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.
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.
Everyone wants to act like Obama ran some sort of grassroots campaign. The man was a millionaire and a politician before he ran for president. What we have in our country is the illusion of democracy. We can elect anyone we want, so long as he or she comes from the static pool of wealthy, corrupt, brainwashed offspring of existing politicians.
Disclaimer: I don't have a problem with rich people, I just have a problem with the fact that if one isn't born into wealth and/or politics, it is for all practical purposes impossible to even get on the ballot.
I used to subscribe to the theory that everyone should vote. Now that I am older and smarter, I still vote, I just realize that the chances of it making things better in my country are slim to none.
meh, Bill Clinton came from a pretty middle-class background; I mean, I think my family has more financial resources than his.
I mean, sure, coming from wealth is a huge advantage; Few people go from being that poor to being one of the most powerful people in the world, and, of course, if you weren't born with the money, you have to come up with it in other ways.
Now, I agree that far too many of our politicians seem to come from the same pool; I'm just saying that they do let new blood in, from time to time.
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.
But even a summarily dismissive response is better than silence (click 'reply', paste in "Sorry, your cover letter doesn't indicate a good fit", click 'send').
While I agree with the author that there does seem to be people just wasting time in the market, I did have the same reaction as you to the phone screen numbers. 8 out of 10 of my phone screens convert into an offer. There is a very human element at the point of a phone screen and maybe that has something to do with the numbers. If the author was just doing an experiment and not truly interested in the position, it may have show through in the phone screen or there could have been other issues with it. It seems weird to me to get to the phone interview and just waste time.
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.
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.
1) If you look at my github account, you can see that I've contributed quite a lot to open source over a long period of time. I've got a long history of 'helping'. Looking at your github account... oh wait...
2) Good point. Can't argue that.
3) Maybe. Maybe not. It would need to be investigated further.
4) I made those suggestions based on code I've got in production. Other than Timeline, I suggested two libraries, both of which would remove a lot of code duplication in the Gantt plugin.
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.
