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webtards's comments

webtards | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: A coding test or working for free?

I have done at home prescreener tasks, as long as they were sub one hour, clearly academic, and patently not related to the business. These are not paid. I have also done on-site dev tasks and tests which were squarely related to the core business, and have invoiced my day rate each time, which was paid. If a company asks for more than an hour, for tasks related to their business, and don't want to pay, run, don't walk away, and better still, spread the word so people become aware and avoid them in the future.

webtards | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: I hate my new job, Need some advice

This. They pay terribly, the work is usually boring CMS and cookie cutter tasks, and there is undue stress because the overpaid account managers can't even run a basic plan and leave all the coding work till the last minute, even when they knew about it months ago. Grab a nice cup of tea, maybe a rich tea or two, pen and paper, make an exit plan, execute it, and good luck!

webtards | 10 years ago | on: The end for Mandriva

Sad to see it all go. Still have the old Mandrake boxes knocking around somewhere. I recall it being installed, under the radar, in one London financial company, as a desktop for a trader to build out some modelling and pricing tools. This was their first linux box - all other nix boxes back then were either sun or hp-ux. Happy times.

webtards | 10 years ago | on: India should make more of a valuable asset abroad

Careful there! It's easy to paint a broad stroke, when the reality is more nuanced. When employers adopt a race to the bottom on salary and skill level, then yes, the plumber replaced by an eastern European counterpart, or a programmer replaced by someone who will "do the needful" may feel some resentment. But it is easy and cheap to paint a nation with the same viewpoint.

webtards | 10 years ago | on: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace

I do wonder sometimes, if all the startups that followed Googs lead into open offices have been pranked, much like the interview folks who blindly followed Googs wacky and wanky interview questions, which have also been shown to be a useless idea. There is probably a pranks team in Goog that publicises the ideas to see who will blindly follow.

webtards | 10 years ago | on: 5 Alternatives to the Fizzbuzz Test for Hiring Programmers

A good set of questions - they don't rely on too much esoteric knowledge, and look to see how the programmer would apply any experience gained to date in solving them.

One question we often use early in interviews is "could you show me something neat you have learnt whilst programming?" - we want to see if they have actually programmed before, if they took the time to dig in a bit more than hello world or the fabulous Paula bean (dailywtf classic) and importantly, why they thought it was neat.

webtards | 10 years ago | on: “The benchmark numbers are completely wrong for both databases”

Not sure what's worse here - people relying on third party benchmarks (hint: always do your own; see how a tool performs on your data, on your hardware, for your problem set), or the fanboy-ish panic when they are unsettled that a benchmark might make their chosen toy less shiny?

webtards | 10 years ago | on: Deutsche Bank Ignored Its CDS Problems Until They Went Away

The money moves around and around and around (notionally) a dizzyingly large number of times because the more opaque the process and end product, the less immediate introspection it receives, the less well the average Joe can understand it, and the firm can continue 'alchemy'. Kudos to the regulators for the arduous task of unravelling the large ball of string and following it to the conclusion!

webtards | 10 years ago | on: Yagni

I think the ability to use YAGNI scales with the experience and abilities of the developer and the team. I have walked into wonderful lean codebases where an experienced hand has kept featuritus down to a minimum, but I have also walked into codebases where multiple kitchen sinks were not only present and plumbed in, but a pile of new ones were ready and waiting by the side to join them, and it was a massive distraction.

webtards | 10 years ago | on: Why PowerPoint should be banned

Powerpoint is just an enabler for crap presentations. Maybe the trick is to make it harder to fill the canvas, so the pages become a bit sparser, and revert back to their original intended purpose, an aide memoire for the presenter to actually present, to use them as a reinforcement of the content, as a guide, and not, really not, something they just read verbatim from the slide!

webtards | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Software developers, What happened when you were fired/laid off?

In the UK, fired is generally for when an employer dismisses you from employment due to a specific issue (timekeeping, poor performance, caught stealing printers etc.) It is very different to being made redundant, which occurs when the employer believes your role is no longer viable and has become redundant. Most employers here would not have an issue with the latter, but might have concern with the former. In both cases I found employment within three months, in both cases during a job market like the current climate, in both cases the employer in question acted like an arse, but did not make moving on difficult. The redundancy was just a cheap move to offshore our teams jobs to southeast Asia, the firing was related to being told I was not pulling 100 hour weeks like the rest of the suckers there, and I said "damn right".

webtards | 10 years ago | on: Why do people waste so much time at work?

Because we are playing the game. Some call it presenteeism, other call it face time, some even view it as the boss owning your ass during the work hours. But basically, we don't really give a fuck for the organisation, for the team, for the project, for the job. We just do enough to keep the gig until something better rolls along. We know you would have no hesitation to cut jobs and other such when it suits, so don't expect any more from us.

webtards | 10 years ago | on: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and tag hell to support said shitty frameworks and having to deploy massive fuuckton heavy sites for a simple blog post. It also sucks hard for the end users : they can see their whole months mobile data allowance get pissed away on a couple of bling websites. It can takes ages now for modern site to finally work as it downloads so much shite. Some big name sites used to render quicker five or ten years ago. At least in the past, you could turn off scripting, images and styling and get to the basic content, but not even that works now due to crap developers. It all sucks. Diseased turtles all the way down.
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