dpritchett

It sounds like OP has been writing C# for ten years straight, so I'd guess there's a certain level of Windows/MSSQL/.NET experience expected.

Try listening to Sandi Metz on the Ruby Rogues podcast. It's a longish episode but she'll give you an appreciation for message-passing OO and how it makes an application design more pliable.

In a pinch the (free?) "Barewords" episode of Ruby Tapas will get you close in five minutes.

I believe it'd be idiomatic to use

  attr_accessor :sanity

  def initialize
    @sanity = 0
  end

On that note I like Go's default values for primitive types. An int sanity would be zero by default.

Edit: seeing five simultaneous posts saying the same thing makes me feel trolled a bit :)

As a happy Ruby/Rails dev I can't figure why Python has double the marketshare. I guess it's the Google backing and the history of Linux admin usage?

The article goes on to mention pocketbooks and stitching.

Same here. My three favorite Ruby books are POODR, Eloquent Ruby, and Hartl's tutorial.

I'm seriously put off by any talk of topgrading and 'a/b/c player' ranking.

Have you gathered much data on the success of this book's approach in your firm? I'd love to hear a positive take on it.

As a developer I've never heard good things about McKinsey. Can you tell us your perspective on their value proposition and the relevance of their hiring methodology?

The best I've heard about them is that they provide political cover for executive agendas that might not play well absent validation from a third party with some academic credentials.

I think nowadays he says 'relentlessly resourceful' instead.

What might I read to begin to learn which platform to emulate and how to get started?

Rails helps minimize time to market. Any sizeable Rails app that gets market traction is likely to have its hotspots revisited and broken out into services. The services need not use Ruby at all.

Edit: Ruby itself is just a language. If you're not building web apps or server scripts there's no particular reason to prefer it.

So they proved out the first version in a high level dynamic language and then someone reimplemented in C for performa performance reasons? Sounds like a solid process.

I use ctrl+L a lot in my term. It clears.

That really is a great talk! It's on Youtube too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

I shamelessly reach for the backtick shell notation in any exploratory Ruby code that needs it. I try to replace it with something written in Ruby if the codebase grows beyond my laptop, but backticks never get old.

    => 1.upto(100) { |n| puts `curl -s fizzy.heroku.com/#{n}` }

    1
    2
    Fizz
    4
    Buzz
    ...

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor is a pretty great resource with similar constraints: "Can you describe a topic using only the thousand most common English words?"

The results in their Hall of Fame are fascinating. It's inspired by the xkcd linked elsewhere in this thread.

http://splasho.com/upgoer5/halloffame.php

Just so! I had three projectiles (rock1, rock2, rock3) and they shared a global "fire selector" that operated as a sort of mutex.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/90b814fd-df52-4fcf-9127...

I was extra tickled that the highest paid public employee in Nevada (read: Las Vegas) is a plastic surgeon.

I had to implement some unsatisfying hacks to make my Scratch shooter work as well! If I remember correctly I was manually duplicating the master projectile and I had to register each projectile against each enemy.

OP left a quarter-million a year hedge fund job to swing for the fences. I'd guess his floor for "acceptable" exits is in the multiple millions. Your personal mileage my vary.

http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/08/03/why-i-quit-my-job-to-s...

Well heck, he probably didn't have the dev environment set up on his machine. I'll bet it's 90 minutes to find the bug, ten minutes to fix it, and the rest for test+deploy.

I can scratch my toes a lot faster than you can - you don't even know where my toes are right now.

The test has less nuance than D&D alignments, that's for sure. Feels like the 'right' answers are all Lawful Good.

I think we agree with each other.

I did a master's in CS from a school not known for CS and I'm pretty sure I'd fail Google's interviews unless I could put in a few weeks of focused preparation. Meanwhile I'm happily employed in Memphis and Google seems to have a recruiting pipeline in place that works for them.

I don't think any of us really doubt that Facebook and Google could find (or train!) the talent they need in the U.S. at a price below, say, the $200,000 profit per employee Google brings in [1]. As a developer living and working in the U.S. I'd certainly love it if legislative conditions forced the above companies to hire people like me at a few hundred thousand a year more than my current salary.

The interesting question to me is whether or not there's a valid reason to suppress permanent immigration (not the revolving-door bodyshop kind) of talented developers who would effectively drive down demand for my services. Again, I'd love to see my salary double or triple overnight thanks to favorable legislation, but I don't know that I have a good economic or moral case for that preference.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=net+income+per+employee...

Western education is fairly individualistic; it may not churn out the same level of hard-CS devotion as Eastern school systems. Check out 'coding' competitions like Top Coder and IOI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Infor...

Given that there's not an actual college major titled "Google SWE II", I'm not sure what sort of standards you're expecting out of people.

(What I understand to be) Google's favorite tools - C++, Java, algo/data structure theory - don't exactly describe a holistic CS/SE/MIS curriculum. I'm sure a specifically designed trade school curriculum could train intelligent people up to ace valley hiring tests in two years or less.

This question suggests that the devs in your target company have lost control of developer hiring.

Coram's Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War provides an utterly fascinating glimpse into this type of competitive thinking. Boyd's theories are regularly cited by today's Lean Startup personalities. Here's an excerpt from his magnum opus:

"To comprehend and cope with our environment we develop mental patterns or concepts of meaning. The purpose of this paper is to sketch out how we destroy and create these patterns to permit us to both shape and be shaped by a changing environment. In this sense, the discussion also literally shows why we cannot avoid this kind of activity if we intend to survive on our own terms."

I never managed to finish the one Kilcullen book I bought.

I like open allocation in principle and I'l be happy to work that way when I get the chance.

It's still not going to stop the macroeconomic entropy that will eventually see Valve and Github die like every other company. Things fall apart.

I think highly paid managers are inevitable over time. It's somewhere between regulatory capture and Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureacracy.

Luckily companies who follow that path will eventually implode and be replaced by others who can only hope to survive long enough to follow the same path.