So I've been interviewing for a while now because I'm terrible I guess and man do people hate that response! I mostly get a lot of "mm hmm" but the one place I talked to today totally blew their wad.

I've been on two interviews with this place and I've been talking to the hiring manager in email. At no point in this process has anyone mentioned compensation at all. So today I get a call from the first person I talked to initially i.e. the "screener".

Her: "So we haven't talked about the type of salary ranges you've been looking for."

Me: <quote above>

Her: "Oh I understand. Um... what kind of salary ranges did you get while working contract?"

Me: <makes up some numbers with a pretty wide range>

Her: "Ah, would you be comfortable with a salary range of <50% more than the minimum I would have accepted>?"

Me: "Yeah we can make something like that work"

grue,

i live in sf and i like italian food.

p.s. re:

don't get down on yourself. interviewing is very much like dating: it's a numbers game, and just because you don't make a connection doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.

also going from nothing -> job is the hardest transition. once you're taken, everyone else wants you.

Is it worth taking a job at a company with not so great reviews if it means much needed entry dev experience? Its also a bit of a hike to work, but I feel like a year or so would set me up for much more desirable jobs.

possibly. impossible to say more without knowing many more specifics.

I guess Im wondering if a year of potential suckiness is worth it to get that crucial first full time programming gig. I program now for not so great pay, and not all of my work involves programming. But yeah, I dont want to ramble. Lets break it down to, how easy is life as a programmer after that first job? From what Ive heard, getting the first is awful, then if youre working hard, that experience can help get you into more desirable jobs much easier.

Congratulations Grue!

Don't feel bad, I was unemployed for... a long time.

Thinking of going to one of those hack nights. Looks like there will be about 25 people at this one and I'll be showing up about 15 - 30 minutes late.

The schedule is about 3 hours. Not sure if said hours are meant to be productive or chit-chatting. I think there is pizza on the menu, which means I'll be bringing my own food and losing out on dinner-side chat*, but I'm looking forward to giving it a roll. Seems like there is a pretty good mix of pros and beginners.

*I've noticed that many people are very uncomfortable around people who aren't eating and most people simply assume you are a weirdo if you don't eat pizza at the drop of a hat. Explaining that I am allergic to tomatoes doesn't help matters any.

first, programming isn't a magic profession. if you don't really, really like it and have at least some aptitude for it and its surrounding disciplines (communication, problem solving, learning efficiently, etc.), it's never going to work out.

all experiences are what you make of them. sometimes the value is by counterexample, though, and it's often best to avoid those.

i wouldn't work at a sweatshop for a year for the hope that it would help me.

i would accept a low salary to gain good experience.

i might work on something boring for a while as a step toward a more useful position.

but you already have a job, so you're asking the wrong questions. you have the luxury of waiting for a good junior position instead of a ****ty one. watch the job boards and wait for the right fit. sharpen your skills outside of work. when the right thing comes, pounce hard. remember it's a numbers game and don't be discouraged.

dave,

lol jfc

if you don't like the position you end up in after "tomato allergy" then play a different line. "oh i just came from a big dinner."

also no one cares about this at all and you're just projecting your feelings of social awkwardness. just be cool, hunny bunny. eat the food you brought (apparently??) or just have a beverage and smile and nod when people talk. you'll find the people that you dig and that dig you.

WHO ELSE SEEKS COUNCIL?!?!?!?!?

Loving every second of it, even those damn NULL POINTERS AHHHH

Good advice, Im just impatient I suppose. Im also barely afloat money wise, but I love the company Im at from top to bottom and I hear thats rare so Im trying to make excuses to stay amidst other opportunities

I'm going to be hiking up Mt. Harvard on the 6th instead of in Vegas at the party, does that make me as big a jerk as the food allergy intolerant?

This is str8 p1mp b@ll'r, so no, you're not a jerk.

Who wants to meet NVG in person, anyways?

for a dude who a few short years ago turned down a hike that was completed by a pre-schooler, i'd say at the very least this wins you Most Improved.

gl hf dd

Is 120kb compressed/minimized huge for a style sheet? Seems like most people have fast internet these days, so it's hardly a blip.

I have the site I was writing into css mostly done, but it's hard to reuse pretty much anything on the PSD I was given. It looks pretty sweet though.

yes that's pretty huge. for many people it won't matter too much, but if your custom stylesheet is that big you are probably doing something wrong. if that's the complete size of your css library plus custom stuff, that's different.

100kb+ can be OK, but 99% of the time not.

If there's not much you can do about it I'd suggest possibly creating a new style sheet that overlaps the current one for your entry pages which is trim (should only be a few kb). Visitors are most likely to exit the website on their first page view so these are the most important pages to keep fast.

You say the style sheet is compressed, do you mean minimised or actually served in compressed gzip format? If it's not being served as gzip, make sure you configure the server to serve it in gzip format as style sheets contain a lot of repeating data which pretty much always compress excelently (actual size sent to client might reduce from 100kb down to 10kb range in some cases).

I find managing style sheets really difficult. I'm pretty terrible at it. I'm always adding new classes, deleting these elements during the development phase and subsequently not remembering to delete the classes in the css. I also struggle with good CSS design, I'm not exactly sure what the best practises are. CSS sheets are very easy to end up out of control and bloated.

ya it includes foundation + font-awesome

My custom css is about a 500 line sass file, but I space it out a lot.

I had never heard of gzip, sounds cool. Seems like it shouldn't be too hard to do on a heroku server using rails, so I'll prolly try to figure that out before actually launching the app.

i'd imagine you can cut a lot out of your foundation file by only including features you need. foundation has a customization page on their site where you can do this by checking and unchecking checkboxes -- it'll generate the minimum needed file for you. if you are not using the js widgets, especially, that should cut your size down.

This might help for gzipping with rails (not my work): https://gist.github.com/guyboltonking/2152663

Another option is to host it externally on a CDN (e.g. cloudfront)

Browsers typically fetch about 10 resources at a time, if you can split the file into 2-3 smaller ones, it will also give you a performance boost.

kind of simple question a friend asked me and i don't know the best answer.

he has a laptop with only 125G memory, and he takes videos which he wants to store but not fill up his laptop. he could put them in a dropbox folder, and then delete them locally and i believe they would still be recoverable through dropbox restore mechanism, but that's an awkward solution.

what he really wants is a folder that acts the same as an external hardrive would, but is cloud based. so you could put stuff in it, and after it was uploaded it would be deleted locally, but you could still see it in the folder (maybe grayed out) and easily redownload specific ones on demand.

what the best way to do this?

Google drive maybe?