MortenK

Yeah I might not have been entirely clear in my post, but I write:

"The other side of the coin is that lots of software companies, really has little to no control over software development... This is a company where crisis' occurs daily or weekly instead of maybe once every couple of months."

That's entirely agreeing with your point: The standard should be a well run team where everybody goes home after their 7-8 hours. If there is constant fire in the kitchen, then it's certainly not up to developers to constantly do overtime. In my post I do actually suggest to OP he gets out, if he is indeed in such a situation (which again, it sounds like).

I think I have not formulated myself very well.

A bad company is "a company where crisis' occurs daily or weekly instead of maybe once every couple of months." In such a company, crisis is the standard, not the deviation. In such a company there'll be rampant requests for overtime.

That's a terrible place to work. As I recommended to OP, if he is in such a company (which it could sound like), he should leave.

A good place is one where most people consistently leave after their standard 7-8 hours. But IF there is a fire, then it's a terrible attitude for a developer to adopt a "not my problem, time's up" attitude.

This doesn't only go for devs by the way, it's the same for managers and any other role really.

This is my personal opinion as a software development manager, so take it as just that.

A developer that always leave at exactly 17.00 and adamantly refuse to come in on a Saturday, gives a very clear signal that they don't give a shit about the company, the product or the team. They're there to get paid.

While most employers realize that your work isn't (or should be) your single burning passion, it is very negative for team morale when one of the guys always flakes out when the clock hits 17 regardless of the fire in the kitchen.

I knew a developer who always left at exactly 17.00, because "that's what they are paying me for". On several occasions, he deployed breaking changes to production five minutes before leaving. Other devs had to come in and work very late to get the system back online. While he is technically in his right to leave at 5, he causes his team much grief and as such is not an asset.

The other side of the coin is that lots of software companies, really has little to no control over software development. Especially startups run by young, inexperienced guys rarely have any idea what they are doing. This is a company where crisis' occurs daily or weekly instead of maybe once every couple of months.

They make up for this by rampant overtime, and excuse this with BS about being dedicated and a team player. You know you're in such an organization if they talk about how "that's what the industry is like".

Your organizations work culture seem like that - very long hours and (seemingly) no extraordinary reason for coming in on Saturday.

If that's the case, then leave. There's not much that can be done except a total change of top management.

But if it's a rare occurrence that they call you in on Saturday and there is a good explanation for it, then buckle up and help your team mates.

Can anybody with practical experience developing with Wit.ai comment on how accurate and consistent it works? Is there any new and better working software behind this, compared to the current breed of frankly abysmal voice recognition software (Siri, Nuance etc)?

Nothing of substance can fit in a tweet.

Some of the differences between trading card games, shareware etc and pay-to-play:

1) The older models have transparent pricing, whereas pay-to-play have opaque pricing. You can tell the price of a deck or full version of a shareware game, but you can't tell how many IAP's you'll need over the lifetime of a pay-to-play game.

2) When something is "free!" but actually not, it is a bait and switch technique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch). This leaves many consumers with a feeling of being tricked.

3) IAP's are often transient replenishables such as gems or gold. A trading card or full version of a game, you own permanently.

4) It's hard to trust that pay-to-play games isn't specifically designed to make you part with dollars. Players come to doubt the fairness of the game rules. Even for "honest" game makers, there will be suspicion of foul play in the game mechanics.

5) Pay-to-play games, like slot machines, make their money from 10-20% of users called "whales", who are susceptible to gambling addiction. Using psychological tricks to extract money from such people is very shaky, ethically.

When games promote feelings of suspicion, exploitation and even psychological manipulation in the majority of players (i.e. non-whales), you get this kind of backlash, as in the case of clash of clans and other pay-to-plays.

Has it ruined the gaming industry? Not in my opinion - I think (or hope) pay-to-play is a fad which will devolve into a niche. As people become aware of the shady tactics being used, they'll tend to avoid them. Or at least gravitate towards those pay-to-plays, where it really is possible to have a decent game play experience without paying.

You are the one here acting like a troll. You come off as argumentative to the point of combative. You nitpick and swear, all in a highly unpleasant tone. If you really are done, great, the discussion will be better off.

Like the author mentions, he subscribes to the "no silver bullet" thought. Methodologies doesn't ensure project success because it's insignificant compared to the individuals involved and the scope of the product. The focus on process, is because process is easy to implement and change, giving the illusion of control.

What good project managers do is much harder than implementing a Scrum method. It's finding good people, making the hard decisions of removing the bad people and get / make a clear understanding of product scope and goals.

The last point in particular should be a well duh, but in reality it's ridiculously common to encounter projects where the PM (and hence even the customer), have a very vague understanding of what's actually being built. Those projects are guaranteed to go massively over time and budget, or being outright cancelled.

Good process is just the icing on the cake. It should be used, process alone does not make a project success.

I might be speaking blasphemy here, but is the advantages of unit testing worth the increased code complexity?

In quite a few codebases I've seen, the amount of tests was entirely unrelated to how stable and maintainable the system was. Some times developers just fixed the tests, rather than the bugs. And in many cases, there were a slew of failing tests even though the system ran fine.

A big question in this is what constitutes a vendor.

People who are experienced enough to price the risk into contracts, manage cashflow and not put all eggs into one basket won't get burned from a customers' insolvency.

But that comes from experience. Young people or the typical specialist such as a carpenter or electrician, are not necessarily this experienced in business.

In my view there's no line between such a vendor, and an individual who happens to be on the payroll. There might be legally, but they are equally entitled to payment for their work.

I'm sure neither you nor Thomas are ones to screw people over. But I think there's too much self-absolution of responsibility in startup circles, and your posts initially seemed to talk that point of view.

It boils down to being a decent person and stopping a venture before puting other people in financial jeopardy. Don't cry over the venture capitalists losses. But do make whole the people who have worked hard for you, whether employed or not.

I'm surprised that both you and tptacek seem to think it's much less of a deal to pay back vendors. Say the vendor is a startup or otherwise small company who's survival is hinged on getting paid what you owe. It's okay to stiff them, because we can get away with it legally?

I think it's downright dishonorable to leave vendors hanging like that.

Terminate your venture in time, before you can't afford to pay what you owe. There shouldn't be any difference whether it's an employee or a vendor.

Well written code covers the what and the how. The why is what you need to be covering with code comments. This is for the inevitable time when the "simply not so smart" developers has to fix errors in the absentee guru's code.

Agree. Notch turned his code into hundreds of millions of dollars, so not much attention should be paid to people calling him a bad programmer.

You consider striking up a conversation to a person behind you in the food/drinks line as "bum-rushing by a random creep"? Jesus Christ, I really don't think you should be dishing out conversation / networking advice!

Dropbox is probably one of the more sustainable companies mentioned in the article, since they have a very large amount of actual paying users and revenue.

Many if not most developers have the same feeling, that "bad code" is objectively bad. And how nice it would be if code quality could be graded on a scale. But it really can't - one mans "elegant" is another's "over-engineered". And one mans "simple" is another's "crude".

My perception of "beauty" is the simplest code that could possibly work, with the lowest possible levels of abstraction. I like YAGNI and similar principles. That's a pretty vague formulation though, so while most can probably agree on a high level, the devil is in the details. What exactly is "simple code" for example? Short code? Easy to read? Flexible? All of the above (that'd require Carmack or Thorvalds)? It really is all in the eye of the developer.

I think the takeaway of this excellent article is that whatever your style is, do have respect for differing styles. Don't grade developers or code on what you intuitively feel. Don't assume that everybody else is an idiot and finally don't waste time on debating / enforcing the one true way of doing things.

I don't do many cold calls, but sometimes I reach out to people on email based on their online reputation, blog posts or similar if I feel I can help them or they can help me. A lot of these people are busy but many actually give a reply, at least if you're being short and to the point about your message.

Ironically enough, the guys who sign their blog posts with "what do you think", "drop me a line", "I'm always available on email" etc, are usually the guys who never reply :-)

Project went bad? It's just a matter of fixing the process.

That's a reasoning that's simple, easy to understand and entirely wrong. Contrary to what the evangelists' tell us, process has small (I'd almost say minimal) influence on software development failure or success.

The responsibility is on the lead project manager. He's not been good enough. A failure on a project of this size doesn't just happen overnight. If you just look, you can see it coming from miles away.

The solution will always be highly uncomfortable though. You'd have to stand up to powerful people who hold authority over you, fire sub-contractors or employees, significantly reduce scope, move deadlines. Big, high impact actions that won't be popular, hell they might even get you fired. Not a job for the faint of heart for sure.

It's depressingly typical of big corporations and organizations, to allow people not capable enough to be put in charge of such large projects. And it's even more depressing knowing tax dollars are being wasted in such huge amounts on relatively (big emphasis) simple software.

Wow, that's faster than Barbara Blackburn who holds the Guinness world record. You should compete :)

I don't think there's much commercial potential in that one I'm afraid. Personally I just look out the window before deciding what to wear.

Well if not an IT bubble, surely there's a housing bubble. "Home prices in San Francisco and surrounding counties rose more than 15% in the past year".

That's the kind of increase we saw year after year just a year or two before the bubble popped, and prices fell by 50% or so (around 2005-2006 I guess).

It's funny how the majority just assume prices will keep on climbing (I was one of those merry fools by the way), and in hindsight it becomes so obvious that such increases are not sustainable.

I don't entirely understand. Is it wrong of them to run a startup news site while having their own startup? If so, why?

Or is that unrelated, and it's just that these particular guys are not very nice?

Ishikawa diagrams and the 5 whys are quality control tools, specifically root cause analysis tools.

What OP mentions is taking notes of his though process as he goes along, so he can jump back in after an interruption.

Yes the majority of positions are never listed publicly, so numbers from Monster is only the tip of the iceberg. But that goes for all positions regardless of language. If you have 5 times the listed positions for one tech over the other, it would be logical to assume the amount of unlisted positions have roughly the same ratio.

Who is talking about quality? OP posted that the majority of development jobs are within .NET and PHP. Some guy gave the low-brow dismissal "was this in India by any chance?". I just supplied position numbers from one of the largest job sites in the US, confirming that .NET and PHP jobs (adding Java), really are the most plentiful in the US by far.

You mean tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Intel and IBM? Yes they do have positions listed at Monster. If by tech companies you mean week-over-week growth companies like fart.io and sfnavelgazer.com then no I don't think so. Probably Monster is not serious enough a platform for such companies, who only staff with top-tier talent. Or maybe they just can't afford the listing fees, since their 30k funding ran out.

Monster.com job listings in the US by keyword:

.NET - 1000+ positions

Java - 1000+ positions

PHP - 454 positions

Python - 295 positions

Ruby - 280 positions

Node.js - 55 positions

Lisp, Haskell, Scheme - 0 positions

Yeah that's true, expect around 50-55% of any pay (contracting or salary) to go to the tax man. As an employee, you get 6 weeks paid holiday, 5-8% of your salary in pension and you also get paid when you are ill. When you are contracting you get none of those things. A good rule of thumb is to deduct 20-25% of the contractor pay to reach comparable employee salary.

Still, 25% off 16K is 12K before tax. As a full-time frontender in Stockholm, you'd generally be around 5-6K before tax.

I didn't know about the blue card, and yeah in theory it looks to make things easier. However like with many EU regulations, there's a nice idea behind but quite often a very different reality.

Individual countries can and do override EU regulations. Sometimes even illegally. Getting local laws overturned in the EU court system is an exercise in futility though.

You'll also notice a long list of requirements, some of which can be very hard to live up to. As an example Sweden doesn't recognize Russian university degrees. You'd need a year or two extra of a special "top-up" education in Sweden, depending on your field, to have a "valid" bachelor or candidates degree. To get that though, you'd need the living permit which you can't get without the degree... At least through the blue-card method. This kind of catch-22 situations grounded in bureaucracy and red tape are very common in Scandinavia. Sweden is much better than for example Denmark though, but it can still be extremely frustrating.

A couple of things:

You have to be absolutely certain that they will supply living and work permit for both you and your family. Immigration laws are very strict in Scandinavia, so you'd obviously want to be certain there won't be any nasty surprises with getting your wife and children here.

Living costs in Moscow and Stockholm is not that far from each other.

A full-time position as a front-end developer usually won't pay through the roof. However a good front-ender never needs to look far for a new job.

Career-wise where you'd really be able to take a leap is after a year or two as a frontend dev at this Stockholm company. By then you have working permit sorted out, a Swedish referral and maybe a little knowledge of the language.

When you have these things you can break into front-end contracting for customers in Sweden or other countries in Scandinavia (Oslo, Norway is particularly booming at the moment).

Front-end contracting is typically full-time contracts on-location for between 6 and 12 months. It typically pays 100+ USD an hour, meaning a monthly income of 16K USD or so given a standard 40 hour workweek. If you have the skills (and it sounds like you do), the contracts are pretty easy to get by using agencies who are always looking for new development talent.

It's very hard to jump directly into contracting in Sweden from Russia, particularly due to the whole work-visa problem. But once you are inside, it's a very viable opportunity.

If your wife enjoys learning languages, there is free Swedish language education (she can even apply for a "learning bonus" of around 1000 USD pr 6 weeks or so). Once you are in, there's also (almost) free health care and such.

Stockholm is a lovely city, and it's only a 2,5 hour flight from Moscow, priced typically at around 400-500 USD round-trip.