Been really trying to code/learn in the past 3 months, when I have time from school/work/gf.

I've been doing FFC which is great but at times I feel there is room to slack off and get by with the minimum on the site. It is good though, really like the format of it. Have been keeping a steady log of notes over each lesson and color coding it to help my mind memorize where things go.

I bought two books, one for CSS/HTML and one for jQuery/JS, both are formatted really well and are a blast to read over.

And i was looking into Odin Project today, and I guess what I am asking is what's everyone's thoughts/what do they prefer Odins or FFC?

Thanks in advance.

This seems pretty standard. But it touches on some flaws you mention a bit later. Regardless, I have no real solutions to this problem.

I think everyone would agree with you.

However, I don't think there are really any good solutions that can be broadly implemented.

Holy fudge Ive been coding like 15 hours a day for the last week. Is this real life?

Higher economic growth ultimately leading to more demand for developers? A sense of urgency seems to be conspicuously absent.

Another factor is that experience is valuable to a point but experienced candidates often overrate their experience. I confess that I tend to so ymmv. Cognitive skills is by far the most important factor in determining the value of a developer. Again, FWIW, a developer with great cognitive skills, that is relatively inexperienced but has a desire to learn and apply those cognitive skills, is gold to hiring outfits.

So of course this is correct, and I am admittedly guilty of doing this myself, but truly this is superficial bull**** and doesn't really matter. The best way to describe, while being a bit callous, is it makes things easier for people who don't understand, to want to be a part of it.

For example, much of my work the last 3+ years at this company has been landing logos and convincing people to join in order to increase our superficial pedigree.

Now, in interviews and in sales meetings alike, I mention the fact our Dir of Engineering joined after a 4 years as a hands on Dir of Eng at a unicorn who is huge in our space. Obviously, I flaunt the logos and name drop executives we have done work for, the companies and organizations we are working with, and am setting up a pitch that's basically like "look at these amazing companies that we work with, if they trust us, you should too" its the old "nobody ever got fired for picking IBM".

Really though, the biggest reason I'm doing this is to make it easier to scale. In order to scale, you can't rely on hiring brilliant people forever, eventually you have to hire some fairly average people, who have decent experience, and will do a rigid fairly specialized job. They won't be amazing, but they will do enough to be a solid cog in the wheel.

In a situation such as that, it makes everyone's jobs easier if they can lean on past successes and pedigree to overcome obstacles. The people who need these crutches are not A+ players, but the people who built these crutches often times are, and this is the way of making them scale when they are no longer on the front lines.

Knowing a company was founded by former Googlers doesn't mean **** to me. But to the average tech slappy in recruiting/ biz dev, it is used as justification for their entire existence.

I think unfortunately that tech attracts a lot of egos and people who spend a lot of time WANTING and not enough time DOING. Like was said earlier about finance people only worried about their own careers. Tech attracts a lot of the same people who are professional resume and personal website creators first, and detail-oriented employees second.

But that said, I love working in technology and never see myself leaving, but there is a lot of pretend and superficial bull**** that you need to filter through.

Right and the non-standard part (I do all resume screening and let lots of people through that would normally not pass a recruiter screening; and the tests given are identical across all candidates) doesn't scale.

Couldn't agree more here and I've always regarded poor hiring practices as an opportunity - if hiring practices were more fair across the board, big prestigious companies with lots of money will monopolize talent to a much greater extent, which seems kind of dystopian to me. Lots of good things are borne out of our general inability to identify talent, which is just a special case of our general inability to predict the future.

Yeah I'm pretty much with you entirely - the lament is really just directed at myself for being generally aware of all this in theory but failing to apply it to myself. I've been focused entirely on doing and making for the past 5 years or so and I could have been a little more balanced in my approach. Also I do have some non-tech related brand names on my resume from a long time ago and couldn't help but notice various people zero in on those instead of my more recent, relevant experience.

if you dont mind, I would be interested in seeing what your technical exam questions are. now that I'm done with class, I could use some exercises.

what is fcc?

https://www.freecodecamp.com/

I can't share but they are not that interesting - just go to hackerrank and you should have no shortage of these types of questions.

I have the same issue. One job description is "Amazon Storefront Manager" and they often assume I worked for Amazon at one time. Reading the company name and the first bullet point would specify that I was working for a 3rd party seller that happened to sell on Amazon. This makes me have to explain myself and I'm left wondering if I am now painted as an equivocator.

Now that you see how nuts the whole process is, would you like to walk back on your comment about me under-selling myself? :/

To be fair, I did tell you daveT that the word Amazon really doesn't belong in a first line of one of your employment titles because it is going to completely throw people off.

It would be much better imo to say "Storefront Manager" and then in the description mention managing your Amazon selling account, etc.

I think we're talking about different things - I have two things on my resume that some recruiters recognize, genuinely, as "pedigree" and they have been generally helpful - it's just that they are not as universally recognized among tech people and are from too many years ago. When those two were the main items on my resume, I was a much more marketable commodity, despite not being particularly skilled in anything.

Don't remember everything I've said but no I can't recall any particular statement I'd like to walk back :P Feel free to remind me though - I like being shown stupid things I've written in the past.

Yeah "Amazon Storefront Manager" feels a little like the "Harvard Extension School" of the tech world - it's going to attract attention at first but I think some people are going to feel that you're trying to mislead even if that's mostly due to their own inability to understand the difference.

In general I'm a supporter of open source, but I kind of feel like github and similar stuff is not really doing any major favors for the movement. People use it as a dumping ground and so so often you find something there that appears really tantalizing and then after 20 hours of ****ing with it and failing to make it work, you give up.

This happened to me yesterday. I tried with a somewhat abandoned project (last update 2 years ago, many updates in the years prior). It had sample pictures and videos and **** and looked like exactly what I needed. I spent at least 5 or 6 hours trying to get it to compile and run, and finally gave up this morning. Among other things I would have had to downgrade a lot of stuff to what was current at the time the software last worked (if it ever did). Like, I'd probably need to set up a VM and try to get it to whatever state his system was in last time it worked for him.

So I gave up. Then did some of my own research and found that I could code the actual solution in something like 30 minutes myself. I had lacked the right keywords to google and everything I'd been coming up with before was 50 page long academic papers.

Anyway, rant over I guess.

This is such a key lesson that applies to many circumstances. The one that I run into all the time is projects with poor or incomplete documentation, where the time it takes me to figure out and learn how to use your thing is greater than (or close to) the time it takes me to build it myself, even if your thing works and is what I need.

Yeah. And if I used this project, I'd just be adding another dependency to *my* project, which would make it harder for anyone else to use it in the future (including me, when I try to resurrect it in 5 years and can't get any of the deps to work)

ETA: frankly, I was trying to get out of doing some math.

I don't quite get a lot of the in jokes, but JS/web devs will probably enjoy this: http://www.adultswim.com/misc/developer-test/

Re the fake pedigree thing: I've seen quite a few resumes from folks that list work experience like this

Google (big font)
Senior developer (smaller font)
Via some contracting agency (tiny font)

Seems really scummy to me.

Yea that is terrible. Would really not trust that person did that non-maliciously.

What if the contracting agency was serving a purely administrative function, you were hired specifically for the Google contract, interviewing with Google management was part of the hiring process, you worked directly for a Google supervisor in a Google office, and the only function your contracting agency served was to allow Google to negotiate a single contract to be further contracted out to an entire team? Just asking cause I'm in a similar situation (not with Google) and I haven't added it to my resume but I'm not sure the best way to present it. Saying I work for the contracting agency would be more accurate but the only contact I have with them is when the program manager checks in via email every ~6 months to make sure everything's still good. In all other respects there's no difference between myself and an actual [not Google] employee.

What d10 describes is how Apple works in some positions. The only thing the contracting company does is initial screening and payroll, and you aren't a contractor in the full legal sense. It doesn't sound like malice to me if someone is reporting to Apple, using Apple's computers, etc. It's possible that's what Google did and the applicant is being nixxed for being overly honest.

Yeah that describes my situation. I'm a W2 employee for the contracting company but for all practical purposes I work for the customer and they consider me as they would if I contracted with them directly. And when people I meet casually ask where I work I just name the customer because it's a lot easier than explaining the relationship of the contracting company and it's more in line with what they're really asking anyway.

I would rather see something like contracting with X instead of worked at X in big font as senior dev in smaller font and via contract in tiny font.

One says what you did the other is saying what you wish you did.