While others find it as a reasonable middle ground between banning things outright(which never works anyway) and letting everyone do whatever they want even if it harms others.
I'm not suggesting that it can directly compete with a macbook in terms of graphics or processor but it's only slightly under for less than half the price.
Although the findings in my previous comment are my own extrapolations from years of dabbling, I'm confident most people can become very healthy by having diet rich in helpful cultures (party in your tummy), all the essential amino acids (that will become good neurochem), and letting the body rest in an aware and balanced state without forcing anything (zen out and in) regularly.
There being no concise source on the matter of general health, diet, good neurochemistry, and mood, I can but offer a collection of disparate books:
Principles of Neuroscience (Kandel, Schwartz, Jessell) is a great textbook.
Emotional Intelligence (Bradberry)
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Suzuki Roshi)
I also read a lot of personal experience vault essays on erowid.org (regarding "experimental medicine," for lack of better terminology)
The people who are going to say "well if he had dropped out he might've been bill gates, instead of just running an RND department at IBM" are not going to change their mind if you had shown them data.
In addition you have to be able to program in Python, Java, JavaScript, C.
This is objectively false.
To expect a junior developer to know all these is unrealistic, plain and simple. If you have working knowledge of one or two programming languages and have an appetite to learn you are good to go.
You also have to understand data structures like linked lists, queues, b-trees..., and to top it all of understand algorithm analysis to judge the efficiency of the code you write or look at.
For 99% of the work out there, this is also not true. This is the horse crap that is fed to everyone so that folks can ask questions that have little to no relation to day to day development. If you are doing web development, then some knowledge of database query optimization will come in handy.
But I don't remember the last time I had to figure out how a linked list worked whenever I was doing any server side or front-end optimization.
For the work it may be true, but there are lots of interviews that screen and filter on these kinds of questions. The other side of the gate may totally allow for learning and growth, but the gate itself is usually not as forgiving.
I did not mean to imply being an expert in all the languages listed, but having some knowledge of them and being able to write code.
I also think that an understanding of data structures is required to be able to identify the best way to deal with data in terms of processing and storage.
It is equally false to say none of what I mentioned is required. There is a broad spectrum between your statement and mine, and the truth is somewhere in between. The better prospect for a job is in the area of knowledge though I hope we can agree on that.
> > In addition you have to be able to program in Python, Java, JavaScript, C.
> This is objectively false. To expect a junior developer to know all these is unrealistic, plain and simple. If you have working knowledge of one or two programming languages and have an appetite to learn you are good to go.
Still in school, so haven't had even begun to look at jobs yet, but I know python, java, and c (and a few others), and have a basic knowledge of js. Does that give me an edge, then?
nope; its actually not that uncommon for a college graduate; An edge may be gained if you vary paradigms for some companies (Procedural, Functional, OOP, Logical, Interesting Type System)
Agree with your points, and want to add that I've been in the professional software world for 7 or 8 years now and I don't have an active working knowledge of Python, Java, or C. I do have Objective-C, Swift, PHP, and JavaScript. I can hack together some Java or C, and I can recognize Python. I think asking for full working knowledge of 4 different languages is a bit much for a Junior, or even Mid position. Ability to apply knowledge to a language is more important than knowing the ins and outs of a bunch of them from the get go.
Try applying for a job as if you don't have any professional experience. Almost everyone wants Python, Java, and something with 'C' in the name for junior positions. However, in my limited experience, they only (reasonably) expect (somewhat) in depth knowledge of one ecosystem and just syntactic knowledge of the other two. Took me about six hours to learn Python to answer the interview questions.
I was also curious about this. Don't have enough data on how this works in real life. What is to say that you won't spend more time on entertainment now that you have a separate device for it?
Learning Vim using vimtutor is one thing for people coming from editors like Sublime/Atom, but setting up vim so that autocomplete/File Tree/FileSearch work like expected is a whole different ball game.
That is quite generous of your company to pay 5000 usd per month to devs in the Philippines. If you don't mind, can you let me know what company you work for? Since there is no contact info in your pofile, If you don't want to put it here, my email is in my profile. Thanks.
It's not generous. They aren't running a charity. There is a market rate for work and that rate isn't limited by geographic location. It's your ability to sell which will get you that rate.
As a developer, you have all the power to become a black hole of resources, sucking in all the money paid to you, the time of everyone who deals with you and all positive energy. That's why the start-up gurus will tell you that one bad hire can sink a company. On the other end, you have developers who can will into existence the sun, the moon and the stars. Location and nationality don't matter.
I think what people get caught up on is they think it's about developer skills. But paradoxically, when you are hiring a developer, it's those development skills which are the last things on the list of importance aside from the fact that they should be present.
There was an HN thread on this article the other day. Agree with it or not, but I think all those things above programming is what separates a disaster looking to pick up a check from an A-team operator who doesn't have to worry about getting work.
>There is a market rate for work and that rate isn't limited by geographic location. It's your ability to sell which will get you that rate.
But for most programming jobs, developers are interchangeable and a big part of hiring a developer(remote or not) in developing countries is that you can pay a fraction of the salary you would be pay if you were hiring a dev in US/Europe. Hence this in essence is one of the major selling points.
What are the specific things would you say one can do to sell themselves at that rate keeping in mind the above mentioned point?
No work is interchangeable. Some manufacturing jobs get close, but certainly not programming. I have heard this idea of programming jobs being interchangeable but I haven't seen it in the real world. This must be the work of a snake-oil salesman who was really good at being heard pushing this idea. Outsourcing and jobs sites like to push this idea because it makes them money. They can sell the idea, get the contracts and pay developers, but that doesn't mean any real work gets done.
If you want to know how to sell software (or services), I couldn't even touch the advice which tptacek and patio11 regularly give on HN. Do a search for their threads and run with their advice. As per patio11's profile, you could even email him and there is a 70% chance of him getting back to you.
I should probably update that downwards [0] these days -- I've even been thinking of dynamically calculating it to have an excuse to do a weekend programming project.
[0] Busy with work and kids leaves me with less time for the Internet generally, as you can probably gather by e.g. my HN participation being "a time or two weekly" rather than "multiple times every day for years."
Keeping in mind the "most programming jobs developers are interchangeable" ? Either be very good at php/css, or be good at, something else. That is more rare. Say, low-level java/c++. And find a job at redislabs/scylladb/elasticsearch/etc.
You are living in a society after all.