As Competition Wanes, Amazon Cuts Back Discounts - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/business/as-competition-wanes-amazon-cuts-back-its-discounts.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER3> > It is difficult to comprehensively track the movement of prices on Amazon, > so the evidence is anecdotal and fragmentary.

I guess this is the difference between award winning journalism and essentially an editorial.

David Streitfeld of the NY Times should be inspired by the work of the Sally Kestin and John Maines of the Florida Sun Sentinel, who won the 2013 Pulitzer for Public Service for their "investigation of off-duty police officers who recklessly speed and endanger the lives of citizens, leading to disciplinary action and other steps to curtail a deadly hazard." The Sun manage to acquire and then data mine the timing data from on and off-duty police officers' toll transponders to reverse engineer their average speed, and in the process blew the lid off some seriously reckless driving by the officers.

By comparison, the data that Streitfeld and the NY Times was looking for to turn their cute anecdotes into hard hitting journalism were only an API call away. I'd love to see journalists collaborating more with hackers and the open source community, or perhaps even big data competition sites like Kaggle to collect and parse this data into a real expose. Like what we saw with Strongbox ([http://www.newyorker.com/strongbox/](http://www.newyorker.com/strongbox/)) - the New Yorker's platform for protecting anonymous sources - or Barret Brown's ProjectPM ([http://trueslant.com/barrettbrown/2010/03/24/project- pm/](http://trueslant.com/barrettbrown/2010/03/24/project-pm/)) - <USER2> targeting specific topics and data sets. Note to reader, you might want to visit those links via Tor...

Nothing like hard evidence to shine a bright light on anti-competitive behavior of a wanna-be monopolist. On the other hand, maybe Amazon is just intelligently pricing their products using their sophisticated proprietary models based on tried and true supply and demand. Based on this article, who can say what's closer to the truth?

<comment><USER4> Actually, a website already exists to track Amazon prices. They could have just searched for it:

[http://camelcamelcamel.com/](http://camelcamelcamel.com/)

<comment><USER5> By looking at the prices of a few fiction books in my collection over the period 2011-today I didn't see any evidence of the increasing price trend hinted at by the article.

The tech books I looked at might do, certainly a larger sample size would be interesting:

[http://camelcamelcamel.com/Joel-Software-Occasionally- Develo...](http://camelcamelcamel.com/Joel-Software-Occasionally-Developers- Designers/product/1590593898?context=browse)

[http://camelcamelcamel.com/The-Innovators-Solution- Sustainin...](http://camelcamelcamel.com/The-Innovators-Solution-Sustaining- Successful/product/1578518520?context=browse)

[http://camelcamelcamel.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas- Comput...](http://camelcamelcamel.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas- Computer/product/1449389554?context=browse)

I'd like to see the results of deeper analysis. A report following an investigation. I suppose that would be _investigative reporting_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is poor journalism. From the article:

 _" Now, with Borders dead, Barnes & Noble struggling and independent booksellers greatly diminished, for many consumers there is simply no other way to get many books than through Amazon. And for some books, Amazon is, in effect, beginning to raise prices."_

Now what they are really saying is that Amazon is pricing books closer and closer to "list price" which is the price that brick and mortar book stores can sell books at and survive (generally). So if Amazon were to suddenly sell every book for list price, there would be a great cheer heard from all the book sellers as they now had a viable business.

No question that Amazon has used its position to establish market dominance and its pricing has killed a lot of book stores. Amazon can't raise prices too far without allowing book stores to flourish. As the article points out, the publishers aren't changing their prices, Amazon is.

<comment><USER7> To be honest, Borders was like a library with built in coffee shop in the UK. People just went in there, checked out the book and bought it on amazon whilst sitting in the shop eating blueberry cheesecake and drinking a nice cappuccino...

<comment><USER8> I used to be an avid Borders customer; I could physically go to the store and check out their computer section and through serendipity I would find things I liked and buy them.

They were enormously overpriced, like most computing related books outside the U.S. ($100 NZD +), but I would wear that because I liked the experience.

This was in about 2003. By 2008, the section which held the long tail I liked had shrunk to maybe 2 shelves. They no longer kept the kinds of books I liked in inventory, just "Photoshop for dummies" or perhaps the odd "Learning Python".

At the point where everything I might want had to be ordered in and would take longer to arrive than from Amazon, I stopped bothering to go :/

<comment><USER6> This was my experience as well. When I first discovered borders they were very well run. They had a lot of interesting books and a very energetic staff. Then they sort of lost their way and suddenly they didn't have any books I wanted and the staff was replaced by people who always seemed to have "just started." I stopped going.

That said, every time I go to Portland I spend a couple of hours and at least a couple hundred dollars in Powell's books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The penultimate paragraph compounds my confusion:

> For Mr. Hollock, the "Born to Lose" author, the issue is readers, not > dollars. His award-winning book, published by Kent State University Press, > had a steep list price of $35 to begin with. In the author's view, Amazon is > simply compounding the trouble by raising its price to more than $30 from > $23.

Why is the author complaining about Amazon, when the list price is as high as $35? Yes, Amazon might have gone from $23 to $30, but that is still a 14% discount.

Why was the list price so high in the first place? Shouldn't the author be complaining about the press?

<comment><USER10> It's a 14% discount only thanks to the strange way pricing in the publishing industry has developed: it's a 14% discount off of an 100% markup.

For mostly historical reasons, wholesale price has become quasi-fixed at 50% of list. So in this case what's happened is the publisher has chosen to sell the book for $17.50, and the way you do that is by setting an entirely notional "list price" at 2x the intended wholesale price. But the $35 is not a real price; the real price in the publisher-bookstore exchange is $17.50. It's then up to bookstores how much they want to mark the book up above $17.50. Here, Amazon is choosing to sell it for a 70% markup above wholesale, whereas previously they were selling it for a 30% markup.

(This is U.S.-specific; list prices mean different things in different countries. Also, I believe the 'standard' ratio of wholesale-to-list varies in some categories, e.g. it's different for textbooks.)

<comment><USER11> You are correct, but the system isn't really as strange as you imply. Many wholesalers in many different markets set a recommended retail price that's some multiple of the wholesale price they charge to their customers.

As far as I understand, Amazon works out the optimal discount for a book based on a number of factors including the popularity of the book and the prices charged by their competition. The same book at B&N is $31.49 [1], 88 cents more than Amazon is charging.

[1] [http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/born-to-lose-james-g- hollock...](http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/born-to-lose-james-g- hollock/1113551830?ean=9781606350973)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> By "as competition wanes," the headline means "Amazon has a 29% market share."

By "cuts back discounts", the headline means "Amazon is selling books for slightly more, which is still less than brick and mortar stores."

<comment><USER13> I'm always looking for the catch with Amazon (from a consumer standpoint, not from a labor conditions standpoint), but there's nothing at all. They're the cheapest and the ones with the easiest return policies. They even replaced some stuff that was missing from a ripped-and-patched-up parcel that I accidentally signed off as being complete.

<comment><USER7> Agree. Never had a single problem that wasn't immediately resolved in over 300 orders.

Prior to using amazon my options were basically phone up then trek to Foyles in London or go to my local book shop and try and work out how to get them to order something that wasn't top 100 dross.

If you buy used books from them as well, they are actually cheaper than a lot of the charity shops now as well and you get a better hit rate.

And that's just the books side of things. Lenovo parts from China, phone parts from Canada, phones, computer parts, memory cards, camera, laptops. Just the best experience so far.

And you can talk to a human pretty much instantly from experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The publishers/authors who think Amazon are making too much profit can open their own stores/sites and sell that way. It is a free transparent market.

They can also go to competitors like Walmart and give them whatever deal works for the goals. Or they can use rebates which keep the profit the same for the store (Amazon) but lowers the price the consumer pays.

I don't see any reason why they are making demands on Amazon's pricing and profits, but don't see fit to adjust their own.

</comment><comment><USER15> Amazon is intensely interested in finding the right price for everything. If you pay attention you can see small adjustments in the prices of a lot of products; they're most likely doing the equivalent of A/B testing to discover their most profitable point for every product. A product without competition will be less price sensitive, so they'll end up pricing it higher. An interesting question is whether Amazon could end up in legal trouble for what their pricing algorithm does.

A major theme of the small publishers and authors quoted in the article is that Amazon's price is higher than the publisher would want. If Amazon pays a fixed price for every book, then there's a fundamental conflict between the parties. Amazon wants to make margin, the publisher wants to make volume. If the publisher wants Amazon to keep their best interests at heart, they'll have to change the nature of their deal with Amazon so that their interests align.

<comment><USER16> I think there is a lot less black magic than you think. The overwhelming majority of the time the small price fluctuations are in response to changes in the price by 3rd party sellers (the ones selling the same item in "new" condition).

just check for yourself at [http://camelcamelcamel.com/](http://camelcamelcamel.com/)

They virtually always undercut the 3rd party - which always begged the question: why do the 3rd parties even bother trying to sell on amazon?

Actually if you think about the kind of testing you're talking about, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a human psychology perspective. You don't look for a camera and think: "This should cost $123.76" and anything less will be huge turn off. There are probably more drastic things at play, like if the price ends in .99 or if it's more than a hundred dollars, or maybe people don't like certain price numbers for some completely random reason.

They probably have some internal database of the average (across all inventory) of the rate-of-sales vs. the listed-price and the algo just looks for a local maximum around the price that is a bit lower than the 3rd parties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just seems like typical retailing to me. Non mass-market books don't get discounts. If someone is really searching to purchase "Jim Harrison: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1964-2008", they're probably going to buy it with or without the discount attached.

Btw, Kindle price of "Born to Lose" is $9.34 at the moment. Seems like a good discount to me.

<comment><USER18> Amazon kindle price here is US$20.35 even though I'm using Amazon.com. Usual excuse for gouging us here is the cost of transport to our small market. Never thought that applied to electrons too :(

<comment><USER19> With a netherlands ip address it's $10.59 on amazon.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Amazon, which became the biggest force in bookselling by discounting so > heavily it often lost money

IANAL, but this sounds like a potential anti-trust case to me. "Predatory pricing practices may result in antitrust claims of monopolization or attempts to monopolize. Businesses with dominant or substantial market shares are more vulnerable to antitrust claims. However, because the antitrust laws are ultimately intended to benefit consumers, and discounting results in at least short-term net benefit to consumers, the U.S. Supreme Court has set high hurdles to antitrust claims based on a predatory pricing theory. The Court requires plaintiffs to show a likelihood that the pricing practices will affect not only rivals but also competition in the market as a whole, in order to establish that there is a substantial probability of success of the attempt to monopolize." ([http://bit.ly/12pG6gq](http://bit.ly/12pG6gq))

<comment><USER21> Amazon's sales are just 29% of the book selling market (2012 share, even after Borders was out of the picture for over a year). B&N's are 20%. If their discount pricing hasn't even gotten them 1/3rd of the market after all these years, it'd be hard to prove that they're soon going to monopolize it.

<comment><USER22> I agree with your overall premise, but anti-trust law is far broader in scope than monopolization. Indeed, there's nothing about anti-trust law that forbids a monopoly, and there's no specific market share requirement.

Market share is but one market-power consideration when the government looks at whether a company has caused harm.

There are several angles to anti-trust, such as collusion and predatory pricing, that can matter even at modest market share points, if the government can prove consumer harm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but why don't the publishers drop their prices by 5-10%? Since Amazon is selling books at a percentage of the cover price, dropping the cover price should theoretically offset the decreasing Amazon discount. I know that books have the price printed on them, but what a great marketing project it could be: "Look, we're dropping our prices across the board by 5%. Go buy a book!"

<comment><USER24> or Amazon just keeps it at the same price, making more money.

<comment><USER23> It was hinted at in the article, but the publisher sells the book to Amazon for less than the cover price. Of course, I have no idea if Amazon's purchase price is a percentage of the cover. But if it's not (and that's what I would have negotiated) then changing the cover price won't affect the revenue to the publisher.

<comment><USER25> Retailer's purchase price is almost always a percentage of the cover price.

<comment><USER23> Then I guess it's up to the publisher to do the math and see what works out to more profit in the end: keeping prices the same w/ less volume, or dropping the price and (hopefully) increasing the volumn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It seems strange that there is no mention of inflation in the article given that they are comparing prices from up to four years ago to today's prices.

> When Mr. Striphas's book, "The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from > Consumerism to Control," first appeared in paperback in 2011, Amazon sold it > for $17.50, the author said. Now it is $19.

Well, given that the 2011 $17.50 price would be ~$18.12 today (due strictly to inflation) then it is not as big an increase as suggested.

> When the University of Nebraska Press brought out a bibliography of the > novelist Jim Harrison four years ago, Amazon charged $43.87. The price this > week: $59.87.

2009: $43.87 Today: $59.87 Correcting only for inflation the price would be: $47.63

Inflation doesn't even account for the majority of the price increase in this case but still this article appears to draw rather strong conclusions from rather flimsy analysis.

</comment><comment><USER27> What keeps publishers and authors from starting a non-profit that sells books at exactly the price they determine?

I realise that selling books from their own websites is difficult, especially for individual authors, and it gives them less visibility than Amazon provides. Banding together would solve that problem.

<comment><USER28> you might find that the accumulated cost (admin/server/people etc) might end up making that sort of service on par with amazon, not cheaper, and thus find that it is either unsustainable (can't sell at a loss), or is at amazon's price level (and so no real benefit?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> BTW where is a good place to buy books online that isn't Amazon?

<comment><USER30> bookdepository.com is the one I often hear about. Particularly because Amazon isn't available in all countries, and The Book Depository's prices are sometimes pretty comparable. Shipping is still 1-2 weeks though.

<comment><USER31> Amazon purchased The Book Depository in 2011.

<comment><USER30> ... goes to show how long ago I ordered something from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I dont understand why they are complaining to amazon. The publishers are the ones negotiating the deals with amazon so they should complain to their publisher to renegotiate the deal. Or else they could just open their own amazon seller account and price the books how ever they wanted

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd argue that the real issue here is not Amazon reacting to less competition, it's Amazon reacting to less demand for printed books. I suspect ebook pricing is still as sharp as ever, and that the affected authors should be looking at their format and market.

<comment><USER34> Is there actually less demand for print books? According to Amazon, print book sales are still growing.

[http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry- news/pu...](http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry- news/publisher-news/article/55721-amazon-e-book-sales-soared-print- crawled.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "It is difficult to comprehensively track the movement of prices on Amazon, so the evidence is anecdotal and fragmentary."

[data upon which entire thesis of article rests] -> stopped reading

<comment><USER36> It isn't actually all that hard. There is an API call to get the prices for each seller on an item. Not sure if that also works for Amazon as the only seller listings but you can definitely track the marketplace with it.

<comment><USER37> Is this what [http://camelcamelcamel.com/](http://camelcamelcamel.com/) uses?

<comment><USER36> Yep, looks like it judging what they have on each product.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to move your app to full HTTPS with HSTS and A+ - <AUTHOR> https://www.peerlyst.com/blog-post/how-to-move-your-app-from-http-to-https

<comment><USER2> Just use CloudFlare, it's easy.</comment>


What Developers Should Know About Job Searching and Negotiation - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/blog/2016/02/patrick-mckenzie-on-salary-negotiation-job-hunting.html <comment><USER3> This is all good advice, but this article falls into the same trap that most other career related advice does: it assumes only one type of job seeker (in this case - ambitious, experienced, and passively job seeking).

The truth is that there are lots of different ways to get a job, each with varying levels of effectiveness that depend A LOT on your situation. An effective job search is one where the techniques are tailored to the situation, and the amount spent on each reflects the expected effectiveness within that situation.

Example: A few years ago I got laid off. I had a few weeks of notice, some severance, and savings, so I decided I would be a job seeker full time until I got a job I really wanted. I followed the advice in this article almost to the letter and specifically avoided lots of the typical job hunting techniques (sending resumes, filling out job applications, talking with recruiters, etc...)

I did a lot of research on companies I wanted to work for, started meeting with people (I didn't know anyone who worked at those companies), sent a lot of unsolicited emails to get an 'in'. And after a few months of doing this I'd made a lot of new connections, but no legitimate opportunities. By this point I was starting to panic, so I broke down and started doing the 'traditional' job hunting stuff. Two weeks later I had an offer from an application I had submitted online.

Don't limit yourself to just one technique. Try a lot of different things to see what works for your situation.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you. I think the best overall approach is to apply the scientific method. Set hypotheses on what will work what will not, test, look for evidence and adjust accordingly. or the startup metaphor of reaching product market fit or pivot

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Patio11 is very respected in the community, but I can't help but feel that most points in here are not applicable to all software engineers. This seems to be mostly for people starting off in their careers, or people that feel that work is a major part of their life. I am sure there must be more people out there like me who:

\- Dont care about getting the best-ever salary thats on offer. If the developer finds out that other companies are offering better salaries, they dont hesitate to re-negotiate or jump ship.

\- Put more emphasis on the work-life balance rather than the work. This means one may not get excited enough about the work to seek out people and companies, but when they get emails from companies or recruiters, they dont mind starting a discussion if the work is decent and the people are good to work with.

This doesnt in anyway mean that the developer doesnt like coding. Just that they feel that its not worth the effort to fight for more money if they feel that what they are making is giving them a pretty good living.

<comment><USER6> I disagree heavily - I think his advice is actually equally, if not more, relevant for people like yourself.

Being a shrewd negotiator is an absolutely critical skill in life, even if you don't want the best-ever-salary. If you know how to negotiate the best-ever- salary, you can trade it in for things that do matter to you.

Don't want tons of money but want great work-life balance? You can turn part of that salary into more vacation time, more flexible working conditions (remote?), one day off every single week, more benefits, and other things that matter to you.

Money can be used to purchase many things - the ability to negotiate for more and take less can also be used to purchase things - in fact they can purchase things not available in cash (see: extra vacation).

<comment><USER7> : you can turn part of that salary into more vacation time

there are not many companies hiring you for full time at $x that will allow you to work 3 days a week for 50% of $x, much more likely they will let you go and hire somebody else (unless you've been there forever and are the only person that can do something, in which case the company should worry about you getting hit by a bus)

money can be used to purchase many things, but in our field work/life balance is not one of them, unless of course you mean be lucky to have a good exit and then for the rest of your career you can work on what you like for part-time, but that is not realistic if you need a salary to put food on the table

<comment><USER8> > there are not many companies hiring you for full time at $x that will allow > you to work 3 days a week for 50% of $x, much more likely they will let you > go and hire somebody else (unless you've been there forever and are the only > person that can do something, in which case the company should worry about > you getting hit by a bus)

Your calculus is a bit off. A company will not hire you part time because employees need time to learn the job. This includes the culture and political aspects.

Once you've been there for awhile, that all changes. Now you're a part of the company, so the company is going to be way more willing to jump through hoops to keep you around. The reason they wouldn't let you come in at 3 days a week, is the same reason they will start letting you (if you negotiate it right) after you've been there a year or so. It's tougher and more expensive to assimilate a new employee than it is to make a productive current employee happy.

If you can show to the company that the bottom line won't get impacted by a proposed change, make it clear that you'll leave unless you get your way, (hard to do convincingly) and offer an acceptable path to move from A to B, then you too can find work/life balance.

It's not impossible, but it's not easy either. I'd put it as being slightly harder than getting a 20% raise, which I've done. Now that I think about it, if you want a 20% raise, then one path to getting it might be to start the process of negotiating something like this, (to let them know you're serious about not being happy) and then come in one day and ask for more money. If you play your cards right, they'd be much happier to open up the checkbook than to deal with the prospect of having half their workforce ask for the same thing you just got. (that's the real reason they don't want part-timers. Even if they can trust you not to abuse it, what about the next three people that ask?)

<comment><USER9> Another approach is to suggest you split a job with another person. I have seen several young mothers take this path as they don't need full time daycare, and don't end up with a long employment gap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've completely turned away from getting another job. Recent scenario: After giving in detail my 14 years development/engineering experience, they ask: "Ok, here is a logic riddle: You have 3 circles A, B, and C. A depends on B, C...." and by that time I've already lost interest. What the fuck does a riddle have to do with anything.

Next.

I'm working my existing software engineer job while I build up my customer base on my side businesses. Your interviews and shit riddles can fuck right off.

<comment><USER11> Did companies do this before the media glamorized Google's job application process? I had to do some of those stupid riddles when I was starting out but hopefully I won't have to ever again (I'm working on a side business too).

<comment><USER12> The lore is it was a part of Microsoft hiring process in early 90s and then spread out. Google "microsoft manholes".

<comment><USER13> MSFT did it .. sure .. but my first half-decade of software engineering jobs seem like coffee chats compared to the crap we have today. I think I got my first job after a 45 minute chat (was supposed to be 30 mins but we were having a fun, geeky convo and lost track of time). What's crazy is I would leave with offers in hand. This is until 2004. Google copied and one-uped microsoft. The Googlers went out and replicated their process and suddenly, most decent software engineering jobs require you to bend over.

I had a startup interview last year where they were a well-funded start up full of PhDs. Had a hiring screen (with non-trivial code), a full day of interviews over the phone/etherpad, a conversation + coding interview with the frickin CTO. This was to decide weather to fly me to the Bay are for the actual interview (was on the East coast). I had a full-time, high workload job at the time (constant crunchtime) ... so this was brutal on me. Never doing this again.

<comment><USER12> Well at the peak dotcom era you often could get away with spelling HTML without stuttering and you were hired. Microsoft could afford to discern however, being the top employer at the time.

I am with you though in principle. Some fizzbuzz-like test is OK, I understand they want to know if you can code at all. Something like code review where you think aloud is fine too. But take home assignments, whiteboard coding, huh.. An acquaintance of mine had to conjure a working spreadsheet application in one and a Space Invaders clone in the other. Mind you, none of the jobs had anything to do with spreadsheets or gaming.

If my living would depend on it I'd do it, no question. But in a relatively liquid job market of today I'd ether pass or offer to do it at a competitive hourly rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a recruiter, even I often refer people to Patrick's article on salary negotiation, and I agree with much of it. There are a couple points that weren't covered that I think are valuable.

First, negotiating live is often difficult and it seems somehow job seekers are somewhat surprised to find themselves negotiating (or talking money at all). You need to be prepared for the conversation, otherwise you will find yourself throwing out numbers that you will often regret. Expect that you'll be asked these questions at every point in the interview process and be prepared to answer - just like you may study technical topics.

Second, in negotiations job seekers tend to mistake silence for a 'no' answer. "I'm looking for 130K". Manager is silent for 10 seconds. "...but that number is negotiable". Don't do this. Once you state your number, don't speak until the other party has spoken - otherwise you are negotiating yourself down before getting an objection.

Lastly, it can be rather powerful for the company to envision you starting work (the end goal of negotiation) during the negotiation process. Instead of saying "Can you make it 130K?" as a counteroffer as Patrick suggests, it can be stronger to say "If you are able to offer 130K, I am willing to commit to a start date of MM/DD/YY." It's a subtle difference, but asking for a number without context can be mistaken for "negotiation simply for the sake of negotiation", whereas an offered start date lets them know you're serious and committed to the negotiation.

EDIT: And as much as agency recruiters are maligned, Patrick's mention of having an "internal champion" isn't much different than an agency recruiter's representation. Sending resumes to "jobs@company" is ineffective. As an agency recruiter, if I'm presenting your resume it is going direct to the decision makers, it's being presented by a trusted source with credibility (for some agency recruiters anyway), and it's not just a resume but rather a short letter outlining why this candidate is a fit for the role. Not to mention, when negotiation does come up, the agency recruiter will have experience and know both the salary ranges and negotiation tactics of the hiring company.

<comment><USER8> I can't help but to pile on about the difficulty of negotiation. The reality is is that 90% of it is done before you've ever started talking. You can maybe influence 10% of the outcome, and it might be worthwhile to do that, but it's also worthwhile to work on that 90% beforehand, and studying negotiation techniques doesn't really help with the 90%, only the 10%.

So if you look at the opportunity cost of effective negotiation, the value prospect doesn't look half as clear. If I want to buy a house, the actual negotiated price is probably somewhere down around #8 on my list of considerations. Time spent looking at comps, finding a good inspector, understanding the real estate biz, could be far better spent.

<comment><USER15> "Time spent looking at comps, finding a good inspector, understanding the real estate biz"

This is literally the biggest part of negotiation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiated_agreement)

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's what I intended to say. My point was that of all the things you have in your life right now to focus on, negotiating price for a real estate transaction may not be the best use of it. It's likely to take more time than it's worth when you take into account opportunity costs.

Sure, if you have nothing better to do, go nuts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Fake the confidence here. If they say, "What are your salary requirements?" > You say, "Well, it's really too early to talk about salary. I just really > want to make sure that we're a great fit for each other. If we're a great > fit for each other, we can work something out. If we're not a great fit for > each other, it doesn't matter. We shouldn't work together no matter what the > numbers are." Whatever you need to say, just do not answer the salary > question until you're actually negotiating.

No need to dance around it so much. Don't worry about how to phrase it! Just tell the recruiter, "No I'm not going to discuss salary until we're actually negotiating." There's really ZERO need to dress it up. They know the game. Just stand your ground, and say "no", "no thanks", "really no", "not yet"... until they say the team wants to move forward with an offer. NOW we can discuss.

I'm saying this because engineers are already nervous about how to negotiate the process, and there's no need to make it even more stressful by worrying about how to _delicately_ phrase things.

<comment><USER17> It really depends on what kind of company you are negotiating with. Companies of a certain size will have salary bands and they can't pay above a certain amount otherwise they risk salary imbalances within teams.

Small startups may be playing with their runway and so need to know where you stand in order to know whether your salary expectations will impact the runway too greatly.

You might be able to play this game if you are personally being recruited for something specific and/or working with the founder or a senior enough person in a large co who can break you out of the bands. But otherwise you risk the recruiter simply not qualifying you for consideration.

 _(I 've hired many, many engineers in my career)_

<comment><USER18> I've run into this argument in the past. It also happens when you're already on the job.

Company: "We can't possibly give you a raise! 'The book' says we can only pay you this much and no more."

Me: Uhh, ok...

[A few months later]

Me: Well, bye!

Company: OMFG WHAT COULD WE HAVE DONE TO RETAIN YOU???

<comment><USER19> > 'The book' says

Hah! I just had this happen to me last month. My wife accepted a position (at her dream company) on the other side of the state. That means we're no- questions-asked packing up, selling our home, and moving for this opportunity.

I told my manager the news and gave him the choice: The company can transition me to full-time remote or they can have my resignation (which I had typed, printed, signed, and brought with me).

So, that afternoon, I'm in the HR managers office. They (HR, not my manager -- he is an amazing, caring, understanding person who laughs at this story harder than I do) literally pulled "The Book" out and pointed to some section of text while stating, "ENGINEERS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO WORK REMOTELY!" at me.

I'm still there, we made it work, but it took almost more effort than it was worth.

<comment><USER20> The book is definitely not based on the local job market. I get emails from recruiters and have a sense of what the proper salary range is for my position. The book is usually on the bottom of that range.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The advice on job hunting is the same kind of vague, shotgun style hunt with the word "meetup" thrown in. This is a terrible way to find a job you love. You might get lucky, but there is a better way. Pick where you want to work and then be good enough to work there.

I'm a strong believer in the philosophy that you need to walk in the door knowing you want to work somewhere. If you don't know already then you've done insufficient research or are insufficiently motivated and it will show.

Starting right out of college I picked where I wanted to work _first_ and then started making the connections to make that happen. I always volunteer to work for free prior to getting hired. Why? because a work-to-hire internship, no matter your level of experience, is better for both you and the company. It's especially good if you don't fit the traditional resume of someone in the role for which you're applying. This works especially well with startups since their hiring practices are flexible and they are cash conscious. Four out of my last 5 jobs have been landed like this, the other I was recruited.

You should be excited about the specific company you're talking to. You should want them to succeed from day one. This will make you stand out from the crowd of "job seekers." You're not looking for a job, you want _this_ job and you're ready to buy.

<comment><USER22> "I always volunteer to work for free prior to getting hired."

This sounds like a perfect way to devalue yourself to any potential employer.

<comment><USER23> But offering to do a short working internship, which is paid at a competitive rate that would translate to the salary you are seeking, is reasonable. That way you are compensated for the effort you provide to assist the hiring company in figuring out if they want to work with you, and if so, at what price they are willing to agree to it.

<comment><USER22> It can be, but that gets pretty close to contract-to-hire, which is rife for abuse from the company.

<comment><USER23> When I say short, I mean 1 week, maybe 2 weeks tops. Few places that want the scammy sort of contract-to-hire are going to bother with someone who expects to be paid their regular wage for a one-to-two-week time period.

Anything longer than 2 weeks, and I'd expect full benefits, possibly a signing bonus, and I would speak at length before hand to get specifics on exactly how I will be evaluated and which criteria will be used for determining if a permanent offer will be made.

This scares away most crappy companies and acts as a good filter to find good employers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> it's also interesting that (anectodally, talking to people I know) the longer one's career is the more unlikely they are to want to switch jobs just based on having to deal with interviews, which of course makes it more likely they don't go for that cool interesting job they might flourish even more in, and makes it also harder for companies to hire as there are less available people around than there would be otherwise.

It's like, yes, you've spent 20 years in progressively more architectural roles, however the decision to hire you or not is based on whiteboarding algorithms you last had to legitimately write out years ago in university and crammed on for a few weeks before this interview.

While I was in university 20 years ago for fun I wrote an iterative AVL tree library in C (everybody else seemed to do it recursive), it was difficult but rewarding, but not something I am very likely to do nowadays and if you ask me to whiteboard the rotation logic I am not very likely to do it correctly and would have no impact whatsoever on my ability to do the job at hand (because in a working environment if somebody asked me to write for production say a red black tree from scratch I would not trust my memory but take out my Cormen book and go from there, or look at AOCP)

When I have interviewed in the past, I've always tried to ask more about the candidate's past and whys of certain decisions, if somebody put on their resume that, say, they designed an API for something, I might ask them what they did for versioning, for schema, what about atomicity, do they expose txns or not, drawbacks for each, and then branch out towards general concurrency and so on and on, you can learn a lot more about how somebody thinks by drilling down from something they worked on than by hazing them on algorithms 101

<comment><USER24> I agree with your observation but I've always found that attitude a little odd.

If you find interviewing beneath you, what else about the job are you going to find beneath you?

Do you find it beneath you, or is that just some kind of excuse for a worry that you might not do well in an interview?

I've interviewed for various jobs tons of times over the course of my career and I've never minded a coding session (either on a whiteboard or an actual computer). They're never really all that hard. It's an easy way to show your stuff and give the company more confidence that you actually know what you're doing. It's not a big time commitment. What's the problem?

<comment><USER7> you don't understand, I don't consider it beneath me at all, I mean, you have to interview somebody to know if they are a good fit, but I don't see why interviews have to be hazing rituals on things mostly unrelated with what they are supposed to measure.

If you've interviewed tons it means that interviewing and whiteboard coding algorithms is a skill you have developed and are keeping current (because you interview tons, so you do it often) so you actually enjoy "showing it off" given that it is part of your core competencies

I would _love_ to do an interview where there is a genuine technical discussion on actual hard problems one might find in a job (say, expanding on my scenario above, what are the pros/cons if you design an API to expose txns, why would/wouldn't you want to do it, and mitigations/tradeoffs you would have to deal with in each scenario) what I wouldn't love is going for an interview with 20 years experience and being asked to whiteboard random algorithms off the top of my head unless I am applying for a position where that is required (hint: I wouldn't)

All I, and others, want is for interviews to reflect reality, where you ask me what I am good at, I show it by examples and answers, and then I ask you if what I am good at is a good fit for the position, where you ask me what type of environment I work best in (collaborative, go and do your own thing, agile, waterfall, ...) and I ask you what type of environment your company provides and if it's a good fit, and then once we figure out that yes, I can work here and what I can do for you is what you need, we have a mature discussion on compensation and it's all done.

Assume you decide to have a custom house built and are interviewing architects for the job, are you going to ask them for their portfolio, for their ideas on flow, for what architects are their inspiration, for how they would be able to make your ideas on how a house should be real, or would you put them in front of a whiteboard and ask them to draw a bathroom cabinet from scratch and fail them if they forget to put the stop on the rails so the drawer does not come out when you pull it out?

<comment><USER24> I guess maybe I've just been lucky (or perhaps have chosen which companies to talk to well) in that I've always had discussions closer to your "what are the pros/cons if you design an API to expose txns" example than "implement a red/black tree off the top of your head." Perhaps this is coloring my judgement.

Honestly if someone asked me to code a red/black tree, I'd probably say "I remember that term, but I don't for the life of me remember what it is exactly. If you want to give me part of the answer I can probably logic out the details on my own but I'm not going to do well on your memorization test."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _" Oh yeah, you've been writing web applications everyday for the last five years. Great. Can you please go up to a blackboard and using chalk write out how to reverse a binary tree?"_

Hahaha, I feel like this was taken directly from one of my HN comments.

<comment><USER26> I don't get it. If the job you're applying for relies heavily on data structures and algorithms, why can't they ask this?

If you're stepping up from writing web apps, you should have done some homework first.

<comment><USER27> Just the other day during a JavaScript/React interview I was asked how a HashMap was implemented.

At this point it's only being used for its Computer Science signalling value. JavaScript doesn't even have true HashMaps, and it's unlikely you'll find yourself implementing them while building a web app.

It's just one example of poor interviewing practice but it's not the only problem.

<comment><USER28> While implementation details may be unnecessary, I feel like knowing how something performs for lookups, insertions, deletions, etc. is important. It definitely shouldn't be the end all be all of hiring, but it is definitely helpful day-to-day to know how the code works performance wise with the data structures you are using.

<comment><USER29> that CS stuff you can look up and understand when you need it, like when you're looking for an efficient algorithm to do xyz, and so you should have curiosity and a wise intuition but beyond that as a web developer that knowledge should not sit in your brain because it will occupy precious thinking resources that you should dedicate to building great UX and making the code modular and maintainable which takes dedicating brain cells to understanding the world around you, not just a commodity piece of textbook knowledge that makes you feel smarter and covers up insecurities about having produced dull or even terrible UX -- "hey I know how to balance a red/black tree or build a hashmap implementation so I must be a under appreciated genius" when in fact that is commodity knowledge anyone can pick up from Google and a few hours of research and benchmarking (and having ability to allocate regions of your brain to tasks of wildly different nature on the fly which means you never keep crap in your head unless you're using it on daily basis)

We could write a thesis on this, right? and we would disagree wildly, but in the end go put up your amazing UX n youtube and show me how memorizing the Algorithm Design Manual helped you create that amazing UX. UI work is mostly art and craft, with math/cs still relevant but applied from an intuitive dynamic center of your brain, not stored and ready to put on a white board on demand.

<comment><USER18> Bingo. If you're looking for someone who's a walking Wikipedia, then those "how does this algorithm work" or "what's the Big-O notation of that algorithm" questions will find that person. If you want someone who gets stuff done and is resourceful when they need to look something up, then that line of questioning is going to filter those people out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here's a list of reasons I've heard for having my resume screened out:

* Didn't study CS.

* Didn't go to "brand name" school.

* One of my job titles (which currently comprises half my software experience) doesn't say "software engineer" or similar on it.

* You know Python; we use Ruby (or similar)

It gets demoralizing after a while, That's the main reason Patrick is right about bypassing the resume black hole. It just doesn't work. I seriously wonder about the number of interviews I would have gotten had I crossed out the school I went to and written "Stanford" or "Berkeley EECS."

I've got 3 years writing Python software, so it should start getting a little easier (and it has -- very little).

PS I'm looking, and my email is in my profile if anyone wants to chat a bit. :)

<comment><USER31> It's too bad to hear that, and a surprise to me... always thinking that it was an applicants market.

Also, python didn't strike me as a hard-to-sell language.

<comment><USER8> Python's weird in the ecosystem of languages. It's way more of a hobbyist language than it lets on. Since, as Patrick writes, most dev jobs are for line-of-business apps, and Python occupies a very very small niche in that world, very few devs can specialize in Python and hope to easily find a job if they present themselves as a Python specialist.

Data science might change things, but it's still a very new field.

If you're looking for a dev job, you should learn Ruby unless you have an irrational disdain for it. It's close enough to Python to be a fairly easy switch, but it will raise your position considerably in the job market.

But really, you should take Patrick's advice and not present yourself as an X developer. I do because I want to work primarily with Ruby and Rails, but when I was starting out, I presented myself as a competent engineer that could get up to speed effectively with any framework. I got a .NET job that way, having no former experience in the stack. Got fired in three weeks, but I still got paid. Now I do Ruby exclusively, and have no trouble finding opps.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure about the UK. Python, according to these job-regex-match statistics, seems more in demand:

itjobswatch.co.uk: number of jobs in the past 3 months citing ruby: 2,766, python: 6,013. Rank table: [http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/IT-Job- Market/UK/Programming-La...](http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/IT-Job- Market/UK/Programming-Languages)

GB section on this page put Ruby mentions at 3% and Python 6% [https://gooroo.io/GoorooTHINK/Article/16300/Programming- lang...](https://gooroo.io/GoorooTHINK/Article/16300/Programming-languages-- salaries-and-demand-May-2015/18672)

EDIT: indeed.com, ruby vs python: [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/ruby%2C+python.html](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/ruby%2C+python.html)

Does anyone know where else to get data (not anecdotes)?

<comment><USER7> what does "citing" here mean? in my experience if a job has, say, ruby, odds are it's a ruby job, if it has python often it's a job on something completely different where at the bottom they put "familiarity with scripting (python, perl) is an asset"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ramit Sethi has some great material. He has a download of a handful of resumes his clients have used successfully in the past including an engineer. I used those as models after seeing no results from my old resume. Then I submitted the new resume to a company with great reviews on Glassdoor and open positions I might be a fit for. I was curious to see what would happen. I was running a test and willing to follow through if anything came of it. Results are I'm flying out for final interviews next week. Time to study Ramit's interview prep material.

I've been reflecting on my experience with resumes and interviews for various positions, mostly technical, over the last 30 years. For me, getting jobs has almost always been about rapport with the person across the table or other end of the phone. Natural problem solving/engineering skills and abilities with a toolkit are important. Engagement with the interviewer via interesting, relevant stories feels like one of the keys.

A friend who used to hire engineers years ago at Sun told me he would hire based on two factors, assuming basic background/skills on the resume. One, light behind the eyes and two, could he enjoy drinking beer with the person after work? I have another friend who used to successfully hire engineers in a similar way. Not sure why we don't see more of this out there. Though the informal route probably embodies this approach by it's nature.

</comment><comment><USER34> > What typically happens is that people are screened into a hiring process on > the basis of what's on their resume... That already throws a lot of the baby > out with the bathwater.

In my experience, about 80% of the candidates who send in their resume will not come close to working out. If you've never run a hiring process before, you'd be surprised how many people look decent on paper but somehow can't write a line of code without some serious hand-holding. The OP points out that sometimes the opposite is true (a candidate with a mediocre resume ends up being stellar), but this is an exception and you'll waste a lot of time trying to find these people.

I've honed my resume screening skills over time and I've gotten pretty good at filtering out most of that 80%, and I know I'm likely to screen out plenty of talented folks, but it's well worth being able to focus my time and my team's time interviewing more exceptional engineers than mediocre ones.

In other words, I think it's OK to throw out a lot of the baby with the bathwater as long as you're left with mostly baby.

<comment><USER35> > In other words, I think it's OK to throw out a lot of the baby with the > bathwater as long as you're left with mostly baby.

Quite true, and basically what companies like Google do.

The issue comes in that we have been inundated for years with people bitching about "talent shortages"; i.e., there ain't enough baby left over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Just a minor note:

> What that looks like in practice is you somehow find that an engineering > company is hiring, which by the way, every company that has more than 10 > engineers is going to hire engineers this quarter.

Not mine. We haven't hired an engineer, or anybody else, in over a year. We aren't struggling, either. We just don't have the work volume.

Maybe we are the exception, but anyone following this advice and trying to contact, say, me is just setting themselves up for disappointment.

<comment><USER36> Are you saying if a superstar dream engineer came along and offered to work for your company you wouldn't somehow find room for her?

The only time that's been true for any company I've worked for is in the few months immediately following massive layoffs...

<comment><USER35> Basically what nommm-nommm said. We have craploads of work to do, but what limits our bandwidth is what our customers will actually pay us to do. We do bespoke work on contracts, so if we don't have the contracts we can't do the work or hire the people, no matter how badly we might have to.

<comment><USER37> How do you have too much work that no one will pay for?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I had a conversation with a friend about a hypothetical algorithms certification program. Yearly, you sit the exam, do the whiteboarding, regurgitate the big O stuff. You get a nice little certificate, and then a tech company can skip that part of the interview if you show you've passed the test in the last year.

The question then becomes, what do you ask if someone's algorithmic knowledge is no longer in doubt?

<comment><USER39> Theoretically, the employer could just look at the grades a person received in their algorithms class in college. So, how would your certification program inspire more confidence than a university degree?

That's one of the perennial problems with programming certifications -- they either certify technology that falls out of favor/use after a short time, or it certifies evergreen techniques that colleges/universities are supposed to cover. So you end up competing with MS/Cisco/Sun or Harvard/Berkley/etc.

Also, sites ranging from HackerRank to StackExchange offer a similar service. It's not a "certification" per se, but they certainly market their platform as a way to identify effective developers.

<comment><USER38> I didn't mean to say it would be an easy problem to solve.

More interesting though is the vacuum it creates in the tech interview process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with almost everything in this post with the exception of taking others for burgers and asking them about their salary (directly or indirectly).

Most people will not feel comfortable sharing their salaries or salary scale (company information) with someone they don't know or just met. Thankfully there are sites such as Payscale and Glassdoor where people share salaries anonymously so you can lookup the salary scale/ range for a company.

Even if you can't find it for company A that you are intending to work for you can always do a comparative market analysis; look up salary info for company B or C who are in Tech and in the same area/ domain and you can use this information to at least get a baseline or as leverage in the negotiation.

In fact this is something I blogged about a few days ago [https://dreamjobexec.com/7-tools-help-get-tech-dream-job- hin...](https://dreamjobexec.com/7-tools-help-get-tech-dream-job-hint- linkedin-job-boards-not-list/)

</comment><comment><USER40> I really don't agree with the advice to kick the salary question down the line.

It's asked early for a reason—to determine if you're compatible before proceeding with interviews. The majority of software developer jobs out there pay (substantially) less than I would accept and it's a waste of my time to spend time interviewing for them.

The ideal is that the company gives a compensation range, but many will refuse to. So I just tell them the top of my range. That ends the majority of conversations but it lets me narrow in on companies which properly value talent.

<comment><USER41> The solution here is to turn the recruiter's around and say, "I'm not comfortable sharing that information, but I'm sure you put together a salary range when you put a rec out for the position. Could you share what that range is, and I'll tell you whether it makes sense to proceed?"

<comment><USER40> Did you miss the part where I specifically mentioned that I do ask for a salary range? That works some of the time, but sometimes companies flat out refuse to give it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Do people actually ask random people from other companies out for lunch? I've never heard of someone actually doing this, and I feel like if I was approached at a meetup this way I'd be very unlikely to accept, if not a little uncomfortable at the prospect.

<comment><USER14> It's sometimes called an 'informational interview', happens quite a bit in the market I work in (Philly).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Great points that stood out-- Every company that has more than 10 engineers is going to hire engineers this quarter. The company really doesn't care whether they pay you 100 or 130.

Having been on both sides of the market, I would add - try and imagine yourself in the company's shoes.. and DIVORCE your emotions from the process.

Understand the company's side of it:

They're buying your services, like they were picking out fruit at a market - <USER2> market where you haggle with the seller. Paid a dollar more? Didn't buy got no fruit? - not a big deal to the co.

The company really doesn't care whether they pay you 100 or 130. This was a great point in the article.

This process is a lot bigger deal to you than to them. If they hire/don't hire you, is not going to affect the company that much. While, it affects your whole life.

And I think the most important thing, don't get upset if things don't work out. It's a cliche, but SO true - some things are meant to be for a reason. There are more opportunities out there.

<comment><USER5> "This process is a lot bigger deal to you than to them. If they hire/don't hire you, is not going to affect the company that much. While, it affects your whole life."

That very much depends on one's perspective of it. What if I think its the same as many of the missed opportunities that I cannot put a price on? (i.e. they might also be totally insignificant)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is not saying your salary expectation a really a bad thing? In my last job search I follow this advice and I actually regret it. A lot of times the conversation goes no where and it can save a lot of time on both ends if you get that part out of the way.

Conversation usually goes like this.

E:"What's your salary expectation?" (or last job's salary)

Me:"We can talk about the salary later. We can first see if we're a right fit"

E:"Cool. But we want to know your expectation." (get's the same question) Me:"I don't want to disclose my number but can you give me your salary range and I can say whether it is within my range"

E:"Its between AA - CC" (what I'm expecting is BB)

Me:"Yup, its in my range"

There. I dodge the bullet, I get the offer, but the salary is AA+.

This happen to me a lot in my last search and I feel like I would have a better salary and save time if I just said BB up front.

AA+ offers will go away immediately. Your goal is to get several BB offers and with a little negotiation bring it to BB+ offer.

<comment><USER45> Do you not try to negotiate then? BB is within their range, and presumably you can argue why you're more deserving than the lower end of their scale. Why would they not go for BB?

<comment><USER44> Of course you will negotiate but a lot of companies have equations/guidelines. "We've paid X salary to our employee that is similar to you" or "With N years of experience at most we will pay X". Some companies have no negotiation policy.

Also a lot of time employer loves to pull a card of "let's start from here". They will give you an example employee that got promoted twice in just a year.

The point is to save more time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I also think that asking algorithmic coding challenges make no sense for most companies. Facebook, Google and other tech giants are you using algorithmic interviews because everything they do is at scale. However, this is not true for most companies.

What I usually do, when I assess software engineers, is checking if they are using good variable names and short functions.

Btw.: I am a technical recruiter from Zürich with a software engineering background. If you look for a coding job in Zürich with net-salaries that are on par with the Bay area (in the range of 7-10k CHF / month after tax), you find my email address in my HN-handle.

</comment><comment><USER47> Every time I see advice that centers around "go to meetups, get coffee, make personal connections," it makes me think that:

a) I would really like to be able to do that instead of the awful application- oriented hiring process.

b) I will never be able to do that unless I'm able to relocate to a suitable location, probably after having completed an application-oriented hiring process.

How do the get-hired-with-connections gurus recommend resolving this chicken or egg situation? I get that Starfighters is aiming in part to solve similar problems, but surely there are existing solutions.

<comment><USER48> Conferences, conventions, vacations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Pleasantly surprised to see Ramit Sethi's name pop up in the article. I've watched some of his 'Find your dream job' videos on youtube and the advice there was solid and yielded results first time I applied them in salary/job negotiation situations.

</comment><comment><USER50> Maybe my part of the world is somehow different from Patrick's but I find some of the points in his talk simply untrue, and others true only with some fairly big caveats. Like:

"Sending in resumes is not how people get hired for most jobs" \- simply untrue. Where I work, most successful hires simply sent their resume via the form on the website. Or recruiters pinged them via linkedin or some such site. No behind-the-scenes hobnobbing was necessary. Boring, I know.

"every company that has more than 10 engineers is going to hire engineers this quarter" \- simply untrue. Hiring freezes are a real thing. Of course if the candidate is really experienced or a perfect skills fit for that particular company then something usually can be done but if you are a junior or a merely "ok" developer then tough luck for you.

"you ask them are they team leader or higher in their company. If they say yes, they either are a hiring manager or they know who is the hiring manager." \- team leaders trade in this funny currency called "vacancies". And if a team leader is short on those he or she has very little incentive to bring you into the company. Of course if you meet a team leader at the developer conference then they are usually hiring (and often explicitly say so during their talks!)

</comment><comment><USER51> In case people aren't aware, Patio11's comments are pretty much exactly what is stated (with many more examples and strategies) in "Guerilla Marketing for Job hunters", a book I recommend whenever posts about job searching come up.

<comment><USER52> This is helpul or was it guerilla marketing for the book? The world will never know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's always good to read about when someone recognizes the process for hiring devs is so broken. Does anyone know of any companies that are both attempting to do something about it, and hiring devs?

<comment><USER53> My current employer doesn't do technical interviews at all. We might ask about favorite languages, blogs, or open source projects, but generally we're more interested in whether the candidate "feels" like someone who is comfortable coding at the job's level. This has never gone badly for us, and we have never had to fire someone for not being able to do the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> His advice flies in the face of every negotiation course/book. Yes, you must know the range they are willing to pay; but once you know... you don't wait for them to make an offer, you ask something at the high end of what they're willing to offer, possibly above (but close enough to) the higher margin(* ).

The one who first names the price forms the baseline of negotiation. Say their range is 100-140k. If you say, "tell me what you would pay" and they say 100K, you're screwed, no way you can say "150k" from there and still be taken seriously. If OTOH you say 150k at the start and are lucky enough to get the answer "no way we can give you more than 140k", from there it's a simple job of asking for an extra concession that you know they can make ("Hmm... ok, say I could accept 140k, but only if the company allows me to WFH when I need to")

( *) Of course, not from the start. He's right about that. They need to be invested in the hiring - if they already spent a lot of effort trying to assess your skill before making an offer, you're in a much better position to ask a lot. Presuming that they like you, of course.

</comment><comment><USER55> Tech interviews have become a favorite punching bag of various bloggers, and partly for good reason. But even still, who can argue with the results? Some of the tech industries most successful companies (Google, FB, etc.) and many successful startups use whiteboard coding interviews as their bread and butter, and it seems to work. Maybe it's not as bad as conventional wisdom says it is.

<comment><USER56> Some unsuccessful companies also use the same format. It makes a lot of sense for Google to place maximum emphasis on whiteboard interviewing, not so much for its lesser competitors. If Google is a more desirable company and they run the same interview process, won't they be hiring mostly people who failed the same interview at Google?

<comment><USER57> The programming world has lots of smart, talented, capable people whose resumes won't get them even a phone interview from Google.

Coding interviews deserve their bad reputation, but dammit, there is no better way to learn whether or not a candidate for a programming job understands the really basic concepts than to have them write a little bit of code that can't be written if you lack the aptitude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> These articles are targeted at developers - someone needs to inform the HR department, that's where the problem lies

<comment><USER4> HR departments are responsible for HR / behavioural interviews ... dumb riddle interviews and reverse a tree using a one line function is made for developers ... by developers...

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I've been a professional developer for 20+ years. Not once have I gotten a job from the submit-a-resume-and-interview path. Not once.

It's _always_ been a personal connection.

At the risk of bragging, I'm very good at this stuff.

If you're filtering resumes and doing endless interviews, you're missing out. You won't get people like me.

<comment><USER60> Well, I'm looking for good software engineers. Getting someone who is a good software engineer but isn't great at personal connections for getting a new job doesn't sound like a huge loss.

<comment><USER59> Whiteboard away then!

Tho seriously, here's the question I'd ask of you...

Is that working out for you? It sounds like it's not, since you're still looking.

Maybe it's time to step back and reevaluate your process.

<comment><USER60> We're _always_ looking, and when I see a sizeable company that isn't, I consider it a warning note.

We have a high proportion of surprisingly high quality software engineers, from a number of European nations (a very international mix, now that I think about it). Good people move on, be it moving on within a company or without, and where I work the product is relatively narrow, so people tend to move on by leaving. I expect to be moving on myself within the next two years. When you have more than a dozen or so high quality software engineers, someone is always leaving. I advise the youngsters that if they ever find themselves in the same job and the same role for five years, they need to start thinking about their exit and get on with it.

In my opinion, our process is working well, thank you. There is no whiteboard involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I have never done this song and dance. I've been working professionally as a software developer for 20 years and my M.O. Is to talk to reputable recruiters, get an idea what the salary ranges are for my skill set, send my resume to the recruiter and tell them to send me prospects that meet my qualifications and that can meet my salary demands.

Then I just sit back, look over the job reqs that they send me and then I decide whether I want to be submitted.

Within two to three weeks, usually I have competing offers. I've never failed a phone screen with an employer and I've only twice haven't gotten an offer.

Luckily my first job I got was based on an internship. I graduated from a Podunk state college and I've been able to demand a competitive salary after my first three year job stint.

</comment><comment><USER62> one thing I've learned about negotiating a job is to discuss responsibility, roles, reporting structure, projects, etc first. Because, in my experience, if a year later I go to the VP of engineering and say "give me more money or I'll quit", I get the money. If I say "give me more responsibility and better projects or I'll quit", I get a going away lunch....

</comment><comment><USER63> My code exams are almost always can you do some form validation plz thx bye becuz I'm dumb.

</comment><comment><USER64> In all the interviews I've been a part of (1.5 years, maybe ~50 candidates), I've never seen a candidate decline because of salary requirements. We would decide if they were a good hire, and HR would make it happen.

<comment><USER65> So that's another datapoint confirming empirically patio11's idea that candidates are underasking. If they would ask for their fair value, 50% of companies would decline their candidature because of the price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> What I'm writing is tangential, but related to the topic. When we discuss tech interviewing, I think it helps to start with the basics of the process and the motivations behind technical interviews that are essentially exams.

Recruitment for tech companies is near constant at a certain level of talent. While there are smaller or profitable but stable niche companies that aren't looking to add engineers, most companies would always hire an engineer with a skill level that exceeds a certain threshold. In other words, if you're really good at coding, have a really strong understanding of software design, and you aren't a hard person to get along with, they'll have something for you.

This leads to the technical "interview", which is really better described as a technical exam. The most infamous incarnation of it goes like this: you arrive in a room, a very strong software developer arrives you are asked a variant on a data structures/algorithms question that you must solve at the whiteboard. It will be difficult to get it exactly right in the time allotted, but you will now demonstrate that you are able to write tight, good, efficient code that largely solves the problem. You will also demonstrate that you can clearly explain difficult technical concepts in clear human language (usually English), without getting angry or excessively flustered. If you're really, really good at this, they have something for you. Exactly what that is we can all work out later.

This leads to a constant state of "filtering". These companies are continuously scooping up silt, sifting through, to see if there are any good bits of gold in there. If they accidentally throw out a bit of gold, that's fine, they just keep sifting and sifting.

The odd thing about this (having been on a few of these interviews myself) is that it turns the "interview" process into a technical exam. I've been shuttled from room to room for six hour of whiteboard exams, all about tree traversal, complex sql, some math, and at the end of the day, I honestly have no idea what this company does or what they'd want me for (aside from what I'd read about in preparation for the "interview", none of which was discussed at all). But I do get it from the point of view of the company - if I can do certain branches of math, write tight code, and do sql really really well, and I clearly have the verbal and presentation skills to explain it all, then yeah, they will be able to make good use of me at their company (for the record: no offer ;) )

The filtering is irritating for candidates, of course, since it means that in our field we sit for exams constantly. The saving grace is that these companies must devote the valuable time of their strong engineers to conduct the interviews, which means they don't do it unless there's a good chance you're a good candidate.

The more insidious side of this is the rise of automated testing and/or "projects". You spend 30 minutes talking with a recruiter, and then you get a link to an on-line exam or project that can take from 2-8 hours. This allows the company to cast a wide net without wasting time. Well, wasting _their_ time. The process allows them to push the inefficiencies of the process out onto the candidates. The amount of time spent by developers on these exams, only to be dismissed in 5 minutes, is staggering. This is one reason I won't take these exams (if they occur very early in the process - if it happened much later, when it was clear both sides were serious, I would reconsider), even though I will spend an equivalent amount of time on in-person exam/interviews.

</comment><comment><USER67> Part I:

Let's get real here:

Yes, in the OP, the good news is likely:

> People who do consulting or freelancing for a living might realize this is > isomorphic to getting consulting engagements. It really is. It's > fundamentally running a sales process for yourself, which is a really weird > skill

On salary negotiation, I'd suggest bringing in some super important data:

Within easy commuting distance of the job, go house hunting. Want 3-4 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath, with family room and two car garage. Maybe also full, dry basement, nice yard, nice landscaping, pool, nice neighborhood, good schools.

So, get the figure per month for the house \-- principle, interest, taxes, insurance, maintenance.

Add in your medical insurance, life insurance, IRA, and college fund for the kids.

Add in cost of cars for yourself and wife and, later, kids.

Add in usual costs of living -- food, clothing, education for the kids, home furnishings, smart phones, Internet access, desktop computers, professional memberships, professional publications, etc.

Add in some for recreation.

Add in some for contingencies, say, for the kids, private schools, tutoring, violin, swimming lessons, etc.

Then look at taxes -- city, state, and Federal.

Then add it all up.

Then add, say, 30%.

That's your figure. Justify it with

> I have a family, and I am the breadwinner. I have a wife and two kids, and > we want two more kids. My wife is busy with the kids, and with the home, she > is fully busy. We need the usual, food, clothing, shelter, transportation, > medical care, recreation, education for the kids, retirement for my wife and > I, insurance against risk, plus smaller items. In addition, my wife's mother > needs to come stay with us. In this area, that's what it comes to. To have > less than that would make us financially irresponsible.

Of course, if the employer wants to hire a single person who wants to live in an efficiency apartment and use busses and taxis for transportation, then, okay, but need to know that.

> It is well worth your time to take another developer out for a hamburger and > say, "Hey, tell me a little bit about the company."

Maybe. But this other person might tend to see you as a competitor and want to hurt your career instead of a colleague who wants to help your career.

> The nature of careers for us is just working for 40 years for IBM and then > receiving a gold watch is something that very few of us are going to be able > to successfully do, and that frankly, I'm not even sure I want. Actually, I > much more than not sure I want. I'm sure I do not want, do not want.

Right, don't want it. But, it's been a very long time since IBM offered such a career. The more common situation was, in an IBM area, a house cost 5+ times what the IBM annual salary was so that, really, the employee had to pay for their house out of other funds and was basically subsidizing IBM.

So, who was living in those houses? In some cases, IBM employees who joined when the house prices were much lower. But in most cases, people just not working at IBM or in any such job. Instead, likely they were doing well in small business, e.g., as owners.

More generally, there is a biggie fundamental problem with the whole career and salary negotiation process in the article: The company will just NOT for long be able to pay more than the work of the job is worth. So, really, the employee needs to know what the heck the work is worth and try to get as much of that as possible, and for that, and quite fundamentally, the employee needs in some significant sense, in one word, 'ownership' of the business. So, we've got to be talking stock or the person just owning their own business.

Biggie point: If own the business and run it, then are facing the 'market' for the product/service the business provides. If that market is poor, gotta pick another business. If that market is good, then the worker gets to keep what the work is really worth. That point is a huge biggie. As an employee, will have a tough time getting for very long even half what the work is really worth in the market. This is a crude analysis, but it can be the difference between (A) being single and (B) providing for a good family and a good life.

From the OP, here is another really fundamental point:

> "Look, I understand just if I start to read through the resume, it doesn't > look like the most promising candidate, but when given a very complicated > engineering task, which involved both security research, and then a > complicated open-ended data analysis task, they not only successfully solved > the task, but produced a deliverable which could literally be published in a > research journal,

Okay, if that is impressive, and it should be, then there's another approach: Look on the resume for candidates who actually have PUBLISHED such work in a peer-reviewed journal of original research. Or, at least they have a Ph.D. degree from a good research university where their dissertation was just such work and is likely publishable.

Let's have an example: Recently at the company, there have been some unexpected problems -- outages, performance degradations, security breaches, etc. -- in the network and some in the server farm.

So, the company wanted, in general terms, better near real-time _monitoring_ for such unexpected problems. That is, the company wanted continual reports on _health and wellness_ of their network and server farm.

They have been using various approaches, but especially thresholds, and in total the approaches have two biggie problems -- false alarm rate too high and detection rate too low.

Joe looked at that situation and saw that from Microsoft, Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS, Oracle, Cisco, HP, etc., there is a river of data available for monitoring. So, he could get data on any of some literally hundreds of relevant variables at data rates of a value each few seconds up to thousands of values a second.

So, Joe thought about how to use that data to get better monitoring. Well rested in a quiet room he put his feet up, popped open a cold can of diet soda, reviewed the problem and old approaches, reviewed some of this educational background, and had some ideas.

Eventually, he noticed: If look at, say, two variables jointly, should be able to do better on false alarm rate and detection rate than looking at the variables separately, unless the variables are independent, which in common cases the definitely are not. So, in some sense, want to exploit several variables not individually but jointly.

Next, Joe noticed that with false alarm rate and detection rate, he was reminded of his course in Statistics 101 and, there, hypothesis testing with Type I error, Type II error, and the 'power' of a test, that is, some tests are more 'powerful' than others. Also he checked in an intermediate text on statistics and noticed that the classic Neyman-Pearson result says how to get the most powerful test possible.

Then Joe had some ideas, got some real data, wrote some prototype code, and the results looked good. Joe was able to adjust false alarm rate, and know the rate in advance, for any detection say what was the lowest false alarm rate at which the data would still be a detection, and had really good reason to believe in an especially high detection rate.

He published his work in a high end peer-reviewed journal of original research and gave a seminar on that work at a world famous, high end server farm where reliability is taken very seriously.

He put this work on his resume, sent 1000 copies, and never heard back.

So, back to the last quote above from the OP, here comes the biggie surprise: Doing such work won't get you hired. Hardly a chance. Now, we should all be screaming, why, why, why, why, why?

<comment><USER67> Part II:

Okay, maybe that monitoring work would not be very important.

But, maybe the company is facing some challenges in routing, scheduling, planning that, as is commonly the case, boils down to linear integer optimization, right, known to be in NP-complete. So, an impressive example might be a 0-1 integer linear program with, say, 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables. Then, asking for a solution that is optimal, down to the last tiny fraction, might be a bit much, but coming within 1% of optimality might be nice. So, suppose Joe came withing 0.025% of optimality? Might want to chat with Joe about any problems in looking for good combinations.

So, Joe also put that work on the 1000 resume copies he sent.

Ah, usually the real data is arriving in ways that are not fully predictable. So, there is a _stochastic process_ and want to know some of what the results will be. Once Joe was in touch with some people in touch with the US Navy, and they wanted an evaluation of how long the US fleet of SSBN missile firing submarines would be under as special scenario of global nuclear war but limited to sea. From an old B. Koopman report and some common sense assumptions, Joe saw a continuous time, discrete state space Markov process subordinated to a Poisson process, wrote and ran Monte Carlo software to do the evaluations, and had the work please the US Navy and be sold to a leading US intelligence agency (could say which one but then would have to ...).

Joe put that on his resume, too.

Then Joe got a call back, and they wanted to know what he knew about C, Python, and R.

Joe said that he'd one some C programming, but the language was so primitive that it was usually next to useless for his work in analysis. For R, that was just simple, standard statistics, and the work he'd done is statistics was beyond what R offered and he wrote his own code. For Python, that was similar -- instead he'd written his own code.

The interview died.

Okay, there's a fundamental lesson here:

Fundamentally, in US business, the attitude remains much as back in a Henry Ford plant 100 years ago: The company and the company managers know more than any candidate employee, about the work, how to do the analysis, how to write the software, and an employee is there just to add routine labor to what the company already knows. So, a resume that mentions work beyond what the company knows conflicts with this fundamental attitude and results in rejection.

In US mainline business (there are exceptions elsewhere), they are just very strongly against hiring as an employee someone able to do something the company can't already do.

So, dumb down the resume.

Then inside the company, fit in, don't expose real potential.

Then look for a good, new problem, say, needing _analysis_ such as in the OP.

Then, largely independently, after hours, make some progress through prototype code and some impressive real output from real data.

Then develop some high level foils, go to the relevant manager, and give a short talk.

Then expect 'incoming' attacks, vicious, whisper campaigns, sabotage, etc., from jealous people. Then discover if the company really wants good _analysis_ or not. If so, likely will have to transfer to a much better position, say, on staff of the CEO. Else, will likely soon get FIRED. No joke.

If say anything about such analysis before actually have the results, then people will either laugh or attack. The situation is quite general, say,

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Mahatma Gandhi

So, what the heck to do?

Sure, face the market directly. Do a startup. Pick your own problem, do you own analysis, write your own code.

Back to it. Work for today: Use a .NET collection class for a fast, easy to program way to find duplicates. So, a Web server, a Web session state store (wrote my own with just TCP/IP sockets, class instance de/serialization, and two instances of a collection class instead of using, say, SQL Server or Redis), SQL Server, and two specialized back-end servers, 18,000 programming language statements in Visual Basic .NET in 80,000 lines of typing.

Going live is getting to be very visible!

Let's see: The work is intended to provide the world's first good, a _must have_ , solution for a problem pressing for nearly everyone connected to the Internet. To start, if I can get on average one user a second, 24 x 7, then, ballpark, I should get monthly revenue of

2 * 8 * 5 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000 = 207,360

dollars. Now, in the OP, what annual salary _ranges_ where they talking about?

The core _analysis_ work? Silicon Valley has more hen's teeth than entrepreneurs who would understand that work even if I explained it to them, and many more such entrepreneurs than such VCs!

If you have something and explain it, then, if it is really bad, no one will like it. But, curiously, if it is really good, the same, no one will like it. Remember what Gandhi said. Or, easier and much the same lesson, just go back to kindergarten and to _Mother Goose_ and "The Little Red Hen" \-- same stuff. The hen wouldn't get hired, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have experience as part of a hiring team that spent over a year searching for a single candidate, and I also have experience as a job seeker who has spent over a year searching for a minimally acceptable job.

In my experience, the only lesson I've learned is that you cannot know much at all about a candidate's eventual job performance or cultural fit from any hiring technique.

Giving them tests or quizzes doesn't work. Giving them take-home coding tests doesn't work. Asking them behavioral and technically probing questions about their background doesn't work. Having them come on-site and suffer through whiteboard hazing doesn't work. Making them sit in on a technical Skype call with three simultaneous interviewers doesn't work. Everybody's pet theory about how to vet them before their first day doesn't work. And most of those things also waste a lot of everyone's time and have the poor false-positive / false-negative rates that the OP describes.

The only thing that I think works is just hiring someone and then seeing if it works and not being afraid to fire them if it doesn't work. Everyone freaks out about this idea because there's so much taboo about the cost of hiring, setting up benefits, and so forth, and the morale drain from firing.

But it's a trade-off. Do you want to pay those costs while getting actual info about an employee? Or pay those costs in a status-showy way ("look how hard our hiring process is!") but not actually get any info for what you are paying?

To address the firing part of it, which of course is not at all fun, there is an easy solution: make generous severance packages a standard part of your job offers.

If _you_ mistakenly hire someone who is not cut out for your team (for whatever reason, skill, attitude, work ethic, culture, etc.) that is on _you_ no matter what your hiring process is. Don't make candidates bear the costs of your hiring mistakes. Treat them well and they will be more understanding if the hiring process involves a lot more firing than most are accustomed to. If you give them 6-8 months of salary as a severance benefit (and that's on the _low_ end), then they will be secure about the risks of getting fired and it will buy them time to find a new job if you need to let them go. For a huge number of companies, this is easily affordable and building in a fixed cost of 1/2 year of their entry salary is borderline trivial (even if people want to make a big argument about it).

Everyone likes to whine that this is expensive, but _hiring the right person is expensive_ \-- it just depends on how you want to pay the cost. Like I said before, you can engage in a bunch of fake performative nonsense like tests and whiteboard hazing, in which case you are paying the price in terms of wasting your existing employees' time and in terms of false positives and false negatives and constantly leaving money-from-would-have-been-productivity on the table, or you can just own up to what it costs and be more willing to pay the dollar amounts necessary to trial people out. Then you can have much lower barriers to entry that mostly just involve basic conversations and extremely simple sanity checks about a person's background. If they pass those and the team more or less likes them, just pay the money to see if they work out and move on. Stop obsessing over it, especially by letting HR middlemen get in the way and obfuscate things.

</comment><comment><USER68> bookmarked

</comment><comment><USER69> So job hunting in tech now is "unsafe." Really? Try applying for a law position, a hospital position, or a standard minimum wage job. Among the many needs to check one's privilege in this world the thought that the process of getting a tech job is "unsafe" is one of them.</comment>


Green capitalism is using Greta Thunberg - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@frackfree_eu/green-capitalism-is-using-greta-thunberg-66768db6c0e1 <comment><USER2> What's the alternative?

The people and companies opposing green initiatives have entrenched industries and money. They have been waging media and lobbying campaigns for decades. If it takes some people pushing their green agenda for profit in order to save the planet, so be it. At least their businesses are moving us in the right direction and not holding us back.

</comment><comment><USER3> Author is green anarchist. I think it fair for her to criticize Greta Thunberg if he thinks that green capitalism[1] can't work.

But using the word 'using' is unfair. If Greta Thunberg would be green anarchist, it would be the other anarchists using her no doubt. To work with others is to be used and use others.

<comment><USER4> > But using the word 'using' is unfair.

The point the author is making is summed up here:

> Greta Thunberg finds herself advising those she castigates.</comment></comment>


The Overoptimism of Research Assistants - <AUTHOR> http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-excessive-optimism-of-research.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This gives a good (and cynical) way to correct for naive programmer time estimates.</comment>


Ask HN: Does modern software development require too much knowledge? - <AUTHOR>

New developers need to know SO MUCH stuff that I wonder how its possible to get anything done without four years intensive learning and practical experience under your belt. <comment><USER2> If you're having fun, seeing the possibilities instead of limitations, eager to experiment and learn, then you won't even notice. Find what you can do, do it well, learn how you can do it better, and it will all come into place.

I've heard it said that software development knowledge has a half-life of 3 years. That means you'll forget half of what you learned 3 years ago. That means half of the stacks that are relevant today are going to be gone in 3 years. What doesn't leave is your ability to learn, how you do things, your approach to problems and your priority.

Keep dreaming and visualizing what you want to create. You may not see how what you're doing today is ever going to materialize into something, but at some point everything will click and you'll be building what you want.

</comment><comment><USER3> Actually I think starting with programming is easier than ever. When I started programming there was no Google, no stackoverflow.com, there weren't even decent IDE's.

Modern languages like C# or Python are powerful and easy to learn.

For JavaScript you just need a text editor and a browser. But then, I think that JavaScript is not that suitable for a beginner because It has some nasty gotcha's and it fails easily without an error.

But it is true, the learning never stops, there are always new tools to discover.

</comment><comment><USER4> Software development requires continuous learning it may be new technology/language methodology or a complete new platform so Why only 4 Years , In my opinion as software developer you are a student always, you need to continuously increase your knowledge and its practical implementation; technology comes and goes so you need to be adaptive.Yes it always takes some practice experience to build something valuable but you can always start with something very little and working and then build as you improve your knowledge and skills. So be open minded learn something new every day and build valuable things.

</comment><comment><USER5> You don't start off having to know everything.

You start off picking off small problems that don't require deep knowledge of an entire stack.

 _Then_ you have to know everything: there's no question a full-stack dev has to know a stupid amount of stuff. I've drawn a line at all but the basics of devops; it's not something I'm interested in, and even though it's important, it won't be where I focus much attention.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think development of software will continue to get "easier" as languages, technologies and ideas evolve. I think over time these technologies will get to the stage where you barely have to think about the technology in use, and rather just focus on the problem at hand/what you want to build; this really is currently the case only after years (or decades) of experience and purposeful practice.

The current development of software does require a lot of knowledge to break into the market; however this also means that software development is a skilled profession which leads to higher than average salaries.

I would also add that we are seeing people enter the software/web dev market without a 4 year degree. A lot of people that I know have done 2 year diplomas and even compressed 4 month "bootcamp" style programs

</comment><comment><USER7> It is true that to succeed the modern developer requires an enormous skillset. At the same time, everything is so accessible because of places like Github, IRC channels. There are a wealth of tutorials covering every topic imaginable, sites like StackOverflow giving you the opportunity to have your problems solved, and a community of developers who truly want to help fellow developers.

Because everything changes so fast in software, in the developer DNA must be built in the ability to master new concepts and apply them very quickly. You build a solid foundation and can apply it everywhere. Additionally, in software development, you reinforce the skills that are important because you use them. You learn as you go and must always be learning.

And for some perspective, think about how relatively easy it is to become a developer vs. getting a PhD.

</comment><comment><USER8> Absolutely.

It especially hits when you try to teach someone new how to do something. It is terrifically easy to open notepad and show them how to make a <p> tag, but the curve then climbs quickly. Stuff that I take for granted I didn't really realize until I was teaching someone—I had to introduce them to browser's developer tools, what caching is, and hey what are these status codes anyway, etc. On top of that, deployment seems harder these days for new folks.

I actually have high hopes for Meteor JS simplifying some of this. Thus far I've noticed that people really like being able to do "create" and "deploy" and have a working URL they can share with a friend.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can keep your software development workflow simple. Example: You could do a website using Html5, CSS3 and Old-school Javscript or you could use all the tools like grunt, bower, CoffeeScript, SASS (or LESS) etc... It depends on the level of engineering you want to put into your project.

</comment><comment><USER10> > four years intensive learning and practical experience under your belt.

You're not even finished after four years. In fact, you're merely starting.</comment>


RIM rejects Amazon's takeover offer - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/21/rim-rejects-amazon-takeover-offer?newsfeed=true

<comment><USER2> I would speculate that Canadian Funds and Institutions that hold significant stake in RIM are loathe to see perhaps the most prestigious Canadian company be no longer Canadian. That sucks for me as a shareholder; RIM's management that was once stellar is no longer hungry and focused as it was in the past.</comment>