Totally standard.
And sorta cute that you hoped it to be "intuitive." It's not the iPod. If you'd know zip about Win or Linux, switching to either of them would be anything but intuitive, either.

I'd also consider it a massive beat to move to OSX and then be forced to use Outlook. That's just gross.
I personally love the built-in Mail application, others don't. No one (who knows anything else) likes Outlook.

Anyway, I'd start with a good cheat sheet for keyboard shortcuts - one that has sections for the most common standard apps, too. Bare minimum Mail, Finder and Safari.

As a long-time FF user, I highly recommend trying to switch over to Safari. It took me 4 years and retina display issues with FF to try it in earnest and I'm kicking myself for not doing it earlier.
There are tons of extensions, many named the same as their FF cousins - from the same devs. A brief search revealed that SafariStand may be what you'd be looking for.
The most important factor is the reduced memory use compared to FF. It is massive.

Regarding guides, I can't recommend one for you. I used a Windows to OSX guide - had both Win and Ubuntu on my home computers at the time both of whom I have replaced, so I picked a guide that had the most detail at the time. Still took me around a month to really feel at home in the new environment.

WRT offers, someone had posted a great article on here not all that long ago about salary negotiation and how important it is to not talk money until it is contingent upon you getting an offer.

Oh, I did bookmark it! Here we go. It's long but good, and I think there are links to another author who'd worked for google that talks about why it's bad to let the companies woo you with intangibles they can later take away (like the google food court or whatever).

Reading The Language of Food by Dan Jurafsky. Really quite interesting if you like food, history, and linguistics. But you should be able to tell just by the names of dishes and their descriptions about how much they'll be.

Have a random question or two about c++ and visual studio, but I'm sick of cluttering up this thread, so I think i'm finally gonna follow thru with my threat of a homework catchall thread. Deal with it.

Unless length is initialized outside this code segment it has an undefined value. Looks like you are only writing to memory when you set i though so it doesn't appear that you are clobbering anything. Using the undefined value yields indeterminate results.

FWIW my view is that companies will tend to see a new grad that has been a diligent student as someone with great potential. You will be relatively inexpensive with the potential to be a highly productive developer in a reasonable amount of time. You don't want to price yourself too low but the work experience you will obtain is at least as equally important.

Unicode characters are 16 bits and Unicode strings are pretty much not man readable. You need a conversion routine to know what is in the string.

At the senior level, if you're not talking money upfront, you will be wasting a lot of your time talking to people who aren't going to come close to what you're looking for. And the best paying employers will be most reluctant to bring up numbers first because they have no reason to bid against themselves.

At the junior level, where the prospective employer's willingness to pay is substantially greater than your current salary, you're generally not going to have the skills to pull this off and you're also going to be too unsure of your market value to bluff without another offer. Or if you are sure, use that number. So this is pretty useless advice for most job candidates, even if it's a good negotiating strategy in general and very useful for consultants or executives or anyone whose value is highly contextual. The general rule of thumb is, if your current job pays embarrassingly little, get two offers.

How reliable are the sites like glassdoor for salary information? I always figured they were pretty accurate up until top-middle management (where there's just not enough people willing to put their info in to make it worthwhile).

Seems like a good strategy is to see if you can figure out their salary range on your own.

I also like the strategy (I think from that negotiating article) about saying a high salary up front but making it clear that money isn't everything and you can be somewhat flexible on that depending on fit and other perks.

Edit: Disclaimer - I've only negotiated an offer once and I failed completely at it. So much so that a couple of weeks after I accepted the offer (and before I started work) they called to tell me they'd given me a 10% raise because they'd re-evaluated their salary levels.

They are not particularly unreliable, but people are not average and best-playing employers are going to pay substantially in bonuses and equity once you go past about 100K in salary, which makes it an unreliable indicator of what kind of pay package you can expect. Salary ranges are also by job category and title - highest paid engineers are disproportionately architects, vice presidents, directors, engineering fellows, principals or whatever fancy titles are in vogue. Also, if they happen to be in organizations where you can't be paid well as engineers, they have may have moved onto management or closer towards revenue generating segments of the business to get paid better, which will change their job categories even if they are still programmers at the end of the day. So if you look at generic categories like "senior software engineer" or "senior software developer" you're missing the top end of the pay spectrum.

Assuming you are not in financial trouble or have a huge family to support etc. most dev jobs pay well enough even if you get lowballed. As a Junior dev I'd say your #1 thing to look for is being in an environment where you set yourself up to learn a lot and learn quickly and enjoy learning. I think it helps to pretty much have the mindset of "I'll quit in three years max, how much can I get then?". Quitting might very well mean transfering/moving up within the company but in tech...move early and often if you can (no commitments etc)

I'd snapcall an offer that pays a good chunk less than another one if I feel like it's the kind of job that is rewarding and leads to selfimprovement in many areas.

While this is a good strategy the problem is that most places that pay well below market rates are not the type of companies where you will have the optimal learning environment. The exception is underfunded startups that have a top notch senior dev team (pretty rare though).

I disagree. I think most startups pay below market rates and many offer great learning experiences even without a 'top notch' dev team.

And I think there are lots of other places that will offer decent perks to avoid spending lots of money on salary. It's not like startups are the only companies that care about cash flow and expenses.

How do you respond to "What are you getting paid now?"

Honestly, I'd prefer not to say I'm not earning minimum wage (I think $9/hr?) but under $20/hr. I did say it one time and the guy on the phone laughed at me and said "We pay WAY more than that."

I never got the promised follow-up call.

Ugh, I wouldn't think people would ask that.

I wouldn't want to answer so I'd probably give a non answer like 'they pay competitive salaries' and maybe just lie if necessary (I'm not suppose to disclose my current compensation).

I had a recruiter ask me that question and basically told him it was not relative information. Which was true, because what I do now was not relevant to what I was applying for. It was both in IT, but different role.

Anyways, I decided not to pursue the position since it was not a company I wanted to work for. However, I don't think you should ever feel as if it's a deal breaker if you do not disclose. You just have to be polite and tactful about it.

That's a tough one. Recruiters always ask and press hard for current and required salary in my experience.

Are you talking about generic recruiters or senior company recruiters? IME, the generic ones don't seem to care. I feel like when a company calls me, they are fishing to answer two questions:

1- How much self-respect does this guy have?
2- Can I low-ball him?

It is lose-lose situation if I answer or not: If I answer, they figure I'm an idiot for tolerating sub-par wage; if I act coy, then I'm being evasive.

It doesn't help when these same people are among the same ones that are calling me for positions I'm clearly under-qualified for. I know it is paranoia, but I wonder if they are calling just to troll me at times.

You could just say a number that you would be more than happy with and take it from there.

connectionstrings.com might be better at doing its one thing than anything else

Are you talking recruiters trying to offer you a job or recruiters trying to find a job for you? I'm probably going to be looking to talk to recruiters in Portland early next year and have never dealt them before.

kerowo, I've been talking to both, although I am not trying to talk to the type that finds a job for me. When I interact with them, they either found my work on github and contacted me or I applied through a portal.

The type that tries to find a job is more likely to ask what I'm looking for And don't seem to care about my history.

Not sure if it is an LA thing, but many companies out here have in house recruiters. I'm not sure if this is really an HR person with a nice title.

why can't you just lie and make up a number?

I don't think the latter really exists - recruiters work for the employers, whether on a contingent or retained basis. They may make it sound like they're working for you but it's not like buying a house, where you can have a buyer's agent and a seller's agent.

What does happen is that within a larger recruiting firm, the person you talk to may not be the same person who owns/manages the relationship with the company and they may split the commission, because one found the person and the other found the company. So from your recruiter's perspective, she may have found the job for you from another recruiter. None of this really matters to the job seeker at the end of the day.

daveT,

Outside recruiters working on a contingency basis, as a group, are not in the business of evaluating you as a job candidate. At the junior level, they are trying to find as many warm bodies and resumes as possible to send to their clients. They don't mind bad candidates because lots of bad candidates will make their clients feel more comfortable about hiring the one good candidate they sent over.

"Company" recruiters, where internal or outside recruiters on a retained basis, are using the salary information as a way to judge you. They are not paid to simply a numbers' game to accidentally hit upon a good candidate, but to actively manage the process. They then have to act as the first gatekeeper. Non-technical recruiters aren't going to be able to gauge your ability and the current salary is a quick way to slot people, not to mention that how much money it will take to get you to accept an offer is something they need to know about anyway.

If you're embarrassed about how much you're making or if this is causing people to form a negative impression, just act as though it's not something you can discuss and immediately follow this up with a concrete number you're looking for, so that you don't seem evasive. Something like:

"I'm not sure I can discuss that but it would take at least $X for me to consider the offer, if that's where you're going."

should work fine.

Don't tell anyone the minimum you'll work for.

~350

select * from X
where A in (select A from Y)


I noticed at work yesterday that, at least on sql server 2005/2012, the above returned the same as "select * from X" if there wasnt a column called A in table Y. Obviously if run just by itself, the subselect errors out.


WTF?

Im guessing this is in accordance w/ some standard but that seems like really counterintuitive behaviour