Public? It used to be 100% Hawaiian until the Haoles came and thought "Wow it's really nice here, and the people aren't even Christians and they don't have guns. Let's take over all the nicest parts for our own purposes.
That's like saying children need to study musical notation before playing a single note, or study art history before taking a crayon to paper. The desire to create is primary. Everything else is secondary.
I was concerned about motion sickness, but happily I have no problem with motion sickness doing simulation racing at 90FPS, even at high rates of rotation. The rift head tracking is nearly perfect and the resolution is adequate.
The rift works fine with glasses. You just have to put the rift on front to back. I use mine for simulation racing where a wide field of view is critical, and the rift works very well. It's both cheaper and better than building a triple monitor cockpit.
The OP's tale is completely believable. In a small company, "all the way up to the very top" isn't very far. Incompetent sociopaths will protect themselves vigorously against more capable and assertive newcomers. I've seen this several times in a long career. The incumbent knows that their market value outside of his present position is about zero, and they will consciously or unconsciously drive away anyone who comes in with threatening new ideas, or anyone who has the potential to open management's eyes by outproducing them.
Anyone who can actually code should not be wanting for a job. The market for coders is the best it has ever been. Even old guys like me are getting relocation offers. As hardware costs drop, the problems that can be solved in software multiply. Speech recognition? Image understanding? Auto-stabilized quad-copters? Self-driving cars? None of these systems could be built at reasonable cost twenty years ago.
Just moved there, amazing energy in Seattle, great food about everywhere. I think it's the most beautiful city in the lower 48. Housing is about half as much as San Francisco, or twice as much as Dallas where I came from. The fashionable parts of Seattle (Capitol Hill, Fremont, Ballard, South Lake Union, Belltown) are about $500/sq. ft. Traffic is congested but not impossible. It's compact and if you live in one of the neighborhoods previously listed you can walk everywhere you need to go. Other good things: we have legal poker and marijuana, it's hiking and sailing paradise, there is decent skiing two hours away and Whistler-Blackcomb with 5000 vert is four hours away.
Grew up there, attended CMU. Some negatives about Pittsburgh: it rains from November to June. It's cloudier than Seattle. Winters are not terribly cold, but they are wet and gray. Clear days in the winter are rare enough that you feel like taking the day off. The state still controls all wine and beer sales. Consequently the selection sucks. Pittsburgh is an island of civility in the middle of what is basically Appalachia. The counties between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are not called Pensyltucky for nothing.
I have been interviewing programmers for over thirty years, almost all with degrees in CS, many with years of professional experience, and the majority are rejected because they can't come close to independently solving even tiny programming problems -- problems that capable programmers solve nearly instantly on inspection. Given today's salaries, I don't think there is a vast pool of potential programmers who are kept out because a four-year degree is required. We have a glut of people entering law school to graduate into a crowded field in hope of a professional income. There's a reason they aren't all becoming computer programmers.
I couldn't work without my old Kinenis Contour Classic. It's twelve years old now and going strong. They seem may expensive at $200+, but they last forever. The only problem is that the keyboard->PC interfaces change. Mine has a PS1 cable, so I need a PS1->PS2 adapter, and a PS2->USB adapter between the keyboard and the laptop.
The black keys aren't a problem, it's the white keys. There are lots of old songs that can be played only on the black keys. One example is the old "All In the Family" theme song: "Those Were the Days".
Thanks, but my kid already wastes too much time in school. She complains that she spends too much time in school to get an education, and I completely agree. High schools should award grades for subject mastery instead of compliance. Homework should be given, but not graded. If a student skips the homework and fails the final, that's their choice. If a student skips the homework and aces the final, give them the A they deserve.
Few public schools have much of interest to the gifted student. Keeping those students in school longer will just take away time from the real education they can only get outside school: dance instruction, piano practice, independent reading, computer programming, etc. We already waste much of the time of the best and brightest in a vain attempt to teach impractical subjects to the uninterested.
Introversion is not the same as social anxiety. I'm an introvert, and have happily paired with other introverts. Pair programming is not a party, it's just work. Confident introverts do fine.
Go for it. You won't have any problem getting a job if you have energy and talent. I'm 50 and even in this market I get interest from recruiters at least once per week.
I've been interviewing developers for about 20 years now, and age has never been a factor. It is so hard to find competent people that it would be silly to reject someone because of age.
If you get the degree, understand most of the material, and can convey your understanding in an interview, you won't have any trouble getting work.
Sounds like a perfect project for incremental test-driven development. They don't know exactly what they want and neither do you. Decide on a fair pay rate, get an overview of their vision for the whole project, then find out what is most important, and settle on some functionality that you can deliver in a couple of weeks or a month. Then deliver it and ask what they want next. Read "Extreme Programming Explained" if you haven't already, then look for material on "XP for one".
After a year working with C# and.NET, my opinion is that it is not ready for prime time. The.NET documentation is about the worst I've seen in 25 years in software development. The Windows forms controls are as pitiful as ever, still with no layout support worth mentioning. I suppose it's a great technology for letting mediocre programmers cobble together small applications, but for large applications it's pretty horrible. And ASP pages are even worse. Why you would want to make web pages as crappy as Windows forms is completely beyond me.
Good programmers with powerful languages can turn large projects into small projects. Average programmers tend to write about twice as much code as a good programmer would use for the same problem. Give that good programmer a good language, and you can reduce the line count in half again. Suddenly your half-million line program is only 125,000 lines, and can be done in half as much time by one-fourth as many people.
Evolutionary programming doesn't mean no design, and no modularization. It means to design a feature, test the feature, code the feature, then refactor to eliminate duplication. It seems your company is only doing the coding part.
Even with a grand design, skipping the testing and refactoring guarantees that you'll end up with a mess. And if you skip the testing then refactoring is almost impossible.
But if you have a spec written in English, you can still get in an argument over the meaning of the spec. Better to write the spec in the form of acceptance tests. It's hard to argue about tests passing or failing. And it's easy to measure progress in the number of passing tests.
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Public? It used to be 100% Hawaiian until the Haoles came and thought "Wow it's really nice here, and the people aren't even Christians and they don't have guns. Let's take over all the nicest parts for our own purposes.
That's like saying children need to study musical notation before playing a single note, or study art history before taking a crayon to paper. The desire to create is primary. Everything else is secondary.
Prices for graphics cards are coming down rapidly. You can get a desktop to drive a Rift (GTX 1070) for about $1000 now.
I was concerned about motion sickness, but happily I have no problem with motion sickness doing simulation racing at 90FPS, even at high rates of rotation. The rift head tracking is nearly perfect and the resolution is adequate.
The rift works fine with glasses. You just have to put the rift on front to back. I use mine for simulation racing where a wide field of view is critical, and the rift works very well. It's both cheaper and better than building a triple monitor cockpit.
The OP's tale is completely believable. In a small company, "all the way up to the very top" isn't very far. Incompetent sociopaths will protect themselves vigorously against more capable and assertive newcomers. I've seen this several times in a long career. The incumbent knows that their market value outside of his present position is about zero, and they will consciously or unconsciously drive away anyone who comes in with threatening new ideas, or anyone who has the potential to open management's eyes by outproducing them.
Not to mention that intelligence is inheritable.
Oh I forgot that we're not supposed to say that.
Linked-In announced that it is shutting down in 2018.
"If you want to get married, do it now. Tomorrow all activity will cease..."
Anyone who can actually code should not be wanting for a job. The market for coders is the best it has ever been. Even old guys like me are getting relocation offers. As hardware costs drop, the problems that can be solved in software multiply. Speech recognition? Image understanding? Auto-stabilized quad-copters? Self-driving cars? None of these systems could be built at reasonable cost twenty years ago.
Just moved there, amazing energy in Seattle, great food about everywhere. I think it's the most beautiful city in the lower 48. Housing is about half as much as San Francisco, or twice as much as Dallas where I came from. The fashionable parts of Seattle (Capitol Hill, Fremont, Ballard, South Lake Union, Belltown) are about $500/sq. ft. Traffic is congested but not impossible. It's compact and if you live in one of the neighborhoods previously listed you can walk everywhere you need to go. Other good things: we have legal poker and marijuana, it's hiking and sailing paradise, there is decent skiing two hours away and Whistler-Blackcomb with 5000 vert is four hours away.
Grew up there, attended CMU. Some negatives about Pittsburgh: it rains from November to June. It's cloudier than Seattle. Winters are not terribly cold, but they are wet and gray. Clear days in the winter are rare enough that you feel like taking the day off. The state still controls all wine and beer sales. Consequently the selection sucks. Pittsburgh is an island of civility in the middle of what is basically Appalachia. The counties between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are not called Pensyltucky for nothing.
I have been interviewing programmers for over thirty years, almost all with degrees in CS, many with years of professional experience, and the majority are rejected because they can't come close to independently solving even tiny programming problems -- problems that capable programmers solve nearly instantly on inspection. Given today's salaries, I don't think there is a vast pool of potential programmers who are kept out because a four-year degree is required. We have a glut of people entering law school to graduate into a crowded field in hope of a professional income. There's a reason they aren't all becoming computer programmers.
I couldn't work without my old Kinenis Contour Classic. It's twelve years old now and going strong. They seem may expensive at $200+, but they last forever. The only problem is that the keyboard->PC interfaces change. Mine has a PS1 cable, so I need a PS1->PS2 adapter, and a PS2->USB adapter between the keyboard and the laptop.
The black keys aren't a problem, it's the white keys. There are lots of old songs that can be played only on the black keys. One example is the old "All In the Family" theme song: "Those Were the Days".
Thanks, but my kid already wastes too much time in school. She complains that she spends too much time in school to get an education, and I completely agree. High schools should award grades for subject mastery instead of compliance. Homework should be given, but not graded. If a student skips the homework and fails the final, that's their choice. If a student skips the homework and aces the final, give them the A they deserve.
Few public schools have much of interest to the gifted student. Keeping those students in school longer will just take away time from the real education they can only get outside school: dance instruction, piano practice, independent reading, computer programming, etc. We already waste much of the time of the best and brightest in a vain attempt to teach impractical subjects to the uninterested.
Introversion is not the same as social anxiety. I'm an introvert, and have happily paired with other introverts. Pair programming is not a party, it's just work. Confident introverts do fine.
Go for it. You won't have any problem getting a job if you have energy and talent. I'm 50 and even in this market I get interest from recruiters at least once per week.
I've been interviewing developers for about 20 years now, and age has never been a factor. It is so hard to find competent people that it would be silly to reject someone because of age.
If you get the degree, understand most of the material, and can convey your understanding in an interview, you won't have any trouble getting work.
That little book was more valuable than all the writing classes I ever attended.
Sounds like a perfect project for incremental test-driven development. They don't know exactly what they want and neither do you. Decide on a fair pay rate, get an overview of their vision for the whole project, then find out what is most important, and settle on some functionality that you can deliver in a couple of weeks or a month. Then deliver it and ask what they want next. Read "Extreme Programming Explained" if you haven't already, then look for material on "XP for one".
After a year working with C# and .NET, my opinion is that it is not ready for prime time. The .NET documentation is about the worst I've seen in 25 years in software development. The Windows forms controls are as pitiful as ever, still with no layout support worth mentioning. I suppose it's a great technology for letting mediocre programmers cobble together small applications, but for large applications it's pretty horrible. And ASP pages are even worse. Why you would want to make web pages as crappy as Windows forms is completely beyond me.
Good programmers with powerful languages can turn large projects into small projects. Average programmers tend to write about twice as much code as a good programmer would use for the same problem. Give that good programmer a good language, and you can reduce the line count in half again.
Suddenly your half-million line program is only 125,000 lines, and can be done in half as much time by one-fourth as many people.
Evolutionary programming doesn't mean no design, and no modularization. It means to design a feature, test the feature, code the feature, then refactor to eliminate duplication. It seems your company is only doing the coding part.
Even with a grand design, skipping the testing and refactoring guarantees that you'll end up with a mess. And if you skip the testing then refactoring is almost impossible.
But if you have a spec written in English, you can still get in an argument over the meaning of the spec. Better to write the spec in the form of acceptance tests. It's hard to argue about tests passing or failing. And it's easy to measure progress in the number of passing tests.