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> Do you see any other professions having to do that in order to stay employable? Yes, most professionals do. Licensed professionals--doctors, lawyers, veteri

> Do you see any other professions having to do that in order to stay employable? Yes, most professionals do. Licensed professionals--doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, civil engineers, teachers, etc.--are usually required to get a certain number of Continuing Education Units every year to retain their professional license. The specific requirements differ from state to state.

VexXtreme 13y ago
Many professions enjoy employer paid continuing education. A totally different ballgame. Staying up every night committing to Github in hopes of landing a job is a terrible terrible thing. I know because I used to do it when I was young and stupid. The only reason why I was able to land my first dev job fresh out of college is because I had an open source project that I built in my own free time. If it hadn't been for that, it's unlikely I would've got the job and that's why I loath the practice so much. 16+ years of formal education down the drain (or 30+ years of work, if you're older), unless you adhere to some arbitrary standards by IT blogosphere keyboard jockeys.
- SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
  >Many professions enjoy employer paid continuing education. Lawyers who work for a firm? Maybe. If they work for themselves, they're stuck paying the bills; continuing education is required in many fields, and yet it's not always reimbursed. >Staying up every night committing to Github in hopes of landing a job is a terrible terrible thing. That's never the "right" thing to do. The right thing to do is to commit to Github because you want to. >16+ years of formal education down the drain (or 30+ years of work, if you're older), unless you adhere to some arbitrary standards by IT blogosphere keyboard jockeys. OP wasn't talking about arbitrary keyword standards. You're tearing down a strawman of your own creation. OP was just talking about whether a developer actually could code, not filtering based on exact keywords. To your comment: Some domains DO take way more work to learn than I would be happy hiring someone with no experience in them. I'm not talking about the fancy JavaScript framework du jour, or experience using a particular database, but actually different domains. Like kernel programming. I wouldn't touch a Java developer with 10 years of experience at enterprise Java for a project that involved kernel-level code. Or game programming. Or Android app programming, even; most Java developers would still take months to get up to speed on Android, if they ever managed adapt to the Android way of thinking at all.
  - nemetroid 13y ago
    >That's never the "right" thing to do. The right thing to do is to commit to Github because you want to. The article presents doing your own projects as a thing you should do. >Or Android app programming, even; most Java developers would still take months to get up to speed on Android, if they ever managed adapt to the Android way of thinking at all. Are you suggesting that it would take an experienced Java programmer several hundred working hours to get up to speed on Android? And that you expect new hires to have worked several hundred hours on Android in their free time instead?
    - SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
      >The article presents doing your own projects as a thing you should do. Well, if you don't want to, and you don't have real experience elsewhere in a domain close enough to what I need, then you won't likely be a developer that I work with, no. >Are you suggesting that it would take an experienced Java programmer several hundred working hours to get up to speed on Android? And that you expect new hires to have worked several hundred hours on Android in their free time instead? Most Android developers work solo, at least the ones I know. If you can find a team to work on somewhere -- some big company that has 4+ people working on an Android project, then maybe they can hire a Java developer and train them on Android. I have no desire to pay a developer for more than 20 hours to learn to do something that shouldn't take more than 4 if he already knew how Android worked (this happened to me, when someone lied and told me they DID know how the Fragments API worked, for instance -- after 20 hours he had a mess of garbage that I threw out). But a solo Android developer probably needs at least two to three months of Android coding experience to really "get" the relatively more obscure parts of Android, yes. Can a Java dev write code on day one? Sure. Can a Java dev start writing production code from day one? Day 14? Not anything I'd want to use. Major exception: Java is Java, and so having someone contribute to an existing, already working app, but staying in the "data mangling" domain, could be done from day one. I'm really talking about knowing how an app should be designed, not whether someone can write code to talk to a database on Android after 10 years of experience writing Java that talked with databases on servers.
  - nicolethenerd 13y ago
- Agathos 13y ago
  Doctors in the US get paid per procedure. I sincerely doubt there is an insurance billing code for time spent reading journal articles.

VexXtreme 13y ago

Many professions enjoy employer paid continuing education. A totally different ballgame. Staying up every night committing to Github in hopes of landing a job is a terrible terrible thing. I know because I used to do it when I was young and stupid. The only reason why I was able to land my first dev job fresh out of college is because I had an open source project that I built in my own free time. If it hadn't been for that, it's unlikely I would've got the job and that's why I loath the practice so much. 16+ years of formal education down the drain (or 30+ years of work, if you're older), unless you adhere to some arbitrary standards by IT blogosphere keyboard jockeys.

SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
>Many professions enjoy employer paid continuing education. Lawyers who work for a firm? Maybe. If they work for themselves, they're stuck paying the bills; continuing education is required in many fields, and yet it's not always reimbursed. >Staying up every night committing to Github in hopes of landing a job is a terrible terrible thing. That's never the "right" thing to do. The right thing to do is to commit to Github because you want to. >16+ years of formal education down the drain (or 30+ years of work, if you're older), unless you adhere to some arbitrary standards by IT blogosphere keyboard jockeys. OP wasn't talking about arbitrary keyword standards. You're tearing down a strawman of your own creation. OP was just talking about whether a developer actually could code, not filtering based on exact keywords. To your comment: Some domains DO take way more work to learn than I would be happy hiring someone with no experience in them. I'm not talking about the fancy JavaScript framework du jour, or experience using a particular database, but actually different domains. Like kernel programming. I wouldn't touch a Java developer with 10 years of experience at enterprise Java for a project that involved kernel-level code. Or game programming. Or Android app programming, even; most Java developers would still take months to get up to speed on Android, if they ever managed adapt to the Android way of thinking at all.
- nemetroid 13y ago
  >That's never the "right" thing to do. The right thing to do is to commit to Github because you want to. The article presents doing your own projects as a thing you should do. >Or Android app programming, even; most Java developers would still take months to get up to speed on Android, if they ever managed adapt to the Android way of thinking at all. Are you suggesting that it would take an experienced Java programmer several hundred working hours to get up to speed on Android? And that you expect new hires to have worked several hundred hours on Android in their free time instead?
  - SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
    >The article presents doing your own projects as a thing you should do. Well, if you don't want to, and you don't have real experience elsewhere in a domain close enough to what I need, then you won't likely be a developer that I work with, no. >Are you suggesting that it would take an experienced Java programmer several hundred working hours to get up to speed on Android? And that you expect new hires to have worked several hundred hours on Android in their free time instead? Most Android developers work solo, at least the ones I know. If you can find a team to work on somewhere -- some big company that has 4+ people working on an Android project, then maybe they can hire a Java developer and train them on Android. I have no desire to pay a developer for more than 20 hours to learn to do something that shouldn't take more than 4 if he already knew how Android worked (this happened to me, when someone lied and told me they DID know how the Fragments API worked, for instance -- after 20 hours he had a mess of garbage that I threw out). But a solo Android developer probably needs at least two to three months of Android coding experience to really "get" the relatively more obscure parts of Android, yes. Can a Java dev write code on day one? Sure. Can a Java dev start writing production code from day one? Day 14? Not anything I'd want to use. Major exception: Java is Java, and so having someone contribute to an existing, already working app, but staying in the "data mangling" domain, could be done from day one. I'm really talking about knowing how an app should be designed, not whether someone can write code to talk to a database on Android after 10 years of experience writing Java that talked with databases on servers.
- nicolethenerd 13y ago
Agathos 13y ago
Doctors in the US get paid per procedure. I sincerely doubt there is an insurance billing code for time spent reading journal articles.