pleasecalllater

And one day someone will invent sticky body. Oh, wait, it is called flash :)

Yea, maybe you are right. I was not writing about her intelligence... but I wrote 'blonde'. On the other hand, I would no write about the color of her skin the same way, and I'm not sure why.

Unfortunately, I cannot edit my first comment.

No, it's not. I was just a description, maybe you should change your attitude and stop judging people by their look.

But my career progresses... but not in the management way. Just imagine a surgeon (who loves cutting people :)) and a hospital looking for one. Do you think it's OK to fail a great candidate just because she doesn't lead people?

Btw. going this way it looks like everybody in their thirties should be a leader. Who are they going to lead then? If we have a team of 10 great programmers, one will be a manager or a team leader... does it mean the rest will never find a new job because of that?

And side projects... a family, kids, jobs, and side projects - choose three of them unless you forget about sleeping.

"Hey, I'm a great surgeon, I love my job, in my free time I make operations on other people for free, I don't sleep, but here you have documentation of my free work. And no, I'm not going to work for you for free. And yes, I'm going to work for free after work. Oh, you ask about my kids. Who cares, I have my free work to do".

Yea

Yey. What a great list... OK, not great. I have almost all of that in my CV. Does it help? I'm not so sure.

That's hilarious. In medicine, a 30-year-old MD is too young to make some more complicated operations alone. In IT a 30-year-old programmer is just too old to be hired.

The funniest interview I had was with some blonde girl in her twenties, who read through my CV and said: "Oh, you see. We cannot send your application to our client. You see, here I have hundred of applications from people at your age, who are managers in their thirties, and you are not. There is most probably something wrong with you." And it was a position for a programmer, not a manager.

And it was when I was in my early thirties, not forties.

Currently, I'm almost 40, and I seek only for remote work (family issues). I have been paid for programming for the last 14 years. I had different jobs like sysadmin, dba, programmer; using over 10 different languages.

And despite all that searching for work is really hard. Usually, it stops at the recruiter who is only interested in an answer to "how much do you want to get?". After that, there is no counter offer, no negotiation, nothing. Sometimes there is an answer like "you want too much, but don't negotiate at this recruitment step".

When I get to the technical part of the interview, I usually get some Yeti-Level programs to write. Yeti-Level, because you are not going to write anything like that in those time restrictions in that jobs. A good example is implementing a program which gets input from a file, in the input, there are domino tiles, and a function needs to match them and find the longest chain... all must be super optimized from the beginning. And you have 5-10 minutes to do everything, including reading the task description, examples and writing tests.

The funny fact is that this company is searching for candidates for months. The sad fact is that due to such strange recruitment process, good old experienced programmers will starve.

I really think that I did very bad choice with my career. There are so many other jobs where people are not removed because of age, and experience is really appreciated. In IT you just need to accept that companies want young inexperienced kids, who want to get little figures, but a game room is a must.

Could you tell me what was the last problem you had that an IDE couldn't do, and vim/emacs could?

Well, none of the pages I saw asked me to allow them for storing cookies. They just inform me about the cookies and the ways I can use to remove them.

I think there is just one sane choice: I'd use the one that I know best, and the one that has huge number of users (which means it's more battle tested).

In my case it would be Django + PostgreSQL.

OK, fine, so I just won't travel to the USA anymore. I'm sure I don't want my laptop to end like my suitcase (which has been seriously damaged somewhere between the Europe and the USA airports).

There are so many more interesting places in the world. If the USA doesn't want my money, I think that's not my problem.

The problem is different, this question is before any interview. This is the main main thing they want to know just before any technical talk. I wouldn't name a short call with some non-technical person where I just read my CV an interview.

That just made me a day. My searching for a job is generally like this: I send a CV, then there is a short call (or email) with this one question at the end: "How much do you want?". Then I usually don't want to reply, but I got convinced with "I cannot go with you further without this information".

So I give them some number, usually something like I'm getting at that moment.

Then I get no reply or "we cannot pay you that much".

The last time I got that from a huge international company, where I really wanted to work. That company has been publishing the same job offers for the last year. I wrote something that I expected maybe some proposal from there side, etc. The answer was really funny "we are not negotiating salaries at this moment of the process".

And all that was even before any technical interview.

And that company is still publishing the same job offers :)

So I'm really confused. I have over 15 years of experience in many different areas, and still the recruitment process is so broken that only sometimes I can get to the technical interview.

Heh, usually when I get a stupid enough idea, it turns out that someone had that before :)

Cool, so I will have backup data in NSA, and Microsoft. Do you think it's possible to recover my data from their servers easily?

Looks like 'my data' will soon be something strange, and suspicious.

As I was looking for some remote job in UK, Ireland, and USA, I noticed that the salaries in Europe are generally lower than in the US. No much lower, but there is a noticeable difference between $120k in US, and $80k in Europe for the same position, similar company, and contract in both cases.

I use the simplest thing like Google Analytics

My blog also doesn't get too much attention. And it was always like that. I was writing in a couple of places, a couple of my blogs, and on a corporate blog. My most successful blog post had about 10k of visitors across the first year.

I also noticed that the average session time is about 2 minutes, sometimes is just too short to read through a blog post. So I assume that people come there just to get a solution to a problem they have, not to read through all the text.

Another thing is that over 70% of my blog entries are from two posts, a tutorial like ones. And this is only because someone found them informative enough to place a link on stackoverflow, and some other places.

At the very beginning I wanted to earn on the blog enough to work only on the blog. In reality that's impossible for a technical blog, and instead I just treat it as an interesting part of my CV.

I think those cats need some upgrade. If they are not compatible with XFCE that's rather not XFCE's fault.

The only reason is that if you don't answer, you won't get the job, because there will be someone who will answer. And this is sad.

My experience is quite bad with such companies. There are some huge ones, who are mostly remote, and the first question is "how much do you want to get". I answer, then there is no negotiation, and I usually want just too much (which usually is what I was making at that time). They don't also want to talk with me about any different figures, there is no counter offer, nothing. This is really sad, seems like they don't care because they have an endless pool of talents to hire.

But then it seems like that's not true, as the companies are posting the same job ad for the next months (or even years), and cannot find anyone for that position. And people from those companies cry that they cannot find programmers. And forums keep filling with comments about their stupid recruitment process.

It seems to me that the companies which want to talk, and negotiate the salaries are winning, and can find people.

For the question about my current salary, I answer that my contract doesn't allow me to tell that. If they insist, I ask them if, after getting me hired, they would like me to tell my future employers how much they pay me. That usually ends these questions.

However I don't have any good reason not to answer about my salary expectations, but it seems like I usually want too much :)

I must write such an article on my blog. Some clickable title like "37 things I have learned during the last 37 years"...

The list would be quite short:

- use Postgres - don't irritate your readers (e.g. with autoplay videos, sounds, making accounts to read anything) - make the page lite (with terribly small usage of javascript)

(then repeat the above 12 times) and the final thing would be:

- just read some books about programming, learn KISS, YAGNI, DI, OFA (other funny abbreviations) - and use it

Come on, autoplayed videos? Just respect your readers. I have my music in my headphones. I'm not going to read your website if you don't respect me. No, changing my browser with some autoplay-disabling-plugin doesn't convince me to read what you wrote.

Yea, I know that most probably the author won't read it :)

So to be honest they should rather change job descriptions from "employee" to "slave".

This is something that companies should pay attention to: knowledge, experience, will of learning. And that's more important than age, sex, location. However I doubt that it will change.

I hope the botox thing is a joke :)

I heard that mainly from recruiters working for huge companies, so huge, that I couldn't apply directly, as they had outsourced all the recruitment so some external companies.

On the other hand I'm not from the USA, and what's worse - currently I need to have only remote job - which makes searching for a job even more hilarious.

The funny problem is that when I was 32 I heard from one recruiter "Oh, so you are still a programmer? I'm sorry, we cannot offer you sending your cv to our client. You see, we have hundreds of cvs from people of your age, and all are managers, so if you are not, then there is something wrong with you".

Yea, 32 years old programmer is just too old, 32 years old surgeon is usually too young to work alone.

I keep on learning, I have accumulated lots of knowledge working in different areas of programming like system administration, database administration, programming etc. I have been payed to program using over a dozen of programming languages... At interviews I still hear "oh, you know, I'd love to have experience like yours"...

And I still hear "you are too old". What's more funny - people are not embarrassed saying that. Even though that's illegal where I live. Writing "we want to hire a woman/man only" is also illegal, but people still write that, and no one reacts.

I'm afraid I will be totally unemployable in a couple of years, just after my 40, which will come too soon. And I don't want to get into management only position (which is also hard, as I cannot get a management job "because you haven't worked on such a position, and you are too old to start that".

That's hilarious, but on the other hand that explains a couple of things like a-brand-new-hyped-technology, which is just a rewrite of what we had 20 years ago.

Hey, just a couple of ideas:

- arrow keys are not moving the visible cursor (although they are moving the cursor position, backspace removes different character than from the visible cursor position)

- why not a command for opening a pdf from the command line?

- provide a page for non technical people, so they can see something without the command line

- add more help info

- why not pdf in console text output?

- a the beginning there is a question "do you need any help", when I just answer it with 'no' I get error

Yep, they definitely will. My blog posts usually make my job interviews easier, as usually I hear "oh, we have read your blog post, so let's omit some of the questions we usually ask".

Another funny thing is that you never know which posts will be popular. On my blog three old posts generate over 70% of the traffic. Some people have found them informative, and linked on a couple of pages.

Yea, that's true. This is the most important part most programmers forget about. You need to know SQL to be able to fully use any ORM. It doesn't mean that you have to write SQL when using an ORM.