el_fuser

You seem to believe that Snowden can control the media.

Look at c# and I think you'll have your answer.

Absolutely. It's not a very sexy language, and I can't stomach a lot of JEE, but the language and the jvm are absolute workhorses. Especially when you're dealing with high performance networking code.

Because the tooling support, for the most part, is lagging.

Media observers will note that snowden has become the story... Very little is being reported on the actual whistle blowing (or gutless treason, if you listen to the media).

As i watch this massive PR engine start to tear apart Snowden,,,, I'm finding it very hard to post anything critical of the government. It's just a little too easy to flip a binary switch somewhere.

I wonder if this is how it started with those countries we consider repressive?

If you had to put in ridiculous hours to hit the under deliver timeline, you in fact over promised.

Your understanding was my understanding. I wouldn't call someone that just does web development full stack, unless they also wrote the browser.

This is better than a lot of the processes I've seen.

But.

Developers that do interviews seem to want a step by step algorithm for doing an interview... Or worse yet just want to throw them a topcoder style algorithm question so they can "spend" an hour on the interview and come up with an easy yes/no answer.

I've been conducting interviews for about 5 years and started out doing the same. I came to realize however, that we were rejecting perfectly fine candidates.

Several devs would either knock our take home puzzle out of the park or show us a great portfolio, but then would flub or stumble when the (mostly JR) devs would ask them to implement something akin to a topcoder challenge.

Now, much like we expect devs to tailor their resumes to us, I tailor my interview to the person being interviewed.

If you're relatively new, you might get asked some data structures / algorithm questions.. If you're senior expect to go into great detail about your past projects and design decisions.

There is no process or formula. Interviewing is an art.

My SO is a licensed engineer and there's little or no ageism there... Just as you report, they're valued even more as they age, even if they remain a line engineer.

Your anecdotal evidence counters research data, and hn votes it to the top. How cute.

While your anecdotal evidence is endearing, it is at odds with the actual data that researchers have compiled. Which the article briefly mentions.

You guys really need to move on

* I've enjoyed my bouts of unemployment, because I've had the chance to deep dive into new things I never had the chance while working full time, and I've come out of them more employable.*

It follows that staying in one job for a long period would tend to make you less employable... And indeed I've witnessed this very thing.

Not surprising. I know quite a lot of professionals that took a couple of years off to care for babies and can't find work.

As a corollary, I've also seen quite a few engineers that were just slightly out of date get passed over.

Wow... That reads like a poster for the slogan "it's not what you know, it's who you know".

It's so easy to wrongly screen out senior devs for the reasons you mention. I've seen JR devs want to ask tricky algorithm questions, because that's still fresh in their minds from school... I've seen mid level devs ask the framework gotchas because that's the world they're in...

Coders have misconstrued fizzbuzz into a whiteboard pissing contest because they want a binary yes/no interview framework... But that causes them to miss the forest for all the trees.

Definitely. Having grown up poor and rural, but with a kid that attends a private school in a city, I am amazed at the opportunities he will have that we didn't at his age.

Sure, we were all told we could be doctors or lawyers or industry titans... But we didn't actually know anybody that WAS those things.

Compared to my kid, who sits next to kids that have dads and moms that are district attorneys, nationally known surgeons, oil company owners, etc...

Kids at his school showed up for kindergarten and all but a few could already read. They spend their afternoons doing "enrichment" activities... Compared to the local public school where a sizable number of kids receive remedial tutoring and show up hungry.