When 3rd party tried not to pay me, I evoked the contract and they paid me.
I've been using .NET. Cross platform, cross language (though I prefer C#), multiple technologies (cloud, desktop, mobile, web, ...) and open source. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/
If it was a public site for any user, I wouldn't offer just one because a single wrong choice could alienate the users you want to use the site. It's common to have a few such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and/or Twitter. If it was an enterprise site where the people in your company had to log in, I would use something as close to the technology stack I was using as possible. I'm thinking about something like Google or Microsoft, especially if you were using a specific workspace (email/docs/etc.) solution that was standard for the company.
I'm seeing folks on social media looking for work. e.g. if it's Twitter, chances are someone's friend list has other people in the same part of the company that might have been laid off. A lot of people are also brushing off old Linked-In profiles and announcing their availability. Meetup is another good source because people will be joining the groups their interested in to start networking and you can scan the membership. A lot of people looking for work will likely make themselves really easy to find.
Save your money so that you can live between jobs if you get laid off. I typically have at least 3 months in savings. Some of these things might sound obvious, but maybe not if you look around at how other people act at work. Concentrate on doing the best job you can - though not from your perspective, but (this is key) from what matters to your boss. Based on that, dig into the technology you use to do your job and learn everything you possibly can. Don't compare yourself to other people on the team, but make yourself better and faster than you were the day before. Get your work done as quickly and with the best quality you can. Work extra hours and study at home. These things will make you more valuable to your company and make their decision to let you go harder. If you are let go, all of the study and practice you've done to make yourself better, with hands-on work experience will prepare you for an interview with another company.
Looking a relatively recent history, 2001 was a huge it to the IT industry where a lot of people went into other occupations and a lot of CS grads never got an IT job out if college, leading to the hollowing out of the mid-tier developer roles in the 2000s. In the 2008 timeframe, there was a rough patch where a lot of folks couldn't find work, but things seemed to bounce back to normal pretty quickly in the IT space while the rest of the country toughed it out. In both cases, people that might not have normally done a startup got together and started new companies, whether bootstrap or funded, some of which might be household names today. This time around, the situation feels a little different. As one poster commented, there are still plenty of startups absorbing the newly available people, who will be grateful to have the opportunity. There will also be normal shuffling of changing careers and moving. However, what is different is that the culture and tooling from the recent pandemic make it easier for remote work. Silicon Valley might be getting hit hard, but that doesn't mean the rest of the country is feeling the same effects. There will be parts of the country (world) that bounce back faster than others, making it less painless for people to get back up-to-speed. Also, in the US, we have more of a safety net that might or might not be available, depending on the political climate - though it looks positive because of recent history and precedent for relief around the pandemic. Finally, considering that a lot of analysts (yeah, they're all over the place) are saying any recession would be short-lived or we might even just have a soft landing (again, understanding there's nothing soft about people losing work), there might be a whole lot less impact this time around compared to the past.
Microsoft has a site dedicated to the Security Development Lifecycle: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/securityengineering/sdl, which is a good starting point. You might want to look at the whole process, including doing a threat assessment. e.g. Concerns differ based on the technology you're developing with, such as cloud, desktop, mobile, or web. Essentially, it's a process of identifying what you need to pay attention to and weighing risk/cost benefits. There's a ton of information available and focusing on your specific situation will help narrow the surface area you need to care about.
I went the other direction, from Windows to Mac a couple of years back. The main differences were scrolling direction, menu ordering and location, and ctrl/cmd keys. I found that most other things weren't hard to adapt to. Having had very nice Windows laptops, I felt like the MacBook Pro is one of the best I've worked with. For my latest project, I needed to go back to a Windows laptop. It was a couple years older than my Mac and of lower quality in comparison to other Windows Laptops. So, I went out and bought a new laptop - got a Dell XPS-15 this time. It's nice, light and good keyboard. The fingerprint reader doesn't compare to the Mac, but with Windows 11, it isn't too bad. I think the transition would have been tough on an older Windows OS and laptop. So I guess the best way to ease the pain is to be on the latest OS with a nice laptop. Today, I transition pretty seamlessly between machines and don't think about the differences because I've gotten used to it.
I've participated in a few Give Camps (https://givecamp.org). They meet on a weekend, bringing charities and developers together so the charities can have a new starter web site, app, or upgrades to an existing site.