wai1234

With pay comes expectations and that can be ugly. You have the rest of your life to get paid.

The first question is: how do you know you can code at a 'relatively high level'? Don't be surprised to learn that you still have a lot to learn (actually, there is always more to learn, get used to it) For example, from the small amount of code on the github, I see no documentation or tests. Also javascript and python are fine, but they are only a beginning. The best education you can get, before you go to college(!), would be to join an open source project and try to contribute. The feedback you get may be brutal, so choose a project you can care about and that is well structured for newbies (look for projects that include specific provisions for new contributors like a 'graded' bug list that have a category for easy fixes waiting to be done). Start looking at the code so you develop the skill of reading and understanding OTHER peoples' code and then fix a few bugs and submit them for review. You will learn more in a month this way than you will in a year on your own.

Coding is very different as soon as you start working with other people, whether they are other developers, customers, bosses, etc. The best way to learn those other skills is before there is money involved.

If you really want to take on projects, look for volunteer organizations in your area that might want help with their websites. They often have at least small budgets and might be able to pay you something for that help. Even your high school IT department might need some help. Ask! Does your high school get any sponsorship from area companies for things like tech or robots? Contact those companies and see if they have any needs.

Good luck!

Any decent undergraduate program will have a defined sequence of courses for most of the first three years. The third year may, and the fourth year will, be all or mostly electives that you choose. The idea is that you will be better prepared to decide what to specialize in once you know the basics. The main point of going to university is to learn how to learn because that is what you will do throughout your career. Choose the best university you can afford and get into. Worry about choosing courses later. If you like programming, major in computer science but also take every math course you can, not just the required ones. You can usually use a math course or two to satisfy CS degree requirements.

I am not a lawyer.

With that out of the way, you have already completed the negotiation phase of the process. They can't reopen the salary question without rescinding the offer completely. Why would they do that? They've already invested heavily in recruiting you and have offered a salary they must be comfortable with. To squeeze you now would make no sense. If they did that, you wouldn't want to work there anyway.

The third party is certainly some 'bcheck' company that services many clients that do require salary info as part of their negotiation process. They don't have a custom process for BigCo, so you got the generic form everyone gets, regardless of employer. They run a series of standard online checks, maybe call past employers and get only dates and title (no employer gives out salary data when asked), and forward the whole mess to BigCo HR. The bcheck company has no opinion in the matter. I'm guessing the only use for past salary data they might have is to judge how they are doing versus the market.

Google makes its money on search+adwords. Everything else they do is a hobby, and it shows. Not necessarily evil, but sloppy produces the same bad result.

From this, you have learned many things already. Make sure you have learned a key lesson: handle your own finances. It was fine to have him pay the fee. It was not fine to tangle up his credit card in your life. YOU pay the fee, he hands you $25, you remain in control of your finances.

Anyone that looks at SV salaries knows that they are incredibly high (and the much freer markets around them, like housing, know it :) The fact is that they could offer $1,000,000 starting salaries tomorrow and the pool of 'qualified' applicants would not change because salary is not the determining factor here. If everyone east of the Mississippi suddenly moved to SV drawn by those mouth watering numbers, what would happen? "Well, you didn't attend Stanford, so...". BTW, does anyone actually graduate from Stanford anymore?

Please re-read my comment. The quantity produced is held static by an external force: the ridiculous filter used by the SV bigs that exclude 99% of developers sight unseen. They create a shortage for themselves and then complain there is a shortage because the world isn't producing enough 'geniuses' to meet their needs (without also requiring any investment by them). It's a self-inflicted problem for which they accept no blame. This 'farm team' notion is just the light dimly dawning on some of them that they might be able to solve their own bind by actually engaging (and investing) in the solution and not just whining. By cutting themselves off from the vast majority of the potential talent supply, they have, in essence, stranded themselves on a desert island of their own manufacture.

Side rant: Directed at many posts already in this tree. Economics 101 does not describe any real market and the labor market is about as unreal as it gets. Developers are not interchangeable goods, and the flexibility in supply is almost non-existent. There will not be 100 new universities founded this fall to 'sell' into this 'market'. The market for DaVinci's would never clear if he were alive in a way that would make all buyers happy. Not. Going. To. Happen.

"We can't even get enough qualified resumes."

Says who? It might be you are bad at promoting your openings or you have a bad reputation on Glassdoor. It also might be that you use the word 'qualified' without knowing what it means. If you expect someone else to have done all the training for you so you just buy the finished product, you're the problem. Do you look at universities as the produce aisle or the bakery?

Your economics are incomplete. You can't buy your way out of an aggregate shortage. The price will rise until only the rich can afford what is in short supply, and then, eventually, only the richest rich, and so on. The rest do without.

These companies have created their own shortage by insisting they will only hire the top 1% and be unwilling to invest in anyone less 'capable' regardless of the quality of their so-called filter at identifying talent. So now they have 'discovered' the concept of actually helping people they would have ignored yesterday to grow into the talent they need (and absorbing the marginal costs of that investment). An idea boldly entering the 1950s as an innovation.

The revolving door hiring in SV has maxed out with virtually all the 'suitable' talent in play and still many openings unfilled despite plenty of reasonably capable but sub-superstar talent pushed to the margins. The lid has been maintained on salaries mostly by agreements between the usual suspects, not market forces. The fact is that many perfectly good developers will be ignored by SV at any price and that's now biting the companies hard.

Hmmm. So, they're saying they should hire people with basic training in the necessary skills but who did not hatch out of the egg already knowing everything they will ever need to know. They then imagine they might need to invest time and energy into something I will refer to as 'training' that will help those people reach full productivity over time. And, they will risk that some of them might not work out perfectly.

This is truly shocking and innovative. Maybe they could come up with something so we can move heavy loads without using rollers and a way to prepare food so we don't have to eat it raw. /snark

If you needed evidence that SV occupies a hermetically sealed mental bubble, there's your sign.

I'll assume that PM is a real role in your company and not a glorified status metrics report generator.

The first thing to keep in mind is that being a PM has nothing to do with the skills of a developer other than to judge estimates and evaluate design decisions. It's a DIFFERENT job. You're not the developers' peer and you're not s super lead (anyone who says those things is telling you they just want to be left alone to do whatever they want). So, here's the simplest version:

A PM is responsible for WHAT everyone on the team is doing, a dev (team member) is responsible for HOW they will do the work assigned. That division of responsibility is not black and white but it's a good razor to start with. Anyone who tells you it's not a real management role or you're not a people manager is badly mistaken. Because the PM role in most companies wields authority through persuasion, you are the only true people manager there is.

As the primary conduit between the world outside the project (with its many, often conflicting, stakeholders), and the world inside the project (with its many, often conflicting personalities, styles, and levels of experience), the PM has to deconflict both worlds and harmonize the two. That means you will always have to choose who to disappoint at any given moment.

The job of the PM is to maximize the value of the project for the company. Everything else is secondary. Note that value, in this case, covers a lot of ground from economics to morale and increased capability to tackle the next project. Always be prepared to explain your decisions on that basis, and, if you can't, why are you deciding that way?

The final thing I would tell you to expect is to spend 2+ years at the role before you begin to become comfortable with it, if you ever do. You are either wired to be a good PM or you are not. The mechanics aren't hard, the social dynamics and the situational awareness are.

Good luck!

The fact that someone wants to buy it proves you are wrong. $10K is nothing for a company. It cost them $10K to decide to offer you that much. Unless you really would not sell at any price, ask for a truly big price ($100K+ ?) and see what they say. The worst that happens is they say no and you are back to where you are now. If they didn't think they could grow your project to be worth millions, they wouldn't bother with you at all.

This.

How useful would hammers be if they ONLY drove nails?

These appear to be incomprehensible drivel.

The employee fired threat is a threat to the employee, not the reviewer (unless you consider a guilt trip a threat). The whole payload reads more like a tantrum than a 'threat'. Given the state of the world, this headline is more than a bit overblown. I would agree with 'harassed'.

Not exactly terrifying.

How is this a 'threat'?

The only place we are ok with this is in the social sciences where rigorous causation can never be proven. No physics theory is considered 'valid' because of a confidence threshold. Pharmacology and epidemiology flirt with this too, because the underlying causal mechanisms can be fiendishly difficult to determine, but we see 'new evidence' stories almost every day that flush whatever last week's 'wisdom' was.

If so, the author says it poorly. Yes, you wouldn't look for a causal link without correlation, that would be insane, but the existence of correlation tells you only that there might be causation, nothing more.

This argument is absurd. It takes the obvious truth that causation will certainly lead to correlation and blindly flips it around and claims it's somehow profound. Just bad reasoning from beginning to end. The correct reasoning - causation leads to correlation - is the basis of all science. When scientific theories are evaluated, the razor is a check that the theory correctly predicts observed results. You can't cook up a theory that fits a set of already known data and claim you have formulated a causal relationship unless you can then predict the NEXT results over a substantial set of trials.

The first implementation was weak from the start. By exposing the instance variable directly, you threw away all the power of inheritance and guaranteed a future meltdown. If you had correctly implemented setters and getters from the beginning, you would have been perfectly prepared for what would have been a minor and appropriate change to the pricing scheme that are the whole point of encapsulation. You wrote procedural code using an object-oriented language. Don't blame a fundamental design approach for your lack of good implementation.

"a lot more code" - Really?

Like most interviewers are skilled judges of 'culture'. This is why most tech companies are filled with bros telling themselves how cool they are and how they are changing the world. Utter BS.

There is no shortage of developers. There is a shortage of perfect developers that meet every preconceived notion of lazy companies that don't believe they have any responsibility to develop and grow people. There will always be a shortage of top performers in any field. If only top performers are acceptable to you, you will have a very tough time growing. I have to laugh when I see these posts where people have 'discovered' that you can actually train people to make them better. I saw one a few months back where the 'secret' to using bootcampers turned out to be 'provide a guided program to finish developing their abilities', as if no one ever heard of this before.

More and more colleges are NOT using them for admissions because they predict NOTHING.

a pile of bricks is not a house.

That C^2 factor is a bit of a problem. Calculate the mass equivalent of any reasonable amount of energy you intend to "throw" and you will be disappointed. In the other direction, that c^2 term works pretty well (for atomic bombs anyway).

For the relationship of the mass-energy equation to the force exerted by radiation. see Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure

I don't see NASA having anything to do with this. Neither Eagle or "NASASpaceflight" have any affiliation with NASA.

So, small tasks you CAN estimate, large ones not so much. Perhaps the technique to use is right in front of you: decomposition.

I have to laugh when I see these posts. So, software development is a special activity that should not be constrained by budgets or deadlines (or estimates)? Where do I sign up? There are so many strawmen here I can't possibly address them all. If you can't provide a credible estimate for a piece of work, you either a) aren't very good, b) don't properly understand the work to be done, or c) perceive some aspect of the job that is unknowable to you (through lack of experience or other novelty). Fixing each of these is up to you. 'a' is obvious (you either work hard to get better or find something else to do). 'b' means you need to ask more questions that allow you to sufficiently complete your understanding of the problem so an estimate is possible. 'c' means you need to isolate the novelty and explain that this part of the problem is new to you and you are not qualified to provide an estimate. Perhaps someone else can provide that insight or you can define an initial activity designed to help you better understand the novel problem until you can estimate the remaining work. NO area of engineering is so cut and dried that estimation is easy.

What IS common is a combination of poorly defined projects and a profound lack of self-awareness. By all means, push back against poorly defined projects ("I can't estimate the work until you tell me what it is."). Lack of self-awareness is squarely in YOUR lap ("I don't understand why it always takes longer than I thought it would..." Well, duh, maybe you should consider that reality for what it is and account for it next time).

Estimating work and committing to those estimates is what a professional does. Deal with it. If estimates are imposed on you that you do not agree with, that has nothing to do with the virtue of estimation. That's a social problem, not a technical one.

This is possibly the silliest post I've ever read. Apparently you don't know the definition of engineering and, most astonishing, claim building projects are always perfectly estimated. I doubt ANY building project ever finished on time or under budget. If everything were tidy and well understood, it wouldn't be engineering. Stick to software, Ian.