hanginghyena

Surprised actually. If she really did run the company "day to day", seems like she would be in a position to give him the boot (grab the accounts) vs. what actually happened.

Actually, those guys make only a tiny slice of the value per click. Banner advertising is a low return game.

Now...if you control the landing page and conversion funnel, basically delivering paid customers (vs. clicks) to a paying merchant, your value per visit goes up by a factor of 10 - 50. $.25/click vs. $10 - $30 (varies by product).

Now imagine a company that launches dozens of offers with hundreds of variations and plows it's bankroll back into the best (most profitable) version (for years at a time).

Yeah, $400MM is possible.

Right but that's where this gets ridiculous.

Telling a patient to fast is basically a clinical practice. Almost like checking blood pressure. No actual supplies needed, just behavioral counseling.

By the same logic, could I patent checking blood pressure?

That seems very anti-competitive. So basically, if fasting is a free treatment for diabetes, you can't promote it without paying these guys a royalty? Boooooo

That's not awful, btw. The one upside of a large consulting firm is you can retain decent talent for boring projects by bouncing them around between assignments.... but you still have a single entity to hold accountable afterwards.

Plus a certain percentage of these people take the diverse base of experience and go start something useful. Teaching a bunch of smart, ambitious people about how the process actually works and then letting them go start their own operation seems like a recipe for job creation.... (and finding better ways to replace the status quo)

Sadly that is trivial to get around these days, especially if someone at the new company knows someone at the old one.

Most professionals I know are happy to "bend" policy to give a respected colleague or personal friend a good reference, especially if that person is on the street.

If the company clams up and limits its response to name, rank and serial number, that's a huge red flag.

=> "makes you wonder about the level of competency of the average web development company"

Our competency on projects where we are being paid a full domestic consulting rate is quite high, thank you.

Now, if you're asking us to compete with cut-rate bids from some online freelancer exchange, we will reduce the level of service and QA to match our competitors in that space....

Eg. you may have Nordstrom's service for a Nordstrom's price. Wal-mart service for a Wal-mart price. But don't expect Nordstrom's service for a Wal-mart price; that usually isn't going to fly....

Another old geezer here (43!); had a good run in my twenties and wound up in technical management a few years ago.

A couple of tips:

- The "hands on" technical skills that launched your career have capped (top salary) and declining value

- If you take time to learn / think about how the underlying technology works (vs. just cut / paste / edit code), you can master related new technologies faster than the average bear.

- It is also worth noting that technical challenges tend to repeat every couple of generations; the software developer community is operating within the same set of fundamental constraints (coder time, CPU speed, network, data, etc.), the main thing that changes is which constraint matters. And they repeat: at some point, CPU will be the constraint again and all ninja coder tricks of my twenties will matter again.

- Architecture, process design, and people herding skills only grow with time; 80% of my value as a manager consists of making unnecessary work go away (without drama). I am much better at using these skills at 42 than I was at 24.

- If you ever see an opportunity to build a side project that could turn into a business, take it. Even if you don't replace your income, this gives you additional control over the direction of your late career and skills you acquire. Note that I said side project and not startup; the intent to get more control over your direction without walking away from your day job and associated income / benefits.

THIS.

Speaking as a hiring manager, I will absolutely notice any delays or interruptions in your education (unless ancient); in the event you don't give the years, it often becomes obvious when you list high school degree or summer jobs.

The key is to have a reasonable story about the situation. Finishing a liberal arts degree in five years after you spent the first four partying doesn't send a good message. Finishing a degree after taking a break to handle <other important responsibility - family, startup, etc> or as a consequence of a major change that helps employer? Not a significant issue....

The real irony here is a rant against commercialism that is published on a page with no less than 11 display ads and a "related content" unit....

There's actually significant learning value in time spent figuring out legacy systems and linking them together. Doing ad-hoc reporting is the IT equivalent of being a short order cook.

Do it long enough, and you learn how to make almost anything from nothing.

And that should be considered an employable skill....

With a truly technical manager, this is honestly one of the fastest ways to torpedo your credibility.

Anything listed on your resume is fair game for questions, especially if you claim it as a skill. "Reading a book" is not a skill; reading a book and using the contents in that book for several real world projects probably qualifies. Especially if you can describe what you did in detail.

Harsh reality: I value everything in that section of the resume at the value of the weakest component that I find. So when we discover that your knowledge of SQL is reading a few tutorials on w3schools ten years ago, I rate EVERYTHING ELSE in that section at the same level (ouch!).

So the safe way to play this is don't list anything that you can't hold a 5 - 10 minute conversation about and explain at least the basics of how the technology works, citing real examples of where you used it (paid or unpaid, I don't care about that, as long as you're clear about what you did).

Yeah. Most of your competitors won't do this. They'll fill out the bottom of their resume with junk. But um... there's a reason they're still looking....

Incidentally my own (technical) resume has exactly two lines of IT skills... each of which I can do a 30+ min speech on. Never had a problem in that area during an interview...

Brilliant!

I may wind up stealing this as an alternative test for more advanced programmers; everything here can be done using the Python Standard library.

And kudos to those of you who suggested in-memory storage vs. writing it out to a table.