Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Developer Skills Report

research.hackerrank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 198 posts

Re: Developer Skills Report

#51

Post by dentemple »

TheCowboy wrote: post #22

> The biggest gap in knowledge is with JavaScript frameworks > Most often, employers want developers who know AngularJS, Node.js, and React. Am I overthinking this? When I've been looking for jobs, I've found the emphasis on JavaScript frameworks slightly perplexing and frustrating. I would assume that a competent web developer should be capable of quickly learning a framework. Having to know JavaScript, CSS, etc. to…

Once you learn one front-end framework, you're halfway there to learning any of them.

There's a lot of shared ideas and concepts among the most popular choices. So it's much faster for, say, an Angular Dev to get productive with Vue.js than it would with a vanilla JS developer doing the same thing.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#52

Post by lobo_tuerto »

kumarvvr wrote: post #50

Sidenote : The background images are '3D' fractals, I remember reading about in HN itself a few years back. There was a fascinating article about a programmer writing about the steps he went through to get a 3D fractal.

I'd love to get my hands on that article/link, do you have it handy?

---

Found this free software for 3D fractals: http://www.mandelbulber.com/

Re: Developer Skills Report

#53

Post by dentemple »

baron816 wrote: post #12
meritt wrote: post #2

> And new generations are opting for YouTube to self-teach over books I'm definitely in the older generation because it's completely mind-boggling to me how someone effectively learns to code from watching a video tutorial. You can't flip back to a page, bookmark a link, copy text, zoom-in to see exactly what was done, etc. It feels like you're inherently missing out on so much you gain from a book or a text-filled w…

Don’t knock it until you try it. I’ve learned a great ton from YouTube videos or just watching the videos in sequence on Frontend Masters. Watching them at an increased speed let’s me cover a lot of ground very quickly. I also like writing down headers of important topics, and then going back and doing research on those topics and essentially trying to write a brief book in my own words on everything. Helps me get a…

Not only that, but when the speaker starts going over "fluff" (or stuff you already know), it's easy to pull up a spare article or resource in another browser and multitask until we're back on track.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#55

Post by just-me »

matte_black wrote: post #28
bob4444 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite this, in my experience, Emacs provides a more feature rich environment, comparable to an IDE, rather than only a text editor.

It’s not about features. Vim is meant to be custom tuned through plugins until it meets your needs, after which no other editor will satisfy you.

I hope you're not trying to explain the value and satisfaction of customization to an Emacs enthusiast!

The thing is an interpreter for Elisp, which the text editor is written and configured in. You can change the core functionality of the editor if you wanted, by writing some code in a buffer and pressing C-M-x. You can make it act exactly like vim if you wanted to. You can add line numbers on the side, better autocomplete for commands and searches, a git porcelain, new modes for different types of files. You can implement an IRC client, a browser, tetris, a file browser, or an email client; or you can just use the implementations that come included.

You can spend a lifetime configuring Emacs, and if you have attained the ultimate configuration, you'll look back at the end of your life and realize that it was worth the thousands of hours you put into it. But if you have not, don't worry: you'll be reborn into the cycle constant suffering-due-to-inferior-configuration until you figure it out.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#56

Post by applecrazy »

flukus wrote: post #27

The site is actually readable if you turn off that awful css. Who thought removing white space from the titles and adding an obnoxious faux cursor were a good idea? Most/all of the charts gain absolutely nothing from the interactive features either, a grouped histogram style chart could show the same information in a static image. It would be better actually, you could compare the groups side by side instead of relyi…

I agree. On my relatively high speed internet connection on Chrome 63 (latest) running on a recent laptop, it took 55 seconds, 426 requests, and 2.6MB to load the first graph on the page. Sure, a lot of the loaded assets are in my cache for subsequent visits, but that initial load time is just...wow.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#57

Post by expertentipp »

rattray wrote: post #32
TheCowboy wrote: post #22

> The biggest gap in knowledge is with JavaScript frameworks > Most often, employers want developers who know AngularJS, Node.js, and React. Am I overthinking this? When I've been looking for jobs, I've found the emphasis on JavaScript frameworks slightly perplexing and frustrating. I would assume that a competent web developer should be capable of quickly learning a framework. Having to know JavaScript, CSS, etc. to…

Right, they don't want to have to pay you to do the learning. It's usually not "how to get a simple task done with React" – many engineers can get there very quickly – but rather having an understanding of best-practices in terms of architecting your application. Angular, well, can take a while to learn how to use properly.

The problem is that in the most of the Europe they dont’t pay market wages. Way below them. Certainly not enough to keep up to date with the the JS framework brainfuck.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#58

Post by dvt »

onion2k wrote: post #43
dvt wrote: post #24

> What’s the biggest challenge when hiring talent? "Hard to assess skills before onsite" -- That's funny, I've never had a hiring manager or interviewer look at my literal hundreds of thousands of lines of code on GitHub or several of the OSS projects I've contributed to. Not to mention the actual book I co-wrote.

I can think of a dozen reasons for that, but here are a few of the most salient ones; 1. Reading and evaluating code in an unfamiliar context is really £@#&ing hard, especially on a complex project. Understanding someone's commits requires knowledge of the project as a whole, the problem space, the environment, etc. That's not possible to do for a large number of candidates. It might not give you a very good insight…

> It might not give you a very good insight in to an applicant.

I'd argue pointless whiteboard trivia doesn't give you good insight into an applicant, either. And yet, 90% of companies do it.

> Most people's public code is of roughly equal quality (eg 'not great').

I disagree with this. Unless you're looking at a toy or unfinished project, most code that's released (on npm, maven, or something similar) is actually fairly high quality. Certainly higher quality than what I've had to work with in production systems that were making millions of dollars a month.

> Building a great team is about hiring great people more that just great developers.

I completely agree. So why do we dehumanize potential hires with standard practices that involve (for example) memorizing algorithms you'll never use? I mean, HackerRank is a testament to how awful our culture is. Is there a DoctorRank or SecurityGuardRank or WaiterRank?

> It's hard to trust someone's public code.

I think this is complete BS. There's people much smarter than me that are getting screwed by these terrible practices. Max Howell, Homebrew's author, was famously rejected by Google for not passing some stupid whiteboard exam, when just about everyone at Google actually uses the software he authored.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#59

Post by iLemming »

just-me wrote: post #55
matte_black wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about features. Vim is meant to be custom tuned through plugins until it meets your needs, after which no other editor will satisfy you.

I hope you're not trying to explain the value and satisfaction of customization to an Emacs enthusiast! The thing is an interpreter for Elisp, which the text editor is written and configured in. You can change the core functionality of the editor if you wanted, by writing some code in a buffer and pressing C-M-x. You can make it act exactly like vim if you wanted to. You can add line numbers on the side, better autoc…

> You can make it act exactly like vim if you wanted to

Thanks to Spacemacs, Emacs is already better Vim than Vim itself. I know what I'm talking about. I'm a die-hard vimmer.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#60

Post by innocentoldguy »

bob4444 wrote: post #16

Being an Emacs enthusiast myself, it always surprises me how much more popular VIM is. Is this because VIM is taught more in schools? Maybe because VI/VIM is typically installed by default on Linux systems?

I’ve heard quite a few people complain that Emacs caused them RSIs. That’s why I stopped using it too. Vim is much easier on the hands in that regard.
Post reply on HN