peterhi

I've seen (and still use to a small extent) a templating language like that. The real exciting thing is the documentation! There is none, so you scrape through the existing codebase to find one that is doing the sort of thing you want to do and copy it

Doesn't help that the interpreter for it was not written in a language we use and it is stuck on a particular version due to some bytecode libraries we don't have the source to

This looked nice. I really want a keyboard that changes it's keycaps when I change language. But then I read this bit "all your settings are saved automatically to the cloud"

WTF! My keyboard requires cloud access?

No. Just no

When I work in an open office I am always been up to date with what is going on. We have been able to squash problems when they were small because we could overhear people having problems with the systems. Problems that would be too small to bother us with if we are working from home. Communication in the office is quicker, we can get to the root of something fast. People who might known something will overhear and chip in

Lots of small things get fixed and fail to grow into big things

When I work from home I get uninterrupted focus on the task at hand which is something that is almost impossible in the office but only get to hear about problems when they get big and urgent

I also feel that I am dropping out of the loop. There are too many messaging systems that I need to keep an eye on, email, chat, texts, whatsapp, slack to keep in touch. In office communications is basically email for clients or in person

If I have a solid piece of work to do the office is not the best place but only if you can do it by yourself. In the office I can see when I can or cannot interrupt someone. When working from home I have no idea if it is a good time to interrupt someone

But for me the open office is only 12-15 people. Large than that and communications become impossible and the noise to signal get worse. Also managers seem to do more 'managing' in bigger offices :(

The chain is still the same length when centralised and may be weaker. Separate services would use separate databases but it would make sense to consolidate resources when centralised

If you had separate services the CI service database going down would not affect anything else. A centralised database for all the services will take down all the services when it borks

If your priority is profit or cost management then duplicated infrastructure will make no sense

Write shallow code, code that is the simplest solution for the problem

If the word "architect" springs to mind then you are doing it wrong

Data aggregation. Scores, stats and tv listings from multiple suppliers covering almost all sports worldwide. As B2B for people who don't want the hassle of doing it themselves

The problem with mental models is that they are domain specific. My domain is sports data, solving problems is easy because I have 10 years of experience and a cookbook of models (can we say patterns) to apply to any given problem

Good mental models == Lots of experience

I suspect that the senior that interviewed you would be out of his depth if he moved into another domain. I definitely would. But then again having lots of experience helps you identify the patterns - sorry models - quicker and recognise the problems that you will need to guard against

"Building mental models" sounds like a deliberate cognitive act. To be honest it is more like recognising which part of an existing system would best fit the problem and what changes are need to be made to get a better fit

Which kinda makes it sound a lot less glamorous :)

Anyhow let me repeat:

Good mental models == Lots of experience

I'm 57. A self taught generalist who's been paid to do this since the early 80's

What keeps me going? There is just so much interesting stuff going on with computers - how can you ever get bored :)

There are a lot of people better than me, also younger than me, but I can still knock out solid code. I think not thinking I have mastered something keeps me going. There is massive churn in languages and technologies, all my COBOL / FCS / IBM Mainframes skills are consigned to the dumpster but they help me learn new things like C / CP/M / MSDOS / Assembler. Which got dumped for Unix (not Linux) / Macintosh (pre OSX) / Prolog / Lisp / C++

I'm now doing Python and Ruby on Rails and learning Nim and Virtual Reality

What a time to be alive!

Age discrimination - can't say I've noticed it but I've always expected to be judged by my abilities not may age. Perhaps I've been lucky

LinkedIn is just an online CV for recruiters to find you by. The one you submit should be tailored to the job you are applying for

The CV that lands on my desk will determine if you get called for an interview. One or two sides of A4 is all you need. We only look at Github if the CV is interesting enough

If your CV says 'I have a CS degree' rather than 'I am a programmer' then I'm not going to look any further. I have employed excellent programmers this way. Only one of them had a Github account. None wrote blogs. Didn't even look at LinkedIn

Github can be interesting to see what languages you work in and what topics you found interesting when satisfying your own needs. But I will only look if the CV makes me think that it will be interesting

Github, LinkedIn and blog posts are merely supporting documents for your CV. If the CV sucks then it goes no further

Unless I have copious free time (and I don't) then I'm not going to browse 130 Github repositories and wouldn't known from Adam if they are forks or not (unless they were all created close together). Thus I cannot trust the metrics from them either

LinkedIn, blogs - not exactly reliable sources of information given they are what you are saying about yourself. We've had candidates list the number of Instagram likes they had as if it proved anything. Sold some t-shirts on Cafepress, wow you must be an incredible developer / entrepreneur then

I have seen some amazing code in a Github repository that the candidate couldn't explain to me. I suspect it was a joint project that someone else was a major contributor to

So yes I will want to verify / test your abilities

But personally I read a CV and then talk to the candidate. Worked well so far

The other example would be the Kin phone. A feature complete working phone that Microsoft decided needed to be rewritten from scratch to use the Windows Mobile / Phone stack

It took 18 months and nearly $1B to rewrite only to find the market had moved on. Canned and written off

I can imagine a situation where Microsoft thinks that GitHub would benefit from being re-implemented using Microsoft tech. Rewriting in APS.net, using Microsoft Login, integration with Office 365. The whole enchilada :)

It would take years, cost billions and, at best, deliver exactly the same experience as GitHub today

Worse case would be that GitHub stagnates during the rewrite as the alternatives spend their time and money developing new features

Lets rephrase that shall we "Why would they acquire Nokia just to turn on it and run it into the ground?"

It doesn't need malice but Microsoft have a talent for this kind of thing

Same here. I am a bot with 84.7% confidence

Dread to think how they came up with this

It's was like that in the 1980s. There was always good money to be earned in Law or Accounting but for those without the drive to study IT looked like easy money. Met many a failed accountant that thought all you had to do was sit in a nice office, drink coffee and poke the keyboard occasionally. Over time they moved into project / client management

Which, sadly, explains a lot

Icon was a language I used in my youth. It took me a long time to unlearn some of the very neat features of the language.

if 1 <= x < 99 rather than if 1 <= x && x < 99 and a host of much more natural expressions

Which would be fine if all sites used the same rules. But I often find that I can only find the rules when I break them. Such as "password too long > 16 characters" or "cannot include a space character" (why not?)

From the 70s to the 90s I changed jobs about every 3 years. Since then the shortest was 7 if you exclude a dot com bubble that exploded after 2 years

Presently heading to the 9th year in this job

There are two issues here. Firstly is your perception that they are 'quite mediocre, or above average at best' - this is your problem. Looking down on people for being less than yourself is not an admirable trait, something you seem to share with them.

The second issue is the other person 'tend to put down others who are more humble/less confident in their skills'. This is a what you would call a jerk (or arsehole in UK parlance). This is the issue that needs fixing. Are you in a position to call them out on this? Not necessarily official manager type position but pull them up each time they do it.

Someone like this could be seen as a bully and making the workplace unpleasant for the quieter / more humble members.

Their skills are irrelevant, if they were the most brilliant programmer in the world this would not excuse such behaviour.

No one asked for Unity, it was just dumped on us and later iterations became harder and harder to remove. So I jumped ship to Mint.

Mir, don't know. What problem was it supposed to solve?

I live in Brighton and work in London. I leave the house at 6h15 to be in for work at 9h00. I leave at 17h00 to get home by, around 19h35.

Pros: What the actual job is, the industry sector and the pay

Cons: Guru, Ninja, Rock Star and Passion. I am 55 with a shit pension and your 'Uber for salads' is not something I am passionate about. Never will be.

Complete put off: Other than the cons is reading the ad and not knowing what the job or company is about. If you can't spell it out your are either incompetent or deceitful.

Problems. We have more things that need to be done than we can ever possibly do. So we get to pick the problems we feel are the most important and simply have to solve them - however we want :)

There is not a lot of money to throw around so we can't go crazy, but that is what makes it such a challenge

Some things fail, some things work but don't amount to much but we have enough hits to keep the business ticking over.

Love it!

When I started in the late 70's the "horizon" was being 30 years old. There were almost no pure programmers beyond that age, they had all gone into management or consulting. It was quite scary to see your preferred career path stop short.

Then home computers (ZX81s, Spectrums, VIC20s) came along and created a new field. After that the internet happened and everything took off again.

I finally got into management at 52 purely based on the fact that I was the longest serving engineer at the company (all of 4 years) when my boss left.

I'm 54 now and the work is not slowing down. Changing jobs would probably be an issue as I have to give two months notice and that would be a pain for most potential employers and is not something I look forward to but lets stay positive here.

Age is a state of mind, for all parties involved.

The question about CS students is "were they self taught before they got their degree". Most who had no interest in computing before they got their degree seem to remain that way - a CS degree was seen as a way to earn easy money.

Most people who were self taught and then took a CS degree did so as part of their self teaching.

The rest just couldn't hack accounting or law :)

Yeah, I realise what I suggested was a hack. But simple word counting is so error prone that the real answer is not to use it.

I am curious if the word 'not' was in your negative list, it is quite a difficult word to handle. "I was not disappointed" against "I will not do that again".

Have you looked to see if you are having runs of negative terms? "bad" counts as 1, "fucking awful" counts as 2. If you are getting runs of negative terms perhaps you might score them as 1/1 for the first term in a run, 1/2 for the second term, 1/3 down to 1/n. Of course given these are journals then perhaps such phrases are unlikely to occur :) Unlike on twitter and the comment section of blogs.

Could it be that the style of writing is producing this bias? I am reading a book on statistical inference and it is continually pointing out how not to use the techniques because they could lead to erroneous conclusions. I suspect that it would score badly with simple word counting.

Word counting can be pretty ropey but there are some things that you should check out. Of the 1800 negative words how many of them actually occurred in the documents?

Or you could simply count negative words as 0.44 rather than 1 (800/1800 if those numbers are correct).

Is "not" a negative word? This might be causing problems with things like "This cake is not bad" which has positive sentiment even if it has 2 negative words

Personally I am still open to persuasion. However I am greatly disappointed when people say they have found God when all they have done is join a religion.

Finding God seems more of a life's work rather than "read this, wear these and you are good to go"

Well this article is over 4 years old, which is positively Paleozoic in language development terms. But I am sure that the discussion here will be equally out of date.

Can we have less of these sort of articles please, it was a waste of my time skimming it.

The problem with his description of his achievements is that he is probably underplaying them. Obviously without knowing what he has actually produced (seen the site, reviewed the code etc) I was hoping to make him see what he has done in a better light. "Spent two years converting a static website to something more modern" sounds really lame and could indicate a lack of confidence in what he is capable of or perhaps he is failing to recognise what he has actually done.

His CV needs to get him an interview and I think he is selling himself short.

Personally 'junior' means 'trainee'. Anyone who after five years is still a trainee would have their CV thrown straight into the bin. But I have always worked in environments with very flat hierarchies. Juniors need supervision and mentoring, I expect anyone who been employed for more than a year to be capable of unsupervised work.

Disclaimer: I am the IT manager, I review all the CVs, I get to say who gets employed. I've yet to regret any hiring decision so I am reasonably confident in the methods I employ.

I've employed people with much less experience than the poster and they were up to speed in no time. In 5 years you could get a degree in almost any subject and complete a masters on top of it - at least in the UK.

I would expect competence in a programming language in weeks or months, not years. Note I require competence not expertise.

Not wanting to be brutal but if you have 2 years experience of anything then you are no longer a junior. Maybe not actually a senior but certainly not a junior. Junior is like saying trainee. Stop thinking that you are junior.

You seem to play down your accomplishments "Just converted some existing HTML(static) sites to dynamic(developed a simple & crude cms like interface to edit the content on the website). I also made some simple web services"

Lets rewrite that for you:

1) Rebuilt existing site into a modern Web2.0 dynamic website complete with it's own CMS to make the sites easier to maintain for the users. 2) Developed webservices to allow the content of XXX easily accessible by other services.

If your CV is like this post then it needs a makeover.

You are not a junior anything, you are an experienced ASP.net C# developer!

Building on your ASP.net and C# skills will provide greater benefit in the short term than becoming a noob in a whole bunch of other technologies.