The last two frontend devs I interviewed.

First:

He had 15 some years of experience, but couldn't answer our most basic of technical questions, we stopped asking after the first couple.

Based on a technical test I got the impression that he couldn't distinguish between backend and frontend.

So, I posed a simple question "Have you interfaced with REST API'S using Javascript before?"

Which lead him to talk about arrays. I shit you not he droned on about arrays for five minutes.

"I have experience using big array, small arrays, breaking big arrays into littler arrays and putting arrays inside other arrays."

Never been in an interview situation where I've had to hold back laughter before. We refer to him as the array expert.

His technical knowledge was lacking, and he was nervous, so he just waffled. I managed to ease his nerves and the interview wasn't terrible after that, but he wasn't what we were looking for.

Second:

This was a phone interview.

It started off OK he was clearly walking somewhere and was half preoccupied. Turns out he was on his way back from the shop after buying rolling papers (we'd heard him in the shop asking for Rizla), and he was preoccupied with rolling a joint.

We started asking some basic technical questions at which point he faked that he'd seen a fight in the street.

We then called him back five minutes later you could hear him smoking "ah, that's better". After that the interview was OK, not what we were looking for, but not bad.

Top tip: If you require a joint to get through a phone interview, roll and smoke it before hand.

Top Tip: Formatting your brain with alcohol regularly helps you clear out unused information.

So for everyone looking for a job, that keeps getting rejection or crickets I'll give you the following tip.

Most of the first level screen of resumes are done by automated machines that are basically just doing keyword matching. So if you want your resume to get through more of these automated scanners, what you do is create a second page on your resume and cram it with every keyword, and buzzword you can thinking of, like "10 years react experience." "20 years java architect", "AR/VR 5 years", "15 years mobile", etc ,etc.

Then select the text and change it to white. No human being will see it, but the automated scanners will and rocket you to the top of the list.

Your welcome. Now help me get my penguin!

Pro tip for job candidates:
If you push a code challenge to a live hosting service like github pages or S3, don’t give the reviewers a link to the repo!! Instead put the link into the home page and send the reviewer only a link to the live hosted page.

Why?

Because, if you host with github pages, you’re required to use the project path as the domain root. If the reviewer pulls your project and doesn’t bother to read your readme file with the link at the top, he’ll complain that he couldn’t figure out why your project isn’t hosted from the root domain, and he’ll pass on your application.

True story.

For the past month my phone has been unlocking really slow. I thought it was just software or the hardware starting to fail.

I finally decided to put my Professional Googling (read: Computer Science) degree to work and instantly found out it was because I had a slow 128gb SD card in it.

Removed it and everything is tip top now.

Top tip back for beginners, make sure your dev and live environments are identical.

And do your testing in dev!

In C# you can open as many scopes wherever you want at whatever time you please. Nested within themselves, doesn't matter.

Use this to fuck with the other developers on your team. Fence off their evil code behind a thousand curly braces!

Or maybe jazz up your indentation, give the code a nice and bouncy flow!

I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!

So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?

Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.

Imagine updating a legacy web app and the code is so bad it physically makes you sick every time you look at it. Tables with over 400 columns, . And don't even get me started on the security issues. Apparently writing "Confidential" on the top of the page is enough security. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. People should get licenced before being allowed to code.

Top tip
Don't use two text editors at once.

Top Tip: When writing 200 line functions why not have a string variable named 'tmp' that changes it's value multiple times throughout?

Modern Web Developer
(To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance")

I am the very model of a modern web developer
I’m quite fluent with JavaScript; An HTML whisperer
My code is clean and elegant, I genuinely innovate
And even know my way around a Promise and async / await

I’m very well acquainted too with matters vector graphical
I understand why SVG coordinates seem magical
And even without Photoshop I elegantly can produce
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose

[Chorus]
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose

I'm quite adept at ES6 expressions like destructuring
I know the ins and outs of functional reactive programming
In short, in matters browser-based or Node.js if you prefer
I am the very model of a modern web developer

[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer

I know our mythic history, the humble start, the browser wars
I know why Douglas Crockford fought the battle over ES4
The World Wide Web Consortium and Ecma International
My knowledge of our legacy is truly supernatural

With LESS and SASS and CSS, designing for mobility
I’ll perfectly apply the right amount of specificity
From custom fonts and parallax to grid and flex and border-box
I know most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox

[Chorus]
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox

And when it comes to lazy loading, bundling up and splitting code
There’s nothing quite like Webpack, which of course is built on top of Node
Considering my resume, I’m certain that you will concur
I am the very model of a modern web developer

[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer

When new frameworks and libraries emerge I must be ravenous
And gobble up the hot new thing, my appetite is bottomless
React and Vue and Angular, Immutable, RxJS
The list will be outdated long before I'm finished singing this

My pull requests rely on multitudinous utilities
To help me lint and test and build, a deluge of analyses
And every single day there are a hundred thousand more to learn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn

[Chorus]
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn

This pace is agonizing! Code from yesterday is obsolete!
The speed of innovation is enough to knock me off my feet!
It's happening too fast! I can’t keep up! I’m tired! It’s all a blur!
I am the very model of a modern web developer!

[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer!

"being gifted is a curse. You are f*cling crippled, you believed you were gifted, but you have been crippled the whole time."

I never could agree more to these words (healthyGamerGg, a youtube therapist specialized in people with issues related to videogames)

If you read my last rant you may in fact know i have a lot of issues with the implications of our jobs and truth be told, it all boils down to my iq.
Or better: to the fact i have a decent skill for abstracting stuff (iq is so freaking generic)... It can be a blessing while solving issues, but it feels awful when you realize that no matter the amount of money, you will still need something else to be happy the first day of work.
Sometimes I really wonder if I am an a-hole, stupid or if i think these 2 things to deny the fact my reasoning is correct.

On a side note table top games are very easy to enjoy: as soon as I sit at the table my brain goes: "the game is gonna be very boring if you play normally, at the best you are gonna learn a new strat, at the worst you are winning and it'll be just an ego jerk off... What if you play stuff you feel like to play and enjoy the ride and the conversation without planning to win?"
Except cards against humanity and yogi. Those two must be won!
(Yogi is a game where you play cards which give you restrictions e.g: "keep an index on the tip of the nose for the rest of the game" or "place this card on your head for the rest of the game" you lose as soon as you fail any of the cards you played or if you declare you can't draw)