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curiousgeekon Ask HN: What would you do if your income was taken care of?

A similar thread from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018713

curiousgeekon Why the Best Companies and Developers Give Away Almost Everything They Do

The article fails to mention that for many of these companies, selling software is not their business model. Their USP comes from the large piles of data they have, and the network effect of their product that ensures a lock in.

I'd be more interested in companies which sell software to end consumers/developers and open source it at the same time. Red Hat is one of the few which has done that successfully.

curiousgeekon Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

I just meant it as a suggestion to companies on behalf of the users of this site. They are free to ignore it. Those who do provide the extra info might stand to gain. Let's see.

curiousgeekon Ask HN: Is cloud computing decimating platform/infrastructure engineering jobs?

The cloud providers are providing a lot of software as well: relational databases, other kinds of data stores, load balancers and so on. They also provide you an integrated ecosystem where these things work well together.

Correspondingly, you need far fewer engineers in your company to build and maintain custom software for such things. I am wondering whether in medium term - say the next 4 to 5 years - we are going to see an order of magnitude decrease in the number of jobs in this sector.

curiousgeekon Ask HN: What opportunities still exist in desktop software?

I thought developer tools would be the toughest to make money off. Developers always believe there is a free, open source alternative out there somewhere, and if not, someone's sure to start one soon.

curiousgeekon Ask HN: What should I have accomplished before graduating with a BS in CS?

A bachelor's is the time to get a good understanding of your domain's fundamental principles, stuff that will stand you in good stead even 10 years from now. As a new college grad you will be tested on those concepts and not much else, esp. if your major is Computer Science.

I would look for extensive knowledge of data structures and algorithms, operating systems, networking and databases. If you are interested in a particular domain like machine learning or web development then it pays to know a bit about that as well.

More specifically for a job hunt, you should work your way through Cracking the Coding Interview, careercup.com and leetcode.com. These have questions marked out from companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon etc.