Heh, for some more than others...

Resume question:

I worked at X company for 6 months, which was then purchased by Y company. Whats the most strategic/honest way to demonstrate this? Just list as one job like X/Y?

ETA: Company Y is very well known/prominent, may look better just to put Y for the whole timeframe?

From Hacker Newsletter: I am a fast webpage, kneel before my greatness

I would avoid anything that could potentially look like dishonesty. Company Y didn't hire you, and putting only them makes it look like you're trying to suggest they did. X/Y seems fine.

That makes the most sense. Thanks goofy

I'm not sure I follow. Why can't you choose to work with good programmers regardless of the language? You choose who you work with and the company you work for. In this sense, the size of the ecosystem matters a lot more than the average quality of the practitioner because you have more options. I can assure you that the programming language you use has very little bearing on the quality of the programmers you'll work with - your worth in the job market largely dictates this. And the best way to get stuck working with bad programmers is by not progressing in your career, which obsessions of this sort will contribute towards.

The problem is that terrible practitioners gravitate towards whatever makes sense economically. So either you choose a language that is so hard to learn that terrible practitioners can't even fake competence or a language that is simply not that useful from a career perspective. Or you can learn Haskell and check both boxes.

Well I'm that guy with lots of experience while you, Craggoo, ChrisV are relatively new to all this and you guys are going fingers in ears lalala while I'm sharing the perspective that comes after 20 years of experience. Notice how the other old people here (adios, suzzer, rusty all have like 20 or more years of experience each I think) mostly agree with me as well.

I don't understand - why does someone who had a career in programming before switching to project management have no expertise in the subject? He has exactly the same kind of expertise in a career in programming that you do on a career in writing unit tests or whatever it is that you did. You're implicitly assuming that the audience is full of future goofy's but that's also ridiculous - why can't someone who would be great at writing unit tests ask for advice on a programming forum? Why can't someone who would like software project management end up on a programming forum asking advice on whether it makes sense?

Candybar you're being ridiculous (the Henry comparison was apt - you have some grains of truth but you exaggerate and misrepresent people a lot).

I'm going to keep avoiding posting in this forum, but I think the group think here is pretty unfair to goofyballer and I just wanted to post to counter the weird appeal to authority Candybar is making. I have lots of experience and the general recommendations people made about php/writing unit tests all day/etc. were fine.

This - JS was supposed to be a toy "scripting" language intended for designers and other non-serious programmers. For that matter, once upon a time, many people used to deride Perl/Python/Ruby/Tcl/JS/etc as "scripting languages" or languages that are not fit to be used for actual application development by real programmers, but only as glue to script together existing applications, by low-level grunts.

lol just had the most bizarre (phone) interview of my life. Node shop and the tech lead clearly hates javascript? They don't use babel/typescript because they're unreliable?? He asks me JS questions, I answer them, he's like no thats not how it works? Ohhh... kay? Not sure how to respond to that when I clearly have it right on simple concepts like the "new" keyword. Just the total "I know everything" attitude you get from some types. Weird weird stuff.

Their whole concept is "youtube for foo" where its a certain hobby that has been catching on. Not only do they have a ton of competition but they're on page 2 of google searches for "foo videos" I mean are you serious?? I should have dropped the interview when I saw that but it was a couple hours before and whatever. Wow.

The advice seems fine to you because it doesn't affect you at all and it kind of feels right for whatever reason. But that's irrelevant. That kind of negative advice is not useful and for many people, it can be actively harmful. Advice isn't something that is ever taken literally - it merely shapes how you think and feel about things. "Don't become an expert in PHP" to someone who is about to take a job programming in PHP has one possible consequence - demotivating him enough not to take his job seriously because it's something that's looked down upon and whatever he learns is just going to be useless once he gets another job where he's going to do something different. That can be intensely harmful because at that point in one's career, especially for someone who is at least partially dejected about taking a bad job, simply learning how to apply yourself fully to the situation is the most valuable thing to learn.

Also, we have to consider that Noodle does not have a lot great things to fall back on at this job. PHP is probably the most useful thing that he can learn about in this job. In all kinds of programming jobs you have to spend months learning completely proprietary technology stacks and business rules that are much less consistent than PHP or whatever and are also going to be completely useless in the next job. Also PHP experts make like 10 times what Noodle is going to make in his job - so I'm really curious as to exactly why you think it's good advice to tell him that learning PHP is worthless so that he come out of it not learning probably the most valuable thing that he can learn and imply that he should go into this job with this kind of negative attitude.

This is what I mean by not even wrong - they are not giving advice to help but to share disdain.

I will also add that caring about experience in specific languages for full-time employees is generally limited to mid-senior level at mid-tier companies. Top employers tend not to care much because they are committed to hiring people who can be productive in any language pretty much instantly so to the extent they care, it's more about caring whether your lack of experience indicates lack of interest, not about knowledge specifically. Below mid-tier software company level or below mid-senior level, many will appear to care but the bar is so low that it doesn't really matter and it's primarily about gauging comfort and interest either way.

One major exception would be hiring for experts in specific technologies or domains, which would generally be impossible without knowing the language in question. It's hard to be an expert in certain low-level stuff without knowing C or C++, just as it's hard to be a front-end expert without knowing JavaScript. But over the course of a career, it just doesn't matter and is overwhelmed by other concerns. Having this as an important concern is generally going to be an impediment to having a successful career.

2nd Q unrelated to the current discussion:

Is it scummy to see a job posting from a recruiting company and then just apply directly to the actual tech company? Is it better or worse to go through the recruiter?

I would much rather go through the company directly. The amount of bull**** you face when going through 3rd party recruiters in unbelievable.

I have no idea about the upsides or drawbacks of using this recruiter but I cannot imagine at all how it could be remotely ethically questionable about applying directly. Unless you had some sort of agreement and this isn't publicly available information.

Seems like a life leak to even be concerned about it, unless I'm missing some big details.

It's not scummy but if the recruiter had already reached out to you and you don't otherwise have a connection at the company, it's generally better to go through the recruiter. I would not apply through a recruiter who has not contacted me that I don't have a relationship with though.

If a recruiter came to you directly with the job then it's at best, a little questionable. This is why recruiters are reluctant to give job info details right off the bat. If you saw it posted on, like, a recruiters web site then you literally do not owe them anything. If you don't have a relationship with the recruiter already then I would go through the company.

Oh god this. I have had recruiters nearly screw up job deals before. I have been enraged by them personally, I have had them enrage the hiring company.

If you're looking for a job, and can find a *good* recruiter, i.e. someone who is actually going to do some work, and who has some ins at places you want to work, that is worth something. To just have a random person tagging along hoping for a payday is worse than useless.

The most recent recruiter I worked with
* outright lied to me on more than one occaison
* called me 1-2 times EVERY DAY whether he had something to report to me or needed something or not
* needled me until he found out the minimum I would accept from a company - then I am *pretty sure* he told that company that number
* in fact, once I told him that number, he treated that as an "informal acceptance of the job offer" which to me it most definitely was not. So the company thought I had informally accepted and I ended up negotiating more money after that.
* he sent me the offer letter from the company without their permission - they wanted to send it to me

Really just every interaction with this guy was annoying at best and pretty awful overall.

And absolutely never forget that a recruiter is not working for you. He may not be working for the company either, but he is not your advocate.

What he wants is:
* for you to take the job - he does not care what the salary is either, really
* for you to stay there the minimum period required before he gets paid
* ???
* profit

I have been pressured on nearly every job search by a recruiter to lie on my resume or job submission. I have been lied to about what the job entails, what benefits it offers, etc.

I realize this sounds very negative. I have also had very positive experiences. One time a recruiter told me to absolutely not wear a suit to a particular interview and he was dead on right. I got lightly ribbed for wearing slacks and a dress shirt by the CEO of the company. And definitely more than once I have found out about jobs I didn't know about via a recruiter, or gotten much more direct attention than if I just submitted my resume randomly.

The process of hiring people is haphazard and best and I have seen lots of good candidates just fall through the cracks because everyone is busy. If there is someone who is a 3rd party who can gently hound the hiring company to move things along, it can make a big difference. And that 3rd part can actually DO this. *you* shouldn't be calling every other day to see what's next, but a recruiter who works with that company a lot can do it. And they know who to call, and what their response actually means, etc.

I have a hard time saying no, and I had a recruiter talk to me for a while about interviewing at a place. I agreed to go to the interview but after talking to me for a few more minutes he said "someone who responds teh way you've responded usually does not actually want to work at this place" and I said, yeah, you're right, I should have said so but I wanted to be polite.

I think some of you might have a different attitude if you spent your teens and early 20s working every **** job imaginable. Try a few months of loading popcorn into a box for 12-hour shifts, then switch to PHP development.

You mean I can solve puzzles all day and the minutes don't go by like hours? And I get not just paid for this, but paid well? It's a Christmas miracle!

I've never taken it for granted that I'm lucky enough to do something I love for a fairly nice living.

And then you get the periods where you have nothing to do for days at a time and you almost wish you were filling popcorn instead.

No. Not as long as I can surf 2p2.

Nor do I wish I was back in the Coca Cola warehouse working the 11pm shift, stacking full premix canisters on palates in 100 degree heat, losing 10lbs a night in sweat. Which was still better than when we had to spray down the vats with acid. Ugh.

And the bonus was you could get killed! A week before I started a woman went into the automatic palette stacker to sweep up, but forgot to turn off both power switches. She tripped the electric eye, it tried to stack her and snapped her neck. I was basically her replacement. Needless to say everyone else there was pretty freaked out about it. At one point or another every worker there poured their heart out to me about it. I felt like a therapist.

All for a sweet $6/hour as a temp. The FTEs were doing a little better but not much.

I think this is actually their motto?

My family and friends include a lot of people with actually hard jobs. I have to be careful about complaining about work to them. Also sometimes I'll walk down the street and think, holy ****, I hate my job (if I'm currently hating it, which I sometimes do) but I haven't had to do an honest day's labor in 20 years. WTF is wrong with me?

Why is this? I experience this a lot too.

On an unrelated note, suzzer recent posts in this thread are really good.

gold

Yeah we can bond over the programming version of "You kids don't know how good you have it! In my day..."