also noodle, you will be surprised how little the education translates to a job. I know a ton of programmers of 5+ years that have no idea how things in the language work, like reference passing. The most common skill from classes is probably just knowing which data structure is better suited for your usage

noodle, i've not read this, but it might be worth checking out:
http://www.functionalphp.com/

especially if you have any say over the style of code you write.

meh I like PHP, it's very good at getting stuff done imo.

I do not have any say regarding style, but I'll check it out, thanks!

So I just had an argument with my coworker. I'm more of a backend java guy while he's a thouroughbred frontend js guy, and he's 15 years younger than me (and cocky).

We're creating a front end client that needs to use a 3rd party payment service. Our wallet backend provides us with a rest endpoint that generates vendor specific parameter strings to open up a portal to the payment service site for entering credit card details.

Basically the procedure goes like this:
1: Make a get request to a fixed endpoint to verify that we are logged in.
2: Make a post request to our wallet service with the amount to charge to the CC in the payload and the redirect urls. This returns 3 encoded strings.
3: Make a post request to the 3rd party service providing the 3 strings as parameters, which forwards you to their payment portal.

We use backbone in our front end for MVC stuff, and he wants us to use backbone for anything REST related. I feel that using backbone to model what is basically an RPC is overengineering. I just started studying backbone so maybe I'm missing something and doesn't help when he accuses me of "not getting it". But I think he's missing the forest for the trees. Isn't backbone mostly for modeling CRUD and keeping track of state in a GUI?

Any thoughts?

Eh? He wants you to use backbone on the server next to a Java stack? If so he's a moron. If he wants to use it on the client to handle rest stuff let him do what he feels like.

it's hard to tell what he's suggesting you do by "use backbone"? obviously backbone on the server makes no sense, but i can't tell what the two competing solutions you guys are arguing about look like....

We're both working on the front end right now, we just have different backgrounds.

I'm asking if backbone is, as he claims, a hammer that fits every nail of http/rest calls that a front end can make, even when you're doing something that doesnt fit CRUD or MVC.

For instance, when logging in, does it really make sense to make a "log in" model in backbone and then call model.save() when posting to your login service? What exactly are you saving there?

I was under the impression that backbone was designed for the MVC pattern.

Well using a backbone model to hold state about a user's login status is a pretty standard use for it sure. If you're already using it why not. Better than another POJO global.

absolute wrong on so many levels

absolute yes on every point

kinda yes kinda no

absolutely not

absolutely yes

absolutely good at creating a buttload of technical debt

This is a terrible attitude and even worse as advice for someone who's starting out.

Craggoo - what I said about ChrisV's post doubly applies to yours. It's one of those things that don't even rise to the level of wrong.

So I've been kinda idly interviewing at a few places over the past few months. Had an interview sequence at a "really cool place to work" that went like this recently:

phone screen with internal recruiter, went fine.

couple days later I'm sitting at home, unknown # on my phone, I ignore it and listen to the voicemail: "hey its foo from bar company, I'll try again in a few minutes" - yep that's right, phone call with hiring manager was scheduled without an email to me and obviously no confirmation. I talk to him anyways.

I get a "homework assignment" (yeah) which is to make a SPA that hooks up with the github api which is rate limited and a hassle to deal with.

I go in for the onsite which didn't go great as I was pretty tired after 3 straight hours of talking to 7 different people and during the "homework review" part was the oldest person by 10 years. Whatever, its fine, its just an interview and wasn't too impressed anyways. At one point with a manager I mentioned that baz engineer that I met at a meetup moved me to HR etc and the response is "oh yeah, he's a rock star! He's here at 7am when I get in and is here at 7pm when I leave" I mean how many red flags is that?!

The last guy is the director or whatever and he literally talks for like 1/2 hour, asking me almost nothing. He says "we'll get back to you tomorrow, 2 days tops". I never hear from them again.

I write a negative glassdoor review that is "pending" because I assume places like this have it in their pockets.

out em. that pretty redic.

eh its some nothing software company here with 400 employees that makes a product almost identical to the "pied piper platform" from Silicon Valley but without the revolutionary compression.

At one point when it was me and 3 engineers I say "do you get a lot of 'pied piper' jokes?" and... get 3 blank stares. I say its from the TV show and one says "I don't have time to watch that".

???

Au contraire, I think someone who's just starting out and thus has no long-term perspective on the potential directions of their career needs this kind of advice.

Like, my first job was as a QA software engineer writing unit tests at a boring large enterprise software company. I think they offered me that job to begin with because I did QA (video game testing, not programming related) in college. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my career yet (or even what I could/should do) and I took the job because it was a job, it paid well, and I didn't know ****. I wasted a year of my life at that place! I wish 2+2 had a programming forum back then full of people who would kindly tell me that writing unit tests for a living sucks and to never take the job in the first place or if I did to make damn sure that I didn't become Guy Who Writes Unit Tests For A Living as a career (thankfully I made a 180 on my own and went into development).

I've been building a wordpress site for the last week so obviously been using PHP.

My highlight was needing to delete a duplicate title that was appearing on page layouts, spending about 10 secs deciding which section of the template it was likely in and then finding the offending line of code in another 10 secs:

[PHP]<h2 class="blog-post-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>[/PHP]

deleted it, and the duplicate title was gone from my page layouts in under a minute.

Great success.

RealNetworks is still going strong I see.

currently pursuing a MBA and will be starting a finance career next year once I graduate.

I have around 9 months "free" and I want to learn a programming language so that I can make things more efficient and automate processes. I've noticed that in a lot of finance jobs, there is a lot of repetitive work that you do over and over that I want to automate.

A lot of finance jobs also require heavy excel usage. I'm very good at Excel and am an intermediate level at vba. I'm also learning sql to pull data from big databases.

I'm now trying to figure out what language to learn to automate processes. I've researched a bit and it seems that C#, Python or Ruby, autoit, autohotkey, and powershell are the most recommended options.

What language is best for my purposes?

For finance I think I'd recommend R. My second choice might be python, leaning heavily on stuff like "panda" and "numpy" which are tools that the data scientists I know use. (Yes the programming language is literally called R)

R is great for manipulating data and pulling stats out, but if he is trying automate oddball mundane tasks in his job, python or something more general might be better.

But it's bad advice. If you're in some dead-end job where you happened to program in PHP, you would do far better if you took it seriously and learned to become an expert than if you whined about a terrible situation you're in and and went through the motions because PHP is an inferior technology that's not worth learning.

Neither QA nor test automation isn't an objectively bad career choice. Also understanding how software design impacts test automation and vice versa is probably worth like 50K extra in annual compensation for mid-level software engineers. If you took your first job seriously and tried to learn as much about writing unit tests as you could, you'd be a better software engineer today and making more money. It's important to remember that not dismissing technologies or career choices as inferior does not mean you have to do something you don't want to do. If you decide that you want to be a dentist, that doesn't mean everyone else is making a huge career mistake by being a pediatrician, an internist or a nurse practitioner.

Yeah not R in the first instance. Python would be valuable to know. I know people in the finance industry and Python is very widely used. Depending on what sort of automation you want to do something like autohotkey/autoit/powershell might be better, but I doubt you'd regret learning Python.

You're conflating two different ideas here though. One is to approach the situation you're in with a good attitude and try to learn as much as you can from it. I absolutely agree this is a good idea. But my post was about avoiding bad situations, which is something else entirely. Like your post starts with "If you're in some dead-end job where you happened to program in PHP" which, OK. But what if you're not yet in that job, or have an opportunity to move jobs? Anyone reading your post naively and literally would come away with the impression that there are no such things as better and worse technologies to work with for the advancement of one's career, which is just not true. Of course I wasn't advising Noodle Wazlib to just not try hard in his job. My advice was that, if possible, he should at some point try to move to using different technologies.

So that's point 1, but the other thing is that your post comes loaded with assumptions, one of which is that all anyone ITT wants is to increase their earnings as quickly as possible. Personally I'd take less money to not have to work with an unwieldy and internally inconsistent language, in codebases which are almost invariably abominations. It gives me less professional satisfaction to do that and generally leaves me wanting to shoot myself for most of the working day.

In my case, doing so would likely get me dealing with better technologies.