@Ampt you're only now bumping into this question? This is one of the biggest problems with college; for all the good it does (lots) this is something people should try bumping into sooner

@JimmyHoffa obviously buy a house, get married, and have 2.5 kids

@enderland Have a third kid with someone other than your spouse?

@durron597 hmmm

@enderland no no- that's the womans job, the man gets to choose their job...right? right? O_O (don't kill me @AshleyNunn, I was kidding, feckin' honest I'd be the stay-at-home if my wife could generate my income)

@durron597 eesh, it's obvious who here works in the financial industry

@AshleyNunn this statement confuses me, but its' been that type of day

@AshleyNunn would beat the hell out of being surrounded by padded walls yet expected to sit still and wonder about the appropriate color for them (chartreuse? Next time I'm demanding something in periwinkle...)

I guess I have no idea what it means

@durron597 so my work has M-R short (15 min) strength training periodically throughout the day, I've been going to that

@AshleyNunn what is a "wife-person" ?

it means she was married to another woman

oh

I'm confused in "wife" vs "wife-person" I guess

@AshleyNunn wait, you're questioning whether you had one of those? Oh dearie, this neurological thing is much worse than we all thought..

@AshleyNunn ahhhh. ok that makes more sense

@JimmyHoffa I do have an interview this week.

@AshleyNunn pah! and sit on hold until 6:30 only to get transferred by the last person in the office to the "We're closed right now, our business hours are noon to three" recorded message? Useful that..

@AshleyNunn, you live at Canada? How is it like?

@durron597 No blow dart guns. Good rule of thumb for interviewing.

@durron597 you are the interviewer? or interviewee :)

@enderland The latter

@AshleyNunn, I'm trying to relocate, go me! So I'm curious to talk to actual people living there, about how is living there.

@durron597 oh fun!

@durron597 decided a tiny shop where you're treated shit and the management are clearly on laudanum wasn't quite your ticket to a Mistress?

I missed that

@JimmyHoffa Well, they reached out to me, too. Sent me a personal email, not one of those mass spam email Amazon keeps sending me.

@durron597 because of your SO profile? or linked-in?

@AshleyNunn, I might do! :-)

@enderland Nah I interviewed with them in 2012 and they told me that I almost got the job but that I was too rusty. They said I could try again once I knocked the rust off

But then I moved very far away and mostly forgot about it.

@AshleyNunn, I'm more curious about regular life

@AshleyNunn hey, I've stared down enough medical bills (and subsequently thrown in the trash, because fuck them who cares), and spent enough hours waiting in ERs only to be told "O, well hmm, no idea, go home? Kthxbye" to know exactly the shit you speak of

I'm recommending this guy come to here, it's a lot more "help me sort through life priorities/what should I do with my life" type question

@AshleyNunn yeah we need to stay on topic here! errr....

@enderland oh yeah, I am the perfect life sorting aid. Yes. Bring it.

@AshleyNunn,@enderland yeah sure thing

... I was kidding about the "on topic" ness haha @André

@enderland, haha, you got me on that one

@JimmyHoffa sometimes a cynical, down to earth perspective is helpful when sorting out life (as you were referencing with ampt earlier)

@AshleyNunn and if there's anything I've learned from shits who want to get into the good life so they can have their Mistress (rock it @durron597, you'll get there!) is they're shits who plan on people trying to be nice and patient and n% of those people will do so until they are per some fine print no longer eligible to get money from shits (gotta pay that alimony on the non-mistress y'know)

@JimmyHoffa well if that's the case, we should probably get rid of high school too. It's just keeping people from realizing that they have to set their own goals and achieve them

"Mistress" ?

@Ampt the gubermint will do that

@enderland Yeah, I didn't understand that either.

@Ampt I never said get rid of- like I said college truly is good for people, and I believe that. But it's not without a tradeoff; it does push out this decision people have to make eventually

@Ampt in all seriousness, high school could use a serious rework to be more encouraging of career paths other than "go to college for 4 years and get a degree in something impressive"

fuckit, I'm going back for my PhD. See you all in 6 years!

why tackle these dilemmas of life when higher education will chose for me!

@JimmyHoffa I believe college benefited me mostly because I knew what career I wanted to get into before I even started applying; I've always been skeptical of how well it works for people with "undeclared" majors

high school could use a serious rework to actually teach children.

no, the degree is always useless, it's the name on top of it that has all the value

(The school name, not the one on your birth certificate)

The problem is that you get promised this ray of "you can do whatever you want! pick what you want to do for the rest of your life" problem - what you can study in school is not what you can necessarily do after graduation

Especially since high school classes aren't designed to make the subject matter useful

I'm not sure the name has any value, afaik a comp sci degree from most places is pretty similar in that there's still a chance you can't do fizzbuzz

History and Economics ought to be the same class.

@Ampt actually I think you're on to something, it was having to take care of myself young that had me decide what I was going to do long before college time came and commit to it. Yes, I decree everyone should be forced to feed and shelter themselves from the time they're old enough to read on! Ergo, I can kick my kid outta the house if he's pissing me off (he knows his alphabet, same thing right?)

English should really focus a lot more on writing and communicating ideas than on reading awful things like Heart of Darkness

@Ampt oh this is so inaccurate. Try putting "Trump" on your birth certificate

@durron597 or on making all your essays exactly five paragraphs long where each one has a designated introductory and concluding sentence because why bother with creativity and communication when you can follow instructions

@JimmyHoffa as an aside, you know the best part of sarcasm is that you can claim to have meant either direction depending on which receives the most reception

(I went to school in the US, I hear other places are less silly about the essay structure thing)

@Ixrec Omg my English Teacher wanted to dropkick me into a lake when I handed her one of those in College

@JimmyHoffa I can't agree more with this! I accidentally got lucky in that I realized this, when I was choosing between engineering and music

yeah, I'm thinking of English classes prior to serious higher education in it

also the one my college made us engineering people take

the presentations we did in the comp sci classes were far better writing practice than the actual (required) writing class

@enderland agree on what, you think my kid should be kicked out of the house, or he's a very literate 5 year old? Choose your words wisely my friend.

@JimmyHoffa wait till he's at least 10?

My first "real job" was terribly crappy but that helped me a ton for exactly the reasons you said - I had to make money to pay school, or... well I guess I'm glad that student loans never crossed years-ago-enderland's brain

I mean more 9-5ish hours, I had several other jobs

@AshleyNunn shit.... I don't have a real job.

imo a real job is one that pays enough for you to be financially independent, and is sufficiently stable you aren't constantly worrying about what the next job will be

definitions are hard

@Ixrec "financially independent" is much different meaning than what you are saying I think :)

Is this a real job, or just a contract gig

@enderland I meant "I don't need to ask my parents for money whenever I want to do something"

Ah, see I want to be FI - as in, I don't need to work anymore - ASAP :)

@MichaelT Because there are useful things to learn in history class, but the year the Treaty of Utrecht was signed and who is Charles V are not those things.

caught in a legal bind, no escape from the lawyer's dig

I guess contracting counts if the pool of contracts is consistently full enough you aren't ever worried about there simply not being any to choose from

open your eyes, look up to the skies and cry because there's no jobs there either.

Contracting is only marginally less stable than salaried

plenty of salaried folks get laid off and contracted folks get renewed

@MichaelT This is how History ought to be taught

tbh, it'd be hard to find a subject that is taught correctly at the pre-college levels

@durron597 see I wish history was valuable, I could (and do) spend hours reading wikipedia articles about different historical things

@enderland Have you read Starship Troopers?

@durron597 no. I'm currently rereading the LoTR trilogy

which is basically intended as a historical novel...

@enderland When you get to it (it won a Hugo, so it's available in PDF), it really outlines how history ought to be taught.

I've been reading a lot more fiction as of late, when I was highschool and younger I devoured books but then college/grad school buried my desire to read

But, basically, if you don't have Santayana front and center when teaching History, you're wasting everybody's time.

obligatory link to A Mathematician's Lament

@Ixrec I'll have to read that later

FizzBuzz apparently works quite well: css-tricks.com/…

having taken some "real" math courses at college, I 100% agree with it

@Spiderman heh

@Spiderman I have to admit, if I saw a "UX Engineer" position I would also assume it meant designing UIs rather than writing the code for them

@Ixrec pre-college is tax-funded employee-abscondance (the funny thing is like everything else, it comes from the wallets of citizens and goes directly into the profits of corporations) - it does not exist as a benefit to citizens or children, it just ensures corporations have employees for work hours.

To be good at UX you need to be able to quickly create mockups, sometimes the best way to do that is to use code

there are a lot of good tools out there to do so too, but it's very helpful to understand the tech stack you work with even if you are doing "design"

@enderland the UX people at my job did once create an actual mockup with javascript and stuff, but because it was just a mockup it was missing all the details that weren't in the wireframe...and thus clarified nothing

so I'm not really sold on the idea of the designer coding a mock as being a useful thing

@Ixrec Yeah no, I totally get the issue with job descriptions. But they clearly asked for experience in Javascript in their list of requirements.

though UX people generally want nothing to do with code

She also clearly calls herself a developer on her website.

@Ixrec coding? no, but understanding? that's important

and offers teaching sessions.

I find it only a little ironic that someone with a UX background designed a website that I can't find the information I want

@enderland s/want/can do/f

@Spiderman admittedly, I have a hard time understanding how someone could know jquery yet not be able to do fizzbuzz

@JimmyHoffa yes

@MichaelT nope

@Ixrec You can even do it in CSS. there's an n-th child selector.

@MichaelT copy-pasta, tutorials FFA - Welcome to Web 9.0 (because version numbers should be impressive and leave you feeling like you missed something important; isn't marketing fun?)

@Spiderman her website makes her sound pretty good at what she does

@enderland I think I missed something here; how does coding a mock improve the UX person's understanding of their own design? (assuming it really is just a "visual mock" and not a prototype with much of the required functionality)

@Ixrec it depends, but generally if you are designing something it is incredibly valuable to understand why/how it works

you don't necessarily have to actually code the mock at all but having literally no idea what will be required for your features causes all sorts of problems

It's kind of like, if you design a car you might want to consult a mechanic a few times in the process and better yet, people who used to be mechanics can make cars that are far more user friendly

@MichaelT that's because you don't have a marketing degree; otherwise you'd have no idea what you just said. UX people are not hired by tech people anymore (not often anyway)

does it mean that all mechanics are good designers? no. Or that all non-mechanic car designers are bad? no

@enderland I would definitely agree with the UX person consulting a developer when working on the spec, if that's what you're implying

the java queue naming conventions are mind numbing if you are used to .NET

@Ixrec it helps avoid this problem - xkcd.com/1425 - which if you work with UX folks happens ALL THE TIME

@enderland She's definitely a good writer, and from what I can tell a pretty good designer.

@Spiderman her site is much better than the site she guest posted on, that's for sure

@enderland I actually go out of my way to do frontend/UX stuff, so yeah I get that all the time

@enderland: you mean, that happens with everyone all the time

@Ixrec right. and in some cases its ok, but in others very small design changes could have dramatically different implementation schedules that the UX person won't know

the version of that strip I get a lot these days is "everything in this wireframe is easy to do, but you forgot to specify whether this popup shows all the Xs or only a subset of the Xs, which means I have no idea what any of these operations actually mean"

@MichaelT That "digital transformation" video that attempted to incinerate your brain cells, is an example of something becoming wide spread based on my recent interactions with the job market. There are a significant number of positions just doing interactive digital UX work for marketing agencies who really are doing what marketing agencies have done historical; 30 years ago they made "engaging TV adds" and "consistent messaging across magazine, radio, and TV".

Now interactive "digital experiences" consistent across mobile-desktop-Hulu are how marketing agencies create a product for their clients (effectively an "experience" meant to sell Schick razors or whatever the clients hocking)

@enderland yep, we have many discussions between business, UX and us devs about those things; lately we've gotten pretty good about making sure the functionality decisions that absolutely must be made and not changed letter do actually get made

that's good, and probably fairly abnormal

after that iterating on the workflow/visual presentation is easy

Likely that's partially the market I've seen (hipster Boulder is full of these agencies), but I interviewed at one a while back and have seen quite a few of them popping up recently, it definitely seems to be an increasing business model

Mad Men ca. 2015: PBR Edition

@enderland I do think I got very lucky ending up here; everyone (not just the devs!) seems genuinely committed to improving the development process to avoid all the horror stories I constantly hear about online about terrible places to work and projects doomed to failure from the start

The main problem is those who go into UX tend to have no interest in dev, and vice versa

I like sitting right in the middle of those groups

@enderland not a problem - the problem is the hiring folk think UX and dev are the same thing, and end up hiring people to the wrong roles and advertising their roles totally incorrectly etc

@enderland Yeah the site's kind of a mess. It's a dumping ground for web designers to get published articles on their resume. But sometimes they have some cool code snippets.

me too, I was a little surprised to discover that my favorite work is right at the top of the stack, rearranging buttons on popups and stuff like that

UX and dev really are different roles, different skills, they tend to be folk with totally different interests; but recognizing that fact allows you to place them properly, ignoring it is stupid.

I think it's a good thing that the UX people don't do any development; they have to stay in communication with business and devs so they know what they're designing has some correlation to reality, but their designs usually make more sense than anything I would've thought of (all my ideas are inevitably tightly coupled to how the data has to be stored in code)

for a couple weeks I was doing css

as a back-end person who likes data modeling/processing/analytics, seeing roles that are advertised at people like me which turn out to be "Make pretty website for me plz?" irritate the shit out of it. If anyone ever calls me a Rockstar again I'm going to hit them with my kid's guitar.

on the plus side, by being so UX-inclined I seem to have developed a knack for seeing/predicting UX problems solely from wireframes when the actual business/UX people wouldn't see it until we demo'd a prototype (speaking from experience here)

@MichaelT I've done plenty of jquery and css; but did you design the UI? Did you run marketing surveys to find out what design would best meet your goals? Have you planned your PR campaign?

these are the things people are oft expected to do in "UX" roles these days it seems.

@JimmyHoffa seriously? I thought they just designed...

@JimmyHoffa well, proper UX design requires a lot of stuff other than "I think the user wants that"

there are a whole host of techniques to design thigns to meet user needs (and find those needs)

@enderland exactly! not saying it doesn't, but it's when people think that + algorithmic data analysis and transaction processing are the same skill that you end up with "Full Stack Rockninja wanted!" ads

interestingly, one of the bigger projects going on at my company right now is a "consistency" initiative, because we have so many products that behave slightly differently from each other in ways that confuse and irritate everyone

so all the devs are given checklists of several hundred things like "popups should have this much space around the edges" and "clickable regions should have a white border appear when moused over"

many people are grumbling about it but personally I enjoy fixing stuff like that

@Ixrec universalmind.com/researcharticle/…

those things are waaaaaay easier to fix than, say, a backend crash on weird unicode characters or a slow database query

@Ixrec sure, just saying I've seen a lot of companies these days confusing the decisions about how those things should be done with the implementation of those decisions; which smells of "I have no idea what the difference is, but make me money damnit!"

@JimmyHoffa yep, once again I think I'm very lucky to have ended up where I did

like, our business manager actually goes through our Jira backlog with our team lead every week to give every single new ticket a meaningful priority rank

I assume that level of "getting it" is not common

@Ixrec I think the industry's just in a currently down period... it'll pick back up in another few years perhaps; right now the quality is garbage not unlike around '00, it's cyclical like eveything I suspect

@JimmyHoffa maybe, I only got my first job last year so I'm totally ignorant of any long term industry-wide trends

I don't remember so many clueless bungleheads wandering our industry 5-10 years ago; it was harder to be party to it without just losing all your feckin money. Nowadays every jibbering fool is again stabbing their soul for a piece of the tech pie, their commupins are on the way.

businessinsider.com/the-ad-tech-bubble-2015-5

it probably helps that I deliberately applied to established companies rather than startups

that's pretty much exactly what I was hoping to avoid

@MichaelT yeah bounced paycheck is sturdily in the "Do I need a payday loan or can I think up someone capable of helping me ASAP?" realm of shit-what-do-I-do

@MichaelT well, I've thrown my meta-migrate-vote at it

Ive been doing some of the algo problems on hackerrank.. have any of you tried them?

pretty fun

imo, the idealistic stuff belongs in what you do in your spare time

realities like needing money are less likely to interfere then

@MichaelT yea Euler is pretty cool too. More math-centric

both cool though

@Snowman programmers.stackexchange.com/…

@MichaelT yea ive done the first 30 or so. they get you thinking for sure

@MichaelT cool ill check it out

@MichaelT ohh that one looks fancy... ill give it a try

there's more than one font for seven-segment numbers?

that sounds to me like either too broad or tool recommendation (as opposed to tool usage)

gah, I still haven't spent my CVs today

to the education tag!

"Q: What languages are the kids of today actually programming in?" lol

does anyone know a good tool, similar to whenisgood for just looking at "morning" "evening" and "afternoon" for different days?

sounds about right

though my job is Javascript/C++/Python, so not too much of a difference

Raciing @Duga

Because... why not.

YEs!

where do people get their impression for what programmers.SE is?

I was going to say "the name", but that one just now makes no sense to me

was code review a thing we did in the days of yore?

> Member for 1 year

Cool, time for a heated debate in comments....

For the record, it's good for Code Review (the question, that is).

yeah

speak of the devil

@enderland Probably the same place they get their impression of what Code Review is, I imagine.

@nhgrif Hah

that's surprsiing

Yup.

I'm not going to pretend I know the scope of Programmers, do I necessarily intend to master it... but I've been fighting them about Code Review for a while now. Figured I might join forces. ;)

@nhgrif lol yeah

We've been having trouble with these sorts of things:

oooh woops that isn't a migration CV

Yeah, exactly...

I offered them a perfectly good close vote reason to pick.

oooh a mod migrated it though

@nhgrif While you're here, if/when we get a question that's basically a block of code and asking "is this any good?" are there any quality standards I should know about before flagging for migration to codereviews?

iirc it has to be code that works (since making broken code work is an SO thing), but I don't know of anything else

Does it work? Is it example code or does it look like real code?

example code is bad?

Example code is off-topic for Code Review.

func foo(arg1: Int, arg2: Int) -> Bool {
    // do stuff
}

I guess that makes sense, examples aren't normally meant to be production quality

foo isn't the real name of anyone's method. We'd close that as example code.

// do stuff is a place holder comment, we'd close that as example or "stub code"

arg1 & arg2 might be real variable names.

got it

so basically it needs to be valid, real code

at the risk of missing the point: good example =)

Right. And it needs to be easily discernible what the code does. Sometimes the readability of the code itself is the focus of the review, but if the code is confusing, a plain-English description of what it's supposed to do should accompany it

And when we say "works", that means "works as intended"

So a question like "This code works, but I want to add feature X" isn't a good fit.

because it doesn't work... yet.

And "This code works, so tell me how it can be better, but also I want to add feature X" is basically the same question.

and because that veers into "write my code for me"

Right, in which case, they get a link to here careers.stackoverflow.com/employer

though if it was "I want to add feature X but can't figure out a good way because <reasons>" that could be on-topic over here

One case that might appear as broken that we make an exception for is when the code works... but it's too slow, like for some online code challenge, for example.

To me, and especially at work, that's broken code... but as long as it actually computes the right result, we let people post it if they need a speed up.

yeah, correctness bugs/runtime errors are totally different from performance/flexibility issues

I guess I'll have to settle for a regular downvote since I'm out of super-downvotes right now

@enderland And then we found out it was broken code.

@nhgrif lol

I was going to upvote a comment. But then I saw I wrote the comment. No wonder I agreed with it.

@Ixrec this is really, really good and I think totally applicable to a lot of fields other than math - thanks for sharing!

thanks!

I sent that to a high school math teacher I never had but who I think gets that

math became so much more fun when I got to college and could take classes that were actually about understanding the ideas and constructing arguments instead of just being a human calculator

Cookie to the first person to explain this closure.

those sound like synonyms to me...is "defect" supposed to include non-code errors like design issues or something?

Ding.

Yeah. Bug typically refers to something in code. Defect is more generic and can be an incorrect requirement, a design error, or even a "bug" in test code that makes you think the software is wrong.

In fact, here are the IEEE definitions. And it's not even my answer.

yeah, after thinking about that for a minute, I threw a reopen vote on that

Seconded.

And thirded, fourthed, and fifthed.

now I'm wondering if quality-attributes is a tag we want to leave around

seems hard to imagine anyone being an expert in "quality", though it's clearly nowhere near as problematic as the current STCI stuff

Quality attributes refers to the *ilities.

It's another way of saying non-functional requirement. It includes security, usability, performance, maintainaibility, and a bunch of others.

It is rather generic, but I don't have a big problem with it.

ah, non-functional-requirements is definitely fine

huh, we don't have that tag

If it existed, I'd probably synonym them.

since it's only five questions I'll just assume I've only ever heard the latter term for some reason and either one is fine

"You have no more close votes today; come back in 31 seconds." let me close you already!

Link?