I suspect certain other posters here are similar to me. I grew up in a society where BS is absolutely zero tolerance. If you are going to give advice to people, you definitely need to know what you are talking about. If you are going to give advice to people knowing full-well that advice is bad, you better be a fast runner, a good fighter, and live within crawling distance of a hospital.

For people like me, if you are reading these blog articles, you take them as truth, because... what benefit does is it to write BS and upvote BS advice for anyone?

If you are talking to recruiter and she gives unsolicited advice on how to improve as programmer or find the next job, you take this at face value. Why would she waste her time on this?

How much of interviewing is the dance of BS -vs- telling the truth? Sheesh, really don't know.

I simply do not have a sophisticated BS lingo since that was never in my vocabulary. For others, BS is a high art and a form of expression, and I fully suspect that the HN / Twitter crowd has a multi-layered form of communication steeped in BS, where they pretend to eat it up, but they aren't, or they are eating up morsels and tossing out the rot, or maybe "nice post!... (three paragraphs of commentary) really means "What a load of BS, here's more for ya!"

This is a chasm of thought I doubt I'll ever cross. I wish I'd been told this stuff a long time ago, though it doesn't really help since I don't understand or know the mechanics of BS.

****

My no-BS thoughts on a simple option to find work as a programmer if you are truly struggling: Sign up with upwork, fiverr, angel.co, and post in the "looking for work" thread on HN. This is what I'm doing to find work. I'm not swamped by any means, but I've done okay over the past few months and have had a decent variety of contracts.

Don't ask for what you think is the correct price. On Upwork, for example, I'd suggest starting at $25 / hour or something like that. I'm charging well above this and this is my typical proposition:

Hey, daveT;

I have this codebase here. I've had 5 of my best guys and 3 other people look at it, and they all gave up. You'll need a degree in Dead Sea languages to comprehend any of this trash.

Here's the main issue we are trying to fix. You think you can take and look and get back to us in 30 minutes?

If you feel confident that you can work through that, then by all means, aim for higher prices, but believe me, you will not get any contracts if you can't hang with this, and you should be confident that you can kill the bug before the day is out. If you are planning to move divs around, then charge lower prices.

larry, do you have any advice on resources for learning Angular/Typescript? like blogs, or websites, or repos that you read or have read. or even exercises that could better someones understanding.

my company has committed to using Angular on a lot of projects and everyone is learning it. the cool thing is that we are all kind of on the same level so I feel if I can outlearn most ppl then not only would I get priority on the cool projects but compensation should follow.

I do like Angular but I am not sure that I fully understand the reasoning and theory behind a lot of the patterns.

daveT, as often, I literally have no idea what you're talking about. Where the hell did you grow up?

And in what world does someone offer a 30 minute contract to fix something "5 of their best guys" can't fix? If what they said was true and you fixed it, they should be firing one of their best guys and hiring you. Probably they should fire 2 of their best guys.

I've done contract work where I've fixed stuff "their best people" couldn't fix, sure, but most of those places were either complete **** shows (i.e. their "best guys" were marketing people trying to do something with VBA or something) or they tried to hire me on the spot. I was also usually charging $150/hour or more, and I was not solving anything in 30 minutes or even implying I could.

ETA: I really don't mean to pick on you, but so often your point of view indicates a world that is either completely different than mine, or it's the same, but for some reason we perceive it or interact with it VERY differently.

I think the 30 minutes was more "take a quick look and decide if you think you can do anything / let me know how long"

I suppose. He also says to be sure you can "kill the bug before the day is out"

There should not be a lot of bugs that your "5 best guys" can not solve, that can be solved by an outside programmer in under a day. If I had such a bug and it was solved in a day, I would want to hire the solver. I would certainly expect to pay an order of magnitude more than $25/hour.

It not happening to you is different than no interviewer is interested in it from anyone.

That is correct. It usually goes "look at this for 30 minutes and see if you can make dollars or sense of what is happening. We'll discuss it, and if you can find the issue, we can get this fixed."

By "one day," I mean something fairly simple that should take one hour on a sane codebase, like fixing a 404 or 500 page.

When you are looking at piles of magic on top of magic, things can get cryptic very fast. The upside is that after figuring it out, it often turns into a week or two of more work, with the joy of each new task being more mind-bending than the previous task.

I have considerable difficulty with many things others find obvious and only do my best to understand it. No offense taken.

To make it clear, this is not something I do at $25 / hour. I suggested going to that pay for moving divs across the page or other fairly simple things. Charging over $50 / hour seems to put me into the last-chance cafe.

Every single interview I've had the last couple years my game has come up. I got my current job mostly because a senior dev was an attendee at a meetup I presented at about it.

Sorry, but I still don't understand. Their "best 5 people" can't figure out a 404 page?

If someone wants you to fix something their best 5 guys can't fix for $50/hour I would suggest you tell them to kindly **** off.

My first consulting job was in something like 2003 for $100/hour. After I completed the job, which I think I actually got on the strength of knowing someone on the hiring side, I was told that I would need to quote higher on the next job, and/or estimate many more hours, because people weren't taking me seriously.

If you advertise your wares at a flea market, people will line up to buy them at bottom dollar. Why are you selling yourself at bottom dollar?

At inflation from then, my underbid would be $150/hour in today's dollars. In the mid-2000s I did work at $150/hour through a consultancy company and I am quite sure they tacked $100/hour onto that for themselves. They were billing my client $250/hour for my services. Was my client a profligate russian billionaire? No. It was a failing municipal power company. My "office" for the project was a computer lab for urban teens that you had to get to by walking through a boxing gym for fire fighters and police men. It was next to a place that advertised itself as a pawn shop/recording studio/deer processing facility.

I am suggesting that you are either doing work that is in no way arcane, or you are leaving MASSIVE amounts of money on the table.

My suggestion is what works for me and what I did for react. Buy a well reviewed book on Amazon and crush through it doing EVERY example as you read along. Then go through a YouTube series as well, and then take one of your side projects and re-write it in Angular. I feel like this can take as little as a couple weeks and make a huge difference.

For Typescript, I'm no help at all. We kinda use Proptypes, but so far I don't, and it hasn't been an issue. Some really smart people itt (gaming_mouse iirc) have advocated in favor of it, but I just find it adds overhead to my work that doesn't benefit me. I am probably wrong, but I really don't get how you can accidentally send an int or function instead of a string. I just feel like to get to the point where something is the wrong type, you are fundamentally doing something very wrong and the error should be pretty obvious. I do like unit tests a lot, so I feel like type systems are unnecessary if you have good unit test coverage. Again, I'm a novice tho and likely wrong about this.

I'm sort of mixing up examples, but a specific issue was a Lisp project. The original programmer decided it was beneath his standing to write routes by hand.

Instead of simply writing out a route with the appropriate functions, he write 3 macros. I'm not entirely sure what they did, but #1 called #2 which called #3. Without understanding this, it would not be possible to even understand where the route entry-point was, as that wasn't really written out either. Grep "/url" would often turn up nothing, and these were non-dynamic routes.

It turned out that the problem wasn't in the piles of macros or the routes at all. Each database field was text while the JavaScript that displayed the information had type-coercion, which threw the error.

Maybe? The maths and "C" courses at the local CC are 80% to help me pay bills and 20% to boost resume/transcripts. If I was working full time I cant say I'd be gunning for a full time course load.

I'm having some issue finding full time work down here and I do think that more knowledge of React and the latest ES6+ will make me more viable candidate.

I think its just like when you go fishing. You could be a great fisherman but maybe that particular spot isn't where the fish are at. So then you have to move. I'm open to moving but again I've applied to some spots and i get an email response from HR or recruiter saying "You do know we are in X city/Y state right?". So thats another barrier to overcome.

Are there any great free web hosts you guys recommend? I was on Red Hat Openshift 2 but they're taking it out of service and version 3 is annoying and complicated, now I'm trying Heroku but the fact that they sleep my app for inactivity means that I'd have to actually write a real session store unless I want to pay $7/mo for always on (which I'm considering).

AWS rocks and first year is free ec2 1GB linux server and free 1 GB ms server

get your own DO/Linode machine? its like $5 a month for a small server. Github pages was pretty easy to setup and it was free (I used it to upload a React front end and it worked well ). I think its free for static.

But yeah, Heroku is beyond simple but I'd go with own DO/Linode for cheaper than Heroku and more customization.

The heroku machines go to sleep after 30 mins of inactivity, so if you can make even the simplest request every 29 mins you should be good I think.

On the free plan, though, it says they require a certain amount of inactivity per month; it would probably get force shut down for awhile or something if I let it run continuously.

Seems like they offer 500 hours roughly per month if you surpass that they'll just cut you off entirely till next month. So i guess you could spin up two heroku apps to ping each other during a window of time to be awake non stop. It would have to be maybe like during a certain window of the day to not consume all the hours

If you end up sticking with Heroku, you can use http://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/ or setup your own slightly customized version using https://gist.github.com/jasalt/9996772669f0da35b453

Actually, this sounds perfect - digging through the docs Kaffeine links to, it says that once you verify with a credit card (which I had to do anyway to set up MongoLab), you get 450 more free hours, which takes you to 1000 which is more than the number of hours in a month. So I should now be able to run 24/7 and put off writing a real session store. Thanks!

I shouldn't say it "never" happened, but it happened so seldom that it really isn't a topic anyone should be reading about as some miracle fuel companies use for finding "the one."

Conservatively, I've been through 300 phone and face to face interviews. Here's the most common questions I've been asked:

1- Fizzbuzz: This takes the number one spot. If not this, then another gimme question.

2- Puzzles: They are all end up being recurrences, so learn you some recursion for greater good!

3- Name some Linux command-line stuff: What do they want here? Beginner, intermediate, or advanced? man, I guess?

4- What tools do you use? Anything but Emacs, including pencil and paper or Notepad++.

One interview went straight to the gutter when that one was asked. I said Emacs and the interviewer went on a lengthy rant about how much he hates Emacs. I thought it was kind of funny for the first 30 seconds, but after five minutes of listening to a slurry of curse words, I figured this guy really didn't like Emacs.

5- Is the interviewer high? That interviewer may have been high as a kite. I don't know and don't remember, but this, of all things, truly confuses me because it happens way too often, IMO.

6- Why did you start programming? I tried it out and loved it... sorry?

7- What kind of alcohol do you drink? I enjoy drinking chocolate stouts, and if that's not available, I'd prefer a porter, though I suspect the "cultural fit" answer is a bottle of Bud w/ Vodka and Dr Pepper. I haven't tried saying Saison yet.

8- Who the **** helped you with this program? Caught red-handed, thanks.

9- Tell me about a bug you solved recently / explain your process for debugging. Some interviewers have a correct answer (specific tools) in their mind while others just care about your ability to logic through a problem.

10- What language do you want to learn next? I honestly don't know.

11- Why do you use [your preferred language]? Part for fun and part practical.

12- Which of those languages is your best one? I'm equally good in all of them (this may peg me as a liar, idk).

The main thing I get are take home tests and chats about what I did at previous jobs and contracts, then get asked how I could have learned anything without going to college. I only give straight answers and don't know what else to say.

rofl what

I really just don't even know where you're applying, Dave. I have literally never seen anything like the above. Of course, I haven't been on 300 interviews.