Do you have an internship for the summer? What would you do in the spring? $25/hr isn't bad, but it's not amazing either.

I think the preferable path is to do something this summer and graduate in December, getting something full-time at that point, unless this is just a dream internship for you or you can't get something lined up for the summer and risk graduating with no CS experience..

I think what you're asking wouldn't be possible to grade in a reasonable way.

Then again I'm deep in the camp that you should just write working code and then refactor when it becomes a real problem.

For instance in your test case I wouldn't bother refactoring something unless it became a problem but in your test case it probably wouldn't be a problem because the scope is too small.

Maybe instead of a todo list you could do a stripped down twitter clone or something like managing an inventory of categorized products? How about asking them to create the game Simon, if it's mostly javascript that you're testing this could be fun and there are many ways to implement it.

Haven't watched the talk but...
Writing and (traditional) engineering kind of clash as metaphors. Engineers tend to test and well engineer (measure 2x, cut 1x etc.) and generally be pretty "this better be perfect up front" type of guys outside of software engineering. Writing OTOH is very creative and iterative in nature and generally more on the "honey badger don't care" side of things

Programming is unique in that it's a mixture of both imo. I think linking it to writing and art too much is a mistake.

I think explaining the 58k in NJ is a reasonable approach. People generally get that you want to improve.
If they make you go through 4 interviews they should pay reasonably well.

I tihnk lowest you should ask for is 68k...if they ask you how you came up with the figure you can always say it reminds you of your old Mac hacking days...o wait you're probably too young to pull that one off

Also keep in mind that you can negotiate other things besides salary (holiday days etc.). Depending on the company they are often more or less fixed on salary but very flexible on all kinds of perks that can add up quickly. This is mostly the case for bigger companies that have fairly set "max allowed salary" type of rules.
If you have the time buy and power through "Bargaining for Advantage"

Some sort of simple contact management/CRM? Or just think of some workflow/business process and have them build a basic CRUD interface for it...like paying an invoice or something. Stuff like that is a supercommon demand for SMBs (take this process and have all the stuff stored in one place and accessible instead of spread across paper/excel etc.)

obviously we disagree. in life i can respectfully disagree with you and everything is alright. but if i'm working with you every day that becomes a big problem, and too much heat gets wasted from friction. you need to find people that are compatible with you. some people disagree with that too. but i am solidly of the opinion that being of similar minds about fundamental issues is really, really important.

so you say there is no way to grade that fairly. but i dont care about fair or objective. i care about liking what i see.

yeah i agree it's a mixture, but DHH's point was that's it closer to art than to a pure science field like physics or math, and i agree with that.

Ok I guess there's complete agreement then. I think on average it's roughly 40% art, 40% craft and 20% science +/- X on all if I had to put numbers on it.
Varies a bit on what kinds of programming projects we're talking about. Sometimes the craft will be very high, sometimes the science will be etc.

You mentioned automated tests so I figured there would a pass/fail mechanic based on the results of the tests.

In DHH's defense he was also very clear he was talking about information related apps and software. He fully understands that the lower level stuff is all about applied math/algorithms/science/etc. but he has no interest in most of that in his day to day.

Have them model a newsfeed for something like facebook. Something that would challenge them to think about permissions (i.e. only friends can see something, or anyone can see something) and how they'd go about querying that and processing that data.

Around here the cost of living is really low and $25/hr is pretty darn good for an internship. I don't have anything else lined up for the summer, was planning on taking summer courses and grinding 1/2 at the casino, but the credits I get from the internship will replace the summer credits and the income will be guaranteed.

I talked to my advisor and it looks like the sister campus about 45 minutes away will be offering all the courses I need to graduate in the spring, so I think it is a pretty no-brainer to do the internship and then commute there in the spring. That way I will get the experience working for a very reputable company, and only delay graduation 1 semester with no downtime. I am also kind of a hardware junkie and a bit hoarder, so the idea of working close to hardware and especially storage really appeals to me.

Anybody see any downsides to this line of thinking?

At a hack night, we wrote an IRC channel, which a damn good programmer can get a fairly decent working spec off the ground in under an hour, a good programmer can do in around 3 hours, and I would need about 3 weeks to do.

Sounds good, but I really wouldn't waste a summer playing poker right before graduating. Otherwise, seems like a good plan.

To DHH:

Programming is math turtles all the way down.

Great, thanks for the replies.

One other positive that I hadn't really thought of is that this company apparently offers permanent, full time positions to like 90%+ of its interns, and with IBM laying off tons of people the last few years, jobs are actually kind of hard to come by around here.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem, I would just move where the jobs are. However, my wife has an awesome job at Mayo Clinic, we own a house, all our family is here, etc. so it would be nice to be able to stay.

What kind of assignments will you have?

i think it would take me infinity, because i don't even know what "writing an IRC channel" means.

It is one of those things that seems really hard at first, then once you look at a basic spec, it is rather easy.

create a connection to ip address.

"login" as anon. You don't need a password, just dive in and chat.

allow multiple users. IRC's suck since they don't allow response. This could enforce unique users, etc.

write a line and submit, perhaps on "enter."

show the conversation.

allow logout / quit irc.

Really isn't much to it. I liked it because it was open-ended.

are you talking about building a gui irc client?

I assume you mean at the internship.

The job title is Firmware Tools and Testing. I interview for it and find out more on Friday.

Ircs aren't really GUI. Sort of like a command line conversation.

Ircs aren't really GUI. Sort of like a command line conversation, though I guess you could go all GUI, but then that would be a comment box, right?

I see. Seems like a good exercise but doesn't really fit my case, as it sounds like it requires some networking knowledge, which isn't relevant to the kind of web development/backend ruby stuff the position calls for.

Time for Nittery: IRC is a protocol, like HTTP or SMTP. Internet Relay Chat. There are IRC servers and IRC clients. Some IRC clients are command line, some have a GUI.

The protocol itself runs over TCP and involves plain-text commands, which is why writing a client is fairly straightforward. Writing a server is a little more complicated since the server handles taking a message sent from a client to a chat room (called a channel) and broadcasting it to all the other clients which have joined the channel, as well as a bunch of other housekeeping

My first "programming" experience was writing scripts for IRC clients as a teenager...

Yes I do. Given your circumstances, I would accept the internship position. I think you'll probably find it interesting. The pay seems good too.

On this note, does anyone with rails 4 experience know the easiest way to eager load a polymorphic association? The few stackoverflow answers that have a real answer don't seem to work anymore (and were hacky to begin with).

I mean it half works. If I do

I'll see 3 calls loading the various types of trackable objects (so comments, votes, etc). But when I try to loop through the activities in a view and say activity.trackable it hits the database again.

I can think of a few ways to try and get around it, but it seems like this would be a built in feature (if you can eager load it, why is it hitting the database again?).

I could post this on SO too I suppose.