MrLeftHand

I love when writers, novelists, artists dream up something then a group of crazy engineers come along and build it.

Haha, been here for quite a while now and haven't noticed these yet. Thanks for the clarification.

You would be right, if hacker news would generate it's own content. But it doesn't.

Hacker news itself, is free from ads. Only the shared content might have it.

As I wrote, forcing people not to share certain content just flies in the face of hacker news and the free sharing of information.

We can advise not to use these sites, but never restrict the freedom to do so, because in the end the ad itself is not mandatory and you can ignore it. And frankly hacker news would become forbes 2.0, but in a different way.

If forbes wishes to use aggressive blocking strategies, it's their problem. They will be the ones in the end not having new readers.

I do agree in certain extent. Forbes is really bad regarding adblockers.

I don't mind being reminded that they use ads to generate revenue to deliver news for free, but doing it in a way where they actually loose readers because of that is nonsense.

Give me a popup asking me to turn adblocker off, not banning me from the content.

In the information age where the same news gets presented on numerous sites it's a bit shooting oneself in the foot denying access to the content because of adblockers.

People on hacker news should try to avoid posting content from sites like forbes, but we shouldn't force them to do so. Because then hacker news wouldn't be better then forbes.

I got an invite to it. It is nice, but doing anything extra beside a very basic portfolio costs money.

As a developer you would be better of to start a blog on blogger or wordpress. Or just buy a cheap domain name with web hosting and make your own website and promote it on linkedin, facebook or whatever social media you use.

Google Drive + KeePass

Democracy gives the same right for far left/right as for the middle. If people vote for isolation and nationalism and you have your concerns, that doesn't mean you hate democracy, it means you fear the way it's being used.

Democracy is a double edged sword. It can cut your enemy, or it can cut you.

If you look back on history, dictators piggybacked democracy loads of times to get in to power. I'm not saying UKIP is the Nazi party, but you can see where this thing is heading or can head now.

Democracy gives a voice to the well educated and to the dumb. Depends which side has more people.

Democracy is it's on worst enemy.

Well, you're right, but hackernews might not be the best medium to do so.

My gosh, loads of people commenting.

Hacker news is indulged in politics as we speak. It's a shame really.

But to add my views to the board...

Yes the EU wasn't perfect. I wouldn't call it undemocratic, or despotic, or communist, fascist, etc...

But it was start of something getting people together. Making Europe a whole.

Now the Brexit sparked other right wing parties in member countries to gain popularity. And we all can remember where far right nationalism leads to.

Remember Hitler being on the cover of Time magazine? Because I do.

Not just that, but how many people will join their ranks as well? The story won't go unnoticed and most people in the Tech Industry will hear about it in some shape or form.

They will have a hard time to find new people. Especially seniors. They wont leave their good, stable jobs for an employer like that.

This is some nasty stuff.

I feel sorry for the guy literally working there less then a day and getting the boot.

Shows some really serious problems in management. Who the hell hires people when they know very well they won't stay and make the whole staff redundant. Well, except for friends and family of course. Either it was a lack of communication between management and HR, or they just really didn't give a flying f*ck.

Another grim story about startup life. Not everything that has four legs is a unicorn apparently.

You're right, but this is one part of the equitation.

The cheap labor will give you a lower price at the end. If it wouldn't then you wouldn't see the 'made in China' text on literally everything.

There was a massive debate about immigrants picking British strawberries. And a lot of the people were going crazy why the farmers don't employ British workers and that EU can go and fuck itself.

It's fine and all, but they forget a lot of things. It's not the EU who told the farmer to get cheap immigrant labor. The farmer saves lots of money because of the cheap labor. This keeps the price down of the strawberries when you go buy a pack in a store. The work is seasonal, so it's not a permanent job and keeps the people occupied only for a couple of weeks.

Some people get a fit when they see a small pack of British strawberries for 2 pounds. Imagine how enraged they would be to have the same amount for 4.

These people, who always blame someone else then their own people (for instance why aren't you blaming the British farmer, business, whatever) would be the first ones crying why are the things more expensive now?!

The whole economy is like nature, you take out one small part and everything changes.

In brexit I see the typical 'The True Scotsman Fallacy'. or should we call it the 'True British Fallacy' now? We are great and everybody is crap and it's always someone else's fault not ours.

Sorry, but is it the EUs fault that UK businesses tend to hire cheaper European labor? Does the EU tell you that you have to hire the Romanian guy instead of the British? Is there a law enforced by the EU to do so?

And people forget that cheap labor creates lower prices on the market. Are you willing to pay more even double the price for a commodity just because it was made by non-immigrants?

Not to mention, that most immigrants aren't staying for long term. They go do the work, generate GDP and after a few years they go back to friends and family. Very few have the intentions to stay.

Is it the EUs fault that British stores and businesses buy the goods from low cost EU countries? If you would have a grocery store, would you buy and sell food that was produced in Britain, but comes with a much higher cost, or would you get it from somewhere else cheaper and get it without the costs of shipping from country to the other because of the free trade?

The EU helps everyone, but it's not their fault if businesses use these to their advantage.

Hate the player and not the game, as they say.

100% agreed.

Most of the time the hiring is about replacement, or expansion. And in expansion I mean "the current team is not enough to handle all the cr*p so we have to bring in people, preferably with the same skill set as the others, so we don't have to bother with getting them up to speed" not the "we need more people because we just started something new and we need fresh blood in the system".

I don't thinks so. You don't have to use join, but you might end up with loads of queries instead of having just one, but the end result will be the same set of data.

Yes you can and you should. Sometimes it's hard to get ahead to learn stuff by yourself when you have a mind numbing job to go to.

But then maybe the person doesn't belong in to the world of software development.

Another problem is, when you learn something outside of work it wont be enough, because they want "commercial" experience.

Like when they are hiring mobile developers and ask: "do you have any successful apps on the store?"

If I would have any successful apps on the store would I be here doing this interview with you?

Potential Employee Perspective: they can't be serious!!!

A lot of times a job spec contains a minimum of 10-15 skill you need to know. And that's just the modest one.

Maybe employers should stop trying to find the non-existing 'developer rock-star' and people would stop lying.

The funny thing is that even the developers themselves start to behave like that when they are on the other end of the hiring (Been there, done that).

"never mind 5 years of claimed SQL experience at a big company" - you can easily have that without touching JOIN.

Most jobs are just 'stuck in a loop' ones. Where you inherit legacy stuff and you're not allowed to change anything.

The crap you can get into and stuck in it when working with legacy stuff is crazy. And you can end up working with something for years without having the liberty to experience and grow.

That's the sad truth about software development. Well one of them at least.

That sounds pretty cool. I hope at the end they wont try to feed me with raw fish.

And there is the part 'may be a cool job'. Sometimes that part is a lie.

Yes come to us and you will be working with the newest tech and learn new things...

Oh did we forgot to mention we use CVS, Java 1.6 and Expoler 8? You want to use something else? No can't do sweety.

Goggle-fu - I like that. It should go on my resume.

Still as I wrote on one of the other replies. Yes, you use an API, but you still provide evidence of coding, because you have to write the application, which calls the API.

It was a small piece of code, which took a number from the command line and spat out in the other format. You still have to know everything else to get it to work. Reading input, writing output, etc...

Thank god, it's not just me then.

I had an interview where the guy was staring at me like I was interrogated. I had to solve a problem of concatenating to arrays of integers and putting them in ascending order.

I was literally frozen and couldn't think and stood there like an idiot for 5 minutes whilst the guys was just staring at me, not making a sound.

I don't have to tell you I felt destroyed after that. I felt I was a good for nothing idiot and should go shovel dirt then develop software. I still shiver a bit when I think back.

The other things that I hate are the always reoccurring questions. Like what's an array; what's a map; what are the differences; etc...

Come on I've been developing for quite a while now. I've been a sysadmin before that. I'm working in IT for more then 10 years now. Do you really feel the need asking all these things?

Had a coworker from a university, didn't even know how to write a while loop.

He didn't last long to say the least.

Of course we will never know, if he could have been a good programmer or not, but it was baffling to see people fresh out of uni with zero knowledge.

Me to supposed mechanic: "Can you fix my car?"

Mechanic: "Yes, of course!" - he gets up and collects loads of bits and pieces, metal bars and stuff, then starts to hammer away to create a car part.

Me: "What the hell are you doing?"

Mechanic: "I'm building the part for your car."

Me: "Don't you have a spare or something?"

Mechanic: "Well I don't, but there are spares I could order."

Me: "Then do it man, order one."

Mechanic: "Nah, I like to build everything by myself."

Anyway, using an API doesn't mean you don't have to code.

I was wrong, I learned, next time will be different.

To be honest this was like 4 years ago. I thought it was a good thing to show that I can get things done in way it costs less effort and time.

I was wrong, I moved on, so did they.

If I would have a similar test today I wouldn't go down the same route, because I know what they would expect.

Maybe it was my sysadmin past talking back then. Trying to find a good existing solution for the problem.

I was thinking, but clearly my trail of thought wasn't the good one. Anyway, lessons learned. I hope...

A solution is a solution. Proving that you can search for a solution and use it is a positive thing. There are loads of people who can't do even that. It wasn't like copy-paste. You still have to understand how to write the code that uses the API, you still have to get the input from the console and write the output to it.

And if I follow your trail of thought, then I hope you're not using stackoverflow when you do your job, because that means you are relying on others to solve a problem for you. Does your boss know about this?

I wonder how many times you copy-pasted anything.

And just for your information I still provided a second solution for them after they frown back the first one.

But hey, sorry if I think solving a problem doesn't mean I have to write everything from scratch.

Yes, call me stupid.

I thought showing resilience by searching for an existing solution and implementing it, instead of reinventing the wheel, will give them a good impression. Clearly I was wrong.

But, when you come across a problem, what is the first thing you do? Try to find a solution and use that, or start from scratch every time? This costs money, time and manpower. Having someone who can solve a problem the fastest way possible without compromising the quality by using a known API which is used and tested by millions of others is the most effective way.

In my book it is a good solution. Believe me I worked with people who couldn't even do that and they are developers.

Yes, they should have been more specific.

Problem solving skills go a long way especially in programming.

But then the question is how far should you go down the rabbit-hole.

For example, how many variables can someone use? How optimized should the code be, regarding memory and speed? Are you looking at the code to be understandable? Should I use comments? Should I use for or while?

Yes, that is a problem as well. They don't want to use libraries from the outside, so they develop a lot of stuff in-house. Which will have specific requirements and getting someone up to speed takes longer then using an existing API, which is well known and used by millions of other companies and developers.

Also most of the times these in-house APIs are developed by if not one, but a handful of people. So if they leave, you are stuck with code which nobody understands and you keep on adding on top of it and breaking it in many ways.

Not to mention your developers will be stuck and get experience with code not used anywhere else. If you want to cripple their prospect to get better jobs and experience, this is the way to go.

It is a vicious cycle and it seems nobody is willing to break it.

With one of many job applications I did, I received a small coding exercise before getting to the actual interview.

It was about writing a small application in perl (one of my favorite scripting languages) to solve a problem. It was a number converter from arabic to roman and vice versa.

Anyway I started by looking up a perl module that solved the whole thing in 3-4 lines of code.

What was the answer? Sorry that's not we wanted. We would like to see, how you would solve it with general code.

So you're saying that doing investigation work, finding an existing working solution and applying that solution is not a good answer for you?

Sorry but that's how I work. I find a problem; I investigate for a solution; if there is one I use it and implement it; if not then I will write one.

The moral of the story is: interviewing is fundamentally wrong and doesn't help you find a good candidate. There are millions of good solutions to one problem in programming. Asking for a solution you want to see and not a solution that solves the problem will never help. Then why don't you clone yourself and have an army of developers which work the same way and produce the same code with the same flaws over and over and over.

Looks awesome, but the guy said the magic sentence for failure.

"I will wait until it's perfect!"

Sorry buddy, but it never will be perfect.

By the time it comes out all the other competitors already dominated the market. So to get some ground in there you have to add some extra features, which will delay the project. Then the competition comes out with the same feature sooner, because they already cashed in the rewards for not waiting and have the funds to push forward and already have a working base system. And you will end up in a vicious cycle until your funds dry up and you will be left there with an unfinished product, which was actually in a finished state.

Or to save something, you will sell out to one of your competitors to get some satisfaction and to see 10% of your dreams integrated into someones else's.

I know, I know, it was a bit harsh, but how many time did this happen?