If by "passive" you mean a lot of fun, I play bass & gig around town as well as running a non-commercial internet radio station - goatradio.org. Being a musician / audio engineer generates a decent amount of cash.
Angular is rock-solid and I think its biggest feature is refactoring. It's not a sexy feature nor anything you can market but refactoring front-end code is something we all do everyday.
It is incredibly easy to refactor logic into services and modules and hold to the fundamental systems architecture principle: low coupling and high cohesion.
My only advice is this: if you're doing in something in Angular that seems too hard or kludgy, you're doing it wrong... and somebody on Stack Overflow has already answered your question.
The current style of tech interviews makes it very difficult. A lot of places have a long interview that you end up burning a whole day on it and you only have so many vacation and sick days
I agree it's a pain, but I work in the industry and most people I have known don't quit without another job lined up. Facebook gives 21 vacation days; Google (relatively stingy) gives 15 or more. Plus you can call in sick (I don't recommend this but if you're out the door anyway it's an option). I just don't think it's good practical advice to follow the procedure in this article.
Yep. Say you have ten days of vacation per year (welcome to the USA!) This means you can “get serious” with max 10 companies per year. I’ve in the past interviewed with that many companies in only a month! You need to be very creative with your time to do serious interviewing while still working.
Selenium or [insert favorite tool here] is pretty good - the tough parts are:
1) architecting the app to be testable
2) realizing that test engineering is a rather tricky discipline
I personally hate the "take home test" approach to interviewing. I've had multiple such tests that take anywhere from 10-25 hours to complete because simply answering the question isn't enough; you need to give textbook correct answers and your code must be formatted perfectly with the requisite comments and documentation. In short, it's pretty similar to an upper-level college course's final exam; however, in college, you can get a good grade with a few mistakes; in interviewing, you get rejected for a few mistakes. I'm done giving a company 15 hours of my time just to get to a first interview; this is arrogant, condescending, and completely devalues my time.
The reality of hiring is you're going to make mistakes, like every other part of running a business. Even in an extended "interview" such as dating for a potential life partner, people make mistakes so I'm not sure how the hiring process can be quantified to remove said error. The interview process is so excruciating these days I often hate the companies I'm talking with.
While we're at it, the skills requirements listed with jobs today are astounding. My experience is that a company wants to hire a programmer with at least a journeymen's level of expertise in 6-8 skills. If you have 5 and are comfortable you can learn the other 3, you're dead in the water. Let's be honest, the latest Javascript framework isn't that complicated. The latest NoSQL database isn't that hard to learn.
The truly hard parts of joining a new company are learning how projects are managed, getting the political lay of the land, finding a sherpa to answer your questions in the first couple of weeks, and learning where you fit within the organization.
If only there was some way that people could spend a couple of years proving they had basic competence, so they didn't have to prove basic skills on every interview.
Why did I get a CS degree if every interview starts with the assumption that I'm an unqualified loser?
Why are those people getting CS degrees? Shouldn't they get flunked out?
When schools allow students to do coding projects in groups, it's possible to graduate with ZERO ability, provided you can find someone competent to partner with.
Right, exactly. That's what I'm saying, I don't know what you're disagreeing with. Having a CS degree does not guarantee programming competence. Some people get CS degrees who shouldn't get CS degrees. Some students probably should get flunked out who don't flunk out. Some students graduate from perfectly fine colleges with good grades but zero ability. It happens, hence fizzbuzz. Some people are just naturally good at marketing themselves, and show up with multiple degrees from top-tier schools, vast lists of publications, with years (if not decades) of industry experience on their resumes in important-sounding positions doing impressive and difficult-sounding tasks, and can't code their way out of a paper bag. Hence fizzbuzz.
Why are universities graduating people who can't pass programming 101? Why are they so grossly negligent? They diluted the value of my degree, by graduating too many clueless people.
I did lots of problem sets, homework, and coding projects in school. Why do I have to do it again FOR EACH JOB INTERVIEW? Especially since the projects are usually less on-topic than the ones I did in school.
I.e., I do a homework project for a class, and if I don't get an A, I usually get a reason why not. I do a coding interview project, it goes into a black hole and I never hear from them again.
I think it's because CS and software development are different things with some overlap if you Venn diagrammed it. It doesn't necessarily mean the university is negligent or incompetent. It means that what constitutes the content of a good CS education doesn't map to in-the-trenches software development. It also probably means the schools reward and incentivize different things than a software development firm does.
We'll be writing yet another goddamn reporting system for marketing. However, the coffee will be exquisitely made by Blue Bottle's autonomous cybernetic drone.
I have written a reporting system at nearly every company I've worked for. I've talked to programmers who wrote reporting systems in the 70's and 80's, and are still writing them today. I think you're right, we will still be writing reporting systems well into the future.
This is hilarious - I just started my internship at a company and a few of the people in the department are working on....you guessed it reporting systems!
A lot of the other things that are going on are fun things though, and being an intern and working on a project - from scratch is a rewarding experience.
