justinlau

It's a new low for Microsoft to use MSDN as a corporate mudslinging soapbox.

I would like it if HN included a short description field, so that I'm not clicking articles with opaque linkbaity titles like "Stop fucking coding", and "You're killing yourself".

"Beauty, usability, and performance aren't mutually exclusive concepts on the web. It's just that most clients only care about the first one (until the site has already launched), and most designers don't have enough knowledge of the second two."

And clients are usually only qualified to care about the first trait.

TRWTF is that this a site like this already and is hillllarious: http://www.thedailywtf.com/

Just kidding. I suppose there's a niche for shortform "sighs" too.

Exactly my reaction!

Investing yourself in the topsoil of shiny new technologies instead of sending roots down deep will set you up for rapid obsolesence. My CS program taught the latter, and it's served me well for almost a decade.

This too. It's much too easy to lift source from somewhere else, or hire somebody from India to write code on your behalf.

I generally don't trust anything that I can't verify firsthand. Stated experience gets a guy in the door for the interview, but their performance during the interview is all that matters to me.

I can't believe how many people here are averse to the idea of demonstrating coding ability in an interview.

Github doesn't reflect the amount of time that somebody put into writing that code. It doesn't reflect how long it took for them to iron out bugs from a poor initial implementation.

My experience is that correctness AND speed both count when a person is developing software. I'm sure you guys have worked with people who are really sharp, can talk the talk, but just flail around helplessly in an IDE, constantly solicit help from their neighbors, and burn up milestones doing very little. I want to make sure that those people don't get hired.

I also want to know that these people are going to use idioms that aren't wasteful, that their naming conventions are sane, that they are being thoughtful and methodical about their implementation rather than grafting edge cases onto edge cases.

I, too, would love to see a list of questions that I should avoid asking in interviews. :)

Getting responses about those projects isn't interesting. By now all the answers you will give will essentially be committed to rote memory, so the interviewer won't be seeing any actual thinking going on. It's also hard to gauge which contributions came from you, or from the people around you, based on your responses and your resume -- most people are happy to steal credit if they think it won't actually hurt anybody.

When you eliminate the reblogged duplicate content, that stream would just be a trickle. ;)

The search results are a hell of a lot better than they were a year or two ago. Content farm results, gone! Thank Jebus.

Awesome. Good times, good memories. Lots of my BBSing was done on slower modems, though - it would be cool if you could render them as an animated GIF with regions slowly typing into view... :)

Complex carbohydrates and fiber rich foods won't spike your blood sugar (and subsequently your insulin levels), so you can last for longer without eating more food.

You can't totally trust your own code, either. Look at all the buffer overrun vulnerabilities that have been found over the years.

A lot of the listed services are redundant. I think I could hit 99% of the same functionality at half the cost using just a subset of those products.

It's not the old code that I'm talking about, it's more like newbie programmers not being fully aware of their limitations. They might put up code that they think is hot shit but is actually laughable to experienced people.

Or maybe that's a good thing - it helps prevent potentially bad hiring situations from happening?

Most of the JS development that I've seen happen is done by people holding their nose and refusing to properly learn the language's idioms, or by people that wish they could be writing in another language that abuses JS as a glorified bytecode interpreter.

I agree that it's a pretty awful language. I wish it weren't the only choice in web dev (and resent the HTML5 zealots that chafe at any attempt to go beyond it with new languages - LOL, as if HTML5 was a real standard to begin with!) But it's there, that's reality, and the good programmers need to deal with it.

Coffeescript makes it a modicum less terrible, but it's Yet Another Language to learn, and people that are already burdened with maintaining more than just the FE stack, like myself, are getting pretty tired of context-switching between all these languages and mini-frameworks-with-adorable-nonsensical-names.

I disagree with the push for newbies to overshare on Github. Some of the code I wrote when I was learning how to program in middle school was completely awful. I'm pretty happy that it's not used as a representative sample of what I am capable of today.

It's one thing for a recruiter to say "hey, I saw you have a GitHub account..." It's quite another when the recruiter forwards your profile to a seasoned engineer and they make a DailyWTF post out of your code!

Also - you've received offers out of the blue, do you mean offers to interview, or offers to just join the company w/o interviewing?

I'm surprised that you're surprised. Read the comments, it's pretty unambiguously spelled out here.

I don't think Dan shares a direct financial stake in the targets of his punditry like MG, MA, and SL do.

Money makes for a powerful conflict of interest.

Good piece. I think of Arrington, Siegler, et al. as the Swift Boaters of tech journalism. They just throw FUD everywhere and they never clean up after themselves.

What's this now?

I do agree with the main thrust of article, but also think he and Michael are big hypocrites for complaining about it. TC is and was the Fox News of tech - all controversy and sensationalism, zero real discourse or educated insights.

They helped make this beast.