Because even at this point, Net Neutrality is still less well protected by the EU than it was under our own national legislation.

I cannot in all good conscience support a union that has the power to undermine our civil rights. If Brits don't want those civil rights, that's their choice.

Brussels is not a force for good simply because in this case it would be an improvement for the Brits.

If you have concrete examples of poor civil rights in the UK, by all means share them, I'm not pretending things are perfect here, and would be happy to get a better grasp of where things could be improved.

Likewise the continued push for mass surveillance (see: DRIPA, the defunct Draft Communications Data Bill and the seemingly inevitable Investigatory Powers Bill) is another - the most recent legislative attempts have been to make legal what the state has been doing illegally for many, many years. What worries me is that there is no common-law right to privacy in English law; our modern privacy rights stem almost exclusively from the ECHR and the EU.

The recent clampdown on the rights of trades unions is a third example. Despite an historic low number of days lost to industrial action, the government has been making it much harder to legally strike, or even to _fund_ trades unions (for example, imposing high thresholds on ballots and attempting to remove the option of payroll funding for union membership).

It's 2016, people treat laptops like any common electronic household item, and the majority of non-Apple laptops, especially Dells, start to look pretty ragged after less than 2 years.

That's why MacBooks tend to have a decent resell value, whereas you cannot even give other old laptops away.

In 2010, I received a brand new Mac Mini. We had at that point been using the Dell laptop to run Hulu and Netflix, and I decided to swap in the Mac Mini. Turns out the Mac Mini couldn't run 1080p without chugging a little bit, but the laptop from four years earlier had no problem keeping up.

It mostly sat in a drawer, as I needed something faster for video and audio work. Over the years I'd try out Windows upgrades as they came through. Another fun point - It came with Windows XP. When the Win 7 beta came out, I installed that just to see - it ran surprisingly well. Back in the drawer it went until Windows 8's preview came out - that also installed without any issue, and ran surprisingly well. When Windows 10 rolled around, it actually upgraded from the Windows 8 beta to a full-fledged installation of Windows 10. Never ended up paying for an upgrade to the operating system!

The internal wifi did burn out at some point, and I'm sure the screen was dimmer than when I'd first gotten it, but other than that? You could browse the internet and run some basic apps.

We finally donated it a couple of months ago. I can't argue about the resell value of Dell laptops, but that E1505 had build quality in spades, and better longevity than the equivalent Mac. Can you even put the latest OS X on a Macbook from a decade ago?

All of Apple's products are essentially business grade, and you're definitely paying for the premium.

People tend to overrate Apple's build quality simply because it really is miles ahead of anything else one can purchase at Best Buy or other retail stores.

And IMO Thinkpad,latitudes and elite books have much better keyboard that the current MacBook, but apple still wins in screen and battery performance

I sell old laptops. Apple and non Apple laptops sell very well. It's true that Macs get more money but it's not true there isn't a market for non Apple laptops

It's kinda shocking that PG omitted that part, because I've seen it happen several times.

(Read michealochurch's comment further down on this page, he pretty much nails it.)

This is not unique to open source, or tech in general. This is a generic social issue.

That inertia and lack of motivation is the reason I wouldn't hire you. Because besides languages, your job as an engineer entails constantly learning and trying new things in order to find the best solution for any given challenge. I need to trust you, the engineer to do that, because that is your job. The actual coding is just the formal expression of that job.

If you don't do that by your own volition, I might as well give the work to a much cheaper coder in an off shore sweatshop.

Disagreed. Studying your way through a breadth-first search tree of available knowledge means you're trying to dip your toes into everything and your neck into nothing, probably just to impress prospective employers. Domain expertise requires focus, which requires going through some portions of the available-knowledge tree depth-first, or having sufficiently well-developed research abilities to select a goal node and search backwards to find the exact breadth and depth necessary to reach that node from your starting point.

What I am always asked is how many YEARS of PAID experience I have with a given technology. No one ever asks what I actually accomplished during those years - whether the product was well received, whether the code I wrote crashed, whether I got any raises or positive performance reviews, what the reviews in the press had to say about the products I wrote.

Experience for which I was not paid also does not count. Especially galling, not long ago a recruiter was convinced that I had been unemployed for several years. "No, I own my own corporation. I'm self-employed. I develop products for retail sale." "Who pays you to do this?" "No one. I write applications that I sell myself." "So you've been unemployed for three years?"

At that point I just hung up on him.

Actually I invest roughly $1,500.00 per year on technical books, and deduct that money as a business expense, specifically so I can stay competitive. That really is all I require to do the work I'm asked to do.

What gets me down is that I can do all kinds of stuff a lot better than those who have many years of experience. Just because you were paid to write code for several years, does not mean you write code well. I've worked with many colleagues who were really quite clueless.

"But you can't be arsed to make that small investment in yourself before applying for a new job?"

Bills don't pay themselves. Why can't you, the employer, be arsed to make that small investment in your new employee? You're the one with the capital.

"Your job as an engineer entails constantly learning and trying new things in order to find the best solution"

Exactly, job. As in getting paid for it. Not sure why you think it's a duty. A sacrifice that employees must make for you.

"I might as well give the work to a much cheaper coder in an off shore sweatshop."

Enjoy the results. :)

If you're a python developer, it wouldn't make sense for you to apply for a ruby job, a nodejs job, a C++ job, and a java job - thus requiring 4 books.

Instead, you should apply to 4 companies looking for python developers, then you need one book at most, unless you've already master the language in which case you don't need any books.

===

Coming from the companies perspective, if I have 10 applicants for a job, the first round of people to get cut will be those who don't have experience with our tech stack. If I have other applicants who already are familiar with it, it wouldn't make sense to hire someone who would need to learn a new language first.

> Why can't you, the employer, be arsed to make that small investment in your new employee?

If there is only one person applying for the job that would be the case. But that never happens. So it's your choice to have that opinion, but understand that not being familiar with the languages the company you are applying to uses will get you ranked last among all the applicants - the most qualified candidates will be interviewed first, and only if no one else panned out would it make sense to hire the candidate needing to learn a new programming language before they can actually start.

This approach to hiring sacrifices long-term productivity gains for short-term productivity gains. A really smart and experienced developer who doesn't know your tech stack may be less productive for the first few weeks, but after that time they could become far more productive than your "Python developers" by leveraging their superior thinking skills, debugging skills, CS skills, communication skills, etc. But if you never give them a chance, you'll never know what you're missing.

I really question whether that exists or not. The kind of developer you are referring to by and large knows how good they are and has no problem finding a job with a tech stack they are already familiar with. Additionally, this kind of person wouldn't move to a new language without trying it out first and likely comparing its features to a handful of other languages before making a calculated decision to switch. And by this point in time they probably have enough experience with the language to be able to make it through an interview because most interview questions tend to be more algorithmic in nature than language specific.

I completely agree that the kind of person you speak of in the long term could be a much better hire, but in the real world I don't think it's applicable. Let's say this kind of person is 1/100 applications where the applicant doesn't have experience on the desired tech stack. For most companies it is not even remotely feasible to interview 100 people with little to no chance of getting the job to find the diamond in the rough.

Like 16-bit assembly code?

PC-NFS?

How to diagnose a serial cable problem with a breakout box and an oscilloscope?

How to calibrate a CCD image sensor?

So how are today's iOS coders going to feed their hungry children when no one remembers what an iPhone even was anymore?

I quite commonly point out that I can debug anything. I'm also quite good at performance optimization as well as reverse engineering.

The API, programming language, platform or what have you - the tech stack - are all orthogonal to my being one of the very best in the business at debugging.

It's not like no one needs their code debugged, but they don't seem to recognize that until it's way too late.

What they ask for is "How many years of Python experience do you have?" If I say "Less than one" - which is what I actually have - I don't get an offer. Were I able to claim that I had five years experience, I'd have a job.

What I'd like to see, is an interview where someone handed me a buggy Python program, then asked me to fix it.

While that does happen, it is quite rare.

For example I was once asked whether I knew how to write Mac OS X Apps. I pointed out that I had been writing Macintosh code since 1986.

I did not get the job because the hiring manager did not believe me, when I claimed I knew how to write Mac OS X programs.

From time to time, while I don't come right out and say so explicitly, I make it plainly apparent that I regard the hiring manager as a damnfool idiot.

That's not to imply that one must understand computer programming to employ computer programmers. I've had lots of really good managers - consulting clients too - who really didn't have the first clue about computers.

However, there is quite a lot more to management, than understanding what your employees actually do.

Most commonly I'm asked to write the Macintosh equivalent of some existing Windows program. While I know lots of stuff about Mac and Windows, it's quite common that I don't have a clue about anything else that that program requires, other than the core OS and standard library calls.

The way it commonly works is that I'll apply for a consulting gig. If I'm asked to interview, I'll buy the required book after I have agreed to interview, but before the interview takes place. That means I only have a few days to read the book.

You'd think that would not work but actually it works just fine.

What does not work at all is when someone wants to know how many years of experience I already have with a given technology. "None at all, but I can buy an O'Reilly book for just thirty bucks."

So hiring you on that basis alone would be gamble, and the odds for that gamble are hysterically bad. They have better odds taking a year's junior developer salary straight to the casino.

The number of people claiming to be able to do the job is a multitude of those actually able to do the job.

If you are actually "in a similar position", it should take you less than two months to get out of that position. Teach yourself a stack that is in demand, build a project and put it out there (Github, App store, whatever) and if you show any talent and skill the odds are you'll be hired within a month.

Just waving your CS degree around isn't going to make anything happen.

Fuck it, you've just graduated in November, you have no proven skills and you're already whining about not getting hired?

Thanks for the advice. I am currently working on that.

Quite commonly I am asked for my Github link, but then regarded as unqualified because I don't have one.

That's because you can download my source from my own website.

I have some pretty good reason to believe that many of those who want to know my Github, don't know what Github actually is. That is, not only do they not inspect anyone's Github source, if pressed, they could not explain the difference between a github and a hubcap.

Almost universally, one is required to have at least on App in the App Store or Google Play.

There's no specific requirement as to what the app actually does, whether it works well, whether it's source code makes sense to anyone, whether it gets good reviews - just that one just that that special magic ticket into a mobile development job.

Again, I have good reason to believe that few ever actually so much as look at the app store or google play pages, let alone download, install and run the app.

Have you ever heard someone say "I'd like to work with you so we can find a way that you can drive a brand new car right off the lot. How about I give you a thousand dollar trade-in on your totally thrashed beater?"

I actually had a Toyota saleswoman say just that to me. The reason I was shopping for a new car, is that my thousand dollar trade-in was so unreliable that I was to be fired if I didn't buy a new car Real Soon Now.

Now consider that many recruiters are really good at just that kind of sales.

It's not that they try to sell anything to the candidates. They sell their, uh, "service" to the hiring managers, by somehow convincing them that its worth paying them tens of thousand of dollars in commissions for placing just one coder.

Yep, and that turned out to be a fucking disaster. So we learned how to filter for programming skills, and the results were utterly depressing. The vast majority of those "engineers who are unable to find work" couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.

That applies to the majority of applicants unless we start filtering for actual proven experience. Trying to find someone inexperienced who's worth investing in training is a truly depressing exercise most smaller companies really can't afford.

Is it really that much to ask that an unemployed engineer who wants a job coding in language X makes a bit of an effort to learn the language by themselves? Employers really don't expect 'paid' experience in something that's brand new, but what they do expect is self-motivation. If you're only willing to learn X when your boss tells you, you're either going to be a pain to work with or you're covering up for your lack of skill.

You only learn a language really well over years. That's your paid on-the-job-training. All most hiring managers look for is some sign of skill and motivation.

Not to mention the reality that the "cult of new", as we see it on HN and in the start-up scene really fucks over most non-startup employers. Most developers don't stick with any company for more than two or three years because they want green field projects in the latest sexy language and framework, not maintain "boring legacy code" (we're talking code no more than two years old...) in a stack that's just been declared harmful, crap or whatever by the HN hipster engineering in-crowd.

So you train someone, invest time in someone, allow them to learn from costly mistakes on real world projects, and just when they are at the peek of their knowledge and productivity, they fuck off again. Regardless of how well they get paid and treated.

We bitch a lot about employers not investing in training, but the flip side is that we have actively contributed to a culture of zero loyalty.

As far as I can tell, there is a real scarcity of actually talented engineers, but employees and employers are stuck in some destructive loop that just makes the problem a thousand times worse.

But that doesn't help me get a job. No one has paid me to work with any of those, see.

If I can somehow get a job through some other means, then yes, all of my self-study is a huge help to me, to my coworkers and my clients.

What people actually ASK of me, when they think they're looking for "actual proven experience", is "how many years of experience" I have with a given technology.

No one EVER asks what I actually did with it, whether I shipped a product as a result, whether my code actually worked, whether it got good reviews, or sold well.

If I weren't such a nice guy, I know damn well I could totally fabricate my resume, and I'd have $250k and an office with a door I could shut in a heartbeat.

It would actually work really well, because you know - I do invest in my own training. So I really could do the work, even if my resume were fabricated.

But I'm a nice guy, so I don't fabricate my resume.

That sounds horribly Randian.

Something about the tone of absolute certainty and the cringe-worthy attempts at humor of Peopleware already rubbed me the wrong way, and I absolutely loathe novels that put convincing the reader of some greater thruth over literary quality (or just entertainment). I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate this novel, even if I probably agree with 90% of the underlying ideas.