chuck32

Have you even asked for a raise at your current job? Having been made offers from other companies that puts you in a very strong position to ask for a raise.

I stand corrected.

True, but it would also perpetuate the stereotype of developers and techies as being a closed community of pretentious nerds.

"I try to put in at least four hours of work every day, including weekends, and balance that with four hours of year-round kayaking, hiking, house-work, seasonal snow-sports, or some other physical activity."

Well done for achieving work-life balance.

It does seem that Silicon Valley used to have a hacker / technologist culture (think Steve Wozniak, Robert Noyce etc.) while now most of the new companies are often just traditional businesses but with slightly better tech and rebranded with nauseating slogans about grandiose missions to "change the world", "connect people", "give experiences" etc.

For most of these companies their mission statements and "company culture" are complete BS. Just look at how much tax these companies (think Apple, Facebook, Amazon etc.) pay to see if they are truly "progressive" and "forward-thinking" companies. They are not. And that hypocrisy trickles right down to the bottom.

Thats why its not surpising that in supposedly one of the most liberal and open-minded places in the world, sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination are rife.

I can't find this thread but there was a discussion about workplace discrimination and a transgender woman wrote that she had pretty much no problems working in a large corporate mid-west based company where the majority of employees were conservative and Christian but faced plenty of abuse and comments from co-workers when working for a more "open-minded" silicon valley style company with more of a "bro" culture.

I don't think its a good idea because in reality most devs are one or the other.

My theory is that most backend developers claim to be "full-stack" in order to get the job even though they really are much more focused on backend stuff. This is because its very hard to learn ruby/python/php/java for web development without learning html/css. Project Managers like having full stack jobs only because they think that can just get somebody to "do everything".

This is also probably a bit of a legacy thing, ~15 years ago the difference between backend and frontend web developement was not as well defined as it is now. A web developer would "make the page look like this with a text field there and a button here" (frontend - html/css/javascript) and then make the form on the page "save the form input to a database" (backend - a php script possibly embedded in the page).

These days development is more like "make the site be a single page app with a responsive mobile-friendly design" (frontend - angular/react/ember...) and make it process data from the user and send it off to external apis and integrate third party libraries (backend - rails/django/.net...) and have a version controlled and automatic way of deploying the code to a multiple servers behind a load balancer (dev ops - chef/puppet for example).

As with any technology, the more advanced it gets, the more need there is for practitioners to specialise.

Wow this thread is depressing..

Perhaps because the reality of being a developer is that its a pretty boring job most of the time. Once you have worked at a few different companies on a few varying projects with a few different technologies you realise that 90% of the time you are building CRUD applications. Also working on other people's code which is significantly worse than your own can be frustrating.

So for me having a competitive element to what i consider a fairly boring job definitely makes it much less boring. As for rudeness and arrogance I try not to be those things but if somebody else is i just ignore it. Simple as.

Developers who are not team players do not make it far in my experience.

> You become adored, respected, have a lot of money and power.

These are very grandiose visions of what being a developer is like. The reality is much more mundane.

Why not try writing contributing to open source projects in your spare time? Maybe try and get a low-paid freelance job or two. Test the waters. Once you have contributed to opensource/done freelance projects you will find it MUCH easier to find a junior developer job since you have actual experience to draw upon.

You say you "spent all of my MBA (top 3) coding web apps instead of networking", where are those web apps? Are they still around? Put them together into a portfolio to showcase them to employers.

I was a hobbyist programming in my teens and now do it full time. I don't program anymore in my spare time since I spend 8 hours a day doing it but who cares? There are plenty of other hobbies to be had..

If you end up quitting your job to go into programming, how hard would it be to go back to your old line of work? If not very hard why not give full time coding a go? What do you have to lose?

> His advice is in the context of functional programming languages.

Thats not what he says. He says that these ideas "can be useful in any programming language". Which is the point that I disagree with.

> there's nothing to prevent a library on top of all these others libraries to accomplish this

So a library to organise the code which interacts with other libraries? Sounds an awful lot like a framework to me?

  Allowing your codebase to develop organically is a lot better than trying to fit the square peg of your domain into the round hole of the chosen framework.

Its a fair argument to make but honestly I've never worked on a web app where I didn't think that using an MVC framework like Django or Rails made sense.. Do you have any examples of web apps that would be better off without a framework than with?

Also there are plenty of PHP codebases that were developed "organically" (i.e. without a framework) that are absolute eye sores to look at because without a structure in place its too easy for developers to write bad code.

  This follows from my experience with building F# libraries, but the ideas are quite general and can be useful in any programming language.

This is just not true. The whole article really doesn't apply to any mainstream programming languages like ruby, python, java, javascript etc. The author seems to be coming from an academic view point and the points he makes really don't translate to the software engineering world.

His analogy about frameworks being package holidays while composing libraries is like independent travel only tells half the story. How do you organise the interaction of libraries? You can do it yourself but you will have to follow some sort of pattern to organise the code in order to make it easy to work with. What happens when another coder joins your project? Are you going to tell them the pattern you have already been using? What if they dont follow it as expected or disagree with it? Frameworks standardise this. Yes you might not always like certain aspects of the framework you're using but its the price you pay for not having a project full of developers who each have their own way of doing things and are constantly argueing over how to organise the codebase.

Also this hyperbolic use of the word "evil" is immature and dorky. Sorry.