Job hopping doesn't hurt nearly as much as you might think. You just need an explanation for every change. Think about the hypothetical resume of a guy who only does 3-6 mon contracts. He's going to have vast experience after 4-5 years, and the explanation is easy because the assignments were all short.

Even if hopping does hurt you, that's not really a concern. Keep on interviewing. Worst case is the guy says no. It only costs you a few hours of time to interview. Eventually someone won't care/buy your story and they'll say yes. You are always negotiating from a position of strength because you have a job. You don't have to take the new one unless it's a good deal. But I don't see any reason to avoid looking for a better deal constantly.

You're not finding people because you're not offering enough money. You're hoping to get lucky that someone takes a bad deal.

As a potential hire on the other end dealing with a recruiter, the first thing I ask them is what the pay range is. If it's lower than my target, I pass on the opportunity.

Doubt it, if people are really making as little as PJo says elsewhere in the loop. Our pay range is from just above those "very talented friends" to double it depending on experience. That's a wide enough net that we're not sitting around "hoping to get lucky".

In the last year we've hired a lot, we've turned down a lot. At some point you're just seeing the same resumes from all the recruiters. I think it's just a really competitive market right now (in Chicago, no clue about elsewhere) and it's a great time to shop around.

This is correct. You're going to be asked so you better come up with some good stories.

Anyone ever witness their own coworker get themselves terminated?

I work in tech support where we support our own application, and this coworker is a train wreck. Comes in late an hour everyday and rarely ever solves a ticket without having the end-user pull their hair out. It's really impressive how far she has gone. Makes me wonder how long this charade will last.

So I found an interesting but rather specific bug today. I have mapped a dropdown xterm to the circumflex ('^') key (above tab, I think '~' is located there on US keyboards) and since I mostly type English stuff I never noticed but apparently my '?' key (two to the right of 'L') isn't working anymore.

Interestingly enough '?' still works (shift+'?'). Took me a bit of thinking back to figure out it could only be related to my remapping of the circumflex key. Changed that to ctr+circumflex and voila...'?' is working again.

Keyboard layouts are a gigantic hassle and voodooish imo so I'd rather not fiddle around and figure out why it was broken exactly but it feels like I should report this somewhere (xfce)

----

Since the topic is salary negotiations I'll recommend the same book I always do (anyone working anywhere should read it imo): Bargaining for Advantage

In my first few months here. We hired a guy at same level (experience wise) as me. He was out in 3 months. Guy took naps at his desk, complained about having to do training, and could not complete anything unassisted.

So I was thinking about good cities to live for developers. Getting tired of the cold and bleakness of Canada. I have a wife and baby so cost of living, day care costs, health insurance are pretty important.

San Jose/Valley - Center of the tech world. Biggest startup scene. There's always someone hiring. Warm weather. High cost of living.

Seattle - Rains a lot, liberal culture, good tech scene.

Portland - I've heard great things about Portland. Seattle on a smaller scale.

Dallas/Ft Worth - Apparently it's a growing and huge tech scene. Less startups but many big companies. Great weather, cheap housing, laid back.

Austin - Facebook, Google, etc have offices there now. Growing area with many startups.

Boulder/Denver/Ft Collins - Many Californians move here eventually. Much cheaper to own a home and great weather and place to live.

Raleigh - Heard it's a growing area and great place to live.

Atlanta - Good weather, low cost living. I really enjoyed Atlanta during my visits there.

Then there is Boston, NYC, Washington which are obviously huge markets and amazing cities.

Did I miss anything? Perhaps my perceptions are off.

I would rank outside of Boston much higher than actual Boston fwiw. Burlington/Woburn/Newton have offices for every large tech company and are 30-45 mins from comfortable country living or the city.

Ya, there are good options outside of Boston depending on what kind of development you want to do. It's still expensive though. Downtown Boston/Cambridge have a ton of tech start ups.

I was just in Boulder, and moved to Denver. I really like Denver for living, and there are a lot of tech companies in the area. Weather is really awesome (very sunny).

Most of those cities are great. One thing I can personally recommend is convincing your company that you can work remotely, then live wherever you want. It's one of the great freedoms of dealing in digital goods, the only logistics system you need is a solid internet connection. I have an Aussie coworker who got sick of bleak Chicago winters and now he lives half the year up here for the summer, then the other half back in Australia for their summer. Not too shabby, especially since the accent works so well for him with the ladies up here. I moved 4-5 hours from my office to be closer to wife's family. Obviously this kind of move works best if you're more senior and less replaceable.

The whole NSA fiasco has made any spot in the US pretty unattractive (not that it wasn't pretty much assumed) for me as a place to do tech. Software patents don't help either.

It really sucks because I do love the states way more than the average European.

The website I developed looks great on a PC using Firefox and Chrome, but not so great on IE or mobile device... it's mostly alignment issues but in some cases (specifically IE) it's other things such as button width extends all the way to end of page. What's the best way to handle issues like these? FWIW the front end is all html/css with some embedded python that is rendered by jinja, no javascript or similar.

lol?

you are being serious?

Same here except it took us two years to get rid of our useless guy. Corporate America ftw.

Why wouldn't I be serious? The idea that some shady agency can walz into an office and I'd be forced to live with putting backdoors into software at whatever company I work at and if I disclose it in any way I'd be in all kinds of pain is pretty off putting.
As is having to potentially reveal private customer information without any real due process.

I don't want to work in China either. Don't get me wrong, most places in Europe have similar stuff in some way shape or form but for now UK and USA have moved down a good 10 or so spots on my list.

Obviously depends on what business you are in but moving from Canada to the US already has all kinds of implications if you ship crypto. Since my IT jobs have been in ERP/business software I would feel very uncomfortable doing that in the US (especially now that we know that a major part of the NSA's activity is business espionage).

Most importantly though the US has changed way too much since I was there the first couple of times. First time I was there post 9/11 was already all kinds of bad. I'm pretty disillusioned at this point as it seems less and less people seem to care about stuff that I consider important.
/politarding/ranting

i'm surprised that you're surprised, larry.

I was kinda just looking to start a convo

I think what the NSA has done is absolutely terrible and laughable because their tactics obviously decreased security for everyone. That is a very bad thing.

The answer is open-source. I think with the NSA revelations that open-source is going to actually reverse a ton of the standard FUD of security and in 5 years it will be considered the BY FAR more secure option when considering different software.

Considering clown's views, I am honestly surprised that open-source could not alleviate a lot of his concerns about security and backdoors in general.

Here's my terrible opinions!

AWFUL place. It's got big city problems like traffic and none of the hip cool stuff you find in a typical city. Taxes are insane in California, so I don't know why anyone wants to live there compared to San Diego where the weather is perfect.

I live in Portland and love it. The city is just big enough to be interesting to me with lots of restaurants and activities, but not as big as Seattle so there is less crime and traffic. The problem is taxes in Oregon are 10% while WA has no income tax. Seattle salaries are also a fair amount higher than Portland. For those reasons I would probably pick Seattle. The weather is the same for both, amazing in the summer, 100% rain in the winter.

Never been to Dallas.

The BBQ in Austin might be enough reason by itself to consider moving there. So delicious.

I would not have considered Colorado a cheap place to buy a house, but you're right it is cheaper than California. Colorado is a very pretty state, but I would rather go to Seattle than Denver. Both WA and CO have legal weed.

Also 3 hour drive from Myrtle beach or NC mountains. I used to live near Raleigh. I would definitely put the place on my list to check out. Salaries are decent and cost of living is cheaper than most places on the west coast. Decent BBQ options but not as good as Austin in my opinion.

Yup Atlanta is cheaper than a lot of places on your list.

Boston, NYC, and all the northeast cities are very cold in the winter. I guess they're not Canada cold, but if you're moving because of weather I wouldn't really consider them. They are also expensive. I am not sure if salaries make up for it, maybe they do.

I would add Phoenix to your list to check out. 9 months of the year the weather is awesome. The summers are very hot, but it's still sunny, and you won't notice while you're swimming in the pool. Salaries are decent, there's a lot of tech companies, and cost of living is much lower than in other states.

Are you using a reset?

Thanks, I had not considered Phoenix. Wasn't aware it was good for high tech jobs.

The income/property/sales taxes vary so much by state. There's so much to consider.

Yes Open Source is a good start and the whole stuff is excellent ammunition for Open Source in general. My bigger concern is that you have a bunch of encrypted customer data and some friendly lady in a suit says "Can I haz private key" (see: Lavabit). I mean that can happen here as well but US agencies seem very powerful and omipotent. Secret courts, stuff like Gitmo (the existence of this scares the living police state hell out of me).

I'd also like to know cloud hosting numbers post Snowden...I've heard stuff like 30% market loss for US hosters from European clients (not 30% overall) tossed around which would be a pretty big deal.

I'm also fairly concerned about DNS, I've read up a bit on GNUnet/Gnu Name System but it doesn't seem super convincing.

Oh well like I said my personal response is that I have downgraded US and UK places as undesirable to live and have gotten rid of some stuff (replaced Dropbox with German hosted ownCloud etc.), have installed Tor and the browser bundle on all my machines+cell and will encrypt my mail again. I've gotten really lazy about all these things so Snowden happened at an opportune time :P

I still use some ridiculously idiotic stuff like Facebook but I'm hoping to phase that out this year.
I might even get out of my political hibernation and become active again who knows.

Germany is a fairly good place to be in this regard. Our agencies are fairly incompetent and underfunded and our history makes the general population value privacy laws quite a bit due to Gestapo (Nazis) and more recently Stasi (GDR). "Stasi 2.0" is a pretty powerful argument to toss around in political debates here.
+There's a decent hacker culture (CCC) which shines light on these issues semi-regularly

Tor is good in theory, but in practice it is controlled by the US gov't so I would probably not rely on that being private fyi.

The weather in Colorado is outstanding. Better than Seattle/Portland by a wide margin. I would take Portland's income tax over Seattle's sales tax any day of the week. If you are at all interested in outdoor activity of pretty much any kind (except surfing...) Colorado wins hands down. And if you are skilled at Java let me know, we're looking for more devs.

Ugh no, never came across that in any tutorials. But after googling it makes perfect sense why it'd be needed. Thanks!