Why don't you just refactor your own work?

FWIW, everything is a loop, for the most part...

Map? Iterate over each item and do an op on it.

Reduce? Iterate over each item, sum each (or whatever op), until you have one item.

Filter? Iterate over each item, remove what you don't want.

Zip? Iterate over TWO lists, do an op 1-to-1 on each respective item.

My answer... SICP or Cormen.

easy...

One extra character is pretty painless. It's known as unary operator. I think most languages have a painless way to coerce a string into an int (if possible) or return a NaN otherwise.

Nobody said we couldn't make 5 + 5 = 10.

You asked for the cases when we care about the difference between '5' and 5 and we gave you one. If you're adding '+' in your code then obviously you care about the difference between '5' and 5 already.

I'm saying its easier to do than force static typing everywhere.

Maybe. The hard part isn't doing it, it's recognizing when you need to do it and sticking with it.

I do probably 60% of my programming in dynamic languages, either entirely untyped or duck-typed like python. There are many things about static typing that are great, and also many things about compiled languages that are great.

In a c++ program you never have to ask "is this variable/function/class used?". Compile, and if it doesn't break, then no.

Goddam it's nice to have something to do with clear requirements, a challenging problem, and a whole group of people who deeply care whether it gets done or not. It's been at least a year. **** being an architect if means creating **** no one cares about all day.

Actually, I'm going to take this a step further.

Handing a bad programmer Haskell, Clojure, GoLang, or some of these other amazing languages is like handing an Uzi to a 6 year old. You did it because you like the kid and you really want him to have fun, but you didn't think through the consequences very well.

I've often mentioned here how I'd never do a project in Clojure if I expected to have a team of developers working on it. If you read blogs from companies that use Clojure, Haskell, etc, they talk about a long training and build-up to bring developers up to speed. In smart hands, these languages are awesome, and those are the people who are talking it up.

You really can't learn these in a weekend. In the early stages, you get a glimpse of what is possible, but it takes considerable thought and failure to really get it and see how incredibly simple they are. One can argue that the learning curve makes it less awesome, but each their own.

Few companies are using these languages because you really can't depend on every programmer to get it right, and so it's much easier to find a common language people learned to code in while in college and run with it. Plus, you have RoR, Django, and a ton of other libs that are well-baked for many neat things. I'm not sure, but the working idea seems to be to mitigate mistakes, and if Java, Python, C++, etc. all do well to prevent mistakes, that's pretty okay.

Let's not kid ourselves that the best always wins. PostgreSQL is probably better than MySQL; Ruby is probably better than Python; Apple is probably better than Windows; etc. No one would say with a straight face the Budweiser is a great tasting beer, but you know, it's popular and everyone gets it. Programmers are human, and not above having unfounded biases or taking short-cuts to decisions.

Have any of you guys worked in a company where you got RSUs from a private company and there was no secondary market to sell after they vest? The talk of RSUs came up with my coworkers and one of them said that he has a big decision as to whether to leave before his 1 year vest since he doesn't want to pay taxes on his RSUs.

I thought that was silly until my coworker explained that once the RSU vest, you paid taxes on them AND you couldn't sell them until we either IPO or there is a secondary market opportunity in which we can sell.

Looking at my offer letter again, it noted that the two liquidating conditions are when the company IPOs or there is a change of ownership.

I was really hoping to sell most if not all of the RSUs, but that doesn't seem to be the case . Worst case scenario is our RSU vest at a high point leaving me paying huge taxes and then the company goes to bust.

Which makes me wonder.. what happens when your RSU >>>> than your base comp such that the taxes you paid are greater than your base comp? You're screwed.

Yea, I think it is almost always the wrong way to structure employee stock in private companies whose only liquidity is IPO or acquisition.

You want stock to be a bonus not a burden.

It might mean the current valuation is relatively bloated and they are trying to help you still get value in the stock they are giving you. But intentions good or not, I just find it a sucky way to do it most of the time.

I've never dealt directly with RSUs and I live in a differenct country... but my understanding was that RSU's weren't taxable until they had vested AND were liquid.

Googling doesn't show a lot of evidence for this, but it does show some. So it might be worth it to read the fine print very carefully and if you're talking about significant money talking to an actual tax expert.

How old do you look?

Because you're in school and it's a co-op, I think some of the stigma of having "nothing" on your resume is eliminated. But if you look like you're in your 30s or they can deduce that, it might be weird.

There were some people at my bootcamp with no prior work experience, and I'd venture a guess that their response rate was higher than mine, older and with a poker resume.

Are you in an area where you can't risk choosing "wrong" because there aren't enough companies to apply to?

I agree with this FWIW.

@Barrin6 - How is the value of the stock being determined since it is private equity. To me, again FWIW, I have serious doubts that you have tax issue until you could actually sell your shares which you can't.

What do you do?

The company you work for has been hired to work on a project by another company. The project requires use of a particular subcontractor. You previously worked for that subcontractor and you therefore know first-hand that they often “pad” their hours and overcharge their customers for their time.

If they do this on this project, though, it won’t hurt your company, since those costs will be passed on to your company’s customer. You’ve mentioned this to your boss and he has advised you not to say anything to the customer, especially since the subcontractor’s portion of the project only represents a small fraction of the overall budget.

You have a very close friend who works for the customer though. One day over lunch, your friend asks you what you know about this subcontractor, since he knows you used to work there. How do you respond and what do you tell him?

There's still a value to the share for tax purposes. It's typically set through an 'independent' 409a valuation.

Thanks

409a, deferred income, RSUs

Looks like you could owe some taxes on them. HR, tax experts FTW.

I'm gonna need to know how many beers I have in me when the question pops.

Assuming zero, I'd probably try to say something w/o using explicit words. Like - oh yeah, they're fine, nothing much to say. But by omission of any compliments you've kind of given your friend a clue. It totally depends on the situation and how you and your friend communicate.

Also I've seen some hour padding pretty much everywhere I've worked that billed clients by the hour. So I'm guessing this is more out of line than that?

What do you mean by hour padding? Like rounding up billable hours to the nearest time period? Or just blatantly adding hours that weren't worked?

wrt employee stock, the whole structure sucks. Just don't get those lol Skype style options.

Oh, I have that too!

Clear requirements? check

Challenging problem? check

People who care? check

Code that people use? check

Yea this is the part that sucks. It has value, but it is very illiquid.

At the end of the day 90% of subcontractors suck. The fact it is only a fraction of the overall budget and it is reputable enough that you worked there previously makes the whole thing sound like a pretty big win.

I think your boss telling you not to say anything means if somehow worst case this blows up on subcontractor and they get fired/some drama happens, you just tell your boss you didn't say anything. He probably will think you said something but not give a **** if it doesn't come back on you guys at all.

So far in my javascript apps I have been making extensive use of hiding/showing/editing dom elements through stuff like:

$('#element').hide/.html/.text, etc.

It feels terrible but they hadn't shown us much other than handlebars, which was a step in the right direction, but didn't solve much of the bloat.

Going through build-with-react I am basically fist-pumping. This looks really solid and also pretty intuitive

In case no one has noticed, I've been pretty tongue-in-cheek about the current code I'm working with. How is someone with no real-world reference supposed to know precisely how bad it is? I knew from first glance that there were many issues, but...

I always feel like, well, I'm below average in talent (or at least interviewing), and then people are actually creating this... stuff.

The bonus is that I'm working alone. This means I can go through and fix everything with no arguments. In some ways, I like the challenge of this particular job, but... I just don't know what the last person was thinking.

Sorry, I'm just having a real hard time wrapping my head around all this. I'm not complaining, just confused.

One of my best friends inherited a codebase mostly written by a phd in data science with contributions from an intern who was copy pasting giant swaths of stuff. He didn't even understand how some of the syntax managed to work.

Your perspective on average code quality at the average company is evolving.

Youll be happy to know that this pattern is basically dead in any application made that isn't 5+ years old.

It is very gross and I came to my breaking point with it this week.

It hasn't even caused me any issues I just hate it.

I look very young for my age--people regularly mistake me for early 20s, so maybe I can use this to my advantage. But the fact that I have a previous degree on my resume (completed in 2014) will tell the employer that I'm at least mid-twenties.

And I'm in Vancouver area at a university with a very-well regarded CS program, so I think there will be plenty of companies to apply to. All the big companies recruit here, and there is an emerging tech scene here so lots of smaller companies as well. I'm not too selective about who I work for; at this point I'd just be super grateful for any company to give me a chance.