Ugh - thanks for that PTSD flashback from my token rabbit hole. You sure you don't want to base64Url encode it first, then convert to PEM format with one of these handy massive opaque packages? Don't forget about the exponent that no one ever mentions. Or maybe it already is base64Url encoded? No one knows. Have I shown you my BigInteger yet? Good luck pasting that anywhere.

Have I showed you my BigInteger yet sounds absolutely filthy

Don't worry - I'll decorate it with a protected wrapper class.

I had a phone interview with a company in Seattle followed up with a mini-project (expected to take a couple hours to complete). I completed it and sent it in.

They emailed back saying they are interested in proceeding with me. They were planning to fly me out @ their expense for the round of in person interviews. We haven't talked about salary yet.

I kinda feel like I should probably ask about it before arranging the date to come out for the in person interviews. It seems kinda dirty to have them fly me out if they are planning on offering a salary I wouldn't accept. Should I ask now or ask at the in person interviews?

Impressing them is the top priority, and I'm sure they'll hit any reasonable salary demands.

Yea considering your situation unless you are trying to 4X your salary you should be fine.

In general, whenever anyone asks about salary expectations I've always just said market rate. Some people seem to see that as an opportunity to offer whatever they want. The last time I used that line, the person I was talking with mentioned a figure which was ~25% below what I was expecting [offered 75 when the role is paying about 100]. I don't know if, in a scenario like that, they are just oblivious to what the role should be paying or if it's just an attempt to lowball.

Re: Interviews
Most interviewers are not motivated enough to come up with their own questions, so usually these types of questions exist somewhere on the internet. Whether you use the Cracking book or some other source, you'll cover most of the material out there. Try to find questions before you know they are in the Binary Search section. For each question try to identify which data structure or algorithm applies. Besides binary search, DFS and BFS are very common. Binary/B trees are very common. Know how to traverse these iteratively and recursively. Speaking of recursion, if a question sounds like it contains a recursive solution it probably does.

It's annoying, but you have to prepare for these types of interviews. You will be asked about things that NEVER come up in normal programming jobs.

Lowballing just doesn't make sense to me from a business perspective. Yet, so many places do this. The difference in hiring a good programmer vs. an average one is what 20%? That good programmer is going to be 2x as productive. Further, should a company want employees who will jump at the first 10% increase losing all the training and domain knowledge that person has gained over 6 mon-1yr or should they just pay 20% higher now and get a more productive person for a longer tenure?

Programming as a profession seems to be something that non-programmers find hard to measure. Do we compare two developers based on how much code they write? How many bugs they introduce? How Many bugs they fix? How many features/products they contribute to? With that in mind, I think people in management roles really cannot see the difference between 2 developers. It's very hard to objectively measure their contributions. If they cannot see the difference between devs then, imo, they have no reason to pay a competitive salary. Whoever will work for the least amount of money is the one they will keep. Of course, they will only find out later if they made the right decision when the dev that was able to do everything left and his work is now passed off to the cheaper, less capable dev.

Always better to let them make the first offer. If they're willing to fly you it it seems extremely unlikely they're going to lowball. And if so at least you got a free trip out of it.

Uh yeah it's not that I'm a 5x developer, I'm a 1x developer and almost everyone else is a 0.2x developer.

I mean even in my inexperience it was super obvious to me within two months who the productive people were and who the crappy people were. There’s no good way to try to quantify it.

Some people on my team produce very little code but the stuff they tackle is enormously complicated and rarely introduces problems. Other people vomit out a ****load of code that hardly ever works as it should.

Actually a good metric would be “resolves more problems than they create”

Works on non coding stuff too.

Ah **** yea i got assigned this kind of involved side task that isn’t script related.

I need to implement a socket pool for our product’s server mode. It’s kind of way over my head and i’m terrible at C but i love a challenge and it isnt on the critical path so the stakes are low, i feel like it’s a test. Glad they’re starting to put a little more faith in my programming ability.

Woah, youtube appears to be hard down world wide for at least the last half hour or so.

If they are in maintenance mode then they would, by default, only be resolving bugs. I guess you could create some while you're at it but seems unlikely. Doesn't seem like a good standalone metric imo.

Haha I wish that were true.

Still down damn

Back for me

Not for me

Edit: Youtube.com is up but the Youtube app on Roku is stuck with an infinite spinner.

How would you guys read this situation:

A company that's been around for 14 years, been profitable for the last 10, and has 40 employees? Most companies are all about growth so it seems really weird to me that a company would stay that small for that long.

Sounds great to me. So often I'll find out how big a company is and thing, what are all those people *doing*

Yes, this difficulty in measuring is probably why the situation exists.

How could this happen? Surely they're multi region? Must be a hell of a story...