You can't stop someone who is dead set on stealing your IP and have an open dev environment. But you are obviously familiar with the tradeoff between security and accessibility Thremp. If you are going to let devs use their own machines, take their laptops home, or let them work at home in any way you are at risk of having your IP stolen. At a certain point you have to trust your devs and that comes back to how you hire them, which you've already shown you're really good at...

How in the world are you ranting about "your devs" when we're talking about hiring outsourcers? What in the world does your own internal devs/employees have to do with some outsourcer who in almost all not ******ed circumstance will be responsible for a small and tangential piece of software.

My bad, I forgot just how much you changed the original question; "would it be a good idea to pay dev applicants to solve an open source task and use that for the coding portion of their application?" and was basing my comment on that. Carry on.

Wait, you don't consider "outsourcers" as your devs? Do you call them by name or just call them all Raj, or Petrov, or Contractor?

So it appears your entire derail is because you didn't read. Atleast we got to the root of the issue.

And yes, I would differentiate between people that work for me and people who're short term contractors working on non-core product. It'd be idiocy to not.

If someone is just a remote developer, then some of the comments you're making have some semblance of reality to them, but that wasn't the topic.

You got me, I didn't read, my bad, that evens us up at 1 derail each.

Theoretically, if one wanted to tap into the resources of outsourcing as much as possible with as little risk to company secrets as possible, one could set an abstraction layer between the employee and sensitive information by having the employee solve it in the abstract, randomizing the database with dummy information, that kind of thing.

Who would write it?

You'd just need the specs to create a dummy database, so someone outsourced could populate the database with rando info generated from SQL scripts. Of course it depends on the specifics of the project, but you get the general idea.

That's definitely an option. You can do similar things with services and create mock services that return dummy data.

The problem is that for the majority of non-trivial applications 'dummy data' isn't going to test a whole lot of edge cases that happen with your real data. Just thinking about something as simple as people's names, you need to have spaces, long names, short names, accents from different languages, etc.

And, of course, a production database can just respond differently than a simple testing database. Maybe performance is fine with the application when the database is small but tanks against a production database doing a bunch of other things.

And then there are performance things. Maybe performance is fine against the simple database/services, but in production a new index is needed or better timeouts are needed for calling services.

If you don't let your outsourcers have access to any of the Production systems you're stuck doing a lot of this data prep/mocking/testing/release/maintenance work yourself. And at a certain point you realize that writing code is a relatively small part of building and running an application and it doesn't really make sense to outsource just that piece.

It also depends on why you are outsourcing. Outsourcing to save money on dev salaries is an entirely different proposition than outsourcing because you can't hire enough developers locally to meet your product plans.

Hey guys, I've been following this thread for a bit and you guys all seem knowledgeable. I just came out of the Marines, after graduating with a BS in a non technical major (silly mistake, shoulda done CS or something related). In the mean time I have been doing, codeacademy, udemy, and udacity for python and ruby. Seems fun and challenging and can clearly see the massive benefits just in doing self learning.

That being said, I am slated to start a 10 week bootcamp(lol) which is FREE + will be getting 2.4k monthly stipend... This is a clear win win for me. I want to maximize my time learning + getting paid to do it. What would you guys recommend as next step? I do not want to be in a CRUD web dev all my career, would be intellectually stimulating to delve deeper into ML or AI (both of which I have 0 clue about) or look into developing on top of the block chain. What would you guys do assuming free community colleges + monthly stipend while studying? So far I have a loose idea which entails:
- precalc(forgot bout it and didnt do so hot so want to review it), calc 1 (maybe calc 2), discrete math, + a couple programming courses offered at the comm college
- apply to Masters CS program ? >> profit?

any advice is sincerely welcome thanks!

I dunno how much more (if at all) math might be used in areas you specified interest in like AI, but in my programming career the most intense math I've ever employed is trigonometry (and even that was only for the fairly niche application of dynamically positioning cameras in video games). I've never used calculus.

Discrete math is a painfully boring subject, but it does have much more relevance to computer science.

How important is money to you?

Let me rephrase...from the massive amount of reading both in this thread and the other one on masters at depaul, seems like the basic cs courses require understanding of certain math concepts. Though majority say they never see it, it would "help" to understand certain CS concepts. Especially for those pursuing a masters, those couple courses seem to be all in the required list.

I like money! I'm not saying I want to be stuck in some research building in X university pursuing theoretical ideas for research. In my short sighted and limited view, I mean to say I do not want to be just doing simple web development at a "lower" level if that makes any sense.

I am willing to listen to any and all suggestions to maximize my learning, like I said before I am doing a boot camp for the immersion and to have some "instructor" able to give direct feedback to some degree. Sounds much better than having 30 tabs open, with git, stackoverflow, learnXthehardway, etc.
Seems like getting paid to maybe pursue a MS CS would help me expand as well. In before "just download and find the course material and read it on your own" comments

MS opens a lot of doors, I don't think it really does much in terms of experience/knowledge. So decide if it's worth the cost to open some doors/ get some interviews and then know it's your job to learn what you'd need to know about the specific field you want to work on

I think getting an MS in CS would be really helpful in opening doors for you since you don't have a BS in something technical, but not absolutely necessary. Getting a MS is also good for people who want people to tell them what to learn, and having the deadlines at university will force you to get things done quickly.

Try doing some challenging projects while at school, or as a side project, and working on open source projects that are in the fields that you are interested in. Network with the people who are doing the stuff that you want to do. You can find them at local meetups, or by going on informational interviews.

College wants me to retake intro programming courses because my credits are over 5 years old. I can build a portfolio and cut-out the middle man. F-em.

I dunno, you just described my average workday.

Are you asking about what to do before the bootcamp or after it? Because a good bootcamp will consume all your time, between coding and job hunting.

I meant after the boot camp, which I should be starting in 2 weeks. what's the best course of action to maximize my learning. I will get after it by building, meanwhile the pre reqs I listed to possibly leave the MS CS door open sound like a good plan ? Yay nay? Just analyzing the cost/benefit analysis would just be the time taken to do it, where as I could be working (but I wouldn't be strained for resources: free schooling and monthly stipend). But if I don't stop building or collaborating on open source projects etc it's still seen as productive correct?

Id say you proly oughta walk before you run

for the record, I actually was just trolling about this

my sincerest apologies

yeah agreed... but i don't like to walk in the woods blindly. Thats why I'm here trying to walk with a guide

WHB, what language are they using at your bootcamp? If you need an idea, try building a blog. This will prepare you for what you need to do in industry. Start with just a command line interface. Then add a database to it. Lastly, add the UI.

Step 1, you should focus on becoming an expert at a good back end general purpose OOP language. Then learning about the basic data structures, and algorithms search and sort algorithms. While you are doing this stuff, you can now start building something that uses the command line to interact with the app. Or, you could do coding challenges on hackerank or codewars.

Step 2, Then build a command line based app that has a database backend. Learn sql.

Step 3, focus on learning how to be proficient in some UI technology. Now you can add a front end to your project. You can use a desktop, web, or smartphone technology for this.

Step 4, start solving algorithm problems on LeetCode. Start learning about best practices for the language you are using from step 1.

Anyone ever use typescript with node? Webpack takes like 30 seconds to rebuild every time and our app isn't even that big yet. I feel like we must be doing something wrong. I haven't started really getting into it yet, just curious if anyone else has run into similar issues. Babel maybe?