jlees

Interestingly the next peak of CS degrees hits in 2002-3. While the obvious explanation of the dot-com boom fits, I would say students graduating at this time were considerably affected by the 1980s home computing culture and that early experiences with a C64 or other computer could have been positive, not negative, influences on their choice to study CS.

(The reason I say this being that I graduated with a CS degree in 2003, so am squarely in that camp, and the dot-com boom had no bearing on that decision - by the time I had picked my A-level subjects and applied to university, the dot-com craziness was not in full swing, though I was in the UK. However, growing up in the C64/BBC Micro/ZX Spectrum era was definitely a big factor in my ensuing nerdiness.)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/04...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrMivdZ-mbI

http://www.dailydot.com/geek/ken-worrall-twitch-diablo-warcr...

Sorry to hear about your friend, chrissyb. Some great suggestions in this thread; only thing I would add is that so many PC games are getting optimised for controller these days, so the number of keys is small enough that a Naga may well be all you need to play them.

Do you want to leave with a solid understanding of how a programming language works, how memory functions, many of the fundamental algorithms and data structures in CS, and more of that kind? Or do you want to leave with a couple of different, solid Rails/Python/JavaScript/mobile apps under your belt, and go straight into app development? Different courses focus on different things.

Many of the online courses skip the former and jump straight into 'rails generate' -- but not all of them, especially if you supplement with Coursera courses which are often far more academic in nature. The in-person bootcamps vary a lot, and I had a fairly low opinion of them as a breed until I started mentoring Hackbright students and realising that they do learn the fundamentals -- but I know there are others that don't teach that stuff at all.

Disclaimer: I'm a part-time instructor at Hackbright Academy and a former Thinkful mentor. In structuring the part-time class I have had to think a lot about how to help convey the elements of CS in a very limited time-frame. It's tough. I honestly welcome feedback and discussion from others who have tried to do it.

There are also simply those who want to pick up these skills and apply them in their job -- one of the Thinkful students I mentored was a GIS data analyst who just wanted to be able to write scripts around the data he was working with.

If you can't get in touch with your customers to get feedback at the earliest stage, how are you going to get them to use your product? And if you don't want to talk to customers because you're ashamed of the prototype or you want to show them something 'perfect', you'll never talk to them at all.

My school had explicit rules about how we should behave when in uniform outside of school, and we lost some agency because of that. Although I have to say it also felt empowering, to some extent, that we were kind of ambassadors for the school. We would definitely show off sometimes.

Similarly, sweet shops near another school I attended had signs saying 'no more than 3 children at once' or something similar. The uniform part was implied but I think a parent taking in four kids on a weekend day would have a different reaction from the shopkeeper than four uniformed children at 3:30pm.

Similarly, a group of teenagers in uniform may be less threatening on the street than one out of uniform, especially as fashions change. A certain school's uniform communicates a level of wealth or manners (or lack thereof) and therefore sets expectations for behaviour. A child alone in the library working in uniform may be far less likely to be approached by concerned staff than one in mufti - at least this was the case when I frequently stayed at the library outside of school hours.

Hiring full-time in SF (SoMA), contract-to-hire preferred: * Generalist or Rails Engineer (application stack) * Back-end Python Engineer (data stack) * Data Scientist * UX/UI Designer

We're a seed funded startup with several former Googlers, and we're tackling the messy world of business. Every day, people shake hands over million-dollar deals that can change the future of a company. From fundraising and acquisitions to partnerships, promotions and product placement, businesses get together and make new things happen. But there's no platform for them; they typically overload sales-focused CRMs, or are stuck in the world of spreadsheets and email. We're changing that.

It's a fascinating data problem as we're mapping out professional and company-to-company networks, trying to understand who does business with whom and why, feeling our way around the underlying graph that nobody's explicitly mapped out before. From old school tie to the boardroom, why do people do business with each other? What are the trust and influence networks? What's the equivalent of PageRank for investors? What does it mean when a VP moves from one company to another? How do I get my startup funded?

We're trying to answer all these questions. We have an invite-only product already launched, we're building a team-facing solution, and we're expanding our data team to work on the platform that powers it all. Here's my take on the space: https://medium.com/@jennielees/the-joy-of-data-a1d3757d3567

Looking for fast learners who can get their hands dirty, quickly; who know when to duct tape and when to have 100% test coverage (think like a hacker, ship like a pro); who don't mind being wrong occasionally; and who are intrigued by the overall space we're in. We've had a good run from HN posts so far, hoping to continue it.

You'd be potentially a single-digit employee and have a significant chance to influence our culture and growth, as well as immense impact on the product itself. We have a generous equity setup, though we prefer contract-to-hire so we can figure out if we'd work well together.

For our generalist role we'd prefer it if you have Rails and JavaScript experience; for our data roles, Python. Graph-specific data experience is a bonus.

I lead engineering at Close, and I'm also happy to chat for coffee if you're interested in startups, this problem space, or if you're interested in the product itself.

Email jennie+HN@close.co.

Interesting idea, at the same time there are ways to replicate this today in terms of 'send me a blind message on Facebook/LinkedIn and I'll maybe reply' and it doesn't seem to work well, at least not in my experience. It's about the power dynamic, fundamentally.

Also, often degree programs (especially those outside the US) don't have the same flexibility to pick and choose classes from other areas of study as the US major/minor/credits system. I know mine didn't, though I did a summer entrepreneurship course at the Business School which was enlightening (and almost entirely focused on writing a business plan, something I have never done since.)

Especially if you're moving to a new area, being in a startup requires you to put in a lot of effort to broaden your professional network beyond that company. If you work with great people and do fairly well, it can work out fine, but in a lot of cases it doesn't.

An alternative is consulting for a few different startups -- I did this and it was great for meeting a bunch of new people in different verticals, learning new platforms quickly, and so on. It also helps you build up a larger set of people who you know and who know your skills, rather than people who know you for other facets of your life ('a really great Halo player but no idea if she can code'). As patio11 points out, the best stuff isn't posted online - you'll get the job you want through the people you know, not through scouring job postings.

Remember the person behind the keyboard is a real person. You might not agree with them, but they're a living, breathing human being who took time out of their day to type what they typed.

The Secret Lives of Codebreakers and The Secret Life of Bletchley Park are both great reads, both by Sinclair MacKay, and Hodges' Turing biography is fascinating and, as we all know, heartbreaking in the end.

Bletchley wasn't just about Turing, though he certainly deserves his due, and then some. Tommy Flowers, for example, who built Colossus -- or Mavis Batey, who broke a coded message that led to reverse engineering the Enigma.

I highly recommend visiting if you can. Really drove home to me the people aspect of the whole thing, and the somewhat frightening (and yet a tiny bit wistful!) realization that had we all been born a few decades earlier, and taken similar paths through life, Bletchley may well be where many if us spent a good chunk of our years.

Hiring full-time in SF (SoMA), contract-to-hire preferred:

  * Generalist Software Engineer 
  * Data Engineer
  * Data Scientist
  * UX/UI/Rapid Prototyper

It's a fascinating data problem as we're mapping out professional and company-to-company networks, trying to understand who does business with whom and why, feeling our way around the underlying graph that nobody's explicitly mapped out before. From old school tie to the boardroom, why do people do business with each other? What are the trust and influence networks? What's the equivalent of PageRank for investors? What does it mean when a VP moves from one company to another? How do I get my startup funded?

We're trying to answer all these questions. We have an invite-only product already launched, we're building a team-facing solution, and we're expanding our data team to work on the platform that powers it all. Here's my take on the space: https://medium.com/@jennielees/the-joy-of-data-a1d3757d3567

Looking for fast learners who can get their hands dirty, quickly; who know when to duct tape and when to have 100% test coverage (think like a hacker, ship like a pro); who don't mind being wrong occasionally; and who are intrigued by the overall space we're in. We've had a good run from HN posts so far, hoping to continue it.

You'd be single-digit employee and have a significant chance to influence our culture and growth, as well as immense impact on the product itself. We have a generous equity setup, though we prefer contract-to-hire so we can figure out if we'd work well together.

For our generalist role we'd prefer it if you have Rails experience; for our data roles, Python. Graph-specific data experience is a bonus.

I lead engineering at Close, and I'm also happy to chat for coffee if you're interested in startups, this problem space, or if you're interested in the product itself.

Email jennie+HN@close.co.

I get the sense from this article that every startup can be reduced to a lot of engineers chained to benches with a founder (or cofounders) standing gloriously in the limelight, cracking the whip between press interviews and investor meetings at the Battery.

One thought is that the founding team at a startup is likely to be entrepreneurial and initiative-taking enough to seek out these opportunities for themselves, should they want them; though I appreciate the nod to startups who remain in 'stealth' mode indefinitely, leaving a puzzling blur on someone's resume.

Another, that I definitely see folks out and about from startups who are not the founding team, but then I go to technical events and read technical publications, neither of which tend to fawn over the CEO to the exclusion of all else. Should we glorify the Rails developer who built a CRUD app over the CEO who found the money to pay the team, test the app in the market, and ultimately grow the business? No, we should reward ingenuity regardless of the title of the person behind it. But HN does a pretty good job of that, and at its core I think this article is just an argument against shallow tech journalists who prefer a tidy story about college roommates over a messy bunch of talented folks who did great work.

I've been programming most of my life (thanks to the 80s UK/BBC home computer revolution), but during high school the web was becoming A Thing. When I was about 14/15 I taught myself HTML and Javascript from online tutorials and trial & error. I volunteered to build my school's website mostly because nobody else was interested, and in the process started learning server side programming (ASP, I think).

I saw a job ad for a summer intern in a magazine and replied to it, ended up learning VBscript and writing a couple of reasonably high-profile websites over the summer for real money. I also started up a few side projects, none of which made money -- or were designed to! -- apart from an e-commerce project with some school friends.

From learning HTML to my first paycheque, probably about 1.5 years? In my spare time alongside school.

What would I change if I were learning from scratch today? Not much, in terms of learning as much as possible and working on interesting projects. Volunteer to build websites/webapps/mobile apps or help out with those which are creaking along. I wouldn't expect to make money overnight but if you can solve people's problems with code then you might be able to align interests despite not being an experienced programmer :)

I suppose one angle on smartness is that it provides a simplistic lens on the tangle. If rather than observing the intersection of life, industry and history around us, we tap a single-purpose button on our phones and stare until like magic, the thing we want appears -- if the layers on a city become intangible -- then we lose some of the glorious chaos that is urban life.