This person (jackg) either does not know or realize that a great software engineer can use any platform, language, and tool to do whatever she needs to achieve. I'm also not a big fan of his own choices of "trendy" technologies. This post almost seems like trolling IMO.
For some context, I work at SeatGeek, Jack's startup, and participate in the later stages of the hiring process referred to in the post.
I think something that a lot of the recruiting/hiring discussions on HN miss is that the hiring process is not only about finding people who are capable of doing the job. It's also about finding people who will thoroughly enjoy doing the job and get along well with the rest of the team.
For example, I spoke to a candidate (in other words he made it through this set of heuristics) whose background was in security and whose primary platform was windows. He was definitely very bright and very well accomplished, but by the end of the interview, I genuinely thought he would have been bored out of his mind at SeatGeek.
Similarly, if you don't use at least one of OSX, git, ruby or python, there's a decent chance SeatGeek just isn't for you. An important caveat, that should probably be in the post, is that if your answer to any of the specific-tech related questions is "no, but I saw that you use X at SeatGeek, and I'm interested in learning more about it", that's probably equivalent to a "yes".
I'm not sure if I can totally agree with the author. I understand his pain, but email isn't the most secured place. If your email is being "watched" by someone else, then that someone else can access other web services that you own WITHOUT requiring to type passwords! I know that it is very rare to have your email being watched, but in security, even the most rare case should be taken into consideration. It's a trade off between user experience and security. This is something you find very often in software engineering.
> If your email is being "watched" by someone else, then that someone else can access other web services that you own WITHOUT requiring to type passwords!
The person watching your email can ALREADY DO THAT NOW by clicking on the "I forgot my password" link, intercepting the reset email, and then setting a new password and logging in.
That assumes someone has live access to your email. If someone has a recent enough dump (or simply a mail you forwarded yourself, because you didn't understand the security implications), then the "forgot password" button does really provide more security than login tokens inside the URL.
Rails (really Ruby) has only one thing going for it, as far as I'm concerned:
The norm in the community is to actively refactor.
That's it. When the Rails folks redesign the routes system, not only does my app get cleaner, but I learn stuff about how to write a good DSL. When Blake Mizerany wrote Sinatra, not only did we all get a super simple new tool for prototyping web apps in, like, zero seconds.... but we all learned something about how far you can take the "hello world" simplification trend.
We're all trying to get better at programming. We're all trying to advance the state of the art in software design. And we're all learning from each other, and it's awesome.
In many ways it's just a microcosm of what's happening in the Open Source world at large. Node.js is teaching Ruby devs important stuff, just as the Node authors seem like they probably took a cue or two from Sinatra. It's why I left the Microsoft world years ago.
Loose federations of heterogenous interests with high incentives to integrate are so much more interesting than centralized organizations.
IMNSHO, the norm in the ruby community as of late as not been refactor, but rewrite.
When the rails folk redesign the route system it's not a refactoring cause a refactoring keeps functionalities unchanged, it does not add/remove/change corner cases. Which has happened in all major rails releases and some point ones.
It wasn't a rewrite. The point of TDD-assisted refactoring isn't to not change anything ever, it's to change things in a controlled way and prevent regressions. It was actually pretty interesting to watch carlhuda and the rails team take rails from 2.3 to 3.0.
That simply isn't true. I'd urge you to pick up a copy of Fowler's "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code."
"Refactoring" as a term was defined in that book. It has very much been diluted into "I changed some code because I think this is better," which is a shame because it has a very clear definition.
I should also note that having a test suite allows you to refactor with more confidence, but it's neither a requirement nor changes the definition at all. So a "TDD-assisted refactoring" isn't different from a "refactoring."
It's more productive. You get more done in a shorter amount of time. Not trivially either. Its more about the language (Ruby vs C#) than the Frameworks (in that all the cool shit the Framework lets you do is thanks to the language).
If you knew C really well, and someone said "Hey, you can be more efficient building a website in C#/ASP.NET", would you have that hard a time believing them?
If you knew C really well, and someone said "Hey, you can be more efficient building a website in C#/ASP.NET", would you have that hard a time believing them?
I wouldn't. But if they said that I could write systems code better with Objective-C I'd say prove it.
Unfortunately whenever I see RoR people talk about ROR vs anything else, including ASP.NET MVC, they talk in broad strokes with statements like, "Obviously dynamic languages are far more productive than static ones." Or "People who program in Ruby are much better developers -- which is obvious to prove, because they program in Ruby."
I'm a former ASP.NET MVP, a codebetter.com blogger, I wrote Foundations of Programming, I own a handful of .NET OSS libraries. Yada, yada, yada..
All of that is pretty meaningless, I'm not saying to show off (most of that stuff isn't show off worthy). However, by all accounts, I'm an expert C#/.NET programmer who's been in the thick of of any progressive .NET movement. I know C# and ASP.NET (MVP or WebForms) much, much better than I know Ruby and Rails. Yet, somehow, I'm still more efficient in RoR (and thats only getting more true). I can get as low level about this discussion as you want, it won't change my opinion.
The two big wins for me: I write a ton less code and code is easier to test (this is largely since IoC is a language feature).
There have been a decent number of them recently. Facebook had also previously said that the talent acquisitions are working for them and they plan to keep doing them.
No, Checkout and Enstore are staying with Sofa's JV partner, Acclivity, makers of the US versions of MYOB.
On one hand this stinks because Acclivity has shown little ability to create excellent software. On the other hand, Sofa's development speed is crazy slow. Way too much pixel-pushing.
It's too early to say anything about Office on Windows 8. What Microsoft showed today was Windows 8, not Office. I'm sure Microsoft will has something for Office on Windows 8 with touch interface in mind. So far, I haven't seen any good office productivity applications on touch interface. I hope Microsoft impresses me.
PowerPoint and other presentation apps are naturals for touch. A lot of the stuff our engineers present in SolidWorks would be much easier done with a touchscreen.
The actual document/drawing creation lends itself to a tradional keyboard/mouse UI, but presentation is more intuitive when you can touch the screen and drag or rotate/enlarge an object with your fingers.
That's exactly it - I don't think the userbase cares. (Hell, I think to much of their userbase, "Windows" is as much of a liability as it is an asset.)
That tying-stuff-together mentality is something that has served Microsoft well while they've dominated, but is increasingly a weight around their necks as areas become important that they can't extend domination into.
What we need to focus here is this...despite the decrease in PC sales, Microsoft managed to grow. They did not just grow a little, but they grew tremendously. 30%? that's a huge number for a company like Microsoft. Nonetheless, Apple has reached another huge milestone in their history.
Right, I think the point is this says more good things about Apple and doesn't really say that MS faces impending doom. Both companies are quite impressive, just more so for Apple. To grow a megacap company in double digits is quite a feat.
Their revenue grew 13% yoy and earnings include 5 cents one off tax benefit. Without that earnings still grew about 24% coming out of a recession. What caused Microsoft's share price to fall massively yesterday was that Windows revenues actually decreased, which is rather surprising.
I've been using Bing since I found the Bing Rewards (http://www.bing.com/rewards), which gives you a point per 2 searches and lets you redeem the points for something later on. I have not found myself going back to Google, yet.
Weird that you find them comparable. I've compared the two and Bing's results are just kind of weird (old results and non-related results come up). It's worth 50 cents a day for me to have decent results.
When did you do the comparison? In the summer of '09 when Bing launched I gave it a shot, but just did not like it as much as Google. A few months ago I went back and tried it again, and have not gone back to Google since.
Google have a special case for vanity / people searches. I don't think that searching for yourself would given an accurate representation of the two search engines.
If you really were getting 2 points per search I'd do it, but I just tried it out and it doesn't work that way, you only get points by taking advantage of their offers which are similar to Dropbox's free storage promos and WoW quests:
How do I earn credits?
You earn credits by taking advantage of offers that may include searching or exploring features of Bing. Offers are found in the Rewards credit counter located in the top right of the header on Bing.
And this buried a bit deeper: Search and earn. Earn 1 credit per 5 Bing searches up to 8 a day until Apr 30.
