AndreyErmakov's comments

What is the point of pushing people out of their comfort zone? Practical software engineering doesn't happen when you're uncomfortable. Discovering quality solutions requires concentration and immersion into problems.

So we all realize technical interviews serve no practical purpose and should be quietly abandoned, but instead of looking into the future and discovering better ways of identifying talent, people keep inventing stuff that makes the torturing mechanism even more sophisticated so that the suffering can be prolonged.

I'd like to see the people behind this project apply their technical skills to something more useful to the industry and the society in general.

>> to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude

Any woman who's gone through that process will likely want to get another career, that where people are treated with more respect. And I suppose many men are having the exact same thoughts.

The more you mock your talent pool, the more actively that talent is running in the opposite direction, just to get out of this mess.

Because hiring is akin to dating and therefore it suffers from the same problems:

1) It's mostly about subjective impressions and often weird ideas of what a suitable date/candidate must be. There are no official rule books or guidelines about how to proceed. It's not about hard skills and efficiency, it very much revolves around soft skills, presentation abilities and invisible chemistry.

2) More often than not both parties in dating/hiring aren't serious about conducting a transaction and getting to a serious business. It's about meeting new people, hanging out, checking the pulse of the job market but no more. Misrepresenting oneself, one's abilities/features and intentions is the norm with both dates/candidates(companies), which leads to a lot of frustration and bad feelings, keeping the success rate of activities in the both fields rather low.

Different industries, similar problems. And for the both of them no technological/software solution in sight.

P.S. See how "candi-date" is linguistically just a particular case or subset of "date". Just another validation of the point.

>> You are not your job.

Very true. I hold the same liberal view as to what people truly are.

An interesting idea just struck me. If a seasoned software developer quits his full-time job to work on a startup of his dream, while taking a part time job at a bar to be able to pay his bills, who is he then? Is he no longer a professional software engineer? Is he now a bar tender? An entrepreneur? What is he truly then during this period?

By the same token, if say an economist has been getting frustrated at his job and starts learning web programming, building simple personal sites for himself and friends, is it insufficient to call him a programmer, even if we would all agree he is only a junior one?

Where do we draw a line?

If someone is serious about a new vocation and invests a lot of time and energy into mastering it, then by all rights he's already in part what he aspires to become.

>> The best handbook of all, though is simply the study of great writers whose work you love

That is definitely the way to approach things. If you come into writing by choice then it's because you've been drawn to it. Which in its turn means you have read works of others and have been inspired by them. Use those as your handbooks then, learn from the great, imitate them and eventually discover your own path.

It's not like you've never read anything of consequence in your life and all of a sudden you decide you're going to turn into a writer. Doesn't work that way. There are no "Writing for dummies" or "Learning writing in 20 days" manuals. You just start writing because you can, when you become ready for it.

It's true that the golden era of the non-English writers lies mostly in the past. What is not true is that the past writings are now invalid/deprecated or whatever term you may coin. If I had a choice between the body of the past literature and the modern content, I would have chosen to stick with the old texts without a second thought. They're just unbelievably great and what is written today is merely an echo of the past.

But what concerns me the most is that you dismiss the world literature without even knowing it and without being able to learn it. It's so arrogant that I can't seem to find the words to express my sorrow. All I can say is that the loss is yours. Nobody in the world has ever produced literature, songs and music like the French and Russian masters have. I am able to enjoy them in their natural form, as well as the English... let's call it "content". I can directly compare them and I'm telling you it would have been a loss of a monumental scale if I had been born in an English-speaking country and would have never been able to make acquaintance with those pieces.

That's not to mention that foreign languages are often less constrained and more expressive than English which on itself allows for more profound thoughts to be born and more naturally and creatively expressed. But that's not something that English-only speakers will ever find out.

I might try to persuade you to change your opinion but I won't. There's nothing in your position to brag about. In a way, I'm luckier than you and to that end I can only express my deepest regrets to you.

Right to the point.

It's interesting that the author pursued a degree in literature and that's what ultimately pushed her away from that career path. It seems to be a common theme where a formal education in creative arts makes people want to do something else in life, anything else.

I've had acquaintances with a musical background and eventually they went to do something else, including IT. From what an old buddy told me once, most graduates of a musical school learn to hate music and quit that vocation past graduation.

In the opposite fashion, I've never had a literary education and I'm feeling more and more drawn to this line of work. I'm not sure if I want to make a complete switch though, software engineering and startups are just too exciting to give it all up. Somehow it feels I can accomplish more and make a better contribution to the society with my honed programming skills than with words, but I might be wrong about it. For now, I'm just writing essays every now and then, publishing them on my blog and that seems to be enough.

One word of advice in relation to all of this. Don't shy away from reading foreign literature. I know that for many native English speakers other languages simply don't exist in their world, but you're missing out on an incredible body of thoughts and ideas that might expand your vision borders. Don't be stuck in your English silo, learn some foreign language and go exploring. And no, a translation is not the same, it's devoid of the original energy. That's why people are often unimpressed by what before a translation was a profound piece of work. You can't translation energy.

Certainly. Yet there's been a tendency later to declare SQL wrong and deprecated and to incite everyone to forget about it and go with an ORM as the only way. I do not accept that. The stronger the ORM zealots are pushing the more repulsive the idea of an ORM becomes to me. But of course it's just another instrument that has its place among the others.

You are quite correct on all your points and I agree with you.

I suppose I could have expressed my idea better. What I meant is that for people with a programming aptitude there are no barriers these days. Whether they want to jump directly into software engineering or pursue another field and use their knowledge of programming as an asset, for the both choices the road is open. There are tons of information freely available for those who wish to learn. If one wanted to get an official CS degree it's also easily arranged, university chairs of that specialization are under-filled. At least that is so in Europe. For some reason the locals prefer economic/legal/business degrees and engineering isn't terribly popular. Can't say anything about the situation in the US though.

Software engineering is genuinely hard. There's no need to add elitism to it. This choice of vocation is already highly selective towards everyone who tries to enter that field.

I'll share some numbers from my academic days pursuing a CS course. From an average group of say 100 students to graduate with a CS degree only about 3-4 actually had an aptitude to become a serious and wise professional. And even those would not necessarily take a programming job in the end. Some didn't see good career perspectives in it. The rest of the group would come to a conclusion it's just too hard and would spread out to whatever alternative jobs they can find, either IT-related or not.

The amount of computer-engineering talent is pretty constant and very low. You can encourage the general population to try it but that won't accomplish anything. Anyone with genuine abilities and an inclination towards this line of work already goes into that industry.

What is possible is that through inconsiderate encouragement of large masses to enter IT you eventually get crowds willing to perform unqualified tasks for pennies, like building trivial smartphone apps, performing WordPress installations etc. In fact, this already is a reality. I see people around me abandoning their careers and moving into IT. This is in part caused by the economic crisis in my country (Russia) which devalued salaries almost three times, and lately everyone's been thinking about getting into IT to improve their earnings. I also see that people just stumble at the basics. As soon as they realize programming is not about dragging & dropping objects in a visual editor and you have to actually perform some intensive thinking, people just give up that idea and quit.

Ultimately, it will just make it more difficult to distinguish a professional in a larger crowd, but it will not make his/her services cheaper. In fact, it will probably cause more people to be burned by amateurs posing as professionals and eventually they'll be more ready to pay the premium in order not to have to deal with amateurs and risk their projects ruined. Software engineering services will then become more expensive in general.

Software engineering is hard and will remain hard. The amount of talent will also remain pretty small and launching a thousand of new programming schools is not going to change that. Smart people don't need any schools at all. For those who aren't smart, schools won't help them much.

As to what the end game might be, it's just too early to say. The society is transforming into a different community. Right now it looks like people with average abilities will have tough times landing a job as those become automated and replaced by computer systems of some kind, whereas it will be easier for the unqualified folks and for the highly qualified ones. The middle might just see some very rough times. We'll just have to wait and see which way it goes.

I've started with the book "PostgreSQL Up & Running". It's rather lacking in detail and has a lot of typos, but I'm nevertheless enjoying it. It's written in a simple language and it provides a good landscape overview, which is exactly what you need in the beginning. Get the big picture first and then you can look for the necessary details as you go.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032144.do

Now that someone has downvoted me, I know it is the right choice and I must learn Postgres. Thanks for your support, folks.

Something like living in a flat infested with insects, walls not properly isolated making it pretty cold in winter with the heating set on maximum so you need to sleep in a sweater and a jacket, broken electrical wiring and the lights shutting down every now and again, a mixer that could not deliver a constant temperature water stream. Loud music, smoking, a construction place less than 100 meters away. Was my reality in Stuttgart. Couldn't find anything better. Or, more to the point, I could but that would necessitate a salary of 80-90K to be able to pay back whatever expenses such a rental would incur.

I know of course that even by German standards it's a luxury. Many working people (non-IT) can only afford a room.

Sometimes I think the government really needs to step in and cap the rental prices to 1/3 of the average salary in the area. Otherwise that inflation never ends.

>> I made 50k in a more expensive city, Paris. From that my partner and I were able to buy a flat, put our son into a catholic school

Having a partner doubles your income. More, if French taxation works in any way similarly to the German system, then an official relationship puts you in a different taxation category. Having children moves you into yet another category where your net income noticeably improves. You're probably making an equivalent of 100K for a single person without realizing it.

>> And yet these startups, everywhere, are able to do exactly that. They use equity as a carrot to lure experienced people from a sure thing all the time.

Not really. Everywhere where I've been I've only seen kids writing code. Anybody who is senior has always been an independent contractor, and it's usually them who actually advance the work by leaps and bounds. But those, today you have them working for you, tomorrow they're elsewhere. And with the young and inexperienced, you won't accomplish much.

Also, experienced people with families usually ignore any talks about equity and start the initial offer analysis with a calculator in their hands. I'm yet to encounter a true senior specialist with family obligations that takes equity over hard currency.

Personally, I prefer writing SQL by hand. That way I know exactly what will happen in a query. A database really is an important component of a system and shouldn't be treated like a dumb data store where you just throw in any stuff you like through an ORM and hope it sticks there somehow.

Because I really like the power of SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools) and how nicely it integrates with Visual Studio and would like to continue using that instrument if possible.

But I can't seriously build a complex product around SQL Server knowing that 10GB is the sky for my database.

What I meant was that's just not enough. You can toy with it in a hobby project but in production that will be exhausted pretty soon.

Thanks for the information! Apparently I missed that in the news stream.

Sad to hear about that though. I was hoping for a break. Will just have to continue reading that PostgreSQL book I've already started.

A bit of feedback from someone who tried to make it in Germany with a 40K salary (in the south) and couldn't. It's just not doable. You need at least 60-70K to get started in medium towns, and around 80-90K for large expensive cities. Otherwise you either have to downgrade your standard of living to that common in third-world countries or accept it to live with a chronically empty bank account and most likely with a long-term debt as you're trying to pay back your initial accommodation expenses. Cheap is an illusion for a brochure.