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Most people will have worked on laptops that have the software installed that allows them to completely brick the device.

It just makes me wonder what they'll be doing with 1000+ laptops and other devices. Do they expect people to send it back? Probably yes. I'd personally just declare: "I have low money and I had to fire your laptop service, thanks for the work of getting it to me, I'll be keeping it now."

I mean, that's what they do with the work of their employees. "I have low money and I had to fire you and 1000+ others, thanks for the work of making my company big, I'll be keeping it now."

Well, sure. I think they were going with the wave of success and simply didn't stop. I've seen companies grow very self-indulgent because of their success many times over.

The fun bit is that in the USA, you can (almost everywhere) whimsically fire anyone without cause and without any transition pay. So what's to stop a company from just hiring a bunch of people while they're growing, and just kicking them out whenever?

I think they already realised it was out of proportions, but you look really (REALLY!) bad if you fire 1000+ people when business is going well.

You only look slightly less really bad if you do so with an implied reason that you then simply don't communicate to anyone.

20+ Years of experience, most chairs are budget, most screens are budget Dell, most keyboards came packaged with the Dell offer. It's unimpressive 9 times out of 10.

In the rare case you do find a good setup you tend to also see people hijacking your stuff when they get to the office before you do.

Ah, you got me. At least I'm not dependent on other people seeing my material things in real life nearly as much as my hypersocial managers ;)

It's about a whole list of things and many shades of gray between them: control, social needs, the need to be seen, crappy home life, unprepared for a home office, etc.

My managers at work (I'm a software engineer) tend to not have a dedicated office. They have kids running around being noisy and nosy. They STILL dress up wearing nice clothes. And I swear some of them talk about their gorgeous cars for the sake of talking about their cars, especially now nobody sees them drive or park those cars anymore.

They are also very verbose in any sort of meeting and dislike it when people turn off their cameras. I blame their extroverted social needs for this. They got to become a manager because of that social skill and need, and they are working with software engineers who are more toward the introverted side of the spectrum.

I don't want to wake up early, drive my car in traffic jams, find a parking spot, see that someone stole my favourite (but still bad) office chair, sit in an open office full of noisy people, working on shared & dirty keyboards, looking at small budget screens, on desks that can't be adjusted.

At home I have a dedicated office with a sofa. Height-adjustable desk. Herman Miller Aeron chair all to myself. Mechanical keyboard (that doesn't drive other people nuts with its sound) and expensive mouse. Two 27" 1440p 144Hz screens on desk mounted arms. Both of my cats to keep me company. My own toilet all to myself. A fully stocked kitchen. A place to work out. A very nice 55" OLED screen. My coffee machine is all mine (Gaggia Babila) with freshly roasted beans delivered every week. And my office has a view over a park and a large body of water.

Best of all: no office small talk. No interruptions at my desk. And if I realise, during a meeting, that I could just be a fly on the wall and continue working instead? Then I do exactly that, whereas in an office situation I couldn't do that.

I started out web-development in 2001 (recently worked for Apple as a senior front-end engineer), and to me the 4 eras of JavaScript are:

1. Form alerts and confirms 2. Ajax, jQuery, and plugins 3. Frameworks, from Handlebars to JSX 4. Revolution: TypeScript

I remember a time when JavaScript simply wasn't used. Everything was server-side rendered (classic ASP using VB6.0, ancient PHP, Perl, etc.) Eventually it gradually became bigger but its development was stifled by Adobe Flash taking charge of highly interactive UIs.

Then, slowly, JavaScript started to do things. Some companies started working with Ajax and suddenly you could talk to the server while you were on the client. But, for the longest of times, JavaScript was not used like it is today; we did not use it for templating or making components, because we had client-side XML and XSLT doing that with `<xsl:template>` and other such nifty tricks.

XML + XSLT + Ajax + jQuery was the status-quo for many years before we started getting UI libraries. Backbone, Ember, MooTools, and many others started to make life as a front-end developer far more interesting. We went from HTML (and later also CSS) drones to actually needing to embrace programming concepts, architecture, design, and design principles.

We had one big advantage over classically schooled university software engineering graduates: We knew JavaScript, it wasn't type-safe, it was full of little quirks, but it was ours and we had worked with it for many years. We knew it. They didn't.

And then TypeScript was born. At first, it was a monstrosity full of bugs, oversights, missing features, lack of intuitive design, and largely undocumented and confusing. Front-end engineers like myself didn't like it, because WE did not need it. We just saw that those classically schooled professionals suddenly thought they could do front-end, too, except they didn't know about HTML semantics, HTML accessibility, CSS (from floats to flexbox to grid to paint/composite/layout), browser APIs, browser differences, and so much more.

So these... people... came into our domain because TypeScript made them feel safe. They were far slower than us, they made more bugs, the code was unreadable (TypeScript generics are a hell, or in generally accepted TS-syntax: `T<G><A, H>(X<G>)<P><A><<A, B>, C>`) and worst of all, they made everything a `<div>`, including buttons and links and tables and lists and inputs and images.

Then, as the years flew by, TypeScript became more mature (except for their error messages) and it actually became somewhat intuitive to use. The back-end developers who were confronted with the fact that they knew nothing about the front-end have now either adapted and learned, or left, and the world is nice again.

The next big thing for web development and JavaScript is probably going to be the next big framework or library that we don't see coming yet. I love React, I enjoy Vue, I admire Svelte, but I don't think that React will stay around forever (libraries die because developers get bored of them, and new developers think these are getting too old), and Vue & Svelte simply haven't taken off the way I had hoped.

We'll see where it takes us.

In any case, I'll keep learning, I'll keep adapting, and I'm trying to be ahead of the hype train just so that I can keep increasing my $500,000 annual salary (excluding stock options).

The day job interviews for programmers ask "write me a language formatter, you have 3 hours" I'll probably end up in jail. Those things are way beyond my skillset and I'm glad smarter people than me exist. If you're one of those people: thank you. I love you.

Finally. I had a custom CSS plugin setup to do exactly this. Took me 3 minutes to figure out.

It feels like a huge step backward in terms of all of that. It's what Flash used to be, except less blatant security risks I guess.

And I completely disagree with the complaint and his examples. Too saturated makes things look unrealistic and plastic. I prefer scenes that make me think "holy shit, this looks like real life" instead of "yawn, another movie turned into a comic book".

There are ML-efforts underway to make games look more realistic. And they do that by reducing colors and reducing contrast. Because Caucasian people don't look orange in real life, we look a pale beige with a hint of pink.

For stand-alone components? Sure, that's good practice. But if you have a `section` with a `h3` inside of it, there's nothing wrong with using `margin-bottom: 1rem;` for that `h3` element. It's the best practice because it leads to less confusion that way.

The problems he's tackling weren't problems, and his solutions are a bombardment of utility class names in your HTML, rendering it extremely and unnecessarily verbose. It makes the HTML less intuitive to read, too. A `<div class="user_profile">` is clearly a container for a user profile, a `<div class="here comes a shitload of tailwind class names because inline styles are now apparently cool again">` tells you absolutely nothing about what the hell is going on.

I fucking LOVE CSS and Tailwind is an insult to the craft.

Those who love Tailwind tend to not understand CSS beyond the basics, is what I've learned. Those who hate Tailwind know CSS inside and out.

To each their own, but this example from their own homepage makes me want to vomit:

          <button class="flex-none flex items-center justify-center w-9 h-9 rounded-md text-gray-300 border border-gray-200" type="button" aria-label="Like">

Like what the actual flying fuck. This is inline CSS, period. And that's wrong, always. Tailwind makes me mad and angry because I love front-end development, I love CSS, and everything about this feels like a mentally challenged person spitting me in my face. Nothing I can do about it, they are challenged after all, but damnit it's annoying.

Did not get rejected, and I loved working at Apple despite the red tape. The only reason I no longer work there is because I moved to a different continent :)

> And that is extremely arrogant. I would end interview right now. I don't care who you are and how much experience you have, I believe in "no asshole" rule.

I'm not being an asshole, the interview goes both ways. I want to know who I'm working with and whether they practice what they test for.

> You are interviewing to work at the company. The relationship is between you and the company and not between you and the interviewer. He has particular job to do which does not include responding to your out there whims.

Oh come on, stop being so subservient. It's just a company.

The company is trying to convince me to work for them. If they want to know about what I can do for them, I have a lengthy resume and 5+ references they can call.

> He is in a tough position, most likely with much less experience than you and still asked to do a difficult job of judging your experience.

It's not a difficult job, though. Their recruiter can call my references, she can check if I worked at the companies I listed, their technical people can absolutely ask me relevant questions. But if they go into the realm of leetcode nonsense, then I am absolutely going to play that game with them.

And I don't really care if I get the job or not, I can afford to not work for about 20 months if I need to, and if I reach out to any of my on-call recruiters they'll have 5 job OFFERS for me in the next 14 days.

> Be kind to people. Show your maturity by understanding what is the other person's role in the process.

Well, I'm tactful in real life, trust me. My anonymous discourse on a forum like this isn't my conduct in real life, obviously.

> I always remind myself that it is likely every single candidate I interviewed knows something I do not.

That's a real good mindset, and I think it's guaranteed. Many junior developers still teach me a lot every day in my work.

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> Have you ever tried actually figuring out how make it more efficient rather than just complain at the engineers you are working with? Have you always been super pragmatic, fast engineer that can accomplish things at startup speeds? Or have you been just as everybody else, constantly complaining how productive you could be if only everybody around you were not dragging you?

I did.

When I got into Apple I was one of the first to introduce them to React Native for one of their in-store specialist apps that were also customer facing. High requirements for quality. I setup a small team (1 back-end dev, 1 front-end, 1 full-stack, 1 designer, 1 product manager) and we finished the software to the requirements in ~4 months where we were given 12 months.

And I think I'm extremely pragmatic, and that it's in my nature, historically speaking. I'm detail-oriented, fast, creative, and while I have my preferences, I easily change my mind when faced with new or better information.

And if I can't change or improve what I do a company (it didn't work at First American, for example), I'll just leave. I'll definitely try, but it's easy to see unbreakable walls of politics and invested third-parties who just want to write and invoice hours, not results.

A local bank I worked for, too. They promised me the world and gave me "unlimited power" to improve everything I wanted. Turns out, the unlimited power only went up to my own level, and I was still 5 levels below the hyper-social CTO who didn't know anything about the technology we were working with.

I don't like complaining, I like solutions. I bring solutions to the table. And it takes more than just me to get them implemented, especially in larger companies...

Yeah, it's a filter we actually got from management at one company. They were looking for specifically agreeable type of developers. It was a consultancy and they needed to put 5 more developers on one of their big clients, and the client was getting sick of the previous people we had there; they were constantly fighting back against their idiots of managers.

Boss wants employees to write many hours, not have a weekly phone call from the client asking to replace another team member...

Agreeable people also stick around longer, because they think loyalty pays, and agreeable people rarely negotiate a good salary.

My experience with problems that can't be solved with a Google search is limited. I tend to use existing technologies and I stick with an architecture that has been around for long enough to have proper support online.

Still, sometimes I run into limitations with regard to TypeScript, for example. If that happens I'll go over the problem with more experienced developers. It'll be a pair-programming thing for several reasons: two pairs of eyes and two brains see and think more than 1, and you both learn something new, and you both have a little more brainpower available because you want to look good. At least I do my best a little more ;)

> If you're playing that game, are there reasons that you'd ever be copy pasting sorting algorithms from the internet? Why bubble? Don't most programming languages have libraries available to help (especially python)? I work in an area with very little sorting, but I can't imagine myself doing that in a higher level language, or even in C.

It's a silly example, I don't care what algorithm we're talking about. And no, many languages lack any sort of built-in sorting solutions. JavaScript (front-end and Node.js), for example, requires external libraries for performant solutions.

And Booking, now also twice. What can I say, Apple was fun. Stayed for 12 months and then I left.

> If someone ever responded like you say you do at the start of an interview my notes would read something like "lots of great experience, seems incredibly intelligent and skilled, total pretentious a-hole".

Well, I wouldn't act like I write on an anonymous online forum like this, obviously.

So far I would say that most of my ex-colleagues would describe me as someone who is quiet, listens well, makes lots of notes on a paper, has a fancy pen with ink, and is surprisingly non-hipster despite all that.

I'm very involved with helping other developers in my social network getting the most out of job interviews and salary negotiations. I know the right ways of getting the most out of performance reviews and how to nail an interview that would otherwise make one uncomfortable.

But, point taken.

~250 Candidates? Sure mate, I'd be surprised if at the end of your application process 5 of them remain and are still available.

Companies are having a very hard time finding software engineers. For the first time in the history of the market, employee retention budgets are skyrocketing because recruiting is so expensive and hard. It's not rare to hear software engineers getting a sudden 30% raise out of the blue.

Because they know we're in high demand, and they know that if we switch jobs we'll get a 30% raise, at a minimum.

I'm not a badass, I am just laying out a baseline: I know what I'm talking about. That's all. And no, many companies don't have 1k applicants that are qualified. They have 5000 applicants in the SF area, 4900 of them are unqualified, 80 who are qualified can't write English, of the remaining 20 candidates only 8 are still on the market once you reach them, 4 pass your filters, 2 accept a job offer, and only 1 of them shows up.

That's far more realistic. In today's world, we're not looking for jobs, jobs are looking for us. Desperately so.

> It goes even further than the "difficult to work with" vibes. If someone has 20+ years of experience and hundreds of interviews under their belts, they ought to know about candidate caliber variability and the meaning of standardization practices, aka why interview panels are setup the way they are.

Most interview panels are setup badly. Most interviewers are biased. Many technical people doing interviews just want to make themselves look smart.

A company shouldn't have one interview process, they should have several. Some do well with live coding, some do well with take-home assignments, others do well with pair-programming. All are valid ways to show skill. And each can also be something that makes the candidate incredibly uncertain and stressed.

> As an interviewer, I might even entertain the idea of going along w/ said "two-way interview" charade

It is always a two-way interview. It's not a charade. You sound extremely entitled and elitist just by saying that. The candidate has 5 other offers waiting for them that aren't being a pain in the rear like you.

Don't "entertain the idea", you are applying to the candidate as much as the candidate is applying to the company you work for. Get over yourself.

Absolute nonsense. In a field where very experienced people are in high demand, they'll bend over backward to offer you the job. I have references and a long history of employment. I'm not "negging" them (also, grow up), and refusing part of an interview when THEY are the one in need of talent, well, that just means they change their recruitment workflow, or lose out on talent.

I am not difficult to work with and I have a real good track record at applying for jobs, and getting job offers. Anecdotal, sure, but when an applicant gives me a good reason why they feel a certain part of the interview isn't helpful to either one of us, then I adapt. Especially if that person already got through the recruiter and tech-review filters, that means they are good.

Nowadays, with 20+ years of experience as a software developer behind me, having worked for Apple, First American, Bloomberg, AT&T, Booking, Amazon, many startups, etc. my job interviews have never been easier.

Before I am presented with a dumbass interviewer who throws a ridiculous question my way about algorithmic stuff, I prepare them: "Since we are both seeing if the other party is competent, I want you to know that I want you to also solve my questions. They will be slightly more difficult than the questions you pose to me."

When I applied for a job at Toptal this made the algorithm-test disappear like snow before an up-close nuclear blast.

I've interviewed hundreds of candidates over the years and I would never ask a question I can't also answer from the top of my head, in detail, and then some. Turns out, most technical interviewers who ask you "write a bubble sort" couldn't do it themselves.

And if they could, it'd be full of bugs. I mean, I'd rather have developers on my team who Google "bubble sort python" and go for a tried and tested open-source solution. I don't need developers who can reinvent complicated wheels from scratch; I want developers who are efficient.

Likewise, I don't want to work for a company where developers pride themselves on over-engineering their things.

Having worked at Apple, it doesn't surprise me one bit how slow they are developing simple features and fixing simple bugs. It's a red-tape hell full of not-very pragmatic engineers that are way too smart for the good of the company.

If math was a programming language, all mathematicians would be fired for terrible naming conventions and horrible misuse of syntax freedom.

Honestly, most math formulas can be turned into something that looks like C/C++/C#/Java/JavaScript/TypeScript code and become infinitely more readable and understandable.

Sadly, TypeScript is one of the languages that is attempting to move back to idiocy by having generics named a single letter. Bastards.

A Reddit post from a few years ago explains pretty well why PHP has such a terrible reputation: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/5tqoqa/web_devs_wha...

PHP should have chosen to undergo a rebranding a few years ago, if you ask me. The stigma it has to deal with is probably unsurmountable and will be forever. If you think PHP, you think WordPress and Joomla, and that means "hacks and vulnerabilities"...

It's a good language nowadays, with quirks like any other language, but I still have one big problem with it: There are too many "PHP developers" out there, and most of them are very bad, and many of the good ones are from poor regions in the world and you can find them on Fiverr doing kick-ass work for a grand total of $50.

I'm a seasoned front-end engineer (20+ years of experience, working closely with UI and UX designers, worked for the big names, etc.) and I recently had to enter an invoice into a system and I couldn't figure out how it worked. The "SAVE" button was greyed out, and it didn't have a visible :hover state, and the text was light grey on a slightly-darker grey background. The mouse cursor was the normal pointer, not even a hand. So I never assumed it was a button I could actually press.

Imagine if someone like me gets confused by stuff like that. Less-seasoned people wouldn't even manage to understand a UI like that at all.

Worst finding I noticed was that because the UI looked so amateurish and outdated, I also didn't dare to click on things out of fear of breaking the system, which would cost or delay me a month of freelance payment if I messed things up.

Bad UX and bad UI are absolutely killing. And unfortunately, many of these companies (the one in my example included) don't give a damn. This company pretty much has a local monopoly on this kind of software. Their backend integrates with numerous (outdated) payment systems and nobody else does it like that. They can get away with it because people don't have alternative options; so why would they even consider spending tens of thousands on improving the UX and UI?

I'm seriously considering setting up my own product to replace theirs. The frontend looks simple enough. It's just the backend that worries me.

I live and breathe CSS and have since its inception. Having interviewed job applicants of all levels for front-end positions I can only say, boy oh boy, most people seem to think CSS is arcane magic.

Yeah, most restaurant owners, regardless of the number of Michelin stars to their name, aren't rich at all. Nor are their top class chefs. You'd make more money working in IT and your hours are far less stressful.

If you want to make it big you need to treat it like a business, like Gordon Ramsay does. He owns 23 restaurants (maybe more) all over the world, his name is known by many, and the income from tv-shows would pay the bills by themselves; they also serve as advertisement for establishments with his name attached.

The few restaurant owners I know who make a good income here in Amsterdam tend to own more than 5 restaurants. Some have their own branding going on, some just take care of the business side of things. And even then I think it's a whole lot of work and stress for relatively little pay.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Shit, for adding an array of objects with numbers just use a simple map/reduce instead of confusing future developers with your fancy curry.

Whenever I run into a curry, I can usually solve the same issue with a simple for loop that makes it instantly clear what the code does, always.

Treating the symptoms, no matter how clever, isn't going to cure the disease. But it might give us enough time to actually get to the cure.

I always wondered how large a satellite we would need at the ideal spot between the earth and the sun to block a portion of the sunlight in order to cool the planet down a few degrees.

Not that it would solve humans being a cancer to the planet, but it would give us a few hundred years to get to a solution before billions of us find ourselves in some sort of post-apocalyptic world.

The government isn't preventing anything, it's a free market. The only thing that needs to change is to prevent companies from buying houses meant to be sold for ownership who then rent them out instead. That is working against the people. The law would work for the people.