kotakota's comments

Some of the points you're making dont seem to make sense. For instance you say you dont have time to make interesting things but then say you only program 2hrs out of the day. What are you doing those other 6hrs? And what about side projects outside of work?

Another key point that lead to crud work is a lack of experience. If your fresh out of school most job offers you'll get will be fairly crud type work until you've shown your able to handle more.

Education can also play a role in this. If you have a bachelor's or no degree experience will be your best friend. If you have a master's or phd you can generally get into some more exciting positions out of the gate.

Where else are you looking for work besides hn hiring / freelance threads? Those aren't even close to the best resources for finding great jobs.

"The product (a place to sleep) is the same"

The product is not the same its "a place to sleep" vs "a place to live" and they are very very different.

If you cant afford a hotel how are you paying for the rest of the trip. Im a graduate student and I can afford to travel and pay for a decent hotel. If you can't you shouldn't be traveling and you shouldn't expect others to put up with poor situations because you want a cheap place to stay.

I think this is the best advice. A lot of these projects will force you to learn new concepts, algorithms, and they will give you a new way of thinking about problems. Learning a new language won't necessarily do any of those things.

Do you contribute to open source? Do you go to user groups? Do you network with other professionals? If you do any of those and are a competent developer getting offers should be easy. Most good developers who network even just a little bit get contacted by recruiters fairly regularly. On the other hand if you are not a strong developer no matter how much you network no one is going to contact you about open positions at their company.

Why would you stay there for 45k and no benifits? 45k/year is a slap in the face for any decent developer.

It sounds like poor decision making to me. You should become really good at a particular area then migrate into full stack. I encounter this in programming all the time. People claim to be "full stack developers" but when you give them anything above a beginner level problem on something specific they can't do it. If you want to be able to work on the "full stack" in any field you have to earn it and really master all the pieces one by one.

I think this an amazing question to ask in an interview and I have actually been asked this question in two interviews. I generally throw the interviewers off track though because I generally talk about my personal project that involves a virtual machine and a byte code compiler for the virtual machine. I actually really enjoy this part of the interview too because it gives me a chance to talk about something im passionate about while displaying my technical abilities.

I agree that the overuse of "passion" in programming job ads is kind of silly. The only thing about job ads that's bothers me more is when recruiters say "work on hard/challenging/exciting/fun/important problems". Simply because 99% of the time their "hard problems" are neither hard nor real problems. These are problems that our community of developers has created for ourselves though. Since a lot of developers choose to change jobs every year or two the recruiters have to use phrases that spark an interest in candidates.

I'm always bothered when I see these types of questions. Why do you feel the need to lead a young child to programming? Why can't you simply let the child be like all other children. Let them enjoy their youth and at around 7 or 8 you can introduce them to programming. If they like it great, if not let them decide what they do like doing.

I don't really get it either. As an experienced developer if I want to work on a cool project I either start my own or I go on github and contribute to something I'm interested in. While the creator claims to be recruiting experienced developer's I don't see why any good developer would pay a monthly fee to work on a side project. This seems like it would attract more amateur or novice programmers who aren't comfortable contributing to a large mature project on github.

I understand what your saying. I live in Chicago and things are pretty similar. I'm not saying that all drivers are correct in the way that they act. Many drivers are jerks about it but at the same time many bikers are jerks about the way they ride in traffic. A major reason drivers simply want to get around a cyclist is to avoid having to deal with the chance of hitting them if the swerve suddenly. Is the way they go about It right? Probably not but if you are going to put drivers in a situation where they have to worry about hitting you then its their right to be rude.

You have to realize that if a driver hits another car going 20 mph in city traffic chances are no one will be seriously hurt. Someone will likely get a ticket between $50 and $200 and their insurance goes up. Now when you throw a bike in that accident the rider is likely going to be seriously injured if not killed. No one wants to be in a situation where they have to worry about seriously hurting or killing someone. Most drivers simply want to get around the biker and avoid it but bikers don't make that easy and many of them act like they own the road. You just have to remember as a cyclists that you are the one who chose to put your safety at risk by riding in traffic.

The name matters with any consumer product.

As many other people have said it depends on what you want to do. You should choose a language for a project based on the project.

With that being said there are a lot of jobs available for programmers who know java, c++, and .net. If you want to do desktop developement work i would suggest being compitent in those languages but if you want to do web dev work you should probably skip those languages for the time being and focus on languages that are better suited for that domain.

Impeding traffic flow is a law in most states and counties and is frequently referenced in accident trials definitions.uslegal.com/i/impeding-traffic/

You should probably at least google something before you immediately claim its made up. Oh but wait that would be using common sense

The cyclist should pull over and wait until the road is clear or ride in roads with lower speed limits and less traffic. The cyclist is the one impending traffic and therefore should be the one to be inconvenienced. Also the cyclist is the one who endangered their own life by deciding to ride in the street with cars. Even though cyclists have the right to be on the road they are still expected to fallow the traffic laws including signaling turns, stopping at stop signs and lights, and not impeding traffic flow. If they fallowed the laws they wouldn't be in danger. The vast majority of bicycle/vehicle accidents happen at intersections where surprise surprise cyclists very rarely fallow the law.

I think this is a very misleading poll. Most people don't have the same definition of what back end work is. For isntace I do a lot of ai and machine learning work which I would consider far more back end than someone doing back end work for a web app where their code might directly effect the front end.

What do you call good proofs? I think what you consider a "good school" is not what I consider a good school. In my calc classes we studied tons of awesome proofs that were very applicable to theoretical cs stuff. Plus most of my linear algebra classes and stats classes were just engineering, cs, and math majors so we once again focused on very useful real world applications and fields of active research.

If someone wants to develop their mathematical thinking and is good at programming descrete math isn't going to help them much because they have probably already seen much of it. They need to be exposed to high level calc and linear algebra to develop their mathematical thinking.

Personally I would recommend doing a ms if you can afford it but if you can't I would recommend that you study the following areas Algorithms and data structures (this is a must) Systems organizations and architecture Systems programming Discrete math Math for cs books (generally proof based descrete and calculus based) Statistics and probability Then Start diving into areas that interest you like Metaheuristics Ai Machine learning Computer vision Compilers Device drivers Graph theory Computer Graphics (if your working in theoretical computer graphics strong maths skills are recommended) And the list goes on. Also read papers were in areas of interest. Papers are a great way to learn high level theoretical concepts.

I think your off base with this. A good school with a good theoretical cs program will always require up to multivariable calc, linear algebra, stats with calc, and discrete math. These are required because they will almost always be essential for doing theoretical work. Sometimes you just need it to properly express and explain complexity of a problem but many times in theoretical work knowledge of advanced mathematics is integral to to the actual research. Your advice is more geared towards what most good schools consider a general cs degree.