1. Go to expensive golf course, 2. Propose large software purchase, 3. Large envelope stuffed with cash, 4. Profit! Rinse repeat.
I have done at home prescreener tasks, as long as they were sub one hour, clearly academic, and patently not related to the business. These are not paid. I have also done on-site dev tasks and tests which were squarely…
This. They pay terribly, the work is usually boring CMS and cookie cutter tasks, and there is undue stress because the overpaid account managers can't even run a basic plan and leave all the coding work till the last…
Sad to see it all go. Still have the old Mandrake boxes knocking around somewhere. I recall it being installed, under the radar, in one London financial company, as a desktop for a trader to build out some modelling and…
Careful there! It's easy to paint a broad stroke, when the reality is more nuanced. When employers adopt a race to the bottom on salary and skill level, then yes, the plumber replaced by an eastern European counterpart,…
I do wonder sometimes, if all the startups that followed Googs lead into open offices have been pranked, much like the interview folks who blindly followed Googs wacky and wanky interview questions, which have also been…
A good set of questions - they don't rely on too much esoteric knowledge, and look to see how the programmer would apply any experience gained to date in solving them. One question we often use early in interviews is…
Not sure what's worse here - people relying on third party benchmarks (hint: always do your own; see how a tool performs on your data, on your hardware, for your problem set), or the fanboy-ish panic when they are…
The money moves around and around and around (notionally) a dizzyingly large number of times because the more opaque the process and end product, the less immediate introspection it receives, the less well the average…
I think the ability to use YAGNI scales with the experience and abilities of the developer and the team. I have walked into wonderful lean codebases where an experienced hand has kept featuritus down to a minimum, but I…
Powerpoint is just an enabler for crap presentations. Maybe the trick is to make it harder to fill the canvas, so the pages become a bit sparser, and revert back to their original intended purpose, an aide memoire for…
In the UK, fired is generally for when an employer dismisses you from employment due to a specific issue (timekeeping, poor performance, caught stealing printers etc.) It is very different to being made redundant, which…
Because we are playing the game. Some call it presenteeism, other call it face time, some even view it as the boss owning your ass during the work hours. But basically, we don't really give a fuck for the organisation,…
The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and…
1. Go to expensive golf course, 2. Propose large software purchase, 3. Large envelope stuffed with cash, 4. Profit! Rinse repeat.
I have done at home prescreener tasks, as long as they were sub one hour, clearly academic, and patently not related to the business. These are not paid. I have also done on-site dev tasks and tests which were squarely…
This. They pay terribly, the work is usually boring CMS and cookie cutter tasks, and there is undue stress because the overpaid account managers can't even run a basic plan and leave all the coding work till the last…
Sad to see it all go. Still have the old Mandrake boxes knocking around somewhere. I recall it being installed, under the radar, in one London financial company, as a desktop for a trader to build out some modelling and…
Careful there! It's easy to paint a broad stroke, when the reality is more nuanced. When employers adopt a race to the bottom on salary and skill level, then yes, the plumber replaced by an eastern European counterpart,…
I do wonder sometimes, if all the startups that followed Googs lead into open offices have been pranked, much like the interview folks who blindly followed Googs wacky and wanky interview questions, which have also been…
A good set of questions - they don't rely on too much esoteric knowledge, and look to see how the programmer would apply any experience gained to date in solving them. One question we often use early in interviews is…
Not sure what's worse here - people relying on third party benchmarks (hint: always do your own; see how a tool performs on your data, on your hardware, for your problem set), or the fanboy-ish panic when they are…
The money moves around and around and around (notionally) a dizzyingly large number of times because the more opaque the process and end product, the less immediate introspection it receives, the less well the average…
I think the ability to use YAGNI scales with the experience and abilities of the developer and the team. I have walked into wonderful lean codebases where an experienced hand has kept featuritus down to a minimum, but I…
Powerpoint is just an enabler for crap presentations. Maybe the trick is to make it harder to fill the canvas, so the pages become a bit sparser, and revert back to their original intended purpose, an aide memoire for…
In the UK, fired is generally for when an employer dismisses you from employment due to a specific issue (timekeeping, poor performance, caught stealing printers etc.) It is very different to being made redundant, which…
Because we are playing the game. Some call it presenteeism, other call it face time, some even view it as the boss owning your ass during the work hours. But basically, we don't really give a fuck for the organisation,…
The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and…