A programmer with 10 years of experience in California can easily make 6 figures using most any language. For example, a mid level Java programmer is making something around 100k in the valley typically. Rails freelancers should be at least in that range as well. The difference between COBOL and something like Rails is that if your COBOL gig dries up it can be pretty difficult to find another job to replace it in a timely matter. A Rails (or any other hot language/framework combo) guy pretty much has to beat off clients with a stick. Also, most of the guys making big bucks on COBOL/RPG/Fortran derive most of their value from their knowledge of the particular system they have been maintaining for the past 20 years. That means they might be worth 400 bones an hour to ABC Regional Bank, but when the bank goes out of business, most of their value is lost as well. Being stagnant comes at a very high price in the programming world.
I have seen crap in COBOL and C#. You are correct that it is about the people. Don't forget, however, that different languages attract different types of people. The VB effect is a strong one. Some languages provide easy ways to code poorly and do not guide the user towards optimal solutions. Languages with crap module systems, for example, tend to encourage programmers to just take the "easy" route and jumble all their code in one 50,000 line god file. ASP.Net (not the MVC version) allows people with little knowledge of HTML/CSS to design web pages with its WYSIWYG editor. It will even hook up to your code automatically by double clicking on a button or whatever. Well, it turns out that the output of the designer is some of the worst slop code on the planet, but because they made the initial steps easy for a bad coder, it has started to dominate the corporate shops, even when M$ has a much better system (Asp.Net MVC) with a slightly higher learning curve. Someone using Asp.Net Webforms instead of a proper MVC framework (asp.net mvc, rails, django, express, sinatra, etc.) is not necessarily a bad coder, but their choosing an obviously inferior framework is pretty troubling.
I am perfectly fine with 100% estate taxes. It would make our society much closer to a meritocracy. Your daddy should have nothing to do with how well you do in life.
People can blaspheme themselves but my God is absolutely impervious. People can disbelieve or deny my God and it remains completely irrelevant to God.
Is God an Anonymous Coward. Seems to share many characteristics...
Btw, if your entire belief hinges on God being beyond comprehension, then how is your belief justified. You can justify any belief with this (the sign of a poor justification). For example, "Fairies exist but they are beyond human comprehension so we cannot understand them or prove/disprove their existence."
A lot of the dangers of US city living are overblown. Don't walk around the crack houses in the middle of the night and you should be fine. Bad stuff happens, but not to the degree and frequency that it has been portrayed.
Porting a js library to another platform is usually trivially easy. Check out Substack's Browserify: https://github.com/substack/node-browserify. JS libraries are typically open source anyway, so even if you have some weird platform you need to run something on, you are usually free to make the modifications yourself. Most of the dominant frameworks run practically anywhere, since js has always had to think about graceful degradation. Socket.io is a terrific example. I have written substantial applications in node.js where I split my development time between my work PC (Windows) and my home PC (OSX), then it runs on a production Linux server. If I find something that does not work cross platform, I am almost 100% sure the issue is in my code, not a library. I fix it and it all works fine. That is pretty much the absolute best you can hope for in cross platform compatibility. Python is not bad either, but there are loads of Python libraries that are Windows dependent. We are talking about real modern js application development, not some random browser plugin from 10 years ago. The js community has come into its own with a lot of polish in the past couple years.
Software development experience is tied to familiarity with general techniques and processes, not a particular technology. Who cares if tech goes in fads? Switch every couple years to whatever happens to be paying best. For a competent programmer this should not be burdensome (quite the opposite in most cases, since learning something new is fun).
Don't commit to hard deadlines further than 2 weeks out. Agile is a life saver. A 160 hour 2 week period is not even possible with Agile (unless you were a spineless moron and willingly agreed to do the slave hours up front). Worst case, some things just end up late. I would rather look for a new job than work those kind of hours, so if the boss is unreasonable about it, too fucking bad. Fortunately, most employers will not hang you for getting something in a bit late. Most deadlines slip because of a change in scope anyway, so it really is not something to feel bad about.
All I need is that extra bit of rope to get my feet on the ground after hanging nearly myself. Not a bad analogy for js actually. Out of one of the worst dev platforms has actually given rise to one of the best dev experiences in the past few years. I do think js on the web will always be 95% crap though, if only because few devs take the time to learn it properly (instead focusing on the server side more with their "real" language). I have found the node.js community has brought a breath of fresh air to js though that has begun to bleed over into a lot of the front end frameworks. Jquery spaghetti will continue to be the norm for copy pasta spaghetti coders for the foreseeable future though.
Hmmm... javascript is pretty much the exact opposite of lock in. It is the closest a language has really come to being "write once run anywhere". Even most node.js stuff runs in the browser and vis versa with ease.
hardy har har. People think you are nuts when you inform them of this. Part of the problem is that college kids are some of the worst negotiators on the planet, so they have put themselves in a permanent bottomed out price war with each other. "Would you like to like envelopes and file invoices all week while occasionally getting shit on by a vindictive boss... for free?" "Sure!"
Experience beyond 2-3 years does not affect practically any career if you are not going for management or starting a business. For most dev jobs, the ability to build and maintain CRUD apps and write code that is somewhat maintainable is about all you need from a coding perspective. Now managing a team of people all building their own CRUD apps in coordination, that requires some time around the block.
Domestic violence was socially acceptable up until fairly recently (and it still is in many/most cultures to varying degrees). Obviously, it is a fucked up situation, but domestic violence has been so prevalent that it is hard to imagine it not having an evolutionary effect.
Yeah, one month is a pretty small amount of time IME. Everyone sucks at their new job for the first 6 months. Any experience otherwise is probably a perfect example of the Dunning Kreuger Effect.
That is not how profitability works. The most you could say is that their online part is the only one that has a chance of being profitable. Costs to run XBL could very well exceed the revenues from subscriptions. PSN might actually be less "less profitable" than XBL, since I would venture to guess that Sony only invests a fraction of the resources into it.
Network graph is probably the worst feature on github. Totally useless visualizations, and if you have ever use it on a real project then you will notice that it take half a decade to load. Personally, I use both, but prefer github a "bit" over bitbucket.
Sounds like a closet case if I have ever heard one. One day, Anonymous Coward, you will be free to express who you really are without the self loathing and shame.
Slashdot Mirror
A programmer with 10 years of experience in California can easily make 6 figures using most any language. For example, a mid level Java programmer is making something around 100k in the valley typically. Rails freelancers should be at least in that range as well. The difference between COBOL and something like Rails is that if your COBOL gig dries up it can be pretty difficult to find another job to replace it in a timely matter. A Rails (or any other hot language/framework combo) guy pretty much has to beat off clients with a stick. Also, most of the guys making big bucks on COBOL/RPG/Fortran derive most of their value from their knowledge of the particular system they have been maintaining for the past 20 years. That means they might be worth 400 bones an hour to ABC Regional Bank, but when the bank goes out of business, most of their value is lost as well. Being stagnant comes at a very high price in the programming world.
I have seen crap in COBOL and C#. You are correct that it is about the people. Don't forget, however, that different languages attract different types of people. The VB effect is a strong one. Some languages provide easy ways to code poorly and do not guide the user towards optimal solutions. Languages with crap module systems, for example, tend to encourage programmers to just take the "easy" route and jumble all their code in one 50,000 line god file. ASP.Net (not the MVC version) allows people with little knowledge of HTML/CSS to design web pages with its WYSIWYG editor. It will even hook up to your code automatically by double clicking on a button or whatever. Well, it turns out that the output of the designer is some of the worst slop code on the planet, but because they made the initial steps easy for a bad coder, it has started to dominate the corporate shops, even when M$ has a much better system (Asp.Net MVC) with a slightly higher learning curve. Someone using Asp.Net Webforms instead of a proper MVC framework (asp.net mvc, rails, django, express, sinatra, etc.) is not necessarily a bad coder, but their choosing an obviously inferior framework is pretty troubling.
I am perfectly fine with 100% estate taxes. It would make our society much closer to a meritocracy. Your daddy should have nothing to do with how well you do in life.
People can blaspheme themselves but my God is absolutely impervious. People can disbelieve or deny my God and it remains completely irrelevant to God.
Is God an Anonymous Coward. Seems to share many characteristics... Btw, if your entire belief hinges on God being beyond comprehension, then how is your belief justified. You can justify any belief with this (the sign of a poor justification). For example, "Fairies exist but they are beyond human comprehension so we cannot understand them or prove/disprove their existence."
A lot of the dangers of US city living are overblown. Don't walk around the crack houses in the middle of the night and you should be fine. Bad stuff happens, but not to the degree and frequency that it has been portrayed.
The first successful test. Soon every site will redirect to facebook, then... the world!
Porting a js library to another platform is usually trivially easy. Check out Substack's Browserify: https://github.com/substack/node-browserify. JS libraries are typically open source anyway, so even if you have some weird platform you need to run something on, you are usually free to make the modifications yourself. Most of the dominant frameworks run practically anywhere, since js has always had to think about graceful degradation. Socket.io is a terrific example. I have written substantial applications in node.js where I split my development time between my work PC (Windows) and my home PC (OSX), then it runs on a production Linux server. If I find something that does not work cross platform, I am almost 100% sure the issue is in my code, not a library. I fix it and it all works fine. That is pretty much the absolute best you can hope for in cross platform compatibility. Python is not bad either, but there are loads of Python libraries that are Windows dependent. We are talking about real modern js application development, not some random browser plugin from 10 years ago. The js community has come into its own with a lot of polish in the past couple years.
Software development experience is tied to familiarity with general techniques and processes, not a particular technology. Who cares if tech goes in fads? Switch every couple years to whatever happens to be paying best. For a competent programmer this should not be burdensome (quite the opposite in most cases, since learning something new is fun).
Don't commit to hard deadlines further than 2 weeks out. Agile is a life saver. A 160 hour 2 week period is not even possible with Agile (unless you were a spineless moron and willingly agreed to do the slave hours up front). Worst case, some things just end up late. I would rather look for a new job than work those kind of hours, so if the boss is unreasonable about it, too fucking bad. Fortunately, most employers will not hang you for getting something in a bit late. Most deadlines slip because of a change in scope anyway, so it really is not something to feel bad about.
All I need is that extra bit of rope to get my feet on the ground after hanging nearly myself. Not a bad analogy for js actually. Out of one of the worst dev platforms has actually given rise to one of the best dev experiences in the past few years. I do think js on the web will always be 95% crap though, if only because few devs take the time to learn it properly (instead focusing on the server side more with their "real" language). I have found the node.js community has brought a breath of fresh air to js though that has begun to bleed over into a lot of the front end frameworks. Jquery spaghetti will continue to be the norm for copy pasta spaghetti coders for the foreseeable future though.
Hmmm... javascript is pretty much the exact opposite of lock in. It is the closest a language has really come to being "write once run anywhere". Even most node.js stuff runs in the browser and vis versa with ease.
hardy har har. People think you are nuts when you inform them of this. Part of the problem is that college kids are some of the worst negotiators on the planet, so they have put themselves in a permanent bottomed out price war with each other. "Would you like to like envelopes and file invoices all week while occasionally getting shit on by a vindictive boss... for free?" "Sure!"
Experience beyond 2-3 years does not affect practically any career if you are not going for management or starting a business. For most dev jobs, the ability to build and maintain CRUD apps and write code that is somewhat maintainable is about all you need from a coding perspective. Now managing a team of people all building their own CRUD apps in coordination, that requires some time around the block.
It is "more than" midnight just about everywhere all the time.
Domestic violence was socially acceptable up until fairly recently (and it still is in many/most cultures to varying degrees). Obviously, it is a fucked up situation, but domestic violence has been so prevalent that it is hard to imagine it not having an evolutionary effect.
Pedo alert!
Watching 5 minutes of Fox News would make just about anyone vote Obama!
Yeah, one month is a pretty small amount of time IME. Everyone sucks at their new job for the first 6 months. Any experience otherwise is probably a perfect example of the Dunning Kreuger Effect.
So... "Here is what didn't work for me, and you should too!"
Also, "Lets not forget".
Correcting grammar in the comments section of a message board, may be one of most pathetic things imaginable.
FTFY
That is not how profitability works. The most you could say is that their online part is the only one that has a chance of being profitable. Costs to run XBL could very well exceed the revenues from subscriptions. PSN might actually be less "less profitable" than XBL, since I would venture to guess that Sony only invests a fraction of the resources into it.
Very useful if you discretely spray a bit on your opponent's tires beforehand.
Network graph is probably the worst feature on github. Totally useless visualizations, and if you have ever use it on a real project then you will notice that it take half a decade to load. Personally, I use both, but prefer github a "bit" over bitbucket.
Cpu percentage is hardly meaningful. For example, my site uses 0 cpu on privacy, since it does not collect user data.
Sounds like a closet case if I have ever heard one. One day, Anonymous Coward, you will be free to express who you really are without the self loathing and shame.