boblebricoleur

here is a testimony that motivated me to try and stop like you are : https://thinkfaster.co/2019/02/quitting-alcohol/

When I tried to stop drinking in college, I used to fill empty beer bottles with water to drink at parties. This helped a lot with social pressure. I reckon one could do the same in a pub if the bartender is understanding and discrete, but I never tried it.

Reaper is awesome. I've made a lot of my (bad) music sound very great with it !

I've used it for more than 10 years, and it's my go-to DAW ever since.

I'm sure there are people out there that are impervious to feedback and believe they have all the answser.

I've also seen countless of young engineers starting to welcome managers' feedback and "showing" their will to improve. Then, gradually,noticing their management incompetence (technical and/or managerial) and start "saying" stuff to avoid confrontation.

Self reexamination and accepting feeback is great to improve but what if the feedback is just plain wrong or contradictory ?

A lot a "sayers" in your team can be a red flag for your management skills.

My experience is exactly the opposite. In the market I've prospected (France) the applicants have leverage because there is more positions than candidates. Even if there is a lot of candidates, there is a lot more positions. There is even more discrepancies beetween available positions and qualified candidates.

Even if there was not, once a company has eliminated 99% of the candidates and put their mind to hiring you there is a good chance you have a little leverage at negotiating your salary.

I don't think the author work the same jobs than I do.

This is turning into a "I'm self taught and I can code juste as well as the next CS graduate" debate.

I totally agree with that proposition. The degree is not a sine qua none condition of competence.

My point was that success stories about kids making a lot of cash on a self taught developer skillset are pure and simple lies. They hide the truth to those who really want to get into the IT industry and make a living with it. That truth is : work your engineering skills if you want to build cools things.

I said make a living. Not get crazy rich. Engineers don't get crazy rich. Salesmen (and salewomen) do.

People that did not have the ressources or desire to go to uni would get a lot more encouragement and from real developer tales : stories about smart engineering, beautiful UIs, dedication to a craft and passion, or even sly hacking.

Instead they read stories about skilled salesmen. The stories are not even that good. Glengary glen ross and the wolf of wall street are much better.

Indeed, and the fact that unskilled engineers with good business skills can and always climb to the top proves my point : those success stories happen because the kid is a good salesman not because he taught himself software engineering.

This does not prove you can make money by learning some wordpress overnight but still the article pretends exactly that. The average worker with average sales talent will have to present real skills to an employer to get hired. Those real skills take time to develop. It's evidently possible to get them outside of Uni but it takes times and effort. Guidance by experienced people reduce time and effort to learn a skill. That's the whole point of schooling btw.

Those article say "I taught myself how to code and became rich by offering the world an awesome product". They should be "I'm a very good salesman and I became rich by getting people into buying my software".

That software is maybe good, maybe not. Mostly not. Second law of thermodynamics teaches us that you can't beat a 30 year old experience with an overnight schooling, except if your father is zeus or someone like that.

What does make a self-taught special?

Maybe is the US the college debt is a problem but they are a lot of countries where education is not as expensive. I attended engineering school for 200€ a year plus help from the government for accommodation.

That degree got me my first job. And the next. I started with zero debt and I do not come from money. I am very grateful for that. I would probably not have attended a 5 year college if I had had to get into debt.

Of course encouraging people to try and get in the IT industry even without a degree is good too. I thought I said so in my comment. I am in no way a college elitist. I know not everyone can go to uni.

My whole point was that the truth of what it is to code for a living is hidden by those kind of sensationnal articles. Those who want to get into the industry are not encouraged to work on what matters (ie engineering skills instead of fancy frameworks) and end up disappointed with their opportunities or their skill set. CS universities tend to push students toward developping an engineering skill set.

I would really like to see people without a degree that want to improve to be encouraged to do the same instead of being encouraged to read 3 wordpress tutos and start selling their skills by manipulating small business owners into spending money they don't have.

I trained developers with and without a CS degree and I always nudge them into improving engineering skills.

Everything you wrote is true and in no way disagrees with what I wrote.

I think you mistook my A => B assumptions for a no B => no A which is a flawed logical reasoning.

Since these articles seem to be putting a cash value on the word "success" (or at the very least an instagram buzz value), I would point that IMHO, most of this success comes from people skill.

You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does not mean your product is good,useful or well-designed. It means you're a good salesman.

Congratulations, you're making money by manipulating someone into giving you their money. Awesome ! Thanks for playing, please leave.

I guess the point of the website is to encourage people without a CS degree to learn programming. That's great. The disctinction beetween CS graduates and non-graduates seems to be very unfruitful IMHO so encouraging people to pick up a computer is cool.

What I would sugget is to stop promoting sensationnal stories like the kid that is making 15k$ a month. This is purely manipulative and dishonest. This kind of journalism is plain wrong. Even if the number are true (which I highly doubt) encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. Getting a degree is the best chance you have to becoming good at it. You can still be creative this way.

More, maybe encouraging good engineering (or craftmanship whatever you want to call it) instead of instagram buzz and money would make tomorrow's software a little less frustrating to use and a little less bloated.

I would love to see a story, just once, with the title "this guy made a beautiful piece of software, and it's awesome"

Harari won't do. Too contoversial and opiniated. Not factual enough.

>OOP is considered by many to be the crown jewel of computer science. The ultimate solution to code organization. The end to all our problems. The only true way to write our programs. Bestowed upon us by the one true God of programming himself…

I've litteraly never met any one praising OOP like this. Even if the intent of this introduction is to overly to make a point, I find it flawed.

> OOP attempts to model everything as a hierarchy of objects I never heard of anyone trying to use a hierarchy where it wasn't adapted

> The real world has no methods The real world needs to be modeled into something that can be computed by our human Mathematics. That's the whole point of modeling.

I'm waiting for the 'Functionnal Programming is wrong, let's go back to coding everyting in asm' post in 10 to 20 years

I feel hn experience is awesome. Everything is accessible with one or two clicks. I never wait for something to load, never pest against it because of some obscure behavior. It's simple and efficient. The content is perfectly served. No frills. Even on mobile I don't really feel the buttons so hard to click, even if they are tiny. Maybe we don't use it the same way.

To clarify, with "human evolution" I mean paleoanthropology and such. A study of human species from a very long time ago to a not so long time a ago. A study of both their biological and social relationship.

Above security concerns, I'm worried about installing a custom theme made by someone who would choose such difficult to read color pairing for their own website.

We could have website-centered search engines. You ask the question on whatsthatquote.com and find out if someone has already asked it. If yes, you have your answer, if not someone answers and no one is annoyed. Stack overflow does that. You don't get ridiculed for asking a quesiton on so that has already been asked on another website you don't know of.

I guess that would be the age of smaller communities centerd around a few websites only? Maybe, I don't know if we can consider google as enabling a real global community as of today. I pretty much browse around the same websites. Anything I want to find without a precise source of information in mind, I use google and stumble upon ads and ads and sometimes ads, but rarely an answer.

I sometimes still search stuff manually browsing through websites indexes. Some things are difficult to find with keywords. Equations of which the name you forgot. Movies with a plot so generic billions of result would be associated with it on a search engine. That piece of music of which you could write the notes on a sheet but don't remember the title.

> Your question belittles the literal billions of dollars and millions of man hours that have gone into making the current and previous implementations of Google's search engine

I don't think this question belittles Google's work.

I feel saying that would be like saying that animals that chose to live on the land were belittling millions of years of evolution in the water.

People working at Google chose to spends their time building a search engine for the world wide web, fine. That does not mean that sharing information accross a network has to be done via { world wide web, google }.

All of this is purely theroical of course, but I'm sure someone more creative than me would find another solution. Maybe not a solution that would exactly fit OP's description, maybe not a solution that would be practical with the current infrastructure.

But a solution that would render Google as-is obsolete ? Yes, I think that would be possible.

You, sir, are a modern-time knight

> Companies do code testing because they have encountered so many candidates who look good on paper, and may even be able to talk about computers convincingly, but can’t actually write a program when asked. Any program. At all.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this and it's just semantics quibbling but maybe talking about computers is not talking about coding ? I've never met someone able to pass for a programmer when they are not. I've always felt just asking candidates to talk about their last or favorite project help catching a glimpse of how they think about software problems.

Little anectode : my brother is the first software engineer of the family

Father : "Son, what kind of computer should I get ?"

Son : "I don't know much about choosing computers"

Father : "Don't you write software for a living ?"

Son : "Yes, exactly"

I see. Thanks for the clarification

My point was : node is just a web server and npm just a package manager. There was countless before, there will be countless after, we will continue to code with or without. I have worked with a few technologies and in a few industries and package management is always complicated. The nature of the package management tools are not that important.

The passion that this kind of topic seems to unleash looks like the consequence of a terrible fear a loosing control over an irreplaceable tool. But no tool is irreplaceable : if you can't/don't want to(for political reasons) use node, npm or even javascript just use something else.

That just it. I have no opinion about who makes money from what. At least, not in this thread.

As "life finds a way", I believe packages will find a way too.

If npm stops being the go-to solution, another one will take its place, naturaly adopted by the community, following the path of least resistance. Centralized or not. It does not really matter. What does matter is the code that's being downloaded. Modules dependencies management is an old problem, countless of tools have tackled.

Is the node and front projects architectures that dependent on npm ? It's a little coupled but not that coupled ? The dependency management still require a little brain power from dev teams, or does it really fully relie on the package managers ?

Yes. That's why setting trap in some countries is a strictly regulated activity and lethal or harmful traps are almost always forbidden. You can't always catch what you intended to, so you have to give a way out to the guy you caught by mistake. Snares without a stop are harmful by design.

Browsing the internet today is so exhausting.

I would add one more rule "make sure your user has to perform at least 37 clicks before accessing your ad riddled article"

Yes I thought about it.

That's why I insisted on the difference beetween imprecise and incomplete.

> I do not mean complete. You can knowingly give an incomplete spec to the candidate to see what kind of questions he/she would ask to try and get the whole picture. (or if he/she goes head first into an unsolvable problem)

I feel that using wrong technical vocabulary in a question is not a sign of a interviewer trying to make the candidate ask questions. Maybe it's just me.

About technical interview questions :

I am not against it at all. It opens the conversation to some technical aspects that can be very intersesting to talk about.

As a candidate I love getting technical in interviews because It allows me to see how my prospective manager thinks. If we have radically different ways of taking care of a technical problem it's a red flag for me.

In the same area, I like the "let's talk about your last project" question too.

So, I've had my share of technical interviews and here what I observed :

I am usually unable to produce good software when the specs I'm supposed to use are not precise enough. I don't mean not complete enough. I mean not precise enough.

Be it on the job or in interviews I seriously question the ability of some interviewers to produce good technical interview questions.

By good I mean precise, using the right vocabulary.

I do not mean complete. You can knowingly give an incomplete spec to the candidate to see what kind of questions he/she would ask to try and get the whole picture. (or if he/she goes head first into an unsolvable problem)

But the details that are given need to be explained in precise terms. Not in a shadowy weird dialect based on a model that only the interviewer understand.

I've had my share of technical interviews and most of my fail attempts at live coding were due to (my lack of skill but also) questions not precise enough or misusing technical terms (sometimes even not grammatically correct questions).

The latter usually make me feel awkward because I wonder if those interviewers simply lack the minimum intelligence to explain a simple feature with precise words.

Good engineers I have worked with always use precise words to describe precise concepts. Using wrong or imprecise vocabulary is proof of a lack of understanding of the job and/or a will to try and sound "smart" or "tech-savvy" to compensate for some kind of inferiority complex.

So maybe a good advice to interviewers would be : technical questions on interviews yes. But good technical questions.

1. I stretch. A physiotherapist I've seen for back pain problems gave me exercises to do daily. Most of them involve stretching the back muscles. One simple exercise is to lie on the floor legs against the wall making a 90° angle with the torso. While in that position, stretching by trying to put your hands away from the wall parrallel to the floor. The chin and the toes going toward the torso. It stretches the whole muscle chain from head to toe.

2. I massage my back with a tennis ball. I use it against the floor or a wall to massage the points in my back where the pain irradiates from. I think chiropractor call those trigger points.

3. I walk. Walking/standing as much as I can during the day has helped me a lot. Sometimes after work I take a long walk. Moving, exercising, is part of the healing process. But stretching is not optionnal. Lack of stretching + exercise is a recipe for disaster : the symptoms can worsen.

-- The pain from sitting all day sucks hard. It's so frustrating.

I spend at leat 15mn every night lying on the floor doing those exercises while my SO looks at me, both concerned and amused (I reckon she's used to it now ^^).

I know it sucks to add yet another routine to our daily obligations, but this one is important. As important as brushing one's teeth I reckon. If you work in an office. It can save you a world of pain.

You can consult with a physiotherapist to get more detailed and custom-designed exercises.

Good luck

I hear that advice a lot. Seems to be consistent with what I see happening around me.

What kind of skills in particular would you recommend to work on and how does one go about improving said skills ?