lrobb

The more interesting post was the link to Phil G's blog post about the MIT reunion: "The medical doctor was at the peak of his career and in no danger of being fired. The university professor had the security of tenure and was looking forward to a defined benefit pension starting six years from now. The corporate attorney was finishing up a prosperous career. The engineers who’d chosen to work in industry, however, were a varied lot. A woman who’d taken a job at a defense contractor was still there, 30 years later. The super-wizard Lisp Machine programmer was now in a senior technical, but non-supervisory role, at a multi-billion dollar dotcom (not necessarily getting paid more than a competent 30-year-old, however). About half of the engineers, however, talked about being pushed into a financially uncomfortable early retirement and/or not being able to find work."

> In the construction industry, a contract might not explicitly say that the building has to comply with local building, fire and electrical codes - that's taken as a given.

That's because you have to have a license to perform that work. If you don't meet the code, you don't keep your license.

This is one of the reasons why McConnell et al have argued that we need professional licensure. Licensed Professional Engineers can lose their licenses if they sign off on half-assed plans.

Does this headline come from the most awesome copywriter we've ever seen?

You can do that with Scala as well. (or groovy or clojure...)

Also have an 8 yo and I can't think of anyone in my peer group that isn't thinking about their child's college. Of course mine attends a private school, so we may have different demographics. As one of the parents told me, who's managed to send his other two kids to elite schools: if you wait until high school (to start working on the admissions resume), it's too late.

StackOverflow solved a lot of usenet's problems, while creating an entirely new set of problems.

Yes.. It reminds me of a recent interview with matz:

"The ones who do not challenge themselves to create new things are often falling behind - they learn a hip new language today and try a new web framework tomorrow, but still lack the foresight to invent and to improve."

"My experience gave me the feeling that this was more of an interview assembly line than someone really interested in my relevant skills"

That's exactly what it is...

Effective interviewing is hard, and like most things hard you won't be very good at it without some practice and study.

Asking an algorithm question is relatively easy.

The fact that this is even a question at all, let alone one that could make it on to forbes, is symptomatic of the tech industry being a giant echo chamber. Are you a bad [lawyer | accountant | civil engineer | doctor | musician] if you don't take on side projects?

Spammy. But under no conditions could a 100 employee business be defined as a LIFESTYLE business!

Wiki: In conventional business terms, lifestyle businesses typically have limited scalability and potential for growth because such growth would destroy the lifestyle for which their owner-managers set them up.

This is eerily similar to what happened with seo: people started to realize there was more money to be made teaching people how to make lemonade than there was in actually selling lemonade.

Indeed... Why?

in my version the fisherman had a nest-egg and a supportive village, killjoy... ;)

Sounds like the parable of the mexican fisherman:

An executive from America was standing at the pier of a Mexican village, taking a much needed vacation. It was his first in more than 10 years. He noticed a small boat docked with just one fisherman on board. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The executive complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman replied, “only a little while.”

The executive then asked, “why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?”

The fisherman replied, “I have enough to support my family for a little while.”

The executive then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, and stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life.”

The executive scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15-20 years.”

“But what then?”

The American laughed and said that’s the best part. “When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”

“Millions.. Then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

It certainly appeared that way to me as well. Although I don't really use ATMs much today, it used to be a fairly regular occurrence to arrive at an ATM then have to find the "next closest ATM" due to the machine having connectivity problems.

Days since a sizable number of hacker newsers confused java the language with the jvm with the browser plugin: also 0

It's illegal in the US as well.

It is a normal question... I never said it wasn't.

It's part of an interview process that includes an in depth review of your projects and roles, a technical screen, some design questions, et al.

"Wtf do I do"? I don't hire people that become belligerent over or flustered over simple meta level questions.

You might reconsider your negative bias towards "spin", btw... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/the-one-thing-every...

Well, around here you need more than just technical skills to get a job. As always YMMV.

True...

I much prefer to ask what they have done in the last year to improve as a developer, and what they feel they need to do in the next year.

But as an interviewer, you always have to be wondering how honest a person is being. That's why you also do an in-depth examination of their past projects, and ask them to design something.

Those are actually good questions.

The work history serves as a nice interview warmup and is a good gauge of a candidate's ability to communicate. A bad answer is to mumble out what's on paper in front of you. A good answer will reframe the question in terms of what the job ad described.

The weakness question tells me how introspective you are. Someone aiming at self mastery that has a big picture view is going to give a vastly different answer than someone fresh out of school that's read an advice column and thinks they're a rock star.

I agree.

When I read this list, my first thought was "I know exactly when you started programming, and the types of apps you were writing".

Some of my most enjoyable programming involved writing high performance multithreaded socket services with a copy of Advanced Windows at my side (back when tech books were relevant).

I do have a certain amount of nostalgia for the days when all programming was pretty much "close to the machine". Now we spend our time gluing frameworks and libraries together to create apps.

It's amazing how smug we can be and how we can lose all sight of perspective.

When apple released their kit, there were already competitors in the marketplace.

What the wright brothers did was much more akin to inventing the first computer, period.

That's some unfortunate grammar.

>>you do his effort to help no favors by upvoting it to the moon

I think you're vastly overestimating this board's power & influence.

Said the exact thing his other post said:

Enter profile information Your profile and +1's appear publicly in search, on ads, and across the web.

“Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Sounds like a great guy to work for. #sarcasm.

I feel like I just stumbled into a jr high lunchroom conversation.... What the hell is wrong with you people that this makes it onto the first page?

Or, change your utensils and embrace being a short order cook.