Freaking instagram. I'm on the web (not phone) trying to unfollow all the boring/inactive people on my feed (mostly FB friends from when I first signed up). It will happily let me unfollow 200, and show that in my following count when done. But then any kind of refresh sets it back to about 15 less than I started with. IE - the other 185 are still on my following list. Cheesy.

Edit: doing it from the phone works.

Ya, the instagram website is terrible by design imo. It is so bad there used to be (probably still are) a number of sites that were built on top of ig api which provided users an experience similar to the mobile app.

Update: turns out my total comp was 16% under the 55th percentile. Ended up getting a huge raise. Most people on my team got a raise as well, so now everyone knows what each person makes.

Overall I’m happy.

I swear if you just graduated from college and went on job interviews you would think that creative uses of call and apply, and class-based vs. prototype-based vs. whatever other wonky types of inheritance came before ES6 - were the most important things you need to know to be a successful JS developer.

Interviewers have asked you a lot of questions that have marginal relevance to performing well as a developer during your job search. Also, interviewers have not posed many questions that are highly relevant to performing well as a developer. This pretty much?

You are an accomplished developer, can handle a lot of development challenges well, and are willing to engage as a productive team member. Communicating that well with interviewers is the challenge you face. Keep in mind that if organizations are doing well in assessing their needs, meeting their technical challenges in a timely manner, producing high quality software products and all that good stuff have a very good idea as to what they're looking for in trying to fill developer roles. Therefore their interviews are likely to be more relevant and interesting. I usually infer that an awkward, irrelevant questions are a sign that maybe things aren't going so well at a place looking to hire.

Developers want to have a job and get paid. Generally speaking, developers are willing to believe that they can help influence organizations where things aren't going so well to improve their ways. Put another way, developers that need a job and/or a change of scenery are willing to put up with a certain amount of crap. So taking a position at an organization that has problems is something developers often do. Ymmv.

I could write a book about train wrecks I've witnessed and how places dealt with them.

lol you're being asked this stuff now in interviews?

i have code in github that is not going to get merged. i want to save it for reference. besides a screenshot, what is a good way to do that?

nice.

I might be building a react native prototype for a founder who’s looking for funding for his idea. One thing he says the VCs keep asking for is a “mobile security expert” to at least be on board as an advisor. Any idea what that entails?

Just let the branch remain an orphan?

We use branches like that on github to archive stuff. Not the best way and it needs to be catalogued somewhere but oh well.

Ok you crazy kids and your disruptive youtube cord-cutting. How does this damn thing work? I just watched the first video ever by Matthias whatshisname:



I had to scroll down past many many iterations of infinite scroll/loading more vids to get to it. Now I would like to watch his second video ever. Any way to do it w/o all the infinite scrolling again? I tried just letting video 1 run out in hopes it would just jump to video 2. But after 2 commercials it jumped to some other Javascript thing by a different creator. WTF

LOL of course - there's a video that shows you how to watch all videos from a channel in chronological order. And it's almost 2 minutes long. Seriously this is what you're all ditching cable for?

There's so much LOL in your posts

* we're not ditching TV for freakin youtube
* watching a video about how to watch youtube videos, like, what
* I actually don't even get watching videos about how to do programming stuff. Gross. Frankly I don't like most how-to videos on youtube. Whenever I go look up how to replace a bike part they always want to show me a 10 minute video so that I can absort 30 seconds worth of information.

Oh man this is terrific. Any other Olds wanna jump in?

Suzzer,

To quickly help you on this one in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMUi...ag-n84&index=1

Should be a direct link to the first video in the set with the rest in the playlist.

These are things the author has set up themself, so it's variable between channels. To get there, click on author's name and then it should have "Home / Videos / Playlists / Community / About" or something similar. Playlists probably only present if there are some. Click it to get a list, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1...Fe4Q/playlists. Then click one of them to start it playing (in a new tab ideally, so as not to lose your place in the list - this is a tip more appropriate for when you've just loaded up a huge list of their all-time videos and scrolled way down, and want to watch in chronological order - I just do this and open new video in new tab)

Also from this page you can text search, restricted to this author, which can be useful.

It'd be remiss to not mention youtube-dl, which can suck down playlists or whole channels etc for offline viewing with VLC or the like.

FWIW - I sorted by oldest first, then played and it seems to be playing in order now.

That dude is very entertaining. It's helping me brush up.

Yes I was told kids are watching nothing but youtoobz now. I guess that was wrong.

Don't blame me for the video about how to watch youtube. I didn't make it and I was making fun of it too. But also annoyed that I had to google how to do something that I think should be built in to youtube and obvious.

Generally I agree with Suzzer that things are generally starting to become optimized for the "algorithm thinks you will like this" over actually providing good searchable content.

edit: which will result in a full circle back around to providing great filterable/searchable experiences becoming more popular

I think I found the source for a big chunk of my interview questions: https://medium.com/javascript-scene/...w-6fa6bdf5ad95

Haha, we have a fairly complicated API call that I’m currently in the process of writing a man page for, and when I brought up the issue of “can we maybe simplify this function a little, our devs can’t even figure out how this works” and i was told,

“Maybe we should make a tutorial video, that’s what everyone does these days.”

Hahaha

Doesn’t youtube already have a good filtering/searching experience?

I usually just hit search and then scroll down until I find what I want

I think I just missed out on an offer because of giving my previous salary (+bonus, etc.) and what I'd expect (which for the record was $20-$30k lower). I'm not giving that out anymore.

The interview went great. It was basically how would you build a like widget - front and back end, right in my wheelhouse. But then right at the end I admitted Santa Monica was a bit far for me but I'd make it work (dumb probably) and he asked my salary so I told him what I was making at hyper-mega CO and what I might be willing to accept. At that point the 2nd person I was supposed to talk to became unavailable and he said "sorry for making you drive out this far for 1.5 hours". Not the best sign.

Either that or because I'm too old, which I'm starting to think is a factor in a lot of these. When I was even in my early 30s I walked in and got so many jobs I wasn't remotely qualified for. Now in my late 40s I'm nailing interviews and not getting it. But I understand if everyone is like 30 you're gonna worry how late 40s guy is gonna fit in (although I can pull off early 40s if you don't know my age). And of course I'll never know if that's the real reason - so I start chasing my tail trying to rectify all these made up reasons.

Another place said they were moving forward, to the point of getting references, then reversed course and said they realized they need someone with more DevOps experience. Which could be true - but it also could be their first choice finally said yes and was a lot younger.

It really sucks because my first onsite was the company that I think really liked me. And I was by far the shakiest. I should have scheduled it later. Argh.

Lol I think I got some props today

Somewhat of a cantankerous and overly critical guy i sit next to asked me to write a script for our test infrastructure that could parse a csv file into separate cfg files for each row in the file.

I was like sure, that’s maybe ~20 lines. Then about 10 mins later he says to me “maybe we should just assume the headers in the CSV file because otherwise i cannot think of how to parse that” and i was just like nah, i already figured out how to parse a csv file independent of how many headers there were, it shouldnt matter at all.

20 mins later and a nested loop with a few piped awk calls and it was done, and he wanted to see my script to see what I did. No critical comments at all, just bewilderment. Lol

It could be your salary requirements. There are a ton of companies out there looking for competent people that they think they can hire for $83,000. They made it work that one time back in 2013 so why not again?

You worked for a large company before and you're older. They probably think you want too much even if you didn't mention it. They probably can't afford to pay for real programmers.

You need to be more selective about which interviews to go on I think. With software it's all about scale. To a first approximation it takes the same amount of time to write software for 10 customers as it does 10,000. You need to get interviews from companies with some scale to get decent salaries. Unless a start up has real VC backing, smaller places simply can't compete because they have no scale.

The market for programmers is a lot different than some other jobs like dishwashers, lawyers, doctors and plumbers. Because of the ability for your work to serve an unlimited number of customers the jobs with the most scale can pay the most. Small shops in other fields have a more level playing field with the bigger players.