malaporte

Maybe the deductible part is a fixed amount and not a % of the total bill?

(I have no knowledge of health care in the US - both countries I lived in have free health care)

Any special insight here?

We started doing challenges like this in our hiring process some years ago. Our challenges are open-ended so the time spent on it really is up to the applicant, but you can come up with a good solution in a few hours.

The feedback from candidates (including those we didn't hire) has been extremely good - they much prefer this to puzzles or whiteboard coding sessions.

Note that we give such challenges to candidates after they passed through a phone screen and a first interview with a pair of engineers.

Indeed I remember seeing ads for Chrome on the Paris subway, back when it wasn't yet as ubiquitous as it is now.

Well, I wasn't thinking of specific skills for a given language/framework, but maybe more how those frameworks help you evolve along with the tech landscape.

I started my career around 15 years ago, working on a complex server system written in C++. The important skills back then were all about managing concurrency using mutexes, RW locks, events, and so forth.

Fast forward to now (with lots going on in between), and I find myself working again on server software, but this time the approach is much different: now for dealing with concurrency I'm relying on immutable state, and using Futures or actor systems to coordinate parallel work. It's been years since I've had problems with a deadlock.

Bottom line, it's true that a good programmer doesn't care about language or framework, since he can pick those up pretty fast anyway. But it's a skill that needs practising, and I've seen people neglect this and then regret it later.

I don't think age as a numerical thing is the issue here. The problem is probably more related to people that stopped learning / being interested in new stuff when they landed a stable job. So they've been using the same skill base for a long time, and suddenly they realize they are obsolete.

Sure they may have grown their skills inside that particular silo, and that is worth something, but maybe outside the whole world has taken a different direction.

Never forget that the cool tech you're learning now will be out of fashion in a few years, and completely obsolete a few years more down the road (replace years by months for any JS framework out here :p).

Hmm I'm not sure I agree with that. From my experience the period where family is most likely to be a problem with a demanding job is when kids are very young. The short nights, demanding daycare schedules, having to clean them, feed them, and provide a mostly continuous watch, etc. It's pretty gruesome. If I look around me this tend to happen around 28-30 years old.

Of course family remains #1 priority afterwards, but there is enough flexibility to go along with a demanding job (provided you like said job).

I've been working remotely for the larger part of may "young father years" so I guess this helped a lot, too.

Wow. I've never heard about him, but reading the article I realized he used to live not 500 meters away from my house (a long time ago).

I've been using a Pi running XBMC for about a year. It's connected to a big hard drive. I can copy stuff there from my laptop (movies, music, etc.) It works pretty well; I don't remember having to "service" it in any way since I plugged it in.

It works fine to stream stuff from YouTube, too. Shows for kids, etc. The XBMC remote on my phone is pretty handy too.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it.

You seem to be forgetting the folks writing the code running on those servers...

Yes. If only JetBrains could release an IntelliJ-based IDE for C#, that'd be nice.

Seems pretty interesting. And official MS support for running the whole thing on Mono, right now, isn't that pretty big?

Funny how this post made me realize I've often been confronted with people wanting to implement 'agile' by imposing us to follow strict processes. I'd never seen it that way, even if the irony is pretty obvious.

In my experience, Typescript support in IntelliJ/Webstorm has always been sketchy --- so much that I find it quite unfair that they would mention this as a feature of the paying version.

I still use it, but I often get invalid highlighting, etc.. Then I update to the latest EAP because it's supposed to fix this particular issue... and then other appear. Hmm, annoying...

I tried the VS version as well, and there the highlighting and refactoring works very well... but the editor is waaaay slower so I always give up. Funny because it works fine when working with other languages such as C#.

Hmm technically you don't need an IDE to make good use of Typescript. It works very well as a standalone compiler installed using npm, and you get static type checking etc. which is really the point of Typescript IMHO --- if you don't care for static typing you might as well use JS directly.

Sure, once you've got this you might as well want good auto-completion, refactorings, etc, but this also applies to any language that's not bound to one specific IDE (C++, for example, or Java).