If you were going to hire a programmer to work for/with you, what level of CS education would you prefer them to have and why? This assumes all other things are equal which, of course, they never are in real life. Self taught? Bachelor's? Masters? PHD? The important part of the answer is the why, not the level. I'm looking for how im...
My career goal is to become architect. I would like to know from people who made such transition what are the best suggestions/hints/recommendation that would be critical in making the change. Thanks ...
Has anyone been looking for a job and received feedback from recruiters since the beginning of this year about which skills are most in demand in the United States (preferably New York)? I realize a similar question was asked in September 2008 but I'm specifically concerned with any updated information since that point in light of how m...
Hi Stackers After reading Bil Simser blog post Being a Better Developer... in 6 months I agree with his headlines which are: • Reading • Writing • Speaking • Community • Learning • Code, Code, Code and more code But I’ve a specific question "How to be a better database developer (specially Sql-Server developer)" and ...
I'm an 18 year old programmer, rounding off my senior year in high school and about to enter college. I have a decent amount of experience in a variety of languages, the most prevalent being C# and Python in the desktop programming space, and PHP with MySQL in web development. Currently I have an internship at a small company working on...
I'm in a situation where I got a job as a developer and there is no mentor or anything. This is my first software job. I'm 24 and working on a BS in Computer Information Science. I have experimented with some languages on my own time, took some classes, and did a few IT internships and software is definitely the career for me. I didn't l...
I am a junior dev in terms of commercial experience (had a short job - 3 months, doing .NET). Although in all the time I have been at home/job hunting, etc, I have learnt loads and written lots of code for myself and others, hopefully putting me in the mid level developer bracket. What I am curious about is whether a junior developer (g...
One of my colleagues once told me that when you hit 40 it's a lot more difficult to find a programming gig. You need to: own your own company become really specialized or go into management I'm 40 now, and am wondering does anybody see any truth to this? And if so, how are you enhancing your value as you age? Personally, I went do...
Given the climate that this economy has created where every IT budget line is more closely scrutinized it seems like we as developers often need to work even harder to convince decision makers of why they should upgrade or go for the latest and greatest this or that. Given where things have been headed it seems like a very pertinent subj...
Hello, all, It looks like performance reviews are used in virtually any organization. You know, those lists of objectives, values, estimates (achieved, partially achieved, exceeded etc.) And then you'll get bonus and (or) promotion by results. Or won't get. But there are certain objections against these reviews. E.g. from Joel Spolsky...
I think I have reached a point, in my career, where I want to get as excited as I did when got my head around programming. . I need excitement and a new challenge (that can still pay the bills). Do I :- Stay contracting - most boring option, been doing this for a long time now. Manage a team and become more a designer, orchestrator ...
I've seen this many times. A junior developer grows in skills and knowledge to reach some intermediate-advanced stage after about 6-9 years in the field and starts wondering "what next?". I'm collating a top-level view of a handful of paths or archetypes for such a person to consider: The Guru: This is a "growth in depth" approach, one...
I started programing in 'Jan 2006', with .NET framework as a desktop application developer. In the same company I worked for exactly two years with VB.NET (desktop and web applications (asp.net)). Actually I changed my job due to some problematic situation in the company. When I was facing these problematic situations my frined offered...
I've been working in web development and design for the past 8 years, which breaks down like this: Graphic Design: 8 years; HTML/CSS/Javascript: 8 years; ASP (VBScript) and SQL Server: 6 years; XML, XSLT, XPATH: 2 years; ASP.NET: Occasional exposure in VB and C#, nothing to write home about. I'd like to move on, but instead of advancin...
What do you guys think of working with dead/legacy or proprietary programming languages? After working on it for a number of years, it seems like your chances of getting to another position is almost impossible because you're not up to date with anything and it's almost a throw-away on your resume. Upsides: expert status: if you're ...
Learning just another language is not much work. However, getting familiar with all the supporting libraries is veeeery expensive and actually you cannot go too far without that. Would you consider a worthy career investment to learn java once you already are an accepted professional of .NET or you would rather invest the same amount of...
I've always been a software development nerd. I got started with web development (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc) and continued with PHP, Java and C#. All along I never seemed to become really good at coding; when I solved problems it was equal parts copy-paste-customize and spending too much time on what seemed to be basic stuff. I thought ...
Currently, I work for a company as a software developer that is shamefully overpays me. I earn about 3x the market average. But anything I do is futile. There is a lot of opportunity to make our sw product great but the short-sightedness of management prevents any success. It is very frustrating to see the great opportunities of prod...
I've been involved in programming for 15 years on small projects such as utilities, web sites, and desktop applications. I'm now working on larger projects and my supervisors are very happy - but I'm not. It was fine in the old days to throw something together and the number of lines of code were relatively small. But now I'm concerne...
I graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Programming in May 2008, with my concentration in Java. I also know a little VB and SQL. Now that I am in the Real World, I'm finding out that the supply of Java programmers exceeds the demand. To wit: I need something to learn that will get me a job. I've slowly learned PHP, HTML, and C on my ow...