scrapcode

Also a lot of those are common words that take on a different persona and depth within the field, which can add to confusion.

Ah, I didn't realize (nor that it was possible) they made a shittier version of the Ranger.

Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.

The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.

Similar competition (Nissan Frontier, Ford Ranger, etc.) would start at around $35k these days.

Tale as old as time. When I was coming up it took a $20-40/m investment to get a "dedicated" server that you could start tinkering around on. When you couldn't afford that, you bricked the family PC trying to figure out how to configure your own LAMP stack.

Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.

I think this is the natural path of things...

I never made it to any hackercons, and haven't kept up with many of the folks I "ran" with back in the day (before social media). And I'm not really sure if I would even remember their handles and such if I saw them today. I remember a fella that went by "proph3t," I believe he was in a band or at least helped with George Smith's website End Effect (looks like it is still up). That guy was a bit older than I was but I remember him being extremely patient and gracious with his time helping me when I was learning PHP.

out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.

You have quite the faith in code enforcement.

I guess I'm just an old man pumping my fist and yelling at the clouds at this point, but I think compartmentalizing every possible aspect of development and then making each one of those as complex as possible lead AI in the bureaucratic deterioration of the trade.

The layer of builders and hackers is still there.

Further underground indeed. It's obvious dev for a career and dev as historical dev are already two wildly different things. My fire was certainly extinguished quite a while ago.

I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new *.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC.

I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.

I think it'd be an outstanding feature on the iPhone to turn off audiobooks/podcasts at ~5 min into sleep or whatever. Seems like they already have the data via the Watch...

Whoosh

Hi Scott! Are the posted salary ranges annual?

Thanks for this. I've been dabbling with code for ~20 years, have the diploma and the t-shirt, but I lack the mentorship. I feel like it would be even more helpful in this time as I attempt to pivot from my general-IT career with dev as one tool into solely development. So, anyways, thanks for sharing additional resources.

I've (mostly quietly) enjoyed the "vibe" of HN for well over a decade now. It's certainly a major contribution to maintaining enjoyment in the crazy world of tech. Thank you for your contributions to this community which remains so special to an entire industry.

Hard to say - but giving without the expectation of return can certainly lead to future gain. I highly respect the company that did schedule a feedback session and it certainly made them one that I will continue to watch for opportunities rather than just a position opening that popped up on a stream of jobs that I happened to find.

I'd be willing to bet they at least think there is some metric being improved there. Possibly assuming it might garner more interest as a desirable workplace during an staffer's market.

That makes sense. I guess I was only considering what my own response would be to receiving feedback. I think I'll just change my approach to just trying to articulate genuine appreciation for the opportunity to interview in the first place, and see if that sparks any love my way.

Thank you for the valuable feedback, and positive nudge. I am trying to get creative in how I introduce myself to organizations to make a good first impression without coming off as "creepy," i.e. trying to connect or send a message with hiring managers on LI for example.

I say average as I'm at about 60 for the past 60 days. Some days 0, some days 15. As an attempt to increase my success rate I have limited most of my applications to specifically target my most comfortable stack as well as focusing on orgs physically close to me that are seeking to fill hybrid positions. I check daily, but the supply of positions that meet that criteria go through waves.

I certainly do apply for remote-only positions as well if I match the requirements really well, but everything in the intermediate to mid-level range is getting 800-1,000 apps per week.

I have been trying this approach to some extent, but with a non-existent network it has essentially boiled down to using LinkedIn Premium features to guess who within the org might be close to the area the position is for. Thank you for the well wishes.

Are there examples of these types of actions in other circles outside of the .NET ecosystem? I knew about the FluentAssertions ordeal, but the Moq thing was news to me. I guess I've just missed it all.

If I had that leverage, I certainly would hard-pass, but the market just isn't there right now. I have hands-on dev experience (and the education) in different roles, but none of those roles are solely as a "software developer," so just getting the opportunity to do these goofy things is almost necessary just to get a seat at the table so to speak to begin talking about my background and KSAs. One thing to note is it is all perms given through the browser.

The most recent example for me was even worse- the position was for a web dev asking for experience in C#/.NET. The integrated IDE had all of the usual spyware did not actually compile anything or run any example checks. Then it proceeded, without any brief at all, to ask 7 more 'optional' gotcha-like questions on C pointers and nuances.

It's a terrible time to want to pivot into dev full-time, from the lense of being in the job market anyways.

I've had two "Online Assessments," as they're called, in the past couple of weeks and they're even weirder than that now. The request access to my desktop, webcam, microphone, akin to a proctored exam. They don't let you use your own editor, or even leave the window. There is no one there to interact with, ask clarifying questions, etc. It then plays everything back with keystrokes sync'd to video/audio for the reviewer.

If I have to go through that bullshit, I would at least like the opportunity to use it to show how I think, ask clarifying questions even if it is just to show understanding of edge cases, create some small talk, etc.

I agree that it doesn't make much sense. You would think if you're even close to being considered they'd want to keep the bridge intact for next time.

I wonder if there is some kind of legal liability involved with sharing feedback with potential candidates? I know this is sometimes the case for referrals/what can and cannot be sad in a reference check, etc.

What do you expect is the reason this happens? I would suspect your skill assessment after a handful of interviews is sound and most people liked you. Do you think you just run into a person eventually that doesn't vibe?

For my current situation, which is essentially a career field switch, I try to balance the possibility of running into someone like you in an interview (which I think would suit my situation best) and getting to the interview to begin with. I essentially work outside of the development industry, but develop internal tools/automate tasks in other tech areas.

I sometimes feel like I would have the leg up in the arena of understanding the business needs, methodologies to get there, etc- but am afraid I'm getting skipped for not sprinkling enough stack-terms and not having much experience with the need to scale across a large user base.

I appreciate your comment and will continue to learn everything I can about an org prior to discussions. Very helpful, Thank you!

I very rarely over the past 15+ years have had/remembered having a dream, and oddly that seems to have started being the case after trying to practice lucid dreaming. Most of the dreams I do have seem to be when I nap on the couch during the day (which I can probably count on one hand how many times I have done in 15 years).

Is that good/bad/neither?

Ah, the nostalgia. Dreamweaver was pivotal for me in my early teens to be able to copy other sites code to see how things were built out and learn HTML + CSS.

If I remember correctly, it was really the only way to go to make image maps when those were a thing.

Same. A very simplified version of bullet journaling does quite a bit for me to track tasks. I basically just use three bullets ( - for information, * for an item requiring action, and > to indicate i need to keep moving that task forward).