panda_person

I initially read that as Fog Creek the company was soon to be going out of business.

I downloaded the RTM through Dreamspark, because Dreamspark students get a free Windows Store account (I have some asp.net and WP7 apps I wanted to port over to Win 8). Turns out, you still have to submit a credit card even if you have a Dreamspark account, which instantly turned me off.

My impression of Academia was meh, since I think the last thing the world needs is yet another social networking startup. We shall see I guess.

"I don't view the low proportion of women in tech as a serious problem (I think it's determined by the typical obsessions of twelve-year-olds)."

Which also has to do with sexism and gender roles in society.

"However some other roles in IT might be better for women to start, like BA and QA and project management where frankly they excel."

Yeah, that's not itself sexist or condescending or anything...

Here's an example from my own experience: There's a significant number of trans women who work in tech. And almost all of them started transitioning as adults, in their 20s and 30s. So, they had the "benefit" of male socialization growing up, and being encouraged more to dabble in computers/tech/engineering. Much fewer trans men (and non trans women) in tech, it seems.

Also, the number of women historically majoring in CS dropped off significantly in the 1980s, when 1. Video gaming culture started to take off and 2. Hardware (something seen as more masculine) started to be emphasized more often. Like, programming historically was something women with math and CS degrees did, then I think there was a greater influence of hardware and tinkering with your hands that was part of being in tech. Stuff that is traditionally seen as more masculine.

I agree totally with what you say. She really doesn't have the experience in age or diversity of tech career fields to base her opinion.

Women are underrepresented in tech, and that is a big problem. Just look at college CS classes, hackerspaces, meetup groups for various programming languages, etc. I think that in a lot of bigger companies, there are institutional pressures to keep this stuff on the downlow, but are more prevalent in startups.

Life isn't a perpetual data structures class.

Yeah, but they are really important to know for interviews. Which of course may or may not have anything to do with the actual life of a developer, but that's life.

Why is the software development interview so radically different from the kinds of conditions a developer actually works under? I mean, I can't imagine someone on the job struggling with code, but only being able to look at a printout of it rather than in an ide/debugger, unable to look at a book, the internet, or ask someone for advice, and having a strict 30 minute or so time limit to figure out their problem.

I remember reading a thread someplace (I think here or at reddit) that criticized the traditional software developer interview process. One person made the suggestion that the reason why a lot of companies ask more...bookish knowledge that seems like its from college homework/final exam, is that they don't want to admit that what they do is relatively mundane, and doesn't really require the daily application of the kind of thing you find on your data structures or operating systems final exam. So, they add complexity to their interview questions, as well as their development process, to compensate.

Does anyone know if traditional, "real" engineering fields, (civil, chemical, mechanical, etc) ask detailed, technical kinds of questions during interviews, like software engineering is known for? I find it hard to believe civil engineers get bombarded with all day grill fests by other civil engineers about technical questions in interviews, but I really don't know.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat, and I can't stand startups that advertise for unpaid internships (which is what this would be). My guess is that they are either totally unaware, or deliberately flaunting the laws against unpaid internships (where the intern is getting paid nothing for doing substantive work). I've seen ads like this all the time on craigslist. Pretty much the only people who can afford to apply are wealthy kids who just graduated, need experience, and can have mom and dad pay the bills. Not paying interns makes me think even less of startup culture than I already do.

My 4th gen iTouch with 256MB RAM simply runs too buggy and slow to enjoy iOS 5

The moral of the story is to simply not update older Apple devices. My brand new 4th gen iTouch was slow and buggy a year ago running iOS 5 right out of the box-I don't see why people think its worth the risk updating.

If by healthcare do you mean all employees who work in hospitals (including many low paying positions), or more prestigious, higher paying positions like RNs, MDs, etc? And what about dentists and other allied health fields?

I agree totally with everything you said, I'd just add that I think companies are outsourcing the training of new employees, often, to college internships. Which is great if you are at Stanford and have lots of connections that implies, not so great if you are a community college student or at bumfuck state u

Everyone is a beginner at some point.

Austin is hipster central-its where all the young RoR and JS devs go to do startups during SXSW. Don't know what that has to do with transit, and I'm pretty sure Seattle has more transit than Austin. Oh well, that's the problem with crowdsourcing.

Part of the problem is that affluent tech workers want to have their cake and eat it too-everyone wants to live in cool, trendy neighborhoods in SF, and commute to their fancy jobs in the Valley. The problem is, its often a pain to get from those neighborhoods in a time efficient manner to a Caltrain station. Which...I"m not sure is a problem, since public transit in San Francisco (MUNI and BART) exists for more than just getting tech workers to a Caltrain station.

There's also the radical suggestion of people actually living near where they work, or (horror of horrors) people living near public transit and taking that, rather than fancy private buses.

Um, that was a sorta counterfactual post-I'm very familiar with that website, and I'm pretty sure it was merely a hypothetical, and that Clem and most people there prefer Caltrain. Which is faster. Roomier. Has restrooms. And you can eat or drink.

But isn't this the way it is in tech? No one cares if you have a solid grasp of the fundamentals that rarely (if ever) change. Its all about knowing the trendy platform/language du jour. Which, I'd think, is a bad thing-it encourages people to hop onto fads to learn in order to get jobs, but I'm not sure if it really encourages people to learn fundamentals.