I'm curious if anyone knows of any open source projects that are similar to what they are doing? This is one area I have a lot of interest in but I haven't had all that much exposure to yet..
I just don't know if this can happen... buying real estate is one of those American ideals that everyone seems to aspire to. Hell, I even do basically because its a favored form of relatively safe investment here and you get tax incentives for it. I think we are at a bit of a crossroads where a lot of things need to be re-thought, however, as investing, as a whole, needs to be re-examined to figure out what truly is sustainable and good for the future. Maybe new opportunities like investing in asteroid mining, etc are what we need to start putting capital into something more productive and good for humanity than just inflating real estate prices.
This is highly dependent on the region. I have lived in both the Bay Area in California and in Arizona. They are like studies in fairly extreme opposites. What you talk about is very much how the situation is in California, even in areas where more houses could be built, its always a huge political battle of attrition.
In Arizona, anything goes, they build shit literally anywhere, its flat (for the most part in Phoenix at least) and land is almost literally endless. Property is dirt cheap, houses are too and they have a huge overabundance of houses, I would say probably at least 1/5 of houses in the metro area there are currently unoccupied.
Areas that are desirable and have geographical characteristics that make usable land scarcer (which includes being near a body of water as that limits the land in one direction) are probably always going to have the characteristics of what you describe, IMO. One thing it does lead to is more valuing of older buildings, etc as these areas don't have the "tear it down and build something new" mentality of a place like Arizona.
That age is really young to start thinking about teaching them programming. I'd work on just teaching them basic logic and things of that nature, leaving out the computer part entirely for now, I think there is still a lot that can be learned about programming logic without even using a computer.
I think its important to clarify, do you mean 40 hours, on average, or 40 hours in one week? Meaning, do you want him to average more than 40 hours a week? If so, thats definitely a red flag
I have a relative who is a doctor in an ER and they are essentially an independent contractor (not on a W2), they don't really get any sick days, per se, they are paid for what they work (at a very high rate, or I think a share of the income for that month for their department, something like that) but they have to manage it as a business, essentially (own health insurance, etc), I think its different for some as they may be an employee (like for Kaiser) but a lot are contractors.
caring about family more than job != not caring about job
I'm not sure how you get that out of what he said, you could conceivably care more about your job than anything BUT your family which is still a lot of caring, IMO
I think in cases where you may loose a client or seriously damage a relationship it could also be warranted. Honestly, if they give you flex time, I don't mind all that much. At a job I started fairly recently I had to push really hard for a couple of days (put in probably 3 extra hours a day for 2 days) but then they gave me a day off after those 2 days and then the rest of the week I basically was given nothing else to do so it was really relaxed. I think the main thing is they recognize the sacrifice and act accordingly to not burn you out.
As someone who moved back to the Bay Area recently, I spent a lot of time applying online, I mostly went out my way to avoid 3rd party recruiters as I'm grown sick of dealing with them. I wasn't out here to go in person like you are suggesting but I found that being persistent, going to company websites directly and applying was lining me up a steady stream of phone interviews. From there, its a matter of getting their interest and then they may pay for you to come out (the company that hired me covered my air fare). If you go the 3rd party recruiter route, you are most likely going to be spending a lot of time talking on the phone to these people having "fluff" conversations as they really don't know anything about programming and they are just grasping at straws trying to place you somewhere to get a commission. If you can find one that seems decent, then go with them, however be prepared to have to filter out some of these recruiters as many may be a complete waste of your time.
Go on LinkedIn and try to add some other developers who seem like they would be the type of person who goes to meetups. I did this before and got some suggestions for places to go (a co-working type of environment) that I hadn't heard of before. It ended up being pretty far from where I actually lived so I never made it out there (busy with work, commute, etc) but it was nice to at least have the option
Or they could just decide not to make their career their personal identity. I rarely feel the need to go out of my way to talk about my career, or tell people what I do, unless asked, in situations where I know their line of work has nothing to do with mine.
I think that non-tech people, especially recruiters, could be responsible for taking something like this and running with it. Recruiters, especially non-internal ones, are often grasping at straws and they may hear something about "brogramming" and take the concept and run with it thinking that they can seem cool to recent grads, younger developers, etc.
At the expense of sounding non-PC, I have noticed that the vast number of females who I have worked with as programmers are foreign-born (I'm in the U.S.), mostly from India. Usually, I get the feeling that they did get into programming later on (probably were pushed down the path by someone when they went to university). I'm not going to try to analyze what this means but its simply an observation.
"What I find fascinating in this setting is that Google becomes such a powerful weapon due to a series of perfectly legitimate design decisions."
I call in to question that these are "perfectly legitimate design decisions", basically, if google thinks that the data is private or too sensitive to cache, then it shouldn't be this easy to have it automatically keep hitting a site like this. Google should have realized the potential for abuse here. I'm guessing it truly is an oversight on their part as I can't imagine they would want to waste all this bandwidth either, however its something they should figure out a solution for.
The thing is though, there is still a lot of value in working for Google to make their webserver 3% faster because you would most likely learn quite a bit, especially if you are a newer developer, arguably as much or more as you would working for a startup, its just WHAT you learn is different. in a startup you would probably be more of a generalist, with a google project on an existing server, you are going to learn about something most people never get access to and this could also benefit one down the road. What I guess I'm saying is that sometimes working for a big, successful tech company first can help a startup career later on. When you get to see firsthand, how a successful company has built a system, and you aren't just guessing, it can lead to expertise in an area that can help down the road when going out on one's own.
Honestly, I'd like to see more studies like this to the point where it is irrefutable that sitting all day causes harm because the way it is now, I feel like a lot of companies basically force their workers to sit all day. They don't allow work from home, or allow it only one day a week, etc, yet they also don't provide any sort of office environment that enables sitting. At the office I work at now, for example, there is no one who stands and it would take a re-working of the entire office to allow it, as there are dividers that can be seen over when standing, so it would be rather awkward, I think, to be standing as you would then be staring down at the person across from you. It would be interesting to hear a case where a company is held liable for forcing someone to sit all day, year after year, I think that could at least nudge a lot of organizations in the right direction towards allowing more remote work options where a person can better control / configure their work environment.
Honestly, I don't like the advice people are giving to just dress "how you would every day" because that's the real you,etc... The bottom line is, when you are programming all day and only meeting with maybe an internal manager / team leader, etc there is little reason to dress up. However, I would think if one day you have to sit in on a meeting with an important prospective client, you might dress a little differently than you do normally when you are just doing programming. Business people often dress up because they have meetings and it shows respect to those they meet with, I can often tell around my office when a "business person" has a day with no important meetings as they tend to dress down those days.
When you go to an interview, you want to show the person respect and it is a special situation, its not just another day at work. You aren't part of the company yet so I don't know why you should have to wear exactly what you would when you actually start the job.
I don't wear a tie, or a suit, but I do tend to dress up a bit. If you don't want to, thats fine, but there's no reason to deride someone for thinking they should treat an interview a little differently than they would just another day at work.
I think it depends where you are in your career. For me, there are times / projects where I find that I am pushing myself and improving my skills by working on them so I may go beyond whats expected by really delving in, optimizing code, etc to better my skills. Other times, I feel the way you do and have little connection to the work.
Its a cool concept, but do you actually send the resume in all these formats when you apply? I find that some of the non-tech people seem to get confused if you send them more than 1 format so I just keep it simple, I've also found they will but absolutely 0 effort into retrieving a resume, so even if I send them a url where I have it downloadable in a bunch of formats they won't go to the url and instead will just demand that I send it to them via email
what it comes down to though is a lot won't accept anything but word, everyone seems to accept word format, so until people start refusing my resume in word format I don't see a reason to put any effort into a different format. Its probably just me being lazy though
The problem is even companies that may be ok still can have dinosaur recruiters, once a company is of a certain size is inevitable that not everyone they employ will be technical and for companies that are smaller they probably aren't able or interested in devoting technical resources to streamline the recruiting process
I tried ditching word format for my resume briefly, however I immediately started receiving replies to please forward a word copy of my resume, so I gave up. I'm afraid non tech people (recruiters) are still living in the past
Weird how this just came out a day ago as I've been starting to learn node and I was just trying to figure out a way to blend backbone with node so that I could re-use models server-side. I saw this yesterday on the front page but didn't pay much attention to it and then today I remembered seeing it and came back to it and it looks like it solves the issue I had been trying to figure out myself. All the examples, etc I could find on combing backbone and node seemed half-baked and I couldn't find an easy to follow example for a beginner, its as if this came to the surface just in time.. I am definitely going to give it a try
'Rocket Lease is me saying that 40k a year would be life changing for me'
I really don't get this line of thinking. I'm assuming the author isn't a programmer as otherwise I don't see how 40k a year would be an acceptable or life changing amount of money, and, if he isn't, then why not learn to code? Or maybe I'm just missing something and the intent is this is only a part-time project that doesn't take up much time so any money it makes is just extra (and 40k extra per year would be welcome by most people I'm sure).. honestly I'm curious, as while I have an interest in entrepreneurship, the potential payoff would have to be fairly high as being able to simply work as a programmer for others already provides a fairly decent quality of life.
Another thing I thought of would that something like this may be best as an open source / distributed project to where there isn't a central point they can shutdown / target, I'm not sure how viable it is, however, to make something like this work without centralized servers (sort of like torrents, I guess)
I think its a great idea and I would love to see something like this... Whenever you challenge people in power, however, its inevitable that they are going to fight back, provided your challenge is strong enough for them to take notice and potentially feel threatened. I would hope our country hasn't become that much of a police state yet to where they would immediately label you as a terrorist etc (but sometimes I worry it may already be this way), however you never really know what is going to happen and the potential for some corrupt charges to be brought against you would always be there. The way I see it, if you are going to make apps like this, either make sure you stay anonymous, so they can't find you (and it takes considerable effort to do this) or be prepared to make connections, get donors, etc and be prepared for a legal fight at some point. Hopefully a day will come when this isn't the case but I don't think we're there yet and it seems this is a point in history where the old establishment is feeling particularly threatened so just make sure you know what you are getting into before you put too much effort into the project.
You can't always have it both ways, having interesting, challenging problems every day and also making good money, sometimes it works out that way, other times not. I was in a somewhat similar situation where I left a very small startup at one point for a much more boring, but stable job, however I felt it ended up giving me time to explore my own interests relating to programming and even start some personal projects, where I otherwise would not have had the time. Why not take the slower pace and use the extra time to work on some of your own projects and plan out where you want to go next, sometimes some "down time", relatively speaking, in a career, can be a good thing
Its hard for me to get a good feel for what your experience level is from your post, but I'm guessing you've worked mainly as a freelancer thus far. I'm someone who started off similarly to you, I don't have a degree, although I am close to finishing a BA degree thats not in CS as I just had a bunch of units from general ed courses. Basically, I just pushed my way in by starting off working at a really small company that couldn't afford to be picky. The pay was fairly lousy but after a few months I found a better opportunity to work with a startup. Then after that, I had enough experience working full-time to start working for a contracting company that did a full-time placement of me at a mid-sized company. Once you get experience working full-time, it gets easier to find the next job so you should really just focus on getting your foot in the door. I've found that companies are often wary of people who just want to freelance as they often want a longer commitment and someone who is going to be more invested in their product / company. Also, there's no reason not to work on your own project and put it on GitHub, its helped me get at least one job, just from being able to talk about it in the interview, as the interviewer found it interesting.
I'm not quite sure I follow.. are you suggesting that not wearing a tie would mean "removal from the process", even today? I've never worn a tie to a programming interview and generally it seems most experienced developers don't, at least in on the west coast of the US