geebee

98 ms·

691.
by geebee 10y ago
New Zealand does sound pretty incredible. A massive national park, the size of California, with only 5 million people, and very liveable and appealing cities. Here's the thing. Would New Zealand stay that way if it pursued a policy o
692.
by geebee 10y ago
I read about that as well. I also think that there are different work cultures based on what you have to do. Someone who works in sales may be on the phone quite often. Same for a lot of managers, tech support, people who do demos and pre
693.
by geebee 10y ago
Thanks for posting. That was the first thing that jumped into my head as well. Many of us are choosing between working at home and working in a loud and noisy environment. If programmers generally worked in the environment you described,
694.
by geebee 10y ago
I think the equation is very different if you major in STEM rather than humanities or social sciences. An internship at Surfer would probably help you if you're an English major hoping to break into publishing or magazines, and I don&
695.
by geebee 10y ago
I'm coming late to this discussion, but there is one point I'd like to make. Our "interviews" in the world of software engineering, are immensely different from "interviews" in the standard sense of the word.
696.
by geebee 10y ago
Wow, people here are being pretty hard on this article. I'm sure everyone here on HN has read their share of programming language flamewars, and this one doesn't come close. It's pretty mild. I also think it gets something
697.
by geebee 10y ago
True, though many of the initiatives for more STEM workers (through visa programs) focus more on graduate students, especially at the PhD level. There are various exemptions to visa caps for people with grad degrees, and there was a propos
698.
by geebee 10y ago
Check this out. http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/ SFUSD has a large number of very high performing public schools, though there are also still a lot of middling and severely underperforming sch
699.
by geebee 10y ago
That's really interesting, and I'm not surprised to hear it. There was a study a while back concluding that it doesn't matter where you go to college - provided you major in STEM. It's a little more complicated than tha
700.
by geebee 10y ago
I agree. I recall a scene from Stefan Zweig's "world of yesterday", where he describes how a group of young men, armed with clubs, stormed a student debate and beat the speakers severely. The police, honoring an old traditio
701.
by geebee 10y ago
Glad to see this post. One other thing I'd add - I read a very good mantra for software development, that I've adapted a bit in my head. Your data will outlast your application Your application will outlast your framework Your fra
702.
by geebee 10y ago
I don't really agree with this passage: "Back-end developers often attribute front-end expertise not to mastery but to alchemy, wizardry or magic. Its adepts don’t succeed through technical skill so much as a kind of web whisperin
703.
by geebee 10y ago
Can I recommend you read the life and times of Frederick Douglass, or perhaps some of his assorted essays and sermons? He addresses this in considerable depth.
704.
by geebee 10y ago
The problem with succinct and clever phrases is that they can be used to shut down discussion of important issues. It's such a great reply that people may, not wishing to appear to be one of these naive souls who romanticize a past tha
705.
by geebee 10y ago
Every now and then, things go haywire in the web world. The last time I recall feeling this way was 2005-ish, when Java frameworks took off. Previously, small to medium sized java apps used servlets, jsp, jdbc, and something along the line
706.
by geebee 10y ago
The median salary for a registered nurse in San Francisco is $133,650 a year. How easy would it be for a software engineer on an H1B to become a registered nurse instead? As a citizen, I could do this, in response to my interests and marke
707.
by geebee 10y ago
I'm glad to see IEEE take a principled stand against expansion of the H1B program, and I'm particularly glad to see them take on the claim that support for the H1B program is equivalent to support for immigrants or immigration. Un
708.
by geebee 10y ago
I might be able to give you an actual moral reason. Let me start with the concept of free participation in labor markets. I think there's a strong moral case to be made that people should be free to choose what they wish to study, and
709.
by geebee 10y ago
I feel ambivalence about formal licensing, but I do agree this would be a positive element. I would be, even 15 years after the fact, perfectly happy to study intensely for an exam on basic math, data structures, and algorithms, similar to
710.
by geebee 10y ago
I don't think the technical test is a problem per se, it's the way we implement it in our field. I think it's perfectly reasonable that actuaries take an exam that shows knowledge of vector calculus. I don't think it wo
711.
by geebee 10y ago
I'll be the first to admit that money doesn't go far in San Francisco, and that developers actually aren't especially well paid given the cost of living and the constant claims of a "critical" shortage talent. I liv
712.
by geebee 10y ago
yep, and as I mentioned above, what percentage of those surfers are actually regulars in sharky places? We're talking about a very small slice of the total surfing population.
713.
by geebee 10y ago
The shark one is misleading, I agree. Out here in California, most people never go more than ankle deep in the water if that. Those who do surf usually only do it occasionally, in very un-sharky places. How many people really surf regularl
714.
by geebee 10y ago
Interesting idea, but probably the wrong decision. In my own life, I've noticed that this approach just doesn't work for me. Rudeness or cheating in response to rudeness and cheating doesn't win. The thing about the shamel
715.
by geebee 10y ago
You're right, I did mix up insertion sort and quick sort.
716.
by geebee 10y ago
Could you implement insertion sort from scratch at a whiteboard in less that 45 minutes? Including getting the partitioning part right? It's tricky, and at a whiteboard, it's particularly difficult to get right (well, for me it
717.
by geebee 10y ago
I think that tax exemptions for universities should come with a lot more strings attached. These exemptions are actually worth considerably more per undergraduate that even the best state funded public institutions receive per undergraduat
718.
by geebee 10y ago
It's a clever quote, but I've always thought this turned a bit on an ambiguity in the word "unreasonable" in the first and second half of the sentence.
719.
by geebee 10y ago
See, that I'm not sure about. I think very good engineers, the sort who rise to often informal leadership positions, may be harder to find and create more value than general managers. These engineers can be a huge factor in the succes
720.
by geebee 10y ago
I agree, and I'd go one step farther. This post warns of the risk of "Gaining a bad manager, losing a good engineer" I actually think companies should even be concerned about "gaining a good manager, losing a good eng

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