bradenb

>> here I am reading yet another email from an Amazon recruiter asking to talk to me about a possible opportunity. Will this horror never end?

> This gets the biggest eyeroll I can possibly muster.

I get why you're saying that, but as a totally average developer, I feel like I can corroborate this: Amazon recruiters email me _constantly_. I do not think I should be a target for them (I doubt I could pass their interview process), I think they're just desperate and take the shotgun approach to recruiting.

>> This is a retelling of the two tedious months that Amazon put me through only to tell me that I can't code, which I now find funny, but at the time it was rather insulting and humiliating

> Is this guy serious? He didn't meet the bar, but instead of working on the weak areas of his skillset, he's claiming he's was insulted and degraded.

I do agree with you on this one, though. I read the story and for the most part thought that nothing they did was too bad. Yeah, they changed up some things, messed up some scheduling (they are human after all), but if you're being considered for a certain level and you don't perform at that level (for them) then what should they tell you? Saying they're "going in a different direction" or "opted for a more qualified candidate" doesn't really give you the feedback you want, does it? I want to know if I'm not performing at the level I think I am.

In the courts, yes, but in an office?

EDIT: I should add that I am 100% for eliminating sexual harassment from the workplace (and in life), but unfortunately there's nothing that forces a company to give employees due process. I would guess that in most cases, even the appearance of inpropriety is enough to warrant termination for at-will employees.

Yes, seriously. How to invalidate is exactly what is being discussed.

I shouldn't give my parents too hard of a time. I had a half-tuition scholarship to the other school. It was also a religious, private school and so there's that aspect as well. They would not have disowned me or been too upset had I made the choice to go to my first choice, but as a kid it's hard to not want to do everything you can to please your family. Ultimately, it was still painful to matriculate.

Yes, that's a good point. I should probably be more flexible. I agree with many other that a very small student loan burden to close the gap between scholarships, grants, work, and going to affordable state schools is also totally reasonable in my mind.

I honestly had never considered this. Siblings to this comment make good points both ways, but regardless I think it could be a very interesting opportunity for my children to not only obtain an education at a low cost, but to also--and just as important, IMO--get another view of the world.

I was discussing student loans and value of a college education with friends the other day. We were discussing whether or not I would recommend college to someone today. My conclusion is that TODAY I would still as long as that person has the means to do so without any loans.

But, then we started discussing whether I would push my children to go. My answer is that I hope I don't need to. Even though I have some amount of college savings for my kids, I don't think it will be enough to let them choose their school freely and I would much rather that money go towards starting them out in their career or family or whatever they choose.

My hope is that when it is time for them to start their adult life that there will either be enough cheap or free alternative forms of education or that the stigma of not having a degree will have lessened. Realistically, I don't think the situation will have changed in that time.

My own experience is complicated because I took out loans--which I greatly regret--but also likely have my career to thank for it. I had a full-tuition scholarship to the school of my choice, but opted to go to another school my parents wanted me at; when I eventually transferred back to my original choice I had lost the scholarship. If I had to do it again today I would definitely start with a 2 year local college education and then work hard through the remaining years to finish debt-free.

I use an Alienware 15 R3 as my main Windows gaming machine (since I game a lot at various locations) and I don't have any of the issues you describe. Sounds like you got a lemon. Their warranty support is excellent, so you should probably ask them about it.

I wish your comment was closer to the top. I totally agree that if you're avoiding nulls this is the right way to do it. I wouldn't say it's right for everything, but when done correctly it makes for some really clean code.

To be fair, I said "can" use them, not necessarily that I do :)

But, I have actually reached out to connections to discuss business opportunities. Since the connections live in the world where I have done business, they are more likely to know and trust that I can deliver on their business needs.

Sure, I guess they put you in contact with them, but why would that person talk to you? If they'll talk to random people on the internet, why not just email them or DM them on Twitter or use any other means beyond LinkedIn?

If, however, that person sees that they are connected to you via some other person they know and trust, I think they'll be more likely to take you serious.

Recruiters are paying for LinkedIn and can message you whenever they want, why do you need them to be a connection?

I take the exact opposite approach and only exclude recruiters. I figure by doing this my network is my legitimate business connections which I can use to further myself professionally.

I found this really hard to read. At first I tried to read left-to-right, top-to-bottom, but then it felt like the "panels" (or lack thereof) were not lining up. Then I thought "Oh! It must be three columns top-to-bottom" so I tried that then realized I was missing content and that I was right the first time.

I'd love to see you lay this out a bit differently. Apart from that, I love the content. Thanks.

Thanks for the clarification. I get what you're trying saying. The point of confusion for me was how literally you used "20 years of experience" in your career. As you said, it's hard to pass that off literally, but I totally understand having compressed learning. I, myself, have been in the industry for 12 years now and I feel that number is fair, but I feel like almost all of my usable experience came in the last 6 years. So in a way I feel like I got 12 years of experience in 6 years.

I appreciate what you're trying to say, but you can't just claim to have 20 years of industry experience after starting in that industry 10 years ago, right? Do you put 20 years of experience on your resume?

This is a really interesting read. Thanks. I have found in my own experience that developers tend to include the same people over and over again in their PRs and what ends up happening is people tend to just "trust" what the submitter has committed. This often leads to PRs that are almost blindly approved. By involving management to keep the PRs as a tool for discussion (social and technical), I think this could be avoided. It's probably also a good idea to mix up the reviewers (a healthy mix of people familiar with the code and those not familiar with it).

Thank you for the quote pointed. I will remember that for next time! As to you’re point, I think others have covered it well, but I will add my agreement that communicating in an environment where you are comfortable and familiar with the topics ahead of time and won’t have your career prospects put in the line is much easier. Some people like myself simply can’t prepare for an infinite number of possible whiteboard scenarios and look competent.

Thank you for the response. I appreciated your take on the situation in the original article and I am glad to hear that you accommodate developers like me that don’t perform well for strangers on the spot. This type of thing really pushes a company up the ranks if I’m interviewing with them.

  VP of Engineering at Eaze, previously CTO at Getable and engineer at Yammer.

  No, not at all. Whiteboard interviews test one thing
  well: How well does a candidate code on a whiteboard.
  Engineers on my team never have to code on a whiteboard
  (whiteboards are really bad at running code), why would I
  make candidates do something that I don't ask the
  engineers already on my team to do?

This comes close, but I think the real issue that most of these reasons aren't hitting on is that software development is typically done asynchronously. Whether it's a whiteboard or a computer connected to a projector or TV or a live peer coding session it doesn't matter: if done in the interview, it puts the candidate on the spot in a way that they rarely (if ever) will be on the job. Developers typically are able to take time by themselves or with trusted/known colleagues to solve a problem. There are very few opportunities to get over performance anxiety related to coding in front of others that we don't know.

This is pretty common for Objective-C, I believe.

Verbose compared to what? It doesn't seem overly verbose to me. This isn't some Hello World example, this provides a fully featured real-world example (minus all the Okta fluff).

A few years ago we put my daughter into a new charter school. We were really excited because on the surface it seemed like she would get a much more tailored and personalized education with better facilities and staff. The only problem is that my daughter has ADHD.

As soon as there were social issues between my daughter and her teachers or her and other students (bullying by other students), the staff quickly turned against us. We met with the principal several times about specific students bullying her but all they wanted to talk about was how she wasn't showing up often enough to school (she often faked being sick to avoid her bullies).

We quickly realized that the school was only concerned about losing funding because of attendance metrics and we pulled her out. It was a horrible experience for us.

The idea of a completely read-only router is really interesting. I used to buy hardware that would only work with open firmware -- I used to love to constantly update and mess with DD-WRT. But in more recent years I've just started buying high-performing hardware and skipping the customization beyond SSID and passwords. With faster connections, UPNP, and decent default QoS policies I pretty much never have to configure my access points or routers anymore. I'm pretty sure the average consumer has no desire to configure anything.

I'm particularly excited about project references. We have quite a few small web apps that use the client/server/shared structure and the default Angular webpack configuration does not like relative references (i.e. referencing ../shared from client). I'm hoping this resolves the issue of having to install the shared project as a module or ejecting the webpack configuration.

Most people that care about Typescript are JavaScript developers who desire more structure and safety. It can't do anything that JavaScript itself can't do. The article itself has a great description of the benefits in the first paragraph.

I think the stock price is finally catching up to reality and public perception. I've noticed a huge resistance to using Facebook in recent years within my social sphere. Professionally, I'm one of the few that I know that still use the service; I think it's FOMO keeping me on, but I find it extremely difficult to add content to my profile and find myself mostly acting as a passive consumer of others' content.

Isn't part of the definition of a laptop that it should be able to be used comfortably resting on the user's lap?

You're right about their incentive, but in this case it's the right thing for the wrong reason. I don't think it makes the article invalid.

Isn’t this exactly the argument for preparing a plan B? If employers believe they can get the same value add for devs in their 20s at a fraction of the cost then why hire the 40-somethings? My personal feeling is that ageism in software development shouldn’t be a thing, but it’s a reality I’ve witnessed myself, so I can’t ignore it.

This is great for Go and I'm happy for them. I feel like in my career many people are extremely intimidated at the prospect of using Go for more than a pet project. The best answer I can manage to get to the question of "why?" is that it feels unfamiliar to them. I think this is an unfortunate hurdle.

Hopefully that is just how things are in my little bubble (as this survey would indicate). I think Go is really cool and I will continue to lobby to implement some mission-critical systems with it.