uh... I'm asking because I am looking.

Then I guess I didn't understand the question and am not seeing why it's harder than telling them what you've done with that technology.

Pretty sure daveT is constantly looking. Didn't you have an interview like a week after starting your last job?

daveT, have you talked to a recruiter to try and help you find a job?

No experience directly with them but I know for some people its really helped.

Edit: I wouldn't put much stock into recruiters that cold-call you. If you want to go that route do some research and then contact one yourself. They should be able to give you better advice on how to market yourself.

I've got around two and a half years of working with elasticsearch. One thing to note is that elasticsearch gives the capabilities of building search engine, but that there's always configuration to do from query pre-processing (query cleaning before you send to elasticsearch), setting types (i.e. text versus numbers and timestamps), and analyzers (such as storing words in lowercase even if the input data is uppercase).

I built a spelling corrector and it definetely wasn't "out of the box". For one you have to have a list of words that are normally used words (I usually use python nltk-wordnet corpus for this). You'll want to use something outside your elasticsearch index because if you don't the spell corrector can become overzealous. You also need to add things that are "words" but wouldn't be in wordnet. In the case of seinfeld these would be things like peoples names or "Festivus". I usually use the index-termlist plugin (https://github.com/jprante/elasticsearch-index-termlist) and create a list of things that I want to treat as words but that aren't in wordnet. This can then be stored in redis and queried during pre-processing.

Elasticsearch is in my opinion a better distributor of lucene's capablities than Solr. It also has an excellent river ecosystem (that handles ETL tasks from traditional SQL stores with the JDBC-river plugin and also from mongodb with the mongodb-river). Feel to PM with any elasticsearch questions -- I love to build things with as well as discuss it.

Get right down it, set a rate you are comfy with, ask for more, and see if they're in the ballpark. If so then find out the sort of assignments you'll have. If it is inline with what you are seeking, tell them why you think you are a good fit

Do I really want them to think I am a burned-out drunken poker player?

Maybe I can put it on m blog.

I always am brutally honest. Saying "No, I have no/only limited experience/knowledge about X" works remarkably well for me.

Then again, I'm also curious, so I more often than not follow that up with a question to explain what X is or what they mean by it.

Real honesty seems to be rare enough that most recruiters or interviewers then go out of their way to explain X to me to see if I'm capable of grasping it.

Any recommendations on a tutorial that walks you through a simple, but more involved than helloworld iOS app? I am coming from the Android world if that matters.

When they can see my github profile, it is sort of self-explanatory. At this point, they mention it and then ask about experience and stuff. This is where I get stuck.

The problem with Clojure is that they assume I must be some child prodigy or something, and they sound rather surprised, if not non-plussed, to learn that I only have a month of "professional" experience.

No, I'm not constantly looking. I had 3 interviews in the past year, and I haven't looked into finding work at all for at least 6 months. Generally, if someone chats me up and wants to talk about this stuff, I will oblige. Mostly stuff that I, nor anyone, is capable of doing.

Fair enough. I haven't actively seeked them out, though if it is a viable option, I may consider it.

The guy who called me last night was pretty interesting. He decided to learn programming so he can get a sense of what programmers are actually like. He told me what was on the table, but the conversation was very casual.

Interesting.

This one called about Golang, which I never considered before. Took a look at the language pages and worked a bit on the online emulator. Seems like an interesting language.

So, that is the cost of learning Clojure. Bet no one ever calls me for RoR.

Man this is a weird career. I'm continually amazed by how little most "developers" actually do. There's guys that are not managment/who's title is "sr. software engineer" who must spend ~1-2 hours a work week writing code. I mean I can just go and look on our git repo. They don't write code. That's their whole job.

Do they lead other devs? Sometimes I spend all day with people in my cube and never get to write code.

I don't know what they do! All I know is every morning scrum its "well I spent a bunch of time in meetings doing planning for projects x and y and then I spent some time on project z which will have to bumped to the next sprint because of foo bar and baz" and yeah I just don't see it. I'd assume they just attend meetings they're invited to, zone out in between, and draw paychecks. I'm pissed if I have more than an hour of meetings a day.

Even worse is the "yesterday I worked on x, today I'm going to work on x again" style of scrum report when x would seriously take anyone even mildly competent less than a 1/4 of a work day. The real problem frankly is the at least the way we do scrum/sprint/agile: when we go into a sprint, the developers say "this is what I can do in the next sprint, this is how much time each user story is going to take me" but there's no reason or accountability for not telling the truth! You could double amount of time it would take you to do a certain task and no one is going to bat an eye. Sort of driving me crazy lately, at least at this place.

Obviously I don't know the specifics but I'll say that generally people do more than you think they do. It's definitely true of senior people on a project.

You're probably right in that most people probably think "I'm the only one who does anything around here". But it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me to have people dictate their own workload in the way that "agile" does.

I've seen a bunch of Swift demos on YouTube that do that and assume there are some for Objective-C as well, I just haven't looked. The Big Nerd Ranch books walk through building several apps.

I think it does - with one important caveat. You need a system that actually ensures people are pulling a reasonable amount of work. If someone is consistently taking too long to do tasks then that needs to be addressed. And it shouldn't take too long to identify those people if they're consistently under promising and/or under delivering.

Shortly after we started with agile at my old company the director had to make it clear to people that if a team was hitting 100% of its goals every week it was doing something wrong and not committing to enough work.

Move up to where they respect your raises.

~ or ~

What did the manager say when you told them how much slacking was going on?

Yeah, I guess I should have explicitly said this. One of the premises of agile is that the people working are professionals who can be trusted to take their job seriously. And part of that is explicitly addressing problems on the team and not letting things slide.

My company works around this problem by picking a release date, a budget and a list of features for the whole project - then telling us to come up with a sprint plan that fits those parameters. For good measure they might let a few key seasoned contractors go and replace them with offshore devs who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. And finally they saddle us with enough pointless Town Hall meetings and corporate BS to take up a couple hours a day.

Keeps us on our toes.

Lol, I find it hilarious when companies do this. We're agile!!!

Everyone I know is ****ed up to some degree. There is loads of determination, redemption, realizations, curiosity, etc... not to mention the very detailed accounts of what you have learned that should entice a rational human to at least want to interview you for an actual coding position. Its who you are. What more do employers want than an honest account of someone. I've never hired anyone but brutal honesty is something that I would really admire and would make the hiring process so much easier. I've been offered several jobs now with professional poker pro in my resume. I don't give them the gory details of the degenerate soul I became during interviews but I do give accounts of how the stress and attachment to money made me quit.

Maybe you could experiment and send a link to a company you have no intentions of working for to see if you get a response.

I have limited first hand experience to base this off of, but I would guess a number much higher than 50% of companies that say they are agile are actually mislabeling themselves and are actually wicked ****ing unorganized, but somehow that means agile.

At least a half dozen prospects this year have labeled their internal methodology as agile and that they would need us to adopt an agile approach with them, then we show them our option, which is actually true agile, and they get nervous that they can't stick to stories/points/sprints, so of course they say "we are even more agile than that".

Employers are lazy. Recruiters are lazier. Nobody is going to take the time to go through that thread. You'd be pretty lucky to even get one post read.