michaelvkpdx

They sell all those Rand books in Portland, at Powell's. Every one of them. It's no wonder that Portland is a hotbed for libertarian thought and free market propaganda. It's awful. Don't move there.

Did you know it's legal for anyone to sleep on your sidewalk in Portland? And where are they going to the bathroom? It's terrible. Don't move there. Go to Beaverton if you need to move to Oregon. But you'll be sorry. Stay away from Portland. They'll take all your stuff and the police won't help you. They are in cahoots with the street criminals. It's awful. Don't move to Portland.

SOMA is So Mach Better than Portland. You can meet other people who work in your field. No one looks at you weird when you get on the bus for work. You can get a real burrito. You can find a bathroom. Don't move to Portland. It's awful.

No toilets anywhere. They are into that composting thing and they think it's all fertilizer. It smells like a mix of rotting feces, pot, and body odor. Horrible place. Don't move there.

Oh it's terrible. There are no toilets. Even though open carry is legal there's crime everywhere. It's horrible. The suburbs are so much better. Lake Oswego is a nice place. None of those dirty anarchists or loud musicians or street thugs. Portland is what happens when you let the inmates run the asylum. It's awful. They'll steal your laptop, key your Tesla, spit in your latte, and defecate on your front lawn, if you can even find a house. Otherwise you'll be in a condo where 8 people in a rock band live next door, smoke pot all the time, and play loud guitars. And the weather is terrible. It's awful. Don't move there.

Portland is terrible. Don't move here. There's nowhere to park. There's homeless everywhere. There's no real tech companies. There's no VC. And the air smells like pot.

Don't move here. Trust me. Stay in California. You think it's bad but you have no idea what happens here. Your children may be kidnapped by Sasquatch.

Did you know that meat might even be illegal in Portland by 2019? And they still listen to rock music, cassettes, and guitars. Don't move to Portland.

Disgraceful anarchists. Car hating thugs. Dirty homeless people. It's terrible. The author has no idea how bad it is.

They don't fluoridate water. You can't pump your own gas. They shut down roads for cars and only allow bikes. It's going to be illegal to drive your own car. You can't do anything to your property if there's trees in it.

And there's hippies. Real smelly granola types. They all smoke pot all the time.

Don't move to Portland. It'll ruin your life. The homeless are everywhere.

If your mindset is $$$ first it doesn't matter where you live. We have a ton of valley expats here in Portland. The ones who are really artists and creatives at heart and work to subsidize their outside lives tend to thrive here. The ones who just want to live more cheaply end up miserable because this is not California North.

Wanna move to Portland? By all means come on up! But leave your dot-com privilege and your "live to impress VC's" mentality back home. Come to Oregon and be an Oregonian.

Also- if you're attached to your car, Portland is not for you. The commutes from the 'burbs are as nasty as the Bay Area, and the inner city is made for biking and walking. Your car is good for the weekends- getting to the Coast and the Mountains- but not for your work week. Change your perspective on commuting. This ain't CAr-ifornia

Note- I said "weekends", meaning Saturday and Sunday when you are not working. If that is a foreign concept to you, Oregon is not for you.

The dream of the 90's is alive and not just here in Portland!

I'm still writing Java to make money to buy music. Just like the 90's.

Perfect, bug-free software has economies of scale.

There is no such thing as perfect, bug-free software.

Once you start getting into any sort of maintenance, bug-fixing, feature creep- you lose all of the economies of scale of perfect software and replace that with the expenses the author discusses in the article.

This is only new for people who did not grow up in poverty. For those of us who were below the middle class, the daily competition to avoid last place was a fact of life in school and in college, and those behaviors and scars don't heal easily, even after you've escaped the pit.

Upward mobility is not completely a myth, but it's a dream akin in actual probability to making it in professional sports, at least here in the USA (in my case, growing up just across the Bay from Silicon Valley).

"Trickle down economics"- aka "Reaganomics"- the great dream of the Republicans- has exacerbated the situation over the last 35 years. I wonder how I was lucky enough to get out.

The rich don't need to keep the poor down, sadly. The poor do a good enough job of keeping one another down.

You still need the capital to feed, clothe, and shelter yourself. If you don't have a hereditary source of wealth, you need to work for that, and if you don't have enough wealth to pay for the education necessary for a living-wage job, even working won't be enough.

Software is still made by people, and people have basic needs, and if you don't come from a family with sufficient wealth to support you, you have to work your way through.

In the USA, you have to do that in a nation that does not open doors for you based on birth, despite the myth the feudalist-owned media perpetuates. This is a feudalist society, the most feudalist society ever known to man (at least in the preserved history).

"Step 1: Spend less than you make...You don't need to be from a rich family to do these things."

Uh, in the USA 2015, you do. Or you need to be a very lucky lottery winner. Living-wage jobs are not available to all, and you need a modicum of education to secure one.

That education is no longer free.

Remember, in the post-WWII USA we live in a feudalist society. If we lived in a true capitalist society, with societal mechanisms in place to keep wealth circulating, this wouldn't be a problem.

And we'd still know how to get to the moon, too.

Strong typing, declarative code, containerization, microservices, reactive systems...trendy?

I've been doing all that in Java for 20 years. Break out the flannel and turn on the Oasis CD... The dream of the 90's lives on in this Portland coder's trendy world!

Thanks for the posting. The article is dead-on but it misses one important contributing factor- the rise and mass acceptance of the "disrupt" culture. It's become acceptable, desirable, even lucrative to use Internet technology to jump into lives, right into people's faces.

If most people had realized what they were signing up for when they first slipped in a phone in their pocket- that every greedhead who could figure out an HTML tag would eventually be able to use that phone to interrupt any part of their lives- I think most consumers would have thought twice. Now, they're all addicted to the endorphin buzz of "likes" and are quickly losing the ability to seek for themselves.

Idiocracy rules! See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

And of course Idiots Rule. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrUUd-30Bzw

Related- my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9999817 (Ask HN: How many non-techies are employed in software for every engineer?)

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9999935 ("On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs")

Thanks, but that's not really the question. I'm trying to find out how many non-techies are supported by each engineer, and my hypothesis is that the number is increasing.

My hypothesis for US companies is that the number of non-techies supported by each US citizen engineer is going up at an even greater rate.

Your comment is based on the assumption that engineers cannot do any of the non-technical tasks a company has, and as an English major who is also an engineer, I think that's a false conception being perpetuated by people outside of engineering.

And a corollary question: how many US engineers in US companies are employed for every non-techie? My experience has been that the more non-techies come on board, the more inclined the company is to offshore development.

Greedy advertisers + good Javascript libraries used by bad Javascript developers= end of the Internet we loved

The Valley will be the next great ghost town. 30 years from now, most of the current offices in SJ, Mountain View, and Palo Alto will be abandoned because people will be sick of the suburban lifestyle.

Plus earthquakes.

I'm looking forward to random shots of wildlife from the marshes infesting FB's abandoned old Sun campus in 2050.

Silicon Valley refugees and people complaining about Bay Area prices, please note that this is 100% true. Portland will be completely wiped out within the next couple years by a giant earthquake followed by a Sasquatch Apocalypse.

Don't move here. You will die. But please visit and enjoy your stay!

Love, Portland

Most of the problems of coding interviews can be solved by good reference checking. Code problems in isolation will never expose how a developer will do when faced with real-world issues, users, QA, and teammates.

Why are people so afraid to pick up the phone and talk to references? I'm always happy to give out my references, and always delighted to talk about the good devs I've worked with, with specifics about what they've done.

Standardized tests don't work for schools and don't work for jobs.

Without any demographic data about who the interviewees were, this is basically useless. Are they all under 30, white and Asian men? Where?

My takeaway- the VC's have leveraged the money from their successes to create a vortex that sucks in money from consumers, into privately owned companies, back into VC pockets, and back into more companies that get more people to spend more money.

The tech vortex that is sucking away quality of life from the middle class and padding the billionaires (and large company) bank accounts. Throwing out a few bones on occasion (fewer and fewer) to entrepreneurs to keep the vortex going.

Vortex is the opposite of bubble, but it does the same thing to the life of the average person.

I learned a dozen new things in the first 100 lines or so, that will save me hours, and I've been living in bash for 20 years.

Thanks for this!

But wait... didn't the "What Is Code?" thing say that Java is just for white-collar IT workers? If you've got Node.js, why would you ever need Java?

Yes, I'm being sarcastic.

My first reaction to this... the document says "We are owners of each and every feature we build", but who is "we"? If I write a feature, am I expected to own it throughout the lifecycle?

It's easy to hide behind "We", and easy to say "we isn't me". I might suggest something like "I own everything I build and everything my teammates build". That eliminates a whole class of avoidance and excuses for bad code.

Overall it's a nice distillation of general corporate engineering teamspeak but I didn't grasp anything new or enlightening. This document would be pretty easy to ignore if I were in that group.

Replacing staring at screens with experiencing life.

Teaching our youth how to learn for themselves from experience, rather than Wikipedia and Facebook and social media du jour.

Talking to people in person rather than through screens and wires.