Rusty,

I'm going to go down a testing rabbit hole today. Thanks for the post.

https://www.bloc.io/

and

https://www.thinkful.com/courses/

Seem to kind of fit that mentor based learning online, but they don't have a lot of individual courses. It's not a massive amount of money, but I think you'd be surprised how much mentoring you could get for free just simply by starting a small project. Then when you get stuck or want to dig deeper reach out to someone more senior (pm sizzlah), show them what you've done and ask for help.

Plenty of bootcamps already work, more or less, on this model where they just act as external recruiters for companies and take the finder's fee--getting paid by the company easier than the individual. (In some cases, at least, that wasn't the original intention but was ultimately the way to make money from an existing business model.)

Recruiting firms could try to get there from the opposite direction, although it would be a little harder (as candidates would need to make more of commitment to them to only take certain job offers, etc.). And they probably have, on average, a negative reputation to overcome...although at least this is a more obvious "service" rather than just forwarding publicly available job postings.

This. And brand/prestige factor of having had to get accepted and past graduates having done okay, not to mention peer pressure and motivation that comes from being surrounded by motivated people in similar situations.

This too. It's really hard to play the cop/middleman here from a legal perspective.

I'm not saying it's an easy legal problem to solve, but if app academy can solve it, I'm sure there's got to be a way to automate it and broaden access to a legal framework to individuals.

I'm just saying the best model is to have the student pay a chunk up front then monthly after that. If you are really that broke take out a title loan on your car or something. This is like the one case where it would probably be worth it.

Just don't make the peer-to-peer mentor/student connector act as a collection agent on your deadbeat ass. Nobody who starts an company like this wants to be a collection agent. Completely different industries and skillsets. Nor do they want to have to sell your unsecured debt for pennies on the dollar. There's a reason why no one's out there offering unsecured debt to people who can't get a loan by any other means.

The peer-to-peer comonay could even offer scholarships to students who show severe need. Although the tricky part there is to separate truly needy students from "broke" middle class or rich kids who could easily borrow money from their parents.

After trying out a few drafts, I figured out that there is no way to not come across as a clingy and desperate weirdo. Thought process goes like this:

This is a good start. I double-checked to make sure I spell the recipient's name correctly.

This start is terrible. I broke the golden rule of business writing: Always start with their problems first. Scratch that and start over again...

Nope, that's another **** up. I did start with the golden rule, but then I got all defensive. Let's eschew the golden rule and start with the first quote, continuing with the postmortem...

Now I'm pathetic and even starting to stretch the truth here, but let's not get into that again... oh why not?

There was one other job I recall really wanting during the past 24 years of my working career. I happened to be super nervous as well and couldn't sleep the night before. I had to wake up at 3am to go to work, pouring coffee for a company that you heard of, then went off to the interview. By the time I arrived, I was awake for about 28 hours, and get this: I got the job!

It wasn't technically a job, but I felt joy every day I went in. I have no lessons to take from my conduct in that interview since I don't remember any of it, though I vaguely recall being at a whiteboard writing what was likely unusable code. I wonder if they knew how damn exhausted I was that day.

Back to the email draft...

Holy ****! Did I forget to mention that I'm persistent and obsessive? Could you imagine working with this guy, sending off emails over every little meltdown? How many meltdowns can a person have in a week?

Finally, got the point! Why would anyone bother with the soliloquy before this. Just say "thanks!" and move on. Sheesh.

(this was all meant in 50% jest / 50% ugh, no. Hopefully someone found it amusing and humorous)

Why not something like:

Hello x,

I'm following up on last week's interview with you and y.

The position sounds like a great fit for me and I'm really excited about the opportunity. Due to my excitement, I feel like I may not have left you with the best impression of my abilities.

If you're open to it, I'd be happy to do a take home project or another interview to prove myself.

Thanks again for taking the time to met with me,
Dave T

Yeah, some version of what blackize did is fine.
I'd add some upbeat friendliness like

.

Aside from not being creepy I don't think you need to worry about doing some Jedi mind tricks. If he's the type of person who would reconsider you, he might. If not then it doesn't matter.

back from my long break

how's it goin everyone, also, how horrible are prolog and haskel? my programming languages class is going through both of them

Not sure about Haskell, but Prolog is pretty much the worst thing ever.

prolog >>>> prolapse

These are great things to study to expand your mind, not quite directly as useful in real life.

XSLT 4 LIFE!

as far as you know

um, haskell is a strong contender the best designed, most beautiful language there is. try to completely forget everything you know about java or c++ or whatever other ****ty langauges you've studied thus far, and be thankful that you have a forward-thinking professor.

lol enterprise. Talked to 3rd party recruiter, they want to put me in for a contract to hire position. Needs a YEAR of being on contract, with no benefits, no vacation, no 401k. What in the world? What rate would you all need to take this?

I mean seems like a trivial problem to solve right? Assuming you have benefits now estimate their full cost to you and add them to your current salary, adjusting for your desire to work with the tech/company involved.

Edit: Also potentially adjusting for future better opportunities the tech/job might afford you if possible. Probably pretty neglible though.

More was curious about what people consider the risk of going to a contract is worth. At least could jump ship whenever I wanted if I didn't like it there.

Tons of staffing companies are "contract-only" and they get more deals by using contract-to-hire, I wouldn't doubt the company wants to hire full timers and the staffing agency wants to bill that sweet hourly margin.

I feel like we talk about this a lot, but to be a contractor I would basically take what you currently make for yearly salary, divide it by 2,000, and multiply it by 1.75. That is the hourly rate you should charge.

Thanks but where'd you come up with that out of curiosity? is it a well known formula?

Guessing 2000 is a rough hourly estimate working 40 hrs per week 50 weeks a year.

Don't know where the 1.75 multiplier came from. I've read upwards of 2-3 times your current hourly but that's if you're fully independent and have to factor in non-working time like building your brand, finding customers, doing administrative work for your business etc not to mention paying for benefits.

Offload some of that to the hiring company and I could see where 1.75 makes a reasonable number.

Yea basically that.

This comes from my first hand experience on the business side of recruiting at a staffing company. I was responsible for breaking into new accounts and billed about ~20 people out in my year doing it, and placed like ~3 people full-time (were were discouraged from placing people full time it was just random things I was able to work out). Plus at my last gig we built up to where we had senior strong people and contractors and were basically a contracted design and scrum development agency for some pretty solid clients.

Basically the way it works is if you are currently making $125k in salary, you would want to be charging around $109/hr if you can get it. Everything said above applies, plus you are being paid for every hour you work, so if they want you for 55 hours a week you are getting $5995/week, which is more than double what you are getting in salary.

Some places may be strict and have you bill exactly 40 hours, but those places are usually not great and are just doing contracted-out work for the sake of billing a client, or just some mundane work. Good engineers on anything of significance should be worth every hour they can be productive/happy.

So if you are currently being paid on 40 hours a week salary and get overtime or only work 40 hours a week and thats totally cool, then balance that accordingly of course.

People can have very successful careers moving from contract to contract, and doing their own stuff on the side. Never having more than an LLC that they put on contracts with zero employees, minimal expenses and just going from job to job. If you are a good contractor you can easily find work because the backbone of recruiting is contracting.

When someone places you full time they want you to stay for 90 days and then they dont give a **** what happens. They can't recruit you again out of there anytime soon because its a super unethical move. But with contracting, they get paid every hour you do, so they want you there forever, and the moment you are even thinking about not extending they want to be the ones to find your next gig.

If you want to take large breaks to travel and do cool stuff other than work occasionally, it can be a great lifestyle. The best is learning one specific niche that is good for 90 day contracts, because you will get a bit more in hourly rate because of the short duration, but they almost always extend if you want it to. Then you can meet more people there who do 90 day contracts and they will refer you in when they move on. You can build a network really fast in contracting.

That said, contracting is also the way that companies throw money at failing projects, so beware of what it is you are getting yourself into.

I interviewed someone today, without much warning that it was about to happen, so I was not at all prepared. I spoke to another person who was supposed to interview him after lunch, and that guy was going to ask sort of typical algorithm questions, so I wasn't sure I wanted to do that. I met with a guy who had just come out of the interview room and he said "make sure you quiz him on python, because he's supposed to be a big JS guy and he did not do well on that"

So we sit down and we talk a bit and I'm like, so, your job would be to do both some FE and BE programming, and our BE is all python. How good is your python? He says "I don't know any python, but I'm excited to learn". I got out of him that he'd done some "backed" stuff in node, and a little PHP.

I did a lot of interviewing in the first job I ever had, and we mostly did not hire people who knew the language we used, because it wasn't common. So I am not a "bigot" in this regard, but... python is a very common language and it's not hard to find people who know it. That makes me a little not inclined to hire someone who doesn't know it. If he'd done great on the JS thing I think it would have been OK to hire him but it was not good.

Anyway, I need to find a few good interview questions to ask people, programming or logic puzzles or some ****, I dunno. I really don't know, because I don't think whiteboard programming is really a great way to find out how good someone is, but unfortunately, the only way I know to find out is to hire them and see how it looks a month down the road.

Which, btw, is what we did a lot of in that first job I had. Hire anyone who seems smart, then fire them in 6mo if it's not working out. I can't decide if that's great or terrible. Certainly, it's a very startup kind of thing to do I guess, and this was at the height of the first dot com bubble.

Haskell looks fine to me because I've done a little functional programming before, but I looked at some prolog examples and it seems like a whole different beast