synnik

A big sincere thank you to the author for giving concrete examples of why this is bad, instead of general fearmongering and ranting.

I'm 21 years into my career myself, so the web is younger than my carrer. At this point, I do full stack development as well.

And... I think you are taking on more than you need to for the discussion at hand.

If you are an excellent JS programmer, you don't need to keep up on the latest libraries. You can code what you need yourself. Sure, maybe you do something from scratch that could have been done with a newer library, but the 10 hours you lose there is more than made up by not having to do those 15 hours a week keeping up.

Likewise on your other tech points. Constantly churning your toolkit doesn't speed you up. It slows you down. There is a balance to be found where you keep up "enough", but still focus the majority of your time on delivering work.

I choose to spend a day or so each month trying to keep up, then roll with what I know for a while.

Likewise with some of your other activities. Meetups and business models? They may help you be a consultant, but that is adding yet a 4th role to the topic at hand.

Many of your other points also apply more to a consultant than a heads-down designer/coder.

In general, it sounds like you are trying to be an even rarer breed. More power to ya, but it may be overkill for most people.

I had a course in grad school in which we wrote our own database system, including having to calculate the storage to disk... as in, calculate the sectors, and where you had to break fields to a new sector, and read/write the raw binary data to/from the hard disk.

I have not really had to re-learn file IO since then.

Clearly there are new things to be learned... (do usb sticks even have sectors?)... but having that low-level experience tends to be more than enough for a front-end web developer.

Good. Convince all your peers to do the same.

You are missing the point. There are established mechanisms for change in this country. I grow weary of people acting like we need to rise up and take drastic action, when most people have not even gone through our established processes.

And the new bosses can change. Obama's election was the result of almost nothing other than: "I'm not the status quo." And he won.

So vote out every incumbent in the next election, and the message will get across loud and clear. Maybe the next generation will start with similar problems, but they just got told clearly that if they want to keep their jobs, we want CHANGE.

And politicians do what it takes to get re-elected. A clear message that change is desired will change this country.

Like, vote in the upcoming elections?

This article raises red flags on the author's credibility. This looks less like a truthful account of a story, and more like a frustrated small company who had a partnership go bad, and are trying to defame their partner.

A whole web site, with linkbait headlines, set up to tell one story? Their about page doesn't even say they are trying to start a discussion... it just rehashes the story. With a few other pages to give a token appearance that they will tell more stories later.

I am sure there was fault on both sides, and I am equally sure the other side would have a vastly different story.

But this whole site sure looks like juvenile vengeance.

If you complete phone screens on 1 out of every 10 inquiries you send, you are doing very well in my opinion.

If those phone screens do not turn into full interviews or offers, that is a statement on how they went, not on company responsiveness.

Frankly, I don't think your stats show a lack of response at all. I think they are very reasonable, as some level of non-responsiveness is natural, when you account for the fact that you gave them enough information to summarily dismiss you from consideration if you don't match their needs or culture.

I also wonder what may have been different if this was not placed in the context of a very public experiment. How many of the purchases were political statements?

I think the same model needs to be employed, without any commentary, to get a true measure of the mechanism.

Some suggestions:

1) If you are going to suggest such a massive scope of changes, offer to help instead of just dumping a list out there.

2) Check to see if the poster on HN is actually the author of the article. Doesn't look like it in this case, so you may be talking into a vacuum.

3) I love that timeline widget. But it is one of the most un-intuitive and complicated things I have ever seen. I recommend re-coding its functions into a simpler library vs. adding even more complexity to timeline.

4) Dependencies can get evil. Your suggestions add quite a lot of complexity into footprint of plugin. I fear that the end result might look good to a coder, but be a bit of a nightmare to actually use in a production environment.

This may be the best example I have ever seen of a great idea that has been completely destroyed by a horrible choice of implementation.

Highcharts' zoomable graphs are a killer feature at the moment. They are not difficult to use, and I use them to show 30 days worth of data (2880 points per graph) in my monitoring apps. They work on mobile and web out of the box, too.

I'm unlikely to even considerer another library until they match that feature.

I don't see a serious problem with a low retention rate from reading HN articles. I do not come here to memorize every item that flies through... I probably read 50 items a week on HN, but the reason I come back is for the 2-3 items per week that make me re-evaluate what I am doing, and cause me to do it better.

Could you set it up so we can input our own Facebook ID instead of having to grant your app access?

I personally have the entire app platform disabled on my account, and do not intend to turn it back on.

Asimov hashed through all this quite thoroughly in the Foundation series.

But it is always interesting when we catch up to classic sci-if and work towards actual implementations of what was pure imagination only a short time ago.

Whether or not non-friends can message you is a privacy setting.

People are missing the underlying root cause of the lower quality programmers in India -- Culture. There, upward mobility is the goal, not being the best programmer. People take a programming job for a year or two, then look to "advance" into management/leadership/etc. So the result is a large number of junior programmers.

That, in turn, is why you need to give very explicit instruction, and why much of the work needs a lot of QA.

Knowing this also makes it a lot easier to interview firms or individuals, looking to their own personal motivations to see whether they match the overall cultural trends or not, and thereby you can build a better team.

The fact that you keep jumping in and defending yourself after every negative comment makes you look like you are seriously lacking confidence.

Nobody is questioning that you believe in what you do and are doing well at it, and enjoying your work. What we are questioning is your methods.

Let me put it into perspective (my perspective):

If you want to donate $2000 dollars to heifer.org for each employee, just do it. Don't put it in my name. I have my own charities, and would prefer to make my own choice.

Don't buy me a bike. I am disabled and that perk just slaps me in the face with it.

Don't buy me beer. I do not drink, and find the implication that drinking is required for your culture to be a little creepy.

Don't say that I am getting $2000 for R&D. That is pocket change for true R&D, and makes me worry that not only do you not handle budgets well, but that the companies future innovation funding could get messed up in HR negotiations.

The bottom line is that most of your perks scare me. Not because there is anything wrong with offering them, but because it shows a severe lack of empathy for the diversity of people in this world.

When I first saw his headlines a while back, I had the same question...

But there is a very reasonable answer - he is bringing to light a gap in the availability of bone marrow for his particular ethnicity. It is not that he is personally more important than anyone else... it is that he, and others like him, are under-served. Using his connections to raise this issue not only helps him, but should help anyone in his same situation.

Yes, it is ridiculous. They are ensuring that they get people who are interesting... and all the exact same flavor of interesting. It feels juvenile, even if they intended it sincerely.

Maybe they are find people, and maybe it is a fine company. I have no way of knowing. But this approach does not appeal to me, personally because is feels like it is trying too hard.

Just be smart...

My favorite bad example is a former kung fu teacher of mine. He was in a motorcycle accident that put him in a wheelchair a number of years ago. He recovered, mostly. And I always had sympathy for him, assuming he was a safe rider.

That is, until he told me the story, and it started with, "I was going 120mph in the left lane on on the LA Freeway one night..."

Don't be that guy, and you'll have much better odds.

This may or may not be true... it is an example of the old statement that I learned in martial arts"

There is a vast difference between having 10 years of experience, and having 1 year of experience repeated 10 times.

The reason there are often few differences between a 5-year career and a 10-year career is that most people find a niche after a few years, and comfortably sit there. But if you can find someone who spent 10 year actively learning and broadening their skills, never settling in... those extra 5 years are immensely valuable.

Some of us are working full-time on renewable energy projects - my company is one of them. The US may not have a policy in place, but the Senators we have met with are supportive of our efforts, showing us where more general business policies can be helpful to our business.

FYI, the problem with developing renewable energy is not the actual energy production itself. Every inventor out there has a "better" turbine to try, The barriers lie in regulatory limitations and the massive amount of capital needed to build out projects.

As a hiring manager, this does not make sense. Why should I pay $50 just to make initial contact with one person, and then still have to do the full recruiting and interviewing process?

Recruiters will do all that for me for free, and pre-screen everyone, so it is the same net result to me, at least on the front-end of the hiring process.

FYI, answering this question here isn't the point - your site needs to clearly tell hiring managers why it is better for THEM. You won't get a chance to open a dialogue with them when they view your site.

Clearly, since it IS the top comment, HN as a whole disagrees with you.

I believe that discussion about appropriate language and communication styles is very applicable to HN. We're trying to be a better, more insightful discussion board with higher quality than other sites. Better writing is one way to do that, so it seem like a perfect discussion point.

I do think this is a better idea than the existing boards. But I won't use it yet. I would be interested after it has traction --

1) As a hiring manager, I want a broad pool of talent to select from. That pool does need whittling, but how do I know that your selections match my specific needs?

2) As a developer, there is a ton of work out there. It is nice for you to filter out the fluff, but the price to me is that my competition is stiffer. If I'm so great that nobody can compete with me, I don't need this site in the first place.

Again, great idea. But you have to execute on getting broad adoption before it will truly be worth something.

That isn't exactly how it works --

It is a valid argument for raises, especially early in your career. But at some point, you are no longer selling your personal value to your boss - you are competing with other programmers who are willing to give the same value for a lower salary.

To get past that point, you need to have specialized business knowledge so that outside programmers cannot compete with you.

The trick to getting very high salaries is to decrease the pool of competitors for work, by increasing specialized knowledge above and beyond your coding skills.

According to the article, he does take weekends off to relax. And 16 hours a day is not unrealistic, if that is all you do. No kids, no family, no friends, no TV, no games.

If you have a passion for your work, and no life outside of work... sure, it could be done. Not that I have any desire to try it.

This has been tried before and discussed before.

The problem with it is that it sends a message that, "I am more important than you, and nothing you say can possibly be important enough to be worth keeping."

Now, maybe that is even true. But slapping people in the face with it isn't a good habit.

I'm less interested in what college students think about office work than I would be to see what changes they may have (or not) after 3 years of experience.

I'm not disputing the results... I've just noticed that a few years of experience tends to temper attitude a bit, once people learn the reasons behind various policies.