synnik

A big sincere thank you to the author for giving concrete examples of why this is bad, instead of general fearmongering and ranting.

I'm 21 years into my career myself, so the web is younger than my carrer. At this point, I do full stack development as well.

And... I think you are taking on more than you need to for the discussion at hand.

If you are an excellent JS programmer, you don't need to keep up on the latest libraries. You can code what you need yourself. Sure, maybe you do something from scratch that could have been done with a newer library, but the 10 hours you lose there is more than made up by not having to do those 15 hours a week keeping up.

Likewise on your other tech points. Constantly churning your toolkit doesn't speed you up. It slows you down. There is a balance to be found where you keep up "enough", but still focus the majority of your time on delivering work.

I choose to spend a day or so each month trying to keep up, then roll with what I know for a while.

Likewise with some of your other activities. Meetups and business models? They may help you be a consultant, but that is adding yet a 4th role to the topic at hand.

Many of your other points also apply more to a consultant than a heads-down designer/coder.

In general, it sounds like you are trying to be an even rarer breed. More power to ya, but it may be overkill for most people.

I had a course in grad school in which we wrote our own database system, including having to calculate the storage to disk... as in, calculate the sectors, and where you had to break fields to a new sector, and read/write the raw binary data to/from the hard disk.

I have not really had to re-learn file IO since then.

Clearly there are new things to be learned... (do usb sticks even have sectors?)... but having that low-level experience tends to be more than enough for a front-end web developer.

Good. Convince all your peers to do the same.

You are missing the point. There are established mechanisms for change in this country. I grow weary of people acting like we need to rise up and take drastic action, when most people have not even gone through our established processes.

And the new bosses can change. Obama's election was the result of almost nothing other than: "I'm not the status quo." And he won.

So vote out every incumbent in the next election, and the message will get across loud and clear. Maybe the next generation will start with similar problems, but they just got told clearly that if they want to keep their jobs, we want CHANGE.

And politicians do what it takes to get re-elected. A clear message that change is desired will change this country.

Like, vote in the upcoming elections?

This article raises red flags on the author's credibility. This looks less like a truthful account of a story, and more like a frustrated small company who had a partnership go bad, and are trying to defame their partner.

A whole web site, with linkbait headlines, set up to tell one story? Their about page doesn't even say they are trying to start a discussion... it just rehashes the story. With a few other pages to give a token appearance that they will tell more stories later.

I am sure there was fault on both sides, and I am equally sure the other side would have a vastly different story.

But this whole site sure looks like juvenile vengeance.

If you complete phone screens on 1 out of every 10 inquiries you send, you are doing very well in my opinion.

If those phone screens do not turn into full interviews or offers, that is a statement on how they went, not on company responsiveness.

Frankly, I don't think your stats show a lack of response at all. I think they are very reasonable, as some level of non-responsiveness is natural, when you account for the fact that you gave them enough information to summarily dismiss you from consideration if you don't match their needs or culture.

I also wonder what may have been different if this was not placed in the context of a very public experiment. How many of the purchases were political statements?

I think the same model needs to be employed, without any commentary, to get a true measure of the mechanism.

Some suggestions:

1) If you are going to suggest such a massive scope of changes, offer to help instead of just dumping a list out there.

2) Check to see if the poster on HN is actually the author of the article. Doesn't look like it in this case, so you may be talking into a vacuum.

3) I love that timeline widget. But it is one of the most un-intuitive and complicated things I have ever seen. I recommend re-coding its functions into a simpler library vs. adding even more complexity to timeline.

4) Dependencies can get evil. Your suggestions add quite a lot of complexity into footprint of plugin. I fear that the end result might look good to a coder, but be a bit of a nightmare to actually use in a production environment.

This may be the best example I have ever seen of a great idea that has been completely destroyed by a horrible choice of implementation.

Highcharts' zoomable graphs are a killer feature at the moment. They are not difficult to use, and I use them to show 30 days worth of data (2880 points per graph) in my monitoring apps. They work on mobile and web out of the box, too.

I'm unlikely to even considerer another library until they match that feature.

I don't see a serious problem with a low retention rate from reading HN articles. I do not come here to memorize every item that flies through... I probably read 50 items a week on HN, but the reason I come back is for the 2-3 items per week that make me re-evaluate what I am doing, and cause me to do it better.

Could you set it up so we can input our own Facebook ID instead of having to grant your app access?

I personally have the entire app platform disabled on my account, and do not intend to turn it back on.

Asimov hashed through all this quite thoroughly in the Foundation series.

But it is always interesting when we catch up to classic sci-if and work towards actual implementations of what was pure imagination only a short time ago.