hanginghyena's comments

Surprised actually. If she really did run the company "day to day", seems like she would be in a position to give him the boot (grab the accounts) vs. what actually happened.

Actually, those guys make only a tiny slice of the value per click. Banner advertising is a low return game.

Now...if you control the landing page and conversion funnel, basically delivering paid customers (vs. clicks) to a paying merchant, your value per visit goes up by a factor of 10 - 50. $.25/click vs. $10 - $30 (varies by product).

Now imagine a company that launches dozens of offers with hundreds of variations and plows it's bankroll back into the best (most profitable) version (for years at a time).

Yeah, $400MM is possible.

Right but that's where this gets ridiculous.

Telling a patient to fast is basically a clinical practice. Almost like checking blood pressure. No actual supplies needed, just behavioral counseling.

By the same logic, could I patent checking blood pressure?

That seems very anti-competitive. So basically, if fasting is a free treatment for diabetes, you can't promote it without paying these guys a royalty? Boooooo

That's not awful, btw. The one upside of a large consulting firm is you can retain decent talent for boring projects by bouncing them around between assignments.... but you still have a single entity to hold accountable afterwards.

Plus a certain percentage of these people take the diverse base of experience and go start something useful. Teaching a bunch of smart, ambitious people about how the process actually works and then letting them go start their own operation seems like a recipe for job creation.... (and finding better ways to replace the status quo)

Sadly that is trivial to get around these days, especially if someone at the new company knows someone at the old one.

Most professionals I know are happy to "bend" policy to give a respected colleague or personal friend a good reference, especially if that person is on the street.

If the company clams up and limits its response to name, rank and serial number, that's a huge red flag.

=> "makes you wonder about the level of competency of the average web development company"

Our competency on projects where we are being paid a full domestic consulting rate is quite high, thank you.

Now, if you're asking us to compete with cut-rate bids from some online freelancer exchange, we will reduce the level of service and QA to match our competitors in that space....

Eg. you may have Nordstrom's service for a Nordstrom's price. Wal-mart service for a Wal-mart price. But don't expect Nordstrom's service for a Wal-mart price; that usually isn't going to fly....

Web publisher here...the real problem is twofold:

- Display advertising makes the web suck; while display ads fund a large share of general market content sites, from a purely technical perspective they kill site performance.

- All major market participants suck equally, rendering no alternatives for end-users or advertisers to defect to; this inherently limits any incentive for real change.

AMP / Mobile index (new development from Google) breaks the gridlock: divert traffic to sites who deliver a good (fast) mobile experience and (assume site owners are economically rational - we are) is supported by something other than old school display advertising. Solving the 2nd part is left as an exercise to the student....

Interesting enough, you can make a banner ad load really fast. Just host images on your site and load it directly from your server without all the tracking scripts and separate calls from your advertising network (plus others). Or go completely native and render text links in html. Granted, this requires you to actually market your content and merchandise an offer (affiliate marketing).

Display advertising actually isn't the highest CPM option for a website; I did a study on small site auction data a while back and it was the lowest CPM model (admittedly, laziest to implement):

http://www.marginhound.com/revenue-model-study-for-small-web...

Another old geezer here (43!); had a good run in my twenties and wound up in technical management a few years ago.

A couple of tips:

- The "hands on" technical skills that launched your career have capped (top salary) and declining value

- If you take time to learn / think about how the underlying technology works (vs. just cut / paste / edit code), you can master related new technologies faster than the average bear.

- It is also worth noting that technical challenges tend to repeat every couple of generations; the software developer community is operating within the same set of fundamental constraints (coder time, CPU speed, network, data, etc.), the main thing that changes is which constraint matters. And they repeat: at some point, CPU will be the constraint again and all ninja coder tricks of my twenties will matter again.

- Architecture, process design, and people herding skills only grow with time; 80% of my value as a manager consists of making unnecessary work go away (without drama). I am much better at using these skills at 42 than I was at 24.

- If you ever see an opportunity to build a side project that could turn into a business, take it. Even if you don't replace your income, this gives you additional control over the direction of your late career and skills you acquire. Note that I said side project and not startup; the intent to get more control over your direction without walking away from your day job and associated income / benefits.

THIS.

Speaking as a hiring manager, I will absolutely notice any delays or interruptions in your education (unless ancient); in the event you don't give the years, it often becomes obvious when you list high school degree or summer jobs.

The key is to have a reasonable story about the situation. Finishing a liberal arts degree in five years after you spent the first four partying doesn't send a good message. Finishing a degree after taking a break to handle <other important responsibility - family, startup, etc> or as a consequence of a major change that helps employer? Not a significant issue....

The real irony here is a rant against commercialism that is published on a page with no less than 11 display ads and a "related content" unit....

There's actually significant learning value in time spent figuring out legacy systems and linking them together. Doing ad-hoc reporting is the IT equivalent of being a short order cook.

Do it long enough, and you learn how to make almost anything from nothing.

And that should be considered an employable skill....

With a truly technical manager, this is honestly one of the fastest ways to torpedo your credibility.

Anything listed on your resume is fair game for questions, especially if you claim it as a skill. "Reading a book" is not a skill; reading a book and using the contents in that book for several real world projects probably qualifies. Especially if you can describe what you did in detail.

Harsh reality: I value everything in that section of the resume at the value of the weakest component that I find. So when we discover that your knowledge of SQL is reading a few tutorials on w3schools ten years ago, I rate EVERYTHING ELSE in that section at the same level (ouch!).

So the safe way to play this is don't list anything that you can't hold a 5 - 10 minute conversation about and explain at least the basics of how the technology works, citing real examples of where you used it (paid or unpaid, I don't care about that, as long as you're clear about what you did).

Yeah. Most of your competitors won't do this. They'll fill out the bottom of their resume with junk. But um... there's a reason they're still looking....

Incidentally my own (technical) resume has exactly two lines of IT skills... each of which I can do a 30+ min speech on. Never had a problem in that area during an interview...

Brilliant!

I may wind up stealing this as an alternative test for more advanced programmers; everything here can be done using the Python Standard library.

And kudos to those of you who suggested in-memory storage vs. writing it out to a table.

THIS.

Yes, there are SQL statements without Joins. No, we don't usually run them in the reporting organization....

So respond to that job spec with a resume which clearly highlights the 3-4 things you actually did master, with multiple specific project examples and real roles/jobs.

You may be pleasantly surprised.

Speaking for myself, I will gleefully hop over piles of candidates with a 1/4 page of alphabet soup on their CV trying to talk with the candidate who hammers Python, PHP, Javascript (etc) across a 5+ years of different projects. Even if I'm hiring for a slightly different technology, because I can be confident they actually know the trade.

Multiple skill-sets do add value if they are related and easily combined to deliver a larger solution. Eg. HTML + CSS + Javascript = Front End Web Dev + Python + SQL = Full Stack Web Developer. So I can staff that person in a larger role.

The spew of semi-related and adjacent buzzwords doesn't really help me feel comfortable with a candidate. And if I start asking you about them and learn all you did was read about them online (or used it once for a class), the rest of your resume goes into the danger zone real quick.

"I mastered X, Y, and Z and used them together to build <pure awesomeness>" will get you further than you think. Even if the job doesn't require X, Y, and Z....

Hiring Manager Perspective: Everyone lies, sorry.

As a candidate, I hate technical interviews. For the reasons above. As the poor schmuck asked to make the hiring decision, however, I've learned that I can't live without them.

My technical isn't complicated. A very basic SQL assignment (delivered to an audience which claims to know SQL) that is followed by a few broader database design / data process QA questions. Entire assignment is 100% job relevant (in fact, my SVP asked for a copy of the report it generates when he saw the problem on my whiteboard). I don't care about the details of syntax.

I do care, however, about candidates who produce SQL code which looks like the bastard love child of LISP and Java. About candidates who claim to know a skill but literally cannot write even basic syntax on the whiteboard. Who put "certificates" from Oracle on their bloody resume and break down under super gentle questioning and confess their tutor hasn't taught them JOINS (wtf ?) yet, never mind 5 years of claimed SQL experience at a big company on their resume.

The coding question is most definitely not an exercise in sadism. We validated it with several new hires who were confirmed to be "good at SQL". Average completion time: 2 minutes, generally with trolling about why do we waste our time with easy stuff.

That being said, my rejection rate from a basic coding interview is at least 50%, grading liberally and generally supported by several members of my team shaking their head about a candidate.

I've tried screening resumes, I've tried doing non-coding phone screens. IT DOESN'T WORK. Actually, all it does is eliminate the socially challenged and non-communicative (who actually tend to pass the whiteboard test) in favor of the liars.

And don't get me started about Python. Lest I bring up the Google-Motorola "I LUV Python heart heart heart" guy who didn't understand the difference between a list & dict.

Speaking as a hiring manager, I place a much higher value on verifiable project experience (either I can see it or you can walk me through your unique/non-trivial app in our interview) than any credentials. I've seen a lot of candidates who are focused on credentials crumble in the technical interview.

Granted, there's a huge universe of people out there who are more than willing to take your money (including Microsoft), but the really good people I've hired blew me away with their project descriptions and not their list of certifications.

<edited>

Seems like you're deferring one dragon for another.

Deliver the project got easier; "Control the customer" got significantly harder. You've now got someone's app store in the middle of your customer relationships and are exposed to approval drama, various forms of revenue squeeze, and other meddling from the platform owner. What happens if the folks running the platform decide to launch their own offering?

Speaking as another small developer, our solution to the cross-browser feature support is simple: anything that doesn't run on most modern browsers doesn't make the final design. If the customer doesn't bite on basic design, we don't expect a miraculous shift with the latest widgets.

My machine learning algorithm says you will click on. So Dance, Monkey, Dance!!!!!

<I think we've finally found skynet. They live at Outbrain.>