zippy786

Couldn't agree more. Just selling the "Wow" factor. In reality, most talks are baseless, same with startups. Some do manage to make millions just by selling the "Wowness". A whale buys the product and dumps it.

It's even worse if your messaging was not off and you did not reply. That shows the ethical ground you stand on. No matter how many applicants you have to reply to. 100 is not a big number anyways!

Welcome to the age where people only think about writing software and releasing fast, and frameworks allowing to do just that. Then you see people trying to solve problems like N+1 query. I look 10 years back where there were not many frameworks and you would laugh if you talked about resolving N+1. Everyone tried to touch DB once and fetch everything in 1 query. It seems many people are doing things when they don't know how the underlying technology is working. This is bound to happen. And many new devs are picking up on bad practices and think they know too much..quite depressing actually.

I try to keep my carbon footprint low. I don't have or want to own a vehicle. I mostly walk or take public transportation.

> * compassionate engineers are most happy when then can do engineering, money is secondary to them

This has been stretched too far. Remember, if they are even remotely good, they will know their value. Engineering is what engineers do, that's the basic requirement. Without healthy compensation, good luck retaining. They can always be more compassionate towards hobby projects or open source.

Programming is about typing less, writing small and smart code that is hard to break and requires thinking. I never understood why fast editing in vim matters for good programming. You can pretty much do copy paste, replace or refactor using any other editors.

Not at all. I know many in early 30 who are junior programmers.

Is it you who is defining the legitimacy here ? Let's not ask questions that would lead to proving something like x^n + y^n = z, only when n = 2. In order to show this is true you have to show it is not true for all n up to infinity. Quite a rabbit-hole and difficult. Has been done, but is this truly worth it in an interview ?

You should feel bad for being one of those who would end up dragging interview process to hell.

You've definitely added an angle that I've not thought about. So true. Quit motivation keeps growing! Thanks

1-2 hour interview, if you can't know the person in that time then you suck at interviewing. During that you can ask some conceptual problem solving questions, resume questions. Please trust the resume, if you find someone lying you can fire them. Another is just give them 1 day to solve what you want them to do in real life. Some of the companies already do this.

Quit whatever you are doing. No work for couple of months (may be even a year), only fun stuff like movies, sports, exercise, good food and may be even light non-work research if you are into it.

I'm actually in the same boat as you are and am planning to quit my job and do nothing, starting next month. Just gaze at stars from high altitude and realize that this world is big. Job and stress are small things that should not matter in one's life. Then one day you might wake up and find motivation to work less, earn more. At least I hope to do the same.

I've been in the industry a while and if a company/recruiter uses tools like HackerRank for recruitment, I simply ignore them and decide not to move forward. I think we as a software industry have been following a bad hiring practice. If you can't tell your fellow colleague is smart enough by having a tech-talk or giving something that's not a test-format, there is something wrong with the process or people doing the hiring. Also, it is hilarious how many times an engineer has to prove himself/herself, and after being hired at these places I've also seen that the people who do the hiring are not that good/competent themselves, although this may vary in some other place.

You can easily convert a dvi to png.

https://www.ctan.org/pkg/dvipng

Could you elaborate why you wouldn't take a 3x more pay and could still program, do whatever you like in your free time. I'm at a stage of life where I'm trying to identify "nay" sayers and "yay" sayers who would go to extreme and forge logic to either say "nay" or "yay". I just thought your answer was a bit borderline there from my perspective.

Send it to me with requirements, I'll do it for 500$

I guess the question is really why is it that only businessmen make the bulk of money. Is sweet talking, managing, being social and creating hype really needed to make money even in this age of Internet.

If so, most salesman would be billionaires ?

This is so true. If you are very unhappy and working hard, you may also be leading towards a burnout. A corporation (big or small) does not have a heart, always think about yourself first because from experience I know a company will do the same when time comes. Do what is right for you and your health. When you try to make a decision for yourself, don't forget to put a price on the happiness that you will get when you wake up every morning. Sometimes all it takes is a month or two of happiness and a change and you start doing amazing things for yourself again.

Ruby/Rails might be great. Not so sure if it is the easiest way to earn. A bloated opinionated framework will be difficult for new comers to grasp. PHP would be the easiest.

Seems like managers do things that are not justifiable and get away with it, whereas brunt work is done by engineers. Managers can't be trusted then, because they can get away with it ? So who is to decide if the consequence to let someone go, block raise/bonus is not because of the need of the company but because of the greed of managers ?

That's why it is justifiable to treat an engineer as a tool ? And since you brought it up, let's start one on science/engineering solutions vs. management. Obviously you think the later is harder, I disagree.

The very premise that an idea will get you money is BS. I guess this is a cultural change and there are those who love it and those who hate it. I fall on the later and miss days where startups in garage could bring down huge corporation and it was all about building. Now, it seems most startups are part of a big corporation via funding and we mostly get to see a plethora of names ending with "ly" or an "xyz" clone. So, on paper they say stop thinking about money and yet everything becomes about it. A bit of a double standard I would say.

Don't you see tight coupling between two components/roles which may be bad ? Of course, for management it's less money they have to pay so they will always prefer a one man doing everything scenario.

Did you miss the time between 1:30 PM - 4:55 PM. Shouldn't it be 5 hrs. ?

Pair programming eats up so much time. If I'm just given a list of tasks, I usually work 7-8 hrs at work (1 hr. break). Return home do an extra 2-3 hr. non-work related coding.

> You present this as reasoning but, doesn't make it wrong.

In essence you are trying to say Rails philosophy is right and the other one is wrong ? This is exactly what's wrong with Rails too much opinionated that it makes me want to puke for it is promoting pseudo-science. Give us fact about any of the philosophy Rails uses, I remember, making too many SQL queries is "just fine".

People who are smart and cunning are dangerous and there are plenty of them out there. Technological feat is not enough in software industry as personal interest and politics is prevalent. If you really despise these things, it's better to think ahead and come up with a plan or work for yourself.

The thing is you always have to deal with people, it's a team effort in the end. After a certain point, you get sick of even trying to state your opinion because people so avidly follow a certain book/someone/language/OS/paradigm and everything else is secondary.

> Thing is, it's pretty easy to code for a machine. It's REALLY hard to program in a way that other developers can understand you.

I feel this statement is way too subjective and has been used very often in the industry in a negative way. Just because one does not understand the depth of the problem or style doesn't necessarily mean the style is bad or the solution is bad. I first realized this when I picked up AOCP.

> OO can definitely be overused, but honestly 99% of the problems I face are people just writing unmaintainable, procedural code.

I've seen unmaintainable OO code and maintainable procedural code.

> OO can often be less simple (harder to read all at once) but that's the trade off we devs need to balance when writing code.

And it's often vague when rules of maintainability pops up somewhere and people try to pick that up. Suddenly, it feels like there is no need of "Science" in CS.

> I don't want to sound condescending but is it possible you are making excuses for learning hard things. Maybe it's the people you work with who are pushing it down your throat the wrong way.

May be it is the people but then you have to deal with people in the industry. Not too sure about what you mean by "hard things". The hardest problem I've faced at work was the interview question (in a Fortune 500).

I used to love low-level graphics programming (drawing polygons, fractals), closely worked with people doing kernel stuff, have a CS degree in Machine learning, doing infosec for fun and have dealt with quite a bit of distributed/system/database stuff to scale.

After some time, these challenging stuff have the same problem, being mundane. Specially constraint of work environment and people you have to deal with. Plus some of the "coolest stuff" just blows up with overfitting and seems to be a mere hype to me.