I don't deny most restaurant websites suck - but I actually don't mind a simple pdf download of the menu. It covers items 3 & 4 above with minimal effort on their part.

I have a random question and dont want to open a new topic for it.

"Is it possible that a window can have a parent window, but the parent window doesn't list the child window when enumerating all childs" ?

Ran into a problem where I can backtrack the parent-window handle from the child, but cannot get the other way around for some reason. Using WinAPI in C# if this matters...

wombert, have you looked at the parent window using some type of spy util? It's been a long time since I've made any form based programs in Windows but I used to some spy util (spy++ maybe?) back then to inspect other programs' UI setup to help better get an idea on how to interact with it.

I sure hope so. I just got an email from the manager of the team that I most would like to work for out of the 3 I interviewed with and he wants to chat some more on the phone tomorrow. I would imagine that is a pretty good sign.

Ime this is to feel you out to see if you would accept the offer and maybe get a sense for the numbers involved. Not sure if the process will be different since you're dealing with an internship

I'm actually graduating in December. This is for a regular, full time position.

I definitely would accept an offer. Do I want to make this obvious or not? I don't want to get lowballed.

Don't make it obvious.

For my latest job I got offered a signing bonus and a modest increase in salary from their initial offer just by not accepting it right away. That isn't to say you should jerk them around, but don't be like HALLELUJAH if they say they want to offer you a job before they even tell you what the salary is.

Just let them know that you are interested in joining the firm however you will have to consider other offers as well.

Easy game

So I had a discussion with one of my friends who is going to be taking upper division CS classes. He said it's going to be a lot more theory, less programming. Which lead to me wonder, if you doing well at the lower division programming classes, does that mean you will have a high likely chance of succeeding in the upper division courses? Or could it be a coin flip?

I am doing well so far in the lower division programming courses, but what I am concerned about is the rigorous curriculum for theory work.

Some people are certainly better at one versus the other, but if you have an aptitude for one, I think you'll be fine in the other as well.

This is probably correct. Given that they a lot of the websites have flash and snazzy graphics, but leave off basic information, are they doing this deliberately?

Definitely not a coin flip. It's a slightly different skill set I guess, but not completely different. Also, in my program we still did a lot of programming in senior courses - it was just more about the programming was how you demonstrated/used the concepts. Being bad at programming would have made some of those assignments pretty damn hard.

Speaking as someone who is graduating in 2 months from a program that is very heavy in theory in the upper division courses, I agree with jj. It is definitely a different skillset, but certainly doable.

The main difference is that for most of the lower division programming courses you could just Google how to do them and there was no reason everyone shouldn't have been able to get full credit on just about every assignment. It isn't quite as easy to get an answer handed to you on some of the upper division assignments, and a much larger % of your grade will be based on test scores and not assignments. You don't exactly have Google to help you on a test, either you understand it or you don't.

Another difference between CS and many other majors is that you can't just memorize facts to regurgitate back on a test. You have to actually learn and apply theory or you won't do well.

Sometimes annoying details like what you're selling really get in the way of a beautiful web experience.

I spent 2 years as a jr front-end dev(html,css,jquery with some c#,sql) which I left in early July.

After laying low since July (europe trip, poker, enjoy summer) it is time to get back into the job hunt and further my coding skills. It seems that most web dev jobs require Javascript MVCs(Backbone,angular,node,etc).

I assume that I should spend the majority of my time picking up one of these Javascript MVC languages or possibly look further into other back-end languages, C#, Ruby?

Any comments would be appreciated thx

That is the thing that scares me. Is there a high drop out rate for students when they start taking the upper division courses? Or do most of those who made it there are able to keep up?

If you are doing well in the lower division courses you will most likely continue to do well.

You probably know who the students that are genuinely intelligent are, and those that just Google everything. My advice is to get a group of friends that are all intelligent, and study together. My group of 4-5 friends has been invaluable to me.

FML I got a MacBook at my new job. First day I felt like a disabled person. The user interface seems very inefficient and it is not intuitive for me. I was staring at the screen for a good five minutes when I installed something from a dmg before I figured out that you had to drag+drop the icon over to the other site to actually install stuff.

Bizzaro land. I'm also forced to use Outlook now...FMLx2. And vertical tabs don't seem to work in FF-Mac.

+my password database actually required me to make an AppStore account (and pay 6.99).

The entire ecosystem seems like it sucks. Will install VirtualBox with a usable OS tomorrow.

[Is there some good "MacOS for Linux users" guide...takes me a while to figure out how to do the most trivial things. I didn't Google anything on purpose day one to see how intuitive everything is. It was painful to say the least.]

I had a little dabbling with a startup the other night that went like a really flat blind date.

After going to node summit I decided I really liked the energy of all the startups going on around me. I'm not really interested in another j.ob right now but I figured I'd at least talk to this guy when he hit me up on linkedin. Immediately I felt like these guys were complete duds and knew I wouldn't want to work with them on a daily basis. I guess the founder picked up on that because by the end he was being kind of an ass - which I totally get. We didn't click and I was obviously ambivalent the whole time.

It also didn't help that even though we were supposed to get together for a beer - instead it turned into tons of food, long dinner, and they weren't drinking. I wasn't really ready for interview-level grilling or 2 hours of sober awkward conversation with even-more-boring-than-normal tech nerds. I figured we were just meeting to check compatibility and the interview part would come later.

But what I don't get is when I offered to do a brain exchange of everything I know about node (which it's obvious they need) for everything he knows about e2e testing (which I need), also to see if my node framework makes sense for other compamies - the founder was completely uninterested. He'd made up his mind that I have nothing to offer and wasn't even willing to give it a try.

Egos man - gotta learn to put that **** aside sometimes. One good skill that poker teaches.

Call turned out to be just to gauge my interest. He told me I should expect to get a written offer in the next few days then really fished to find out if I have other interviews, offers, how much I am interested, etc.

Gotta have the stones to go with the old "I have an offer for X=money you want +10% from a tech company (which you don't name) but would rather work for you if you can match it (if said company is somewhat close to where you live you can mention that and kind of hint that the other company is in SV land). I want to give them my decision by deadline_here."

:P

[don't do that it's unethical etc.]

Yeah, definitely a mistake. I'm always clear going into these things that I'm just getting a drink and say I'm meeting someone else later for Dinner.

Definitely doesn't speak well of him. Even with ****ty interviews that I'm going to abort, I always spend 5-10 minutes answering any questions someone has and selling the company a bit. In this market for developers you never know what developer friends someone has that might be interested in you if you're not a jack ass.

Boom

It seems like tech companies go to pretty extreme lengths to determine if you'll accept an offer before they actually make you an offer. I think it might be about saving face, but I don't really get it.

Re: saving face

I got a call from a company I interviewed at to see how my search was going, find out if I had other offers, etc. I did the whole I have other offers(true) but really liked you guys(false) thing.

The ceo starts talking some lowball numbers, I tell him he'd have to come up almost 50 percent to be in the same ballpark as what I have in the table.

A couple days later he emails to let me know they're "going in another direction" as if because they didn't actually extend an offer, they're the ones rejecting me.

Computer interfaces are inherently non-intuitive. You don't know the metaphors so expecting just suss out multi step commands to get something done is a false expectation. Get a book, find a web site, get some instruction on how to actually use the OS. You'll be happier.

Mac Outlook confirms sucks donkey balls. I can paste a screenshot image into an email, but I can't edit it in any way. Which is awesome on a retina mac where even the tiniest screen grab (using Ctrl-Shft-4) shows up like 2000 px wide in Outlook.

Anyone know some kind of an easy plugin that will help me edit screenshots (mainly shrink) in one or two steps before pasting into Outlook? Note that I am aware I can fire up Photoshop, paste the screenshot into Photoshop, shrink it, save for web, then import that into my email. I paste a lot of screenshots so I'm looking for something that can work almost seamlessly with as few steps as possible.