Coding Blocks - Stack Overflow Salaries and Landing the Job

Episode Date: August 2, 2016

This week on Coding Blocks, Allen says www as best he can, Joe eats the microphone, and Michael does something crazy as we discuss Stack Overflow’s Salary Calculator and our experiences in landing the job – what to do and what not to do. Want to be part of our Slack community? Sign up @ […]

you're listening to coding blocks episode 44 subscribe to us and leave us a review on itunes stitcher and more using your favorite podcast app and visit us at coding blocks.net where you can find show notes examples discussion and other stuff send your feedback questions and rants to comments at coding blocks.net follow us Follow us on Twitter at CodingBlocks or head to www.codingblocks.net and find all our social links there at the top of the page. Wait, www? I'm confused now. I had to do it for everybody, right?

What if it was www? It could be. Can I go there? We'll switch it up next time. We have what? Three times two times one? We have that many permutations of that. So with that, I'm Alan underwood i'm joe zach and i'm michael outlaw all right yeah first up here we got some podcast news and actually the first thing we're going to

address is a question that we received just a day or two ago from svitan maybe or Vitan I don't really know exactly how that one's pronounced it's the first name that I've seen that I had no idea you know what that kind of actually makes me feel a little bit more normal that you know you have trouble pronouncing a name every now and then too because I was beginning to develop a complex because you guys would always just roll through these names and I don't know if you were just making it up as you went, but it always sounded really confident like, oh, I guess that is how you pronounce it. I actually should have left this one to you

because I'm curious if it would have come out Kavitin. I'm not sure what you would have done with this one. Corvette Tan. I would have probably been way off. All right. Hopefully, we have not offended you, and hopefully, we're going to give you a good answer here. Corvette's a good car. I way off. All right. Hopefully, we have not offended you, and hopefully, we're going to give you a good answer here. Corvette's a good car.

I hope not. All right. So, he's basically asking here. I'm not going to read the entire paragraph, but he's talking about the fact that, you know, with the advent of newer technologies like MongoDB and other things like that, it seems like some of the DevOps-y type stuff that needs to be done nowadays is sort of going away. Because if you're dealing with a database like SQL or Oracle, doing some administrative tasks with those things can take quite a bit of time. You could eat up a day easily, whereas MongoDB, you don't really mess with it. So he was basically asking here, is everyone going to be a full-stops developer in 10 to 15 years like basically

is this kind of stuff going to be you know is it going to be easier you know okay so i'll go first my immediate reaction is i mean i kind of hope so i I kind of like that. Right. But my gut says that it strongly depends on the type of dev shop though, because where I have found where you're going to have that, that dev op culture in your team is when your quote product is like a website or service or something like that but if you're doing like a product that gets shipped right then it's less so that's at least been my experience does that make sense yeah so i think there's always going to be a job for somebody who can make other people's lives easier so i don't see devops going away there's so much more we can be doing i mean just the thought of um well i don't think he was suggesting it would go away but it was the rise of the devops

or you think like and the non-devops going away well dev duties i think what did i read his question wrong he was thinking more like the non-devop jobs would start to dwindle oh interesting so things have become more operationalized. I think we've seen a big trend towards that in programming in general, like bigger moves towards using frameworks and less hand coding stuff. So I can see a bit of that. Well, let me read the question that he posed at the very end. As more and more tasks and processes get automated and with the recent push towards DevOps,

it makes me think that traditional operations folk like DBAs will be less needed in the future. What do you guys think? Yeah, but then he says specifically, is everyone going to be a full stack DevOps developer in 10 to 15 years? And so I guess my take on this is, dude, already BMSs and those kind of things aren't going away anytime soon because they're still core.

And while the mongos of the world make a lot of sense, they still, it's not quite the same as a centralized data platform, right? Like one of the big things with, and I know this isn't a database versus a developer type thing, but I think there's still going to be roles for people that do those other kind of maintenance things, right? There's more to DevOps, though, than just DB. Totally.

You know, DB work, DBA work. Yeah. I mean, you know, system, like, you know, your bare metal system admin type work. You've got build systems, whether it's continuous builds, or there's so much. But i don't know that i let joe finish this point though with the um you know everyone you know they're always being a place for that guy who makes your job easier

yeah totally go ahead finish that up yeah i was just kind of thinking um there's there's always room for that but i do see the point that uh you know as as full stack or the do see the point that as full stack, the rise of the full stack developer and these larger and larger frameworks and things like Docker come along that make things easier to do, what it does is it pushes those responsibilities

to other people. And so you might see less DevOps people and more developers and more business people doing DevOps-y type things as those grow into other spots. And that's that kind of sucks and is also cool about programming is the better you get at something and what and the further you can push it down and consolidate it and get it into a like a reproducible thing that you've mastered um you know you basically just automate at that point and then you focus on the harder stuff so there's always a tougher solve problem to solve there's always something uh icky and difficult and uh yeah well there's any jobs are going away

just changing yeah and there's also you could how to say this uh it's a good thing i have a microphone in my face you could also uh make the claim to that like depending on well how extreme do you want to take the whole you know operational part of devops right because as thing as more and more vms are used like you know vagrant as an example right just the fact that you could bring down a vm as your uh you know development environment right that's some operational uh work that has been taken away now now the developer could just do that on his own right like that's not something like it used to be you know 20 years ago if you got a new job somebody was setting up a computer before you before you even walked in the door right and now like that time is shrinking and because of things like uh you know vms and as the use of vms are you know uh

different cloud environments you know that that it's making it easier for the developer to just oh hey let me spring set up this new vm to do x y and z or whatever you know i you know i'm going to piggyback on what joe said though with the whole it's it's not that they go away i think they change and what makes me really feel like this is because, you know, what, 10 years ago, everybody was about, you know, creating sites and creating applications to where they could get information and whatever. And now it's sort of shifting towards, you know, we have all this data, let's start using it, right? Let's start doing things with it. And so now there's different problems, right? Like, so like what you're talking about, you have vagrants, you have the dockers of

the world. Well, those things don't come free, right? Like as those things start scaling out, you have, you have horizontal scaling systems that you need to deal with, you need to provision resources. So I think it's probably going to shift from a lot of things, the problems that have been solved. It's almost like you guys both remember 4GL languages came out and they're like, oh, the role of programmers not going to exist in 10 years. Right. And I think that's kind of the same type paradigm, right? Like what you see is the programming problems get more difficult. And so you still need somebody that can manage those new things that have to be taken care of. So.'ve also always had or for an extremely long time had this opinion that um a good uh there you know everybody's going to have their strengths right

and so a a great developer is a good admin and a great admin is a good developer kind of you know point of view which lends itself well to that whole DevOps kind of mindset because not everybody is going to be strong at the same thing. And I remember, especially early in my career, I would take, what would you call them? I guess continuing education type classes. Yeah. Like specifically for administration of things what would you call them? I guess continuing education type classes. Yeah. Like, um,

specifically for administration of things that I didn't want to be an administrator in that, you know, I didn't want that as a job title per se, but I wanted to better understand it so that as a developer, I know what I'm working with. Like, like, you know, one example comes to mind is mq series if you recall that like i had no desire of ever you know having a job title of an mq series administrator back in the day but you know courses were available and and i took those courses so that i could you know learn how to administer it as a you know just to better myself from a developer point of view so you know i think yeah a similar experience like i learned linux literally so i could so i could set up um vms and understand how it all fit together having an understanding of that actually makes you a better programmer but i think to his question, I really don't think DevOps

is going to necessarily go away. I think you're still going to have people that focus on that. Are developers going to have to be a little bit more involved with it? Probably, right? But I mean, at least so they understand how all the things structurally fit together. But I don't see it going away. I see it maybe shifting. Well, I mean, to Joe's point though, you're always going to have, there's always going to be a need and room for that specialist that knows, uh, you know, insert technology here backwards and forwards. And I don't care if that's from a developer point of view or from an administrator point of view, you're always going to have that guy. You're always going to need that guy. Totally agree.

Poor gal. So thanks for the question. Hopefully that gave you a little bit of our insights, be them right, wrong, or somewhere in between. And next up are reviews. So as what? Well, no, I was going to say, yeah, it's totally time for reviews.

And you want to know the most exciting part about this fruit time? I'm pretty sure I don't have to say any of the names. I think it's up to you two this time. So you two can pick who wants to do Stitcher and iTunes. All right. I'll go for the iTunes ones this time. How about that?

Oh, that's easier. Okay. Oh, wait. Hey, man, if you're scared, I'll do the other one. Actually, I think you guys are both getting off easy. Yeah, these are pretty simple. I think even Outlaw could say these. You know what?

I'll take Stitcher. I'll take Stitcher, and I'll reserve my not having to say random names. No, no, no, no. Joe, you got iTunes. I got Stitcher. Let's do this. Yeah, sure. So iTunes reviewers are MusicManic2, YaxleyEXB, MJHaze412, Lord Prinello of Dorset.

And for Stitcher, it's Isaiah22, Runner Woes, Gregon, and L. Piock. Oh, wait. Did I just totally step over you guys' thing? You did. Oh, my bad. See how easy he makes that look, though? Like these random names. Hey, by the way, there were a couple that were really good.

Like there was one guy who said he left his family business and started programming, and we helped him with that. Honestly, I don't know about you guys, and I don't know that we've ever gotten fully sentimental on the show, but part of why I love doing this personally is I love to help people. I love to see people succeed, and I love to see people get better and do things that they like and feel empowered. And so when I read that review, I actually felt super good about the fact.

Now, I hope that he succeeds, and I hope he does well. Yeah, I don't want him blaming us. Right. That would be awkward. But that was really cool. Yeah. How cool is it to help people make things? Right.

You make things out of magic and nothing yeah he said he that was actually a music manic that said that it says i've been listening for over a year now and have loved every episode last year i decided to take the plunge and leave my family's printing company to take my passion for programming into a career in a software development so that is totally a scary endeavor right there when you have like here's the safe option right right i could just do what the family's been doing and you know keep status quo or you know you could go off and do the thing that like really inspires you that you're passionate about that that thing that excites you right i mean it's it's scary but at the same time you

just want to applaud and say bravo man and thanks for letting us be a part of that like that's truly exciting so uh and i apologize for mispronouncing stitcher there i'm pretty good about everything uh you know i wanted to say too though i noticed uh that that shirt that joe is rocking there That's a nice-looking shirt, Joe. Yes, sir. I love this shirt. I've been wearing it for two days. Working from home, yo. Wait, was that in between showers, hopefully?

I didn't see that one coming. I walked right into that. Well, I was going to say, I mean, you haven't even made any comments on my lovely shirt of choice this evening. Oh, is it GNR? Oh, yeah, baby. Yeah, Guns N' Roses was in the Atlanta area. comments on my lovely uh shirt of choice this evening oh is it gnr oh yeah baby yeah guns and roses was in the atlanta area and i went it was so awesome you know i mean i know i know i know it's not programming related but i'm still on such okay Okay, so first of all, a little background meta information for the listening audience.

We were actually planning to record last night, but the thought of not going to that show was... It wasn't quite bringing a tear to my eye, but I was definitely getting emotional. I can't believe I am actually even considering not going to this show considering that this band hasn't been together you know i mean for the last what 20 years that that axl and slash have have uh you know not performed together i can't believe it i'm gonna i'm actually considering not going to this i have to go. We're a day late in recording because of me.

I think that the internet, I hope the internet would understand. What's your favorite song? Oh, favorite? One favorite song from Guns N' Roses? No, you can't do that. That's why they're one of my top favorite bands because I can't pick one favorite. It's impossible.

Okay. Yeah, I don't have one either. No, I mean, it was awesome. I will say that of the show, it was like a two-hour, 40-minute long performance, and they played dozens of songs, but there were two songs that I really would have liked to have heard, maybe even a third one,

that I really would have liked to have seen live. You going third one that I really would have liked to have seen live. You going to sing it for us? Would you like me to? Can I? Oh, man. I've got a microphone. Okay. Somebody count me in. Three, pause. Ah, dang. Wow, that's cold, man.

I mean, you like listening to this voice now. Why wouldn't you like listening to it sing? You could serenade us, I guess. No, I'm kidding. I kidding i sit back for that mic a little bit i don't want to break the internet i don't want to break the internet uh that's awesome yeah man if they if they come to your town like there's i was thinking about this too and and you know we all we you know we we listen to music as we write code right and i And I know like music is a huge... Alan is always posting different music that he's listening to. We've got...

I think there's at least a couple of different Slack channels. Actually, no, I think we may have pruned that down to just the one. I think it's just the one now, yeah. Devoted to like, hey, here's music that you're programming to. But I was thinking about this. Name one or two bands that you feel so passionately about that if you had an opportunity to go see that band as like you know original as it can possibly get what would they be because i can only think of one other one bone thugs Really? Okay, Joe, you're up next with the surprise.

Totally kidding. I would love to see the original line-up of Spinal Tap. They're just amazing and just really funny down-to-earth people. Genesis. You're talking about the movie, dude. Metallica. Now, I have seen Metallica live in concert. Have you ever seen them live in concert, Joe?

Not the original lineup. Michael Jackson. I was, well, what do you call the original lineup? Mustaine and Cliff. Wait, you guys know the names of people in bands? What is this? Before the Megadeth? No.

How does it go that meta? I don't know the name of anybody in a band unless their name is the band. Well, because ever since ever since um what's his name jason whatever who is the bassist yes ever since he left and and now they brought on the basis from suicidal tendencies it's just i haven't i'm not trying to be a hater but i just haven't been a fan like i once was but the other band that i was thinking of though okay because obviously there was the the riff between axl and slash and that's why they kind just haven't been a fan like I once was. But the other band that I was thinking of, though, okay, because obviously there was the riff between Axl and Slash,

and that's why they kind of went their ways. And I guess enough time has passed, they've made up, and now they decided to tour again. And it was a phenomenal show. If they come to your town and you have an opportunity and you even halfway like them, you should definitely go see them. It is worth it. But the other one that I was thinking of which is actually unfortunately not even possible if i had the opportunity to go see it is nwa so wait you're

making fun of my bone thugs i wasn't making fun of your bone thugs in harmony i was just surprised because like who would pick bone thugs in harmony as the one that they're that mostly passionate about masterpiece come on make them say no not compared to nwa man they don't even consider I was just surprised because who would pick Bone Thugs-N-Harmony as the one that they're that mostly passionate about? What about Master P? Come on, make them say it. No, not compared to NWA, man. They don't even consider it. But Eazy-E, I mean, that's not even possible.

So it's like you can't even – it's not even possible to have that reunion concert. It can't happen. Oh, Cool J? Come on. No, no. I'm not as passionate about that. All right, all right.

We're killing it. All right. Man, so Slack, the music channel on slack what else is there let's go check it out awesome um speaking of social media type stuff i submitted to a link to reddit and i didn't get totally smacked down which is amazing and uh the link was shared and that's newsworthy in and of itself i know i got some karma for once and and who was it that shared that with us on slack um i didn't finish looking that up because jstadnicky okay thank you jstadnicky yeah that was that was killer that that was exciting so what was in the link there jay-z

it was a 15 top-notch podcast for programmers and software developers and by some sort of mistake we were in the number one spot which felt really good because usually we're just left off okay now not to not to rain on our own parade here oh come now what are you gonna do okay because were we the number one but were we just listed first? That's the same thing. Don't rain on my parade, sir. Well, okay. But the only reason why, I don't know. I don't want to seem too cocky about it if it wasn't intended to be like, hey, number one is the best, or if it was just meant as like,

okay, here they are, not in any particular order. Look, man, our trifecta of heads show up there at the top. They do. So it was just meant as like, okay, here they are not in any particular order. Look, man, our trifecta of heads show up there at the top. They do. So it was totally exciting. Number one. It is numbered. It's an ordered list. It is technically an ordered list, but it does not say anywhere that

they are, you know, because what if they were saving the best for last? Yeah, but I looked at the rest of the list. Oh, wow. So much for the cocky part of that comment. My wife listened to the last episode. She said, less Joe, more Kanye. More Kanye, right?

Okay. So I'm going with that. Okay. Awesome. So yes, thank you. If anybody from Make Use Of is listening currently, thank you seriously. Actually, who wrote that article?

Yeah, I was looking for a byline on that article and have not found one. Written by Joel Lee. Where did you see that? It's up there in the image. So thank you, Joel. Seriously, seriously appreciate it. Oh, there it is. That's a super huge deal seeing as how we didn't ask for it or anything.

So that was a very awesome part of our day. Yeah, awesome news like that out of left field. And so, so hey you know what let me take this as an opportunity to say that um you know like joe said he he didn't get totally smacked down on reddit but here's how you could help us how about you dear listener if you are a reddit user why don't you throw our name out there on a Reddit article if someone's asking about a good

podcast or a good resource, or if you want to share a good podcast in the podcasting or whatever subreddit of choice. Oh, man. We're going to get doxxed. Oh, really? We apologize for your negative karma

that you're about to receive. I mean, that's going to be mostly Joe's fault because he's got a really bad track record with it. Oh, man, let me go delete my user account before I get destroyed. Right. So the next thing up, I had to revisit this because MS Dev Show, Jason and Carl did an excellent episode on bash on windows. And I highly recommend it. We'll have a link in the show notes, but if you remember, right outlaw was like, yeah, I don't know if bash on windows is going to be all that great. You know, I'm not. And so if you go listen to this other episode from the MS dev show, it's killer because really

what it is, it's trulyux running on windows with the layer in between to do the translation for the file system and all that stuff so the bash on windows is literally running ubuntu on windows it is not just a shell command okay i'm gonna totally have to listen to this it was are you telling me that now in which version of windows was this it's windows 10 preview at the time so um 10 pro no no just windows 10 and then you had to go into like the extra components for windows it was like beta type stuff and i'm gonna be running two operating systems at the same time it's actually running the linux subsystem on windows so the bash on windows you are literally running ubuntu so that doesn't even make sense that is super

duper cool mind blown it's pretty awesome so i i thought i'd bring that up because i know you'll be interested in that and it's really sure you're saying this right dude so here's the thing if you want something like let's say that you want ssh app get install ssh if you want something else update app get install it is literally ubuntu want something else, app get update, app get install. It is literally Ubuntu running on windows and they're working. So the cool part is you listen to this Joe. Yep.

It was very good. And when he's saying is accurate, he's not just like, this isn't like an early or very late April fools. My, my head is still exploded from listening to it, but it sounded pretty amazing. Yeah.

And so here's the cool part, Outlaw. The guy who they interviewed for is the guy working on the team that is doing, it's basically a bunch of facade layers, right, if you think about it. So they've got the layer that can communicate with Windows. Yeah, I'm looking at their show notes now. Richard Turner, who is the senior program manager on the Windows team, making the command line cool again. I already like

this guy so i'm totally going to have to listen to this it's really good so all right we'll have a link to this uh this sounds like phenomenal episode in our show notes yeah it really was i mean i loved it uh we like those guys over there anyways so uh we feel good sharing i gotta imagine though like you know i i jokingly asked why they're running two operating systems. You know, they probably, in order to do that, they must have, like, taken portions of the kernel to run it. Or not even, it couldn't be the kernel, but. It's running the Ubuntu kernel, but they basically put a layer.

Well, no, they couldn't have two kernels. Isn't that what they said, Joe? I can't remember exactly. They'd rewritten some of the Windows subsystems. I don't really understand it, though. Yeah, there's a layer to where Linux can talk to the Windows subsystem and then translate like the past. So it's not changing things.

I wonder if they took... Okay, now I'm going to have to listen. Yeah, let's not speculate. Listen. Now my mind is just racing with like, oh, I wonder... Because like, especially when, you know, you're probably mostly right with, you know, the use of the facade pattern, it would be a great way to implement this.

And I wonder if they just said, okay, fine, we'll keep all of these commands from the open source community along with Bash that will run inside of Bash, but we'll have facades to mock these calls out or to translate these calls from one to the other. Yeah, it's pretty cool, man. Definitely go check that out. Alright, I'll talk to you guys tomorrow. It was good talking to you. Good show. Yeah, well, he's on his way to

the White Snake concert now. Oh, man. If only White Snake was playing. Alright. I was more of a Milli Vidal fan. Is that why you didn't want to talk about the bands that you were most passionate about? Hey, drop some beats here. Yeah, do it.

Give us a song here, man. Yeah. Oh, this is horrible. Where could this possibly go wrong? I don't know. That's awesome. All right. So the last thing

Well, no, there's actually two more things So Michael and I attended an ASP.NET Core meetup this week And I really liked it Sean Wildermuth was the one that was presenting And the guy is amazing He really does But there's an L in there I think it's Wilder

Wildermuth If you listen to his podcast podcast he has one he says his name very clearly so wilder muth and if you look at it you probably think wilder muth because it's m-u-t-h but he pronounces it the other way uh but it was an excellent excellent meetup like he took you through the nuts and bolts of standing up the plainest, barest ASP.NET core and then walked you through everything. From an empty project file to let's start adding stuff in. And I got to say, I've had the pleasure, and I truly mean pleasure, of listening to this guy speak before. And if you ever have an opportunity to go to an event where he's speaking on something

you will not be disappointed or bored yeah by listening to him speak he is a he is an excellent presenter yes um and here's the great part right like you even i think you even blurted out like you're serious so he's oh yeah i accidentally did yeah he starts up with the powerpoint right and it's got his name up there in the title of the presentation he's like well that's the one slide i have tonight and no it no the title it had the title of the presentation asp.net core and then it said at the bottom a subtitle i am very prepared dot dot dot and he he vocally made the comment about this being the only slide and then suddenly during their presentation he hits the escape key and away goes powerpoint i'm

like oh wow you were actually serious i i'm so used to that not being the case you know it's usually a powerpoint presentation that you go to see yeah it was it was super cool i mean he literally walked through the code step by step and and if you haven't had a chance to play with.NET Core, and this was specifically an ASP.NET application, dude, it is bare metal, right? Like you start off with nothing and everything that you want to do, you have to add to the services and set it up. So he's got a course on Pluralsight on doing ASP.NET Core, and we'll provide that link in the show notes as well uh definitely go check it out the guy is an amazing presenter he's got he's got uh several courses on plural site and like i said if you have a chance to see him wow that's impressive

there's a reason this dude's an mvp yeah yeah he he might know a thing or two. Yep. So that, that was an excellent, excellent meetup. And just like every other thing, if you watch it and you go try and do it yourself, it will not work. Uh, it always looks so easy. Uh, I've actually been spent a little bit of time playing with it and it is so annoying. Like you watch him do it. You're like, Oh, he made it look awesome. Granted, he probably rehearsed it 900 times beforehand. Well, don't take that away from him, from him being prepared. No, I'm not. It just is frustrating.

He's like, oh, this is magic. I got it. No, I don't. Alan speaks the truth. Yes. All right. So I feel like one of you might need some clinical help here with this next topic. Oh, this is amazing.

So I think Jason Giles sent this out. And so shout out to him and his kid because we mentioned him last podcast. And I think, I think he said his daughter, correct me if I'm wrong. He was like, she was like, wait, my daddy's famous. He was just mentioned on his show. So here you go. Number two, man. Yeah.

He threw this out. It's kind of funny despair.com like if you ever just want to feel bad about something now wait a minute this is if i remember right these are the the company famous for the demotivators right yeah demotivators the demote demote i can't even say the word forget it we're done with the show we weren't recording were we isn't it now now my my my kryptonite here has uh moved on from just normal names to words not random not often used yes demotivators there's funny there's some good memes up there they actually have a pop-up that shows up it is like yes this is one of those annoying pop-ups the motivational posters is what they call it that's the word I'm trying to struggle on. There's some funny things in there.

If you need a moment to take a break and entertain your brain, go to www.despair.com. Make sure you check out those posters. That's my favorite part. The posters are awesome. These are the things that I remember from forever ago. That's it for our news. And I guess really this other one could have kind of gone in this section as

well, but this other one, this, this next thing that we're going to talk about. Oh, okay. So who wants to lead in Jay-Z? Why don't you lead this one up?

All right. This is a hot topic making its way around the internet right now. Stack Overflow has released their salary calculator. I've heard've heard of them yeah what you make of the company apparently they're really open about who makes what and so there's no kind of weird secret conversations going on and people trying to figure out stuff and i'm hiring firing looking at glass door so you can go to the website plug in and see what you would get if you work for Stack Overflow. So I have a feeling... They don't try to claim that this... Okay, I'm sorry. Go ahead. They don't try to claim... I don't think they try to claim that this is

all programs should get paid and they have other positions too like product designers and whatnot. But it's basically just what they would pay you if you worked at Stack Overflow. But it's still interesting to compare your current position to this calculator and see what to think about it.

Okay. So here, here's my thought on this thing, right? And let's see if you guys agree, which I'm going to assume not, but no matter what you go look at this thing and regardless of the outcome,

you're going to feel bad. Either you're going to feel bad because you're going to look at it and go, oh man, I could be making that much if I was there. Or you're going to look at it and go, oh, whoa, I'd only be making that much. Don't let anyone see this. Let's block.

Let me jump on the old firewall or the old router there and block this page so that HR can't see it. And done. DevOps for the win there's a third possibility which is uh you do the little uh more info what would the skill to see uh how you would qualify oh man and you feel depressed when you realize that you're a zero so wait tell me this you did it you did it what did your number end up being uh i i had a hard time answering honestly So you did it. You did it. What did your number end up being?

I had a hard time answering, honestly. I honestly didn't do this thing. So let's see. So you're supposed to score yourself on all of these things? Yeah. And so one of them is strategic thinking. Understands and helps define the overachieving big picture goals for the product or the part you own as a whole yours execs other i yours execs other ideas it doesn't matter combining all these ideas into a clear well-defined strategy for your team and product and you get a choice of grading of well this is weird uh you're either a b which is the worst an a an a plus or an a triple

plus and the way they have these ratings defined is a b means you could be more awesome this is a good thing to work on over the next year an a is does as expected at our high stack standards, completely, utterly able to accomplish what is needed. A plus means does more than your team expects, even at our high level, exceptional and noticeable skills.

Or the A triple plus, which I don't know what happened to A double plus, but A triple plus is widely recognized level of amazingness, does and teaches. When people think of this skill, they think of you, or would if they knew you. This will be rare, even on our amazing team. So this is what's crazy, right? I went through here and by the way on their

on their calculator they say most everybody's a one or a two right so i went through and filled this out i thought fairly honestly and i ended up at like 4.02 and i was like do i think too much of my skills or yeah yeah and i seriously i was going internally i was like wait a second do i have an over inflated inflated idea of what my skill set is is this real is it wrong is it you know i didn't do any a triple pluses by the way none because i feel like you just did a truckload of a pluses uh not a truckload like i was pretty honest like There were some things that I rated lower. I chose B on a couple and I chose A on some. I mean, for those that know you, we know you're not a modest man. I know what I know.

I know what I know. I mean, you're rather confident and sure of yourself. Some might say full of yourself, but i'm not going to be that guy i should i should add though that that example for strategic thinking was the skills for product manager so you know if you do decide to check out our show notes and find this link or if you've already found it on your own um you know be sure to uh change that that link maybe that's why you know what it is. That's probably why, because you probably left it at janitorial staff and then was going down, and they were like,

oh, man, yeah, you totally rock. You know how to clean things. That's right, man. I'm good at cleaning. Actually, what did I choose? I did developer. Well, the choices are web developer, mobile developer, data science developer, product designer, marketing designer, site reliability engineer, engineering manager, or product manager.

I don't have all those, by the way. Then you're doing it wrong. I win the internet's game over. That's weird. What are you doing, man? What are you talking about? You're talking about that position drop down, right? No, no.

What I'm saying is when you – okay, where did you start from? Just the link? You started from, okay, position, and it says like – yeah, when you click on the original salary calculator, it has positions. Developer, site reliability, engineer, product designer, marketing designer, engineering manager, and product manager. Yes. But then you see where it says skills, and it says more info, and that's where you take the grades. engineer product designer marketing designer engineering manager and product manager yes but then you see where it says skills and it says more info and that's where you take the grades yeah there's a drop down on the top right that is someone who was you know i really kind of feel like the uh well whoever was in charge for the design of this site which i guess product designer

this portion of maybe they should have rated a b because i really feel like that should have been a little bit more obvious it's like hidden off to the right like you don't want to your eyes don't immediately fall to it so that's what i'm saying like uh you'll want to you'll want to check that so before you start answering the wrong question the person who put together the calculator you know's fantastic. You know, only on this one thing. You know, they were probably A triple pluses on everything else. But on this one thing, I don't feel like there's enough attention drawn to that where it is right now.

All right. So real quick, though. And Joe and I were both in a conversation on Slack regarding this. Well, wait a minute. No, because you didn't say which one you picked when you did the test that was the whole thing i was trying to get out of the developer which developer i named three no but hold on there was web developer mobile developer and data science developer oh man i don't know it was web that was default no product manager was default for me that's why i made the whole point of like you got to be careful and change the questions that might be why you developer no i did web are you sure yeah web developer that's

where i ended up because that was the whole point i was making is like if you did the default which was product manager when i went to it mine's web developer is default same really yeah i wonder why it defaulted to product manager because you. Because you probably chose manager in the drop-down on the previous page. Probably. Well, I didn't choose anything, so whatever was there. But at any rate, so here was the interesting take on Slack. Oh, you know what? I bet that's from the link, the parameters in the link.

Let me try this. Let me remove their query string. And there you go. That's what it was. The query string that we have in our show notes, we'll have to remove that because that defaulted to product manager, and that's why when I went to more info it took me to uh skills for product manager so so check this out this was the part that i thought was interesting though so you can go to www.coding

blocks.net slash slack and get in on some of this fun by putting in your email and joining us in there but it was funny though because the bare minimum range was like eighty thousand dollars for like a beginning programmer right and a lot of people crazy yeah people were like whoa whoa whoa what in the world no am i doing this wrong again if you pick developer oh wait if you picked zero experience and zero skill then, right? Is that what you did? Okay. So developer, zero experience, zero skill, and then the base was 86, right? That's the lowest you can get is 86, which is pretty crazy.

But I have a feeling that Stack Overflow doesn't hire many of those. Well, well. Yeah, probably not, right? Yeah, but I mean, even if they do take some of those, I'm sure that they're not just going to say like, hey, no, you have no idea how to code at all.

I mean, there's still going to be some requirement there on. I don't know, dude. A zero is pretty rough with zero years, right? Like, I mean, that's literally somebody coming out of college is what that boils down to. So you're saying that literally. No, I'm saying if you know how to if you came out of college, then you at least have knowledge of programming and development. You might not have the experience in it. I'm saying when I think of zero experience, zero skill, then that would be like somebody who doesn't even –

I don't even know why you would have zero as a skill option. That's what we're saying. $86,000 for the absolute bare minimum seems kind of crazy for somebody that's starting at that level. But again, you know. Go ahead. Their zero is basically just a B, which means you could be more awesome. This is a good thing.

It doesn't mean like zero skill. It doesn't mean like you have no skill. But one thing I did want to point out also is Amazon will pay you over $80,000 right out of college. So will Microsoft, Facebook, Google. So I think that Stack Overflow does want to compete with those guys. They do want to draw in those best candidates, and so they probably do pay that high to people coming right out of college. Yeah, totally.

And the Amazons and those people, because of that area where they're all located, they're all battling with each other for the same pool of talent coming out of colleges. Well, Stack Overflow is based in New York though, right? I don't know where Stack Overflow is. I'm pretty certain I recall that. So, I mean, they're like, my point being is they're not in a cheap area. So, I mean, that's one of the reasons why, though, that those are not low salaries. For one, the cost of living out in like, you know, the Washington area is not cheap where they are.

And on top of it, they are battling each other, right? They've got a few colleges up there that have potential candidates coming out. And, and if you want them, I mean, you're fighting with some of the biggest tech companies out there to get them. So, you know, well, one thing I noticed is that the location adjustment for New York, San Francisco or London is 10%. Yeah, that's low. And that's low, in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, those places are not just 10% higher cost of living.

No, not at all. Yeah, but like half. Yeah. So yeah, I thought that was pretty crazy. That was the most surprising thing to me. uh that and also um how little this thing actually goes up so if you go in there and actually plug in like 25 years of experience and bump that scope to five uh you do get up to 200 but i mean that's pretty extreme so if you put in like 10 and you're hitting 170 so even though it starts so high it doesn't continue that trend very much it doesn't change much over the years. Now, I will say this, that I looked to see, because I was curious, they worded as people in their head offices in New York, Denver, and London, but I'm pretty sure New York was the start, if I recall.

Don't a lot of other people work remote, though? Well, that's the thing. If you're an engineer, you totally have that option. In fact, one of my favorite meetups that I've ever been to, I think, Alan, you were there with me. I was there, yep. And I think we've even talked about this one on the show before. We have. It was one of the guys from Stack Overflow doing a live interview with,

I mean, it wasn't really for a real job, but I mean, they were going through the whole thing as if this was, you know, the real deal. And the other guy who was, you know, the interviewee, had no prior knowledge to like what was coming at him. He was just getting these random questions to him as if this was the real thing. And the whole point of the meetup was all about the technical interview and what to do, what not to do, how to be prepared for it,

and witnessing this awesome thing go down in front of us. And it was really good. It's one that still sticks out in my head. Say what, dude? Was it the interviewer, the questions that were interesting, or was it the interviewee's responses? The process. He was trying to get out of it.

The interesting thing was, he was like, I'm not necessarily looking for the perfect answer. He gave a problem, and he wanted to see how the person thought through the problem. And he would give feedback, right? Like if the guy looked like he was getting stuck, then he would give him some feedback on,

hey, maybe you need to try this. Oh, and it was so painful watching it too, because the audience was specifically told, don't say anything. Let him work on this on his own. And everybody, to their credit, actually behaved, and nobody blurted out answers. And we all watched the guy try to – There were some times he honestly, to his credit, I mean, he did good.

But there were some times where he struggled on some of the questions. But the whole point, like Alan was saying, was that the – I can't remember the guy's name from Stack Overflow. I really wish I could. I can't either. Joel Spolsky? No, I think his name was Scott something. I can't. It's been a while.

I don't know. Yeah. But he started this guy off – well, okay. From his point of view – now now this is obviously this question, this series of questions was something. He said that they change out their series of questions regularly. Yep. So he said, by the time I'm showing you this,

we'll never use this one again. But the whole point was, as the interviewer, he had this path from A to Z that he wanted to go with the interviewee. And depending on the interviewee's responses in the amount of time would dictate how far to Z they got. So the whole point was, we're going to solve a complex problem, but we're going to start with small pieces and we're going to keep building onto it.

So the first part was something like, hey, I need you to sort first part was something like you know hey i need you to sort this array or something like that i don't even remember what the question was but then it's like once you had the array sorted it's like hey i need you to insert something into the array and keep it in order yep now i need you to be able to remove something from the and it was just like you keep building onto and – and again, I don't remember if the array thing is exact, so don't hold me to that. But the point was as the interviewee, you think you're being asked these questions that really – like in and of themselves, they didn't seem like they had a lot of meat to them, right? But then as the interviewer, you know where you're going with this

and you know where you're building on it. And you're watching the interviewee and you're trying to see like, okay, well, because I'm going to keep asking him to iterate on the same thing, what changes is he going to make? And it's so crucially important for that interviewee to speak what is going through his mind because the interviewer has no idea what that guy is thinking. So if he's running through 10,000 possibilities, right, and he's only thinking them and not actually vocalizing them, the interviewer has no idea that he's thinking of these amazing thoughts.

You know, one of my favorite parts of that entire thing, though, was he said that they'll take different paths depending on what the interviewee does. So he said, you know, a lot of people want to go just start designing a database, right? They'll be like, oh, well, you need this. All right, well, let me go create these tables. And then if somebody goes from it at that route, then they'll be like, okay, well, I'm going to throw a wrench at you that's going to make your schema not work at all. And now we're going to have to revisit this. So it was basically just seeing how people think on their feet, right? I wish I could re-watch that meetup. It was excellent. It truly was. And it's a good way to identify how you need to think through problems. So it was interesting. So at any rate, a lot more about Stack Overflow than what we intended to talk about, but cool.

And so there's no video of that, right? That was just a live meetup? Yep, live meetups. It was. So, yeah, and it was just like the random topic was, you know, the technical interview. Yep. And the idea that they had was, like we said, you know, if you want to be an engineer at Stack Overflow, remote work is very much an option for you. Yep. And so one of the guys from Stack Overflow, an engineer there, had been there for a while. Works here in the Atlanta area.

He was the HR guy. He was the one who interviewed people. No, he wasn't an HR guy. He was a developer that interviewed a lot of people. Yeah, my bad. Yeah. All right. So with that now, it's time for us to beg.

I think we've gushed over Stack Overflow. Yes, now we need to beg. If you haven't already, and I know a lot of you haven't because we see lots of downloads. We have a decent number of reviews in iTunes and Stitcher, but please brighten our days. Take time. Go to www.coatingblocks.net slash review. After you get out of your car, when you get home, whatever, when you're chilling at night sitting next to your wife

while she watches some show that you're not interested in. Right after you get out of the shower. Or if you're chilling with your husband and you're not interested in whatever show he's watching, go up there and leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It seriously, seriously makes our days. And it helps us. It's the

one way you can give back to us for us giving to you. While there's still soap in your eye, leave us a review. Right. Totally. Pause the shower right now and leave a review. But seriously, we greatly appreciate it. Please do that if you get a chance. And end beg.

All right. So we were talking about jobs a little bit there. Um, what do you guys think is the hardest part about actually landing a new job? Hey, you know what? I'm going to derail you for a moment though, Joe, because I know that jobs was our whole thing that we wanted to talk about. But before we start, I want to talk about something that I did that was totally... Michael did something stupid. Michael did something crazy. How about that? Let's not say stupid.

Let's say crazy. Listening? Are you? I'm listening. All right. Hold on. Because Alan saw me randomly carry in this giant box right before we were recording. I'm like, oh, I need to get something out of my car.

And I said it like, you know, it's no big deal. Yeah. All right. Hold on. Let's see. I got to make sure that Alan doesn't cheat because I already see him trying to look out of the box. I can't move, man. I got so many wires wrapped around me.

We need to do a video, guys, so you can see how beautiful we look right now. Yes. All right. So we have, we have, stop trying trying to cheat i saw one all right so we have a lot talked about uh keyboards and mice right and i have talked about this one that I was using for quite a while, the K three 50 from Logitech. Right. And, you know,

I brought this in so Alan can, can take it, take a look at it and give it a go. And, uh, it's one of those where it's, you know, an ergonomic,

um, keyboard design. Oh crap. Alan's going to break something. Just going to feel this thing real quick all right here let me make sure you have plenty of room there alan because you're gonna want space here all right uh joe you can still hear me i didn't accidentally unplug you no so um yeah so it's an ergonomic keyboard right and as you can see, this is the keyboard that I've joked about wearing the letters off of some of the keys, right? And it's got a built-in palm rest and everything, and it's got this little wave design,

and some of the keys are lower than others and things like that, right? Yep. So that's been my trusted go-to for a while, right? What did you think of that? I do like the feel of the Wave. Some of the keys are a bit stiff, but overall it has a nice feel. I don't like the layout of the home end cluster, but that's similar to my Sculpt Ergo. Not a fan of it, but I do like the function key layout on it.

It's a good feelingfeeling keyboard overall. Yeah, I liked it too. The one thing about the function key layout that always kind of threw me off is that it's in groups of three instead of four. Instead of four, right. So that always threw me off. But then I eventually got used to it and didn't mind it. Right.

And like you said, the home key cluster, I eventually acclimated to that as well. And then here's the mouse that I was using with it as well, which was the M570 from Logitech. This is one where you have a, what would you call that, a thumb ball? The thumb track ball. Thumb track ball that you use. So the mouse doesn't actually move anywhere. There's no mouse pad or anything like that right yeah i i hate that um but you know it was it was comfortable i mean you know so what ended up happening was i don't know i don't know if i just like wore it out or

what but especially the keyboard uh would just start giving me problems where it would just be lagging for reasons that i couldn't figure out right like you know i would replace the batteries and it still you know would be weird like that there'd be times where like i would like alt tab to something and then nothing was happening what what just happened is my machine frozen or something and i keep on tabbing so i don't know like i i honestly don't know why things stopped working so well for me but just because i have had it for a while the mouse i didn't have problems with but um you know the same or as bad but occasionally i would have some lagging experience with the mouse too. And so I decided,

okay, enough of the wireless, right? I'm going, I'm going full on wired. I'm going to be so mad if I get the touch. So, all right.

So then I better show him the mouse first. All right, hold on. Let me get the mouse out. Wait, you don't, you never touch another person's keyboard and mouse. Oh yeah.

Yeah. All right. I totally get it. All right. So I even left this in the box because i wanted you to have have not the experience of a brand new opening experience but you know something as close to it as possible so this is the mouse that i have gone to and i am absolutely in love with that thing it is never getting it is the razor uh death adder chroma and it's technically considered a gaming

mouse now but to look at it you wouldn't think that it is okay it's a simple uh you know three button on top design with two buttons at the thumb right uh so the third you know the third top button being the scroll wheel can can click right but uh what it what it makes up for is one the size of the way it fits your hand and then if you notice to the fingers alan where the fingers go there's indentions did you notice that so where your where So where your pointer finger and middle finger would go on the... Sorry, your ring finger and pointer finger would go on the

left and right mouse buttons. There's some little... There's a little groove there. Yeah, it's just a nice little area for a fit. It's not classified as an ergonomic mouse, but yet it is incredibly well-crafted to fit your hand, right? It does feel good.

I mean, even the scroller itself is one of those loose ones. It's nice. Now, here's where the gamer part comes in. It's a 10,000 DPI mouse, all right? So very fast movements movements on it right and uh as it is with some of the gamer things let's say you know it's got that that bling wow factor where you can change the colors of it so the default is that the logo and the wheel on it will rotate through the 16 million color spectrum on its own or you can just

configure it to always be at a particular... It would definitely be configured because I don't want something rainbowing in my eyeballs. Oh, it actually looks pretty cool. It really does. And it's not like in your eyeballs like what you're thinking that it might be. It's not that...

It's more subtle than what you might be thinking of. It is a good looking mouse and it feels nice. And, you know, with their software, you can set multiple profiles and configure it. So that's another part of the, you know, why it might be more considered as a gaming uh aspect now my thought on this though was that um i think joe had either retweeted or someone had someone had commented to us and joe mentioned it on the show but there was this comment that someone had about using a gaming mouse for productivity and and configuring the the multiple buttons to do things. And that's what got me thinking down the path of,

hey, maybe for a new mouse, a new wired mouse, I should look into a good gaming mouse because then I could configure the buttons to do things. In this one, you can configure the buttons to do whatever you want them to do. I left them at your traditional you know like the the thumb buttons you know are either forward or backward you know things like that all right i need the keyboard i need to feel this keyboard this this was uh you

know oh and by the way there were many sites that i looked at for this thing too that had this listed as their top pick for a gaming mouse by the way and on um amazon there's two versions of this mouse one is this one here and then another one is a uh call of duty branded one you didn't get that one or uh the other one was world of tanks branded and uh but it's literally the same exact mouse it's just instead of this one has the solid black cover uh the the other two would have so instead of this razor logo here it would instead have like a big call of duty skull or it would have a world tanks logo on it there and literally that was the only difference each one of these dude had both both versions of it okay had i think it was around 900 reviews on amazon and it was like a 4.6 4.7 rating on the mouse that's pretty good. Not only did multiple

editorial sites say that this thing was amazing, but so did people that owned it. Consumers. Alright, let's see what the real piece of hardware is over here. Mice are mice. I need to see a keyboard. What do we got here? Close your eyes. I can't see anything.

There's wires and stuff everywhere. now again now stop you're gonna make me look at the table that's gonna make me all uncomfortable stop trying to cheat i don't have my legs crossed okay so the so i i like the mouse'm going to let you do like a quasi-unwrapping of this, okay? All right. All right. I present to you DOS Keyboard. Oh, sweet.

The packaging is very thick. Oh, man, I'm going to feel bad. I'm not going to be able to put this thing back in here. That's okay neither will i okay good so you haven't actually you've just opened it and looked at it oh no no no no i was like that's why i was uh you know late on time today for this recording because i was like oh crap i forgot i need to like pack up some stuff i feel like it's's Christmas and I'm the bad kid who didn't get anything. I didn't get anything either.

I'm just getting teased with it, man. I'm like the poor kid that didn't get anything. So this is the DOS Keyboard 4 Professional, I think is how they word it. It's got the cherry blue switches on it. Yeah, they're loud. Yeah, man. Clicky clacky right can you hear that joe yep oh yeah that's not even close to a microphone for anyone listening that hears this thing like there's probably a foot or two like at least alan's arm length away from the microphone to

the keyboard hey our old friend daniel would love this keyboard yeah well you might too so the top of that thing is aluminum by the way that is considered the thinnest mechanical keyboard you can buy um and and i so far, I think I've had it now for two weeks, one week, something like that, one or two weeks. But, yeah, I have totally loved it, been a big fan. I've actually been surprised that on video calls from the house that you guys haven't said, hey, wait, why are you typing so loud compared to the other one? Because the Logitech was much more quiet compared to this now here's the thing you said you were going to be upset about the ergodox yeah because

you thought i was going to break out on ergodox yeah i had all plans and intentions of buying the ergodox that was what i had set out to buy was the ergodoxox. And the thing was is that when it came time to buy it, I had picked out the one that I wanted with the options that I wanted. I was ready to do it. They wanted $30 for the shipping. I'm like, this is a $300

keyboard already. You can pitch in the shipping. Are you kidding me? No, it's not even a matter of pitching in. It's a matter of charge me a reasonable rate here, man. It is not $30. It does not cost $30 to ship this thing. Yeah, that's ridiculous. That's a ridiculous fee for this thing. I mean, fine. I don't mind you charging me for the shipping and even making an extra dollar or two off of it but 30 dollars man that's ridiculous so that was literally the deal breaker i swear like the keyboard if i remember right the one that i had picked out the ergodox keyboard that i had picked out with the stuff it was 295 dollars and i went to go, as I was going through the checkout process, they're like, you know,

enter it in, your shipping information, and we'll pre-calculate what it's going to cost to ship it. And it was $30. And I'm like, you're kidding me. Yeah, I'm not doing that. All right. So for the listeners, what's so special about this keyboard? Well, okay.

So this is not your typical ergon ergonomical keyboard right this is standard this is a standard old school layout right you know just 104 yep it's flat um you know i do wonder if maybe like uh any if there's any kind of difference in not finger strength because your fingers don't have muscles but um you know if if there's any kind of difference if my finger if what's it called uh the tactile feedback on no there's a there's a d word uh dexterity yes dexterity that if that's going to improve at all because of having like you know that versus like a chicklet or anything like that, I don't know. Honestly, I don't know.

Because I'm actually kind of curious to see, am I going to be hurting because I don't have an ergonomic keyboard for the first time in a very long time? But this one was a much more reasonable price, even with the shipping. So just playing with it for a second there the keys feel amazing they they straight up the the tactile feedback on them is killer like the mechanical switches are very good there is no ergo slant or anything to it so i mean well well what you didn't get to see is this also amazing feature. Oops. As I rip open the box here.

Alright, so hold on a second. Give me a second. Was this the Pro, the Ultimate, or the Professional? There's a couple different models. He's got the 4. Okay. There's three different kinds of 4s. Unbelievable.

Which one is that? Is that the pro? This is the DOS Keyboard 4 Professional. Professional. Which is only available in two options. It's either you get it with the keys printed or you get it blank. So, I mean, the thing is, like, literally, if you go back to the old mechanical keyboard days that's what this thing is except with like a volume and uh some other all right now do yourself

some suggestions there heavy dude yeah right well that's well like i said i mean that whole top of that thing that's not plastic right it might look like it. Now, here's the cool thing, too. That is a USB 3 hub built into it as well. So if you have a USB 3 hub that you can plug it into, it's, of course, backwards compatible. But, yeah, I mean, it's not an ergonomic keyboard, but it's got a nice feel about it. I mean, it has a great feel. I don't think that I could ever go back to a non-ergo keyboard. I mean, Joe.

That's why I said I did something crazy, because I'm trying it. Yeah, because, Joe, you've had two wrist surgeries at this point, right? Yep. Have you noticed the difference with your sculpt? I do, actually. yep have you noticed the difference with your sculpt i do actually i like the the fact that this kind of slanted apart just lets me have my um my arms a little bit wider apart like the elbows and just seems a little bit more comfortable to me but i'm also very wide so that's probably part of it now here's the thing like a traditional keyboard or not traditional let's say other

keyboards might have like a some kind of tinting thing on it right and this one does not as well you and joe can see but the listening audience can't but it's just flat on the bottom yeah it's just flat on the bottom but it has this thing here that is just magnetic here that'll snap into place okay so what he's talking about is like on the bottom of a lot of keyboards, like even the Sculpt Ergo comes with like a little thing that kind of clips on the bottom. Some keyboards have like a little thing that you can either put little legs in the back or the front to elevate them at different angles. Tint it however you want.

Yeah, this one actually has like a little mechanical bar that just kind of... Well, not mechanical, magnetic. A magnetic bar, I'm sorry. Well, it's actually plastic and it's just got some magnets on it, but yeah. Now, here's the cool thing. Well, I don't know. Let's say a weird thing. I guess they felt the need that they were like, well, I mean, if we got to make this hunk of plastic

and it's going to be a straight hunk of plastic, why not make it functional? This thing is actually a ruler it's it's a it's a you know millimeter on one side inches on the other this is this is a ruler hand me the hunk of plastic like just like queen elizabeth was one so is this hey i'm going to give you a little pro tip and for anybody out there that does any DIY type stuff, you can't actually see anything because the entire thing's red. You can take whiteout and brush whiteout. Like if you have anything that has marks or notches on it that you can't see because the color's off, you can take a little bit of whiteout, rub it across there, and then wipe off the excess.

You'll be able to read the lines perfectly. Well, this is why I say, like like i'm never going to use this thing as a ruler like it's just going to stay you know attached to the bottom of it and that's all i'm ever going to do it's it's a pretty piece of metal there's no doubt about that and i mean if somebody loves a mechanical keyboard that's flat that's that's a significant chunk of machinery there but wait we go there's more all right so because this isn't an ergonomic keyboard okay and this this isn't as flush to the desk as like say apple's uh you know keyboards are for example like they're they're you know either the wired or the Bluetooth keyboards those

are really slim you know low profile right I got this little guy here a wrist pad yeah this is made by glorious PC gaming race and if you notice the thing that that kind of drew me to it is that the sides are actually stitched together to keep it from fraying and anything coming out or whatever.

Yeah, good workmanship on that. Yeah. The only other thing that I'm looking for to complete my set here is, uh, um, kind of something similar to this,

this mouse mat that you have that you let me borrow for tonight. Um, but I was kind of thinking about the area that I have for my mouse. Isn't it? Isn't like, just like how I have the keyboard on top of this mouse mat, right? Um,

you know, I don't have a room for a gigantic mouse mat. And so I was actually thinking about getting one of those where you'd put the keyboard on top of the mouse mat have you seen those where they're like you know elongated ones so yeah i did i did something crazy well you'll have to check back well let's see we record every two or three months so by the time we record our next episode, you'll have some good feedback on whether or not there's pain or not. So we'll check back in on the next one.

Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, it's been a week or two so far. I'm still on that honeymoon stage. Yep. So there's still a lot of love and favor with it. I did look at and consider the code keyboard. Yep.

A big difference between the two that may or may not matter to you is the code keyboard is illuminated. This one is not. I do like the backlit keys on my keyboards. Yeah. My scope doesn't have it, but I do like them. Yeah. And I figure, well, I've dealt with this Logitech for so long now, and it's not backlit. So who cares, right? Yeah. My scope doesn't have it, but I do like them. Yeah. And I figure, well, I've dealt with this Logitech for so long now, and it's not backlit, so who cares, right? Yeah.

I mean, if you know how to type, you pretty much don't need it. Okay. Or we could put it that way. Yeah. Well, it might not necessarily be like that. You could just be wanting to type, and the room is dark or whatever, and you just want to look at something real quick, and you're like, oh, crap, I've got to type in my password. Right. Right.

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Head over to www.infragistics.com today and start your free trial. All right. So now that I have completely derailed the conversation, now we can talk more about jobs. Let's do this, Steve. Oh, no. Are we derailing it further? No, we shouldn't.

No, I think Joe is trying to ask mostly you about the hardest part of about landing a job yeah we get a lot of questions about um jobs in general whether it's finding your first career or when to switch or um you know what kind of money or technologies people should be looking at and so i wanted to ask you guys what you thought uh the hardest part about actually landing a job is well you wanted to ask us but what you thought the hardest part about actually landing a job is. Well, you wanted to ask us, but I want you to answer it first. Oh, I didn't really think about it. For me right now, it's probably just the location because of where I'm located. So I would say even just finding the job in my area is pretty tough unless it's remote.

So that's the thing that i'm uh kind of thinking about now um so yeah that's my answer interesting well i don't know if you guys heard or not but i scored a four on the skills challenge thing earlier so you know i seem to recall hearing something about that yeah i actually i mean i've i've never had a difficult time getting a job. And here's why. Is the three of us know, because we've interviewed people, a lot of the candidates out there will come in saying that they, you know, the resume reads like they basically created the interwebs. And you'll ask two questions, and then like man really come on dude and so like

because i've and this is truly not trying to come across cocky or anything but i feel like because i do prepare if i go in for a job interview like i take them seriously if i'm going to go in and i'm interviewing for a javascript position i'm going to polish up on things that I might not touch a lot, right? And if I go in for a.NET position, I'm going to read up on some of the things that I might've forgotten about or whatever. I treat it like a test in school. And so I usually show up pretty prepared for them. And I have a fairly decent ability to talk on the fly. So if somebody asks me a question, it's easy for me to elaborate on it the problem that i always have with that part though is like you were talking about the

brushing up and it's like you you don't always know what to brush up on and i always seem to have this like incredible talent for brushing up on the wrong thing and then it's like oh well okay we're going there with the questions i don't know man so i mean i've known you for a while i think you just stress out a lot like what i there are people this guy there are people that are good at taking tests right like joe are you were you good at taking tests uh i was uh good at getting mediocre grades okay so but did you study hard for those mediocre grades no okay so so that was kind of me i mean i get good ish grades without really even trying

and and no i don't think this i i mean i know you're trying to say that like people who are bad at test taking and everything but well they stress out when they're put on the spot is kind of what i'm getting at because i've seen you know because when it was time for school like no i was fine with that in school really i mean if if if i only put if i only you know did a half i won't finish that if i only did if i only baked okay there you go thank you If I only did a half-baked attempt, then I wasn't surprised if my grade wasn't stellar. And when I did actually put the time in, I would normally do pretty good. But it wasn't stress like what you're describing now.

Okay. With the interview thing, I've definitely seen you go into full-on physical lockdown mode like it's it's kind of crazy that that what you're thinking i know you're thinking of like one time in particular and you know that was but there was also like a lot of build-up from a lot of build up from a lot of places you know that were just kind of I don't know I don't know how to describe it but you know circumstances were tough yes so

that's not I don't think a fair representative example okay well fair enough yeah I mean I think the hardest part for for me is the expectations. So landing it is not a big deal. Like for me, the biggest thing is if I'm going to take something, I want to enjoy it.

And so like, I've literally gone before on full day interviews where I'm like, look, you can interview me first. And if everything goes well, then I want to come in and see your office. I want to come in, and I want to see what the people are doing all day. I want to walk around. I want to interact. I want to see what's happening. I want to see what the environment's like.

I want to see how the people feel or how they look when they're walking around the place. And so I know that's not as much about landing the job, but that's, that's almost me like interviewing the people that I'm going to, to potentially be with, because that's a big deal, right? You spend more than half your day there. So. Hey, I could see how that could show passion and interest in their company, which is a really good thing to, um, hello tech which is a really good thing too. Hello Tech Pros is a really cool thing. One of the episodes talking about Tiggers and Eeyores. And this is basically what we referenced. You know, are you a Tigger who kind of gives off

and exudes energy that other people kind of feed on and picks them up as well? Or are you kind of an Eeyore who is also cool, but tends to kind of bring the energy level down and make everyone want to take a nap. So your interview style there sounds like a tigger, and it makes people want to kind of join in and throw a parade. Yeah, I heard that referenced in a recent episode with James, who is in the Slack channel.

I loved that... Come on. He is a Slack channel. He's a celebrity. He's the MVP, VIP. James is awesome. I loved the whole Tigger Eeyore

analogy though. I thought that was a great way to visualize your office and your peers, the people around you. Oh, speaking of, along these same lines, one of our buddies, John, he was saying if he goes into a place and there's too many meeting rooms, he's out. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That wasn't John.

That was Sean. Was it that was that was uh was it him i thought he said he said that in the meetup that if he's interviewing because he he hates uh you know he hates talking to people and interviewing uh or having me he hates having meetings and that that every programmer's job is trying to find ways to avoid meetings and everything that we do that we can program is an excuse to you know get away from a meeting like we we he was making the example of um anything that we could move from say if he if he does anything in, say, a configuration file, then he has to have a meeting with someone and explain what the configuration file is

and how it works and what the settings are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if he just tells people, hey, you can set this environment variable and you're done, then he can just send out an email and administrators all over the world know how environment variables work

and they're comfortable with it and every cloud system uses it so it's not a problem and you know he was saying avoided yeah so he he avoided meeting and he told a story about how there was one job interview that he walked in he he actually walked out of or or declined the job because he walked around the facility there and noticed that there were way too many meeting rooms and he didn't like it that's amazing and i thought you know what that is there's actually some gold in that in that uh um advice there there's a lot of truth to that now let's dial it back a second though what's the hardest part about landing your first job yeah that's really tough um i you know

i hear a lot of people complain about the computer sciencey kind of tech questions and so i kind of wonder if that's part of it but another part is just finding a job that doesn't have crazy requirements like 10 years of note or or you know just something totally wacko that is not appropriate for a beginner that's one of the frustrating things right like you'll look at a job description sometimes and and for a beginner they're're like, oh, you need three years of experience in C++, five years in this. And it's like, whoa, wait a second. You know, that's not quite fair for what you're asking for, right? I mean, that is frustrating.

I mean, I don't know. I don't even know how you – So how do companies hire? If there's so many people that are out there first year looking for the first job, how come more companies aren't taking advantage of these people that are desperate to work? Maybe they're not qualified. Maybe they don't interview well. Maybe they don't know how to interview well. Maybe the interviewee is fine, but the people who are interviewing don't know how to interview well.

Because there could be a number of things, right? That that's like the whole college degree thing. We've talked about this before. I don't want to take away from it. It's, you know, it's an important thing that you can get and you spend time doing, and it proves that you stick to something, but sometimes the most qualified candidate may not even have one. And in, in some places, I mean, in corporate environments, especially, you know, there's almost like a stack, I'll call the trash, where resumes go that don't have a college degree on them. Well, I was going to say that that's the hardest part is just getting that callback there. Totally. And that, so that's almost, I guess, going back to to this the hardest part about landing a job maybe

it's finding the position in the first place that you want to to apply for right because like you said like joe you live out you're not real close to a tech spot right right and for us like michael and myself we are but the commute would be horrendous in a lot of cases, right? It's the same. Yeah. I mean, seriously, like you probably end up driving an hour. We will too. It'll only be 20 miles away for us, but it'll be, you know, 60 for you, but it's same amount of time. And that's, that might be the most difficult thing. And honestly honestly the answer to that probably is to get involved in things like linkedin right that's a professional social media site uh build up your profile there get connected with people on their recruiters other people in the industry i don't know man man for a developer

linkedin that is not the place i would say to go start building up your GitHub, Stack Overflow. For someone today, in the world we live in today, that's where you should start, man. You're talking about answering questions and writing code. I'm talking about building a network. Stack Overflow is a great place to build up your reputation as far as answering questions and all that. What I'm saying is get on a social network like LinkedIn so you can start building up Stack Overflow is a great place to build up your reputation as far as answering questions and all that.

What I'm saying is get on a social network like LinkedIn so you can start building up your professional network. Stack Overflow can be invaluable. I mean, if you're just out of college, though, I don't know. That's a tough one, though. I mean, how do you define building up your network? Like every recruiter you talk to, all of a sudden you're going to connect to that guy. Okay, so you're connected to the recruiter and then connected to every person you interview with. Screw all that. I mean, it sounds like we're solving the wrong problem.

I mean, we just said that the real problem is basically bad interviewing or bad interviewees, which I think means either not enough practical knowledge, like they don't know the basics that are required for the job like Git, or maybe that the companies just aren't set up for beginners. They don't have a good way to bring new people in without a lot of overhead and setup and taking time away from more senior people. Well, no, that's what… So, like, they find themselves giving out, like, the same kind of advice to go to meetups or create side projects, but… No, that's why mine was different, though. Wait, what did you say, Joe? I just was saying the advice that you read when you Google or even the things that you instinctively want to say,

they don't solve the problems that we just said were the biggest deal for finding your first job. Well, I mean, I'm sorry that i like spoke every but i i was what i was saying though was that um the for the hardest problem isn't necessarily the interview it's even getting to the interview and that networking that you've done like what you're describing like who cares if you build up that reputation on Stack Overflow, especially for the college age, if you build up that portfolio on GitHub where somebody can see what your interests are, like how you code and everything,

those are the things that are going to get you noticed and even give you a chance to get that FaceTime or maybe just, you know, voice time with the interviewer. That's the hardest part is getting noticed. I don't know, man. I don't necessarily think like the Stack Overflow thing is going to be the way or even GitHub, right? Like how many projects are on GitHub now, right right it's not no no no no wait wait

wait wait wait wait i am not suggesting that it is a matter of you being the most famous person on github right like like that you become like oh my god every time this guy uh commits something it's amazing so just automatically approve his pull request i'm not suggesting that what i'm suggesting is just the mere fact that you have stuff out there to be seen like it can be when you and i came out of college this wasn't an that wasn't available and it didn't matter right didn't exist right well yeah that's my point and so and so for uh you know us we're not going to have that much out there to show for that uh but for someone in college like that that's that's the way that they're going to get noticed is through those um i think that's one avenue and i guess that's the thing so like i would get more on board with the go-to meetups.

If you're in college, try and get an internship. And the reason why? Because the companies don't expect you to have any great skill set at that point. Well, yeah, I totally am on board. Co-op, internship, those are amazing opportunities. And if you were in school and you have the opportunity to – well, of course you have the opportunity, but I'm saying if they make something like a – not a job fair, how would you classify that? That's a job fair. That's usually what they call it.

Really? I don't remember it being worded that way. That's what they still call it, yeah. But there's usually like a center. Take advantage of it is my point, though that is that is that is how you're going to build your network that's how you get your foot in the door so you need to leverage your professors and all that but let's say but i still say that if you're in college and you don't already have a github account you should be opening up a github account and every bit of your homework

you should be saving to your gith GitHub account in different repos for each one so that people can see, so that one, you can build up that collection of projects and that people can see how you think and how you solve problems. Yeah, but your implementation of QuickSort isn't going to get you through an HR screen. No, it's not going to get you through an HR screen necessarily.

But what I'm saying is that if somebody sees that you already have that, then they can already... Okay, here's the thing, Joe. Who are you more likely to want to talk to? You've got two candidates

that you're looking at their resumes. One has nothing like that at all available. The other guy, he has questions that he's answered on stack overflow so you can see some of the things he said how right was he you know do you agree with his answers or his approach and then you can look at his github projects and see how he solved some of the problems do you like them you already know ahead of time what this guy's thinking

which one of these two candidates are you more likely to contact for an interview but you know go ahead one who actually knows how to use git because i uh i haven't fixed it and that's the real answer but yeah i mean if nothing else it shows like a real world understanding of like how programming projects are done and how to actually get things kind of finished and published which is good but it's just i keep hearing that advice over and over again and i still keep hearing people ask like how the heck do i get my first job so there's something broken in the system somewhere along the way well the technical interview is broken i mean let's let's be honest it is totally i'm not a fan of the way the interview goes and i don't really have a good answer for it. Like I was, I was chomping on this with a

will, one of our friends recently, and it's frustrating, right? Like you can't hire everybody and find out who's good and who's not. And then just throw the other ones away. It's too expensive, right? I mean, that's, that's really the problem. It's it's too expensive right i mean that's that's really the problem it's just way too expensive i'm a big fan of a contract to hire type thing so that you could test somebody's skills out i'm a big fan on a trial period now granted they still got to pass some sort of screen before you pull them in the door right like you're not going to say oh okay well we got 100 people here let's bring them all in for 30 days you still have to narrow the field down somehow but you know here's my problem with the github thing right how easy is it to fork a project and make it look like it's yours or how easy is it to go copy some code and just push it up there okay well

if as as the interviewer if you don't know how to read these sources whether it be a stack overflow or a github then you know you probably shouldn't be relying on this. But even read the sources. You could literally just go copy and paste the stuff and put it into another solution and push it up. So I guess my thing is I would rather – when we ask what's the hard part about getting an interview, I still go back to the network. I still think that meetups are a huge way to go to it. Go to a big meetup. Okay. If you're attending meetups that have three people that could be good depending on how narrow focused your industry is

or what part you want to get into or go to big ones, but don't keep your mouth shut. I guess is my, is my key point. If you go to a meetup and your whole goal is to get, you know, noticed, talk to people, right? Find out what's going on see how you can introduce yourself it's almost like going on a date right make some small talk get in know the people connect with them well i've also seen some people get noticed for some negative reasons totally and that's the thing right my personalities are going to play a key role in it but the other thing to me not mine it's do you guys remember back in the day, a few years ago,

if you went on an interview, they said that the next thing that you were supposed to do was send a thank you letter in. I think that's almost like a lost art nowadays. Have you ever done that? I have, back in the day. Really? Yeah, but I mean...

Joe? Back in the day. Really? I'm a jerk. So, if if you take that here's the same thing like i went to a meetup the other night we talked about the sp.net core thing right every meetup you go to has a thing to where you can post a comment afterwards guess how many people actually said something there were 100 people at this meetup there might have been five people posted anything in there right go up there and say hey man thanks for taking the time to do this meetup put your name

out there because guess what your name shows up next to that comment like there are so many ways to try and grow your network and get your name out there in a positive way and i think a lot of people fail at it well one aspect of the meetups and uh Joe, you can comment on the Florida scene, but I know here in the Atlanta area, a lot of the meetups, depending on which group it is, might be at the end, might be at the beginning, but usually it's at the beginning, if I recall. They'll have recruiters announce themselves at the start of the meetup and with any openings that they have,

if they have specific openings. And even depending on the meetups, there's some meetups that I go to where the companies themselves, they'll have, I'm thinking specifically of the iOS meetups, iOS, Android, and Node meetups, they will have, if you are an employer looking for someone, you get to speak separately from the recruiters. And so they give each, because it's a little bit of a different situation if it's the actual employer that you might be talking to.

So you want to be kind of aware of that. So in fairness to everybody, they break the, they recognize the distinction between those two and, and break them apart. So that's kind of an interesting take. What are the light down there, Joe?

What's the, what meetups? Yeah. Are they similar type thing where they'll have like, Hey, this, you know, this particular recruiter sponsoring sponsoring this or whatever?

And we haven't even mentioned the free pizza. Right. And Sprite or Coke or whatever. And there's a couple of things we've kind of touched on. Like you will see people talking about their open source projects or things that they need volunteers for or help for. You will meet other people that are looking for coworkers. And if you could talk to your buddies and go in with you, say your buddies from college or whatever, your boot camp, need volunteers for or help for uh you will meet other people that are looking for co-workers and if you could talk to your buddies and to go in with you you know say your buddies from college

or whatever your boot camp then that's also a really great way of kind of keeping in touch with those guys when they get a job there's a good chance they could bring you on and vice versa it's just good to keep in touch with everybody so i mean we've i feel like um you two are more on the networking side of the equation to this problem, and I'm more on the building your, let's say, online reputation or portfolio as your way. So why don't we just agree that this is a multifaceted problem, right? It's not the one thing that you need to do. There are several things that you need to do,

and these are some of them. I will say, though, on the GitHub side of things, I do agree with it. Not so much about your projects, though, unless you're building something just kind of cool and neat and shows off some things. I would say go find some big open source projects like a lot of the apache ones right like those are huge and there's big players

that work on those things if you get in there and you help with some of the bugs that are happening in these that you know maybe some of the main developers don't have time to get around to because they're working on some other things get your name in on some of those big projects right okay okay and fair i yes if that's something you feel comfortable with doing but what i was suggesting was that um if you're say for example a a college student that you know you you haven't landed that first job yet, right? Your experience is only what you've done in class, then you might not feel comfortable committing to someone else's open source project, no matter how big or small it might be, right? You might not have that comfort level yet.

And even as Joe was, I hope jokingly, referring to difficulties in using Git. No, he was talking about other people. He hates fixing their problems. Oh, oh, oh. You know, even if something as simple as like getting experience using Git, you might want to do that on your own and your own projects. And if you already have to do programming assignments for work,

why not get into the habit of using source control for those projects and just go ahead and throw them up on your GitHub account? And then that way you get some experience and you become familiar, how's that, with Git and its syntaxes, right? Yeah, I'm good with that. I think it's good to get outside your comfort zone, though. And that's when you become way better. I mean, i play basketball

the most fun you'll ever have playing basketball or any sport or anything that you do is going up against somebody that actually challenges you somebody that's better every time every time i play basketball and i hit a home run i feel amazing see there it is and i i don't know like that's that's kind of like where i'm going like i'm not I'm not trying to say that you should not have your own GitHub projects. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that if you're starting out and you're trying to build a name between the networking, you need to work with other people. Because I guess my problem is it's almost like I kind of see it like the App Store in iOS, right?

You can build this amazing thing, but there's so many other things out there that you're just going to get eclipsed now now on your resume though saying here's my github account and here's my linkedin account and here's this i think that's hugely important being able to show those well okay i just want to make this one last point though because because uh especially as it relates to using GitHub, for example, as a way to store your school projects, whatever assignments and everything, is that everyone will tell you. There are a thousand articles out there about,

hey, go find some open source projects that need some help and even submit what you think is a problem and fix it yourself or find an open ticket that they haven't fixed and start with the small ones and do it, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean you've each read that article multiple times, right? And my point is, especially if you're inexperienced, then that can seem like a very challenging and daunting task, right? Start small. Iterate small with your own projects that you are in complete control of.

And then as you gain that confidence in it, then move on to going outside of your comfort zone and saying, okay, let me commit to this open source project, right? Let me see what I can do to help there, right? Start small is my point, though. Yeah, I like that. I do want to throw in the negative aspect, too, though. You need to be careful nowadays.

Social media is huge. It are kind of a thing i mean i've heard about it like like there was uh i mean this story came out during the nba playoffs there was some dude harassing a fan uh harassing either either the cleveland player no it was some cleveland players fan harassing the Golden State Warriors. I think Steph Curry or maybe his sister or something. Dude got fired, right? Oh, wait, the fan was harassing the player? Yeah, and the fan got fired for what he was saying on Twitter. You guys, like, if you're trying to build a career,

and I know this is hard to swallow, being that everybody grows up in the days of Instagram and Facebook and all those things right now, and it's so much fun and it's so easy, that stuff can haunt you. People saying do some stupid stuff online, though. I mean, you got to be careful, right? Like, if everybody can see it, your employer can see it, your potential employer can see it. And believe you me, nowadays, there are actually services out there to help build or repair your online social profile. And so that should tell you something, right? Like you need to be careful. You need to conduct yourself at least in a public manner that would not be detrimental to you going and getting a job.

Well, I guess this is going to take us into the survey for this episode. Yeah, and we kind of talked about this a little bit, but we were curious what you guys thought was the hardest part about sticking in a new job, whether that's finding it and meeting those job requirements, dealing with recruiters, getting past that computer science, technical interview, maybe racism, sexism,

ageism location, or maybe we have other box too. So yeah, we're curious to see what you guys think is the hardest part. And also we were just hoping that um what you uh is the best advice like the single best thing that someone could do if they're looking for their first programming job yeah i would definitely suggest uh you know number my favorite place for you to comment on as it relates to this episode would be the comment section of the show notes for this one, which will be www.codingblocks.net slash episode 44.

Right. Yeah. So, um, while we're aren't kind of on the topic of survey, no, what were you going to say to you? I did want to ask you guys,

uh, how did you, how did we get our first jobs are we talking programming jobs or my job bagging groceries at kroger how did you get that job bagging groceries was that really your first job was bagging groceries yeah dude it was really terrible you were a lazy kid pushing and chopping carts in 100 degree weather in georgia yeah man sir no no here's why because if you were uh not a lazy kid then you would have had a job where you didn't have to meet some legal age requirement like

cutting neighbor lawns cutting your neighbor's lawns yeah uh no bagging groceries let's see on my first programming job uh i actually kind of stumbled into it. So I went to work for IBM, working in the global learning department. And what I was hired to do was like help with presentations for, like put together presentations and slideshows for learning programs.

And I found that they were doing a lot of redundant stuff. So I ended up programming in, what was the name? Lotus. It was Lotus Script is what was the name? Lotus. Lotus. It was Lotus Script is what it was behind the scenes. So I ended up writing programs that basically automated all my work.

And from that point, I kind of got promoted into a lead developer position, and then I left. All right. All right, Alon, what about you? First tech job. I wish it was something glamorous. I wish I had some great story to tell you here, but Alan really just took the wind out of my sails a lot, unintentionally maybe, because coincidentally,

my first job was as a co-op with IBM. But like I said, purely coincidental, we were not in the same departments. Although we were like same road. Yeah. Like, you know, same office complex, but different buildings during that time. And yeah, I was originally hired on as a land administrator, or as much of an administrator as a co-op is, right? But that was what I was to help out with.

And ended up eventually getting hired on as a C++ developer there. So you went to a job fair or something and found that in the first place? Oh, no. This is the most horrible example of an interview ever. Do you really want to hear this? I mean, I'll tell you. I'm curious. Oh, God.

So I guess maybe it was called a job fair. I really honestly don't remember it that way. What I recall was, and maybe because I was in college, I just wasn't paying as much attention, and that's why I don't recall what it was called. But I remember that there were a bunch of companies coming in for co-op positions. Career fairs is what they called them. Career fair. I don't remember the word fair at all in it, but whatever.

Maybe it was. I just remember that companies would come around every quarter and look for co-ops or internships, depending on the company. And, you know, as a computer science major, I obviously wanted to get into one of the tech companies and IBM came around. And so this is why I say like people do stupid things, right? So I get into this interview with IBM right at the beginning. And if you've ever co-opped or if you never have, the way co-oping typically works is that you, let's say your school is on a quarter system because it's a lot easier to think about it that way. There's four quarters in the year. You go to school for a quarter.

You work for a quarter. You go to school for a quarter. You go to work for a quarter. Every three months, you're either in school or you're working, right? Um, but you're, you're theoretically, you know, you're not doing both at the same time. Um, because often the co-op jobs are not in the same vicinity as your, as your school school and when the career fair as maybe it was called uh came around and and the companies were interviewing for interns and co-ops it was during the uh what would it be They came in during the winter, which meant that they were looking to

fill jobs for that spring, which meant that I would have worked during the fall and spring quarters of the school year and gone to school during the winter and summer school, uh, quarters of the school year, which I felt was the most depressing schedule you could possibly have because winter was just a horrible time altogether, at least my university experience, because anyone who might have partied a little too much during the fall quarter, when winter came around, they felt like they really had to hustle and work harder to pull up that grades from the partying they did in the fall. And then because all their hard work paid off, when spring break came around and spring quarter came around, they were ready to have fun again.

So winter was the quarter where nobody had fun, right? I mean, not to mention it was colder, but it just wasn't the fun. And then the summer one was boring because a lot of people, you know, there was a lot fewer students on the campus during the summer quarters, and the summer quarters were highly compressed compared to the others. So you had to work much harder and there were just less fun around because there were less people there. So I just, I had no desire to work, um, during the, the fall or spring. That's when I fall and spring quarters were when I wanted to be in school

because those were the fun times. And if you're going to go to college or university like those, you know, at least have some fun about it, right, was my take. And so I walk into this interview

in the winter knowing that the job is for the spring and I tell that, you know, I sit down after, you know, introductions and I after you know introductions and uh i remember i'll never forget the look on this guy's face because uh you know the very next thing i say as i sit down is i don't really want this job i'm just wanting to uh you know get some

practice interviewing so we can start now and this is why i say like we say stupid things because the interview had started the interview had started when i walked in the door but yet i was just you know whatever let's start it now he didn't tell you to leave no no he he surprisingly he He went through the whole process, and I guess I made a... Impression. Yeah, one of those. I don't know why that word alluded to me, but yeah, I guess I made an impression. So yeah, it was literally the dumbest thing that you could do in an interview, and I did it. Got it.

Well, no, because I told him I didn't want the job. Oh, he didn't give it to you? No. But it must have made an impression when I'm saying whatever he wrote down, because what happened was the next spring, when I wanted to be in school and the career fair or whatever came through, I get this call. Nice. And they're like, hey, we'd like to talk to you.

Very cool. So it was really weird. That's crazy. And I would never recommend anybody ever do anything like that. Yeah, that's like anti-networking and in fact if i would probably go back i would almost want to say i would go back and tell myself that i to not do that but it worked out did work out okay maybe it could have worked out better if i had approached it different i don't know we'll never know so joe what about you did you ever

start programming i did start um uh our buddy john actually got me in uh he was working in the company and they were hiring some kind of junior devs to do some like real basic um html stuff because this is kind of the days of like pre-cms you know we still took like you know the like webmasters were still a thing and so i would take like articles and stuff and press releases and like throw some brs in there and he kind of coached me to uh what they'd be asking an interview and i was going to school for it at the time and so uh i was like making little crappy games and messing around with websites and stuff and so it wasn't too bad to to uh kind of brush up on

html a little bit and uh get in the door so what you're saying is it was who you knew through networking that got you into the job. Here we go. All of our stories were all kind of based around the people, whether it's the people you work with or the people that you met, kind of putting yourself out there, or the people that you went to school with.

I don't think that was the takeaway from my story, but if that's what you got out of it. Well, it wouldn't happen if you didn't go to the career fair or career star. And said stupid things. Yeah, 90% of this is showing up, right? It really is. Look, man, we've said this before.

People say, oh, you were lucky. Man, you're not lucky if you weren't there. Right? Like, you cannot be lucky if you weren't at the place or the time. Like, showing up is most of it. Yeah. And saying stupid things is the other part. Memorable.

And I've been pretty good at saying stupid things ever since. All right. So, along those lines, we were talking about the survey. Hey, what happened? Where did Joe go? And what? I don't know. Joe disappeared.

He's gone. Where did you go? All right. Hi. I dropped my phone and rejoined. I don't know if you guys are talking about that. I don't think he wanted to are talking about that i don't i don't think he wanted to hear oh i missed it yeah i don't think he wanted to hear this next part but

i'm gonna say it anyways because this is where we're going to talk about the survey results from the last episode oh yeah right oh hold on i haven't cheated yet oh wait no no, no, no, no. All right. So in the last episode, we asked, well, this is going to get weird. Okay. So in episode 43's survey, we asked in episode 42's survey, only 1% of the listeners identified as preferring front-end dev work only. And why is that number so low? Oh, that's right. Yeah.

So your choices were CSS. I noticed that SAS wasn't included. Or number two option, the lines have blurred. Front-end work is leaking into the back or number three choice full stack is where it's at or your fourth choice is it's irrelevant the podcast poll demographics are skewed which one do you think it is three full stack is where it's at yep all right joe what you got uh i uh i'm i'm i'm gonna go with leaking b leaking okay the lines of blurred front end work is leaking into the back all right uh either of

you want to put a number behind it how like how confident you are in your answer i just want to say that i think there was a psychological um study that could be done on the fact that joe remember the word leaking more than anything else i did write this poll. On numbers, I'd say 35% on the full stack. No, no, no, no. 40%. 40% on the full stack. 40%. Remember, price is right rules here.

If you go over. I was 0.1% off last time. You were. Yes. You were. If you go over, it's done. Joe, what's your number? 30%.

All right. I was waiting on one of you to say one when I said that. The reason why Joe thinks the numbers are so low, why most people prefer front-end dev work is that the lines have blurred and front-end work is leaking in the back. Alan thinks that the number is so

low that people prefer front-end that most people don't prefer front end work because full stack is where it's at and uh alan is more correct than joe but by price is right rules you both lose oh is it way lower well see if you had stuck with your gut instinct you would have been spot on man oh dude it was 35.6 i was off by 0.6 yeah man you when you said that i almost like fell out of my chair because like oh he's cheated again but yeah it was uh it was really a toss-up between that and CSS. Most people don't like front-end work. The second most popular choice was because of CSS.

That's interesting. People really hate CSS. I guess I could see it, though. And that's why Windows development Or application development would be easier Because you only have to deal with one set of styles You're not dealing with 20 browsers And 3 OS's Well let's not care about

What the UI is Whether it's desktop, mobile, or web But if you're server side Period Then you don't have to worry about any of that So your interface is just like a bunch of unit tests yeah right yeah versus if your job requires that you touch css then the frustrating thing for you can be all of the different browsers out there the different

versions out there and if you have to support ie8 or below you really want to hurt yourself but i'll even say this though taking it a step further i mean css is is pretty much the bane of dealing with styles for browsers right but i think that it's even starting to blend into applications now because not not the css but the frustration with front ends. Because now you can, with things like Xamarin or NativeScript or React Native, you can write your business core once, but you still have to redo the UI on Android, iOS, Windows, whatever. Like the UI in general is super duper frustrating because it's not consistent anywhere. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I understand what you mean. And I don't have a good answer for that. That was actually, that's a shame we didn't have an answer that would kind of support that, though. Yeah, I mean, because we definitely went more web-centric on that one. Maybe that's where the people who voted that it was irrelevant, maybe that's where they were thinking is that, hey, you're not including the mobile developers as an example or desktop developers as an example.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that is so frustrating. I mean, what are the cross-platform choices for doing desktop-type applications out there? I can't remember them off the top of my head. I know Xamarin's one. Electron. Java. Windows.

Well, Java really, I mean, if you're relying on the Java controls as the skinning for that thing, though. Look at Eclipse. It's cross-platform because it's Java, right? Yeah, that's not exactly an attractive UI. I don't know if that's the one you want to use as your... I'm just saying it exists. Mine have offended a few. What about Unity?

Oh yeah, Unity. For gaming type stuff though, right? Not necessarily for applications. So it's... I still think that just front end ui type stuff is one of the most challenging just because it's not as easy to port in anything whether it's a browser whether it's an os whether whatever it is it just seems like it's always the thing that is that is treated differently for whatever reason. I'm going to clarify that.

Let's make the analogy that a browser is an operating system. Kind of, yeah. Okay. Because if you have to do any kind of UI development cross-platform, then it's frustrating. But if you're able to stay in one ecosystem, then it's less so. Like if you're only ever doing Windows development, right? If you're doing desktop Windows development,

then the UI portion of your job is not as bad as if you had to do Windows and Mac and Linux. Totally, yep. That's always why I've had a hard time making a desktop application. Even if you were doing iOS development, if you're only doing iOS development, It's fine. That's not as bad.

Now you make an app where you also got to support every version of Android device that's out there. Because if you're doing ios development you have like i don't even remember what the current uh supported set of of ios devices is but i mean you know less than a dozen uh if you consider like every well i mean way less than that if you consider the different resolutions you know're talking about a handful of different resolutions that are out. The point being is it's a much smaller subset, whereas when you get into Android,

all of a sudden, you already know right off the bat that whatever the latest version is is not going to be the most widely used version of the operating system. You start going down to lowest common denominator. Could you imagine being the Evernotes of the world that need to be on every

platform? You're right. I mean that, oh my goodness. Wow. But anyway, yeah. So that's a good poll results.

Oh man. I just realized we have to go to back. We have to start again. We have to go back we have to start again we have to go back to the news session what we didn't talk about the most important thing to happen in nerd culture for since the internet was this the new pronunciation of uh gif no let me look up the date here that she'll forever live in infamy. March 14th. Nope. You got to guess. May the 4th. Okay, you guys

both lose. July 6th, 2016. And it's the day that people started going outside again. Oh, right. Yes. I know exactly where we're going with this. i have not like oh my god

to 60 year olds walking around parks and parking lots staring at their phones catching pokemon oh man how have you not seen this you know it's funny i have i don't have that app. I will never have that app. But Nintendo's stock price doubled because they finally... Did it sink again? It tanked, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, because people figured out that they didn't actually own Pokemon. It was another

developer and it was a licensing thing. But yeah, I go to parks now in my area that were abandoned a month ago. You would never see anyone in there. And let's say we're like drinking beer and eating chips. And now there are teenagers. There are roving bands of baby boomers walking around in these parks in 95 degree weather.

That never would have happened two months ago or a year ago. And everyone's catching Pokemon. Everyone's talking about Pokemon. I mean, it's completely crazy to me the world has changed but i think that's kind of cool though in a way right i mean people are having fun and they're actually using technology to get out and about instead of being camped out in front of a tv right like that's a win oh yeah yeah and i'm seeing teenagers talking to 60-year-olds in a friendly way. Like, that is not natural. That's new.

It's different. It's weird. It definitely did bring the world together in a new way for the first time. In a friendly way. Yeah, it's crazy. Do kids usually, like, trip old people where you live? They just stay away. No kid wants to be hanging out with somebody who looks like their mom, right?

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, none of that. No, man. Yeah, these kids are talking to grandpa. No big deal. Wow. What are you defining as grandpa, though? Me?

Basically, no. I look at an eight-year-old, and their parents come up, and they're like, Have you seen there's a Pikachu around the corner? And we all go over there together, and they watch me catch it, and we talk about it and high-five, and it's great. That's awesome, man. So you're doing this then? Yeah.

Unfortunately, there's none in my neighborhood, so I have to kind of go out. I have to go to restaurants. I have to go to parks. I have to go to strange places I would normally never go. So you're doing it. You know what this reminds me of? The new age geocaching.

Oh, that's exactly what it is. It's a digital geocaching. That's all it is. It's the gamified version of geocaching. I mean, there have been some interesting stories that have come out about it, though. Some that were kind of like really bad PR kind of stories where uh like at the i forget one of them was like at a holocaust museum there was uh a gas pokemon a gas type pokemon i don't remember the exact story um you've been camping out near near uh poestops looking for people not paying attention.

There have been people that have purposely set... Well, I don't know about cops, but definitely maybe the criminal type. There have been stories where people have laid a trap by putting...

I don't play the game, but You can place a lure on a pokey stop to kind of There you go. A pokey stop is what I was looking for. I feel so goofy. To get people to come out to some place and then that way when they'll just watch that area and when they know that they come by, then

they know at least they have some kind of a nice phone. That's brutal. Yeah, but it's been really interesting to watch, at least in my area. You'll see church parking lots, and there's all sorts of activity and people getting out in cars and hanging out near the playgrounds and stuff. In Florida, at this hot, this time of year, you don't see people hanging out outside. It's crazy. Anyway, I thought that was interesting i wanted to bring it up you guys got to start playing because then i think

you'll start seeing a lot more activity going on you'll see a lot more people playing once you know what to look for that means i have to go outside with the all the other people yeah alan ain't gonna do that no i like air conditioning no i mean like even um i know we've noticed it a few times just uh there there's the mountain around here that uh we've been hiking here recently and um you know on a morning hike there they'll be like random people going up going up the mountain trying to find pokemon as they go up there falling down the side of the hill because they went off the trail. You kind of watch for them, and you know what? I'm going to move over two feet to the left. That way there's room for you to go down without slowing me down.

That's awesome. All right, so with that, now we are on to the tip of the week. This is literally your favorite part. All right, so mine's actually fairly simple and kind of cool if you have ever heard of this thing called dropbox it's a thing out there what and how do i get to it you can put files up can you can you include a link in the show notes to this resource i think i could okay my referral link so that i get more space there we go there oh wow here's mine look at you guys abusing your power alan this is gonna be the one wordpress

thing that's gonna have like 100 edits on it because we're gonna keep going and changing the link man oh so here's the cool part like if anybody if you ever go and you are in a file and you want to share that file with somebody else, you can create a link and you can share that link with somebody else. Well, one of the things that can be annoying about it is if you give that link to somebody else, they click that link, they're going to be taken into the Dropbox UI that will show them the file and then they can, you know, them right click it and download it or click on it and say download. If you just want them to be able to download it at the end of that URL, you can put question mark DL equal one, meaning download equal one. And so if you're ever having to write any applications or anything, that's kind of a nice way of doing things because now putting that DL

equal one on there means that it will automatically initiate a download instead of taking you to the HTML page that has the, that file listed on it. So it's kind of a nifty little tool. There's also a raw equal one. And what that does is it tries to display the content directly in the browser. So that one's kind of interesting. So if it was something like a PDF, instead of going straight to the page to where you have to click on the file to view the PDF, you could actually put raw equal one on it and it will show the PDF in your browser if you had the available plugin. So in other words, your tip is how to avoid Dropbox's UI and just get your file.

Well, this can be useful if you're trying to do anything programmatically to like download the file. So like, let's say that somebody is putting a file up and they want you to suck it in every day and use it for something. If they just give you the URL and you go straight to the URL with your application, all you're hitting is an HTML page and it's not going to be what you want. So if you put the and percent or the question mark DL equal one, you're now actually getting that file that you can use. Gotcha. So yeah, it's not really trying to avoid it.

It's if you need to use it in another way. That would probably be a better PR way of phrasing what I said. Yes, it's not avoiding. Yes. So that's my tip. All right. You guys are familiar with code school right we've

talked about that a few times on the show recently we bought by portal site it's basically a site where you can go and kind of interactively work through some videos and coding and you can kind of run your stuff and it'll test it and pass value it's just a really cool way of learning but recently they have dipped their toe into the net waters so if you have been interested in learning.net NBC or maybe brushing up on it, then they've got a course that you can take for free right now. And I've, I haven't watched it yet, but I've heard a lot of really good things about it. People have, and it's on my list of to do things and it's free and they're gonna be rolling out more stuff so we'll have a link to that in the show notes yeah i really uh like and i'm a big fan of their uh course format

yeah with with the with the um the challenges that you were describing and the interactivity of it all right so mine is an article that i want you to all read. This was shared with me and I thought it was an awesome little resource full of all kinds of great little topics. And it is an article by, oh man, why am I trying to pronounce the name? Daniel Reese. Hey, I did it. That one was hard. You know what? I still might have pronounced that last name wrong.

Who knows? And it's called Beyond Console Debugging Tricks. And it's basically JavaScript debugging tricks and how to debug your JavaScript like a boss. There were all kinds of little great things in here about how to avoid using things like console.log in your JavaScript and other ways to debug your app or your JavaScript app.

So we'll have a link to that in the show notes and uh it's not a terribly long read so i mean you can definitely get through it um rather quick you know it's not going to it's not going to consume uh hours of your time and there are some great um examples and uh you know pictures to illustrate the examples of what he's describing in there. It's a quick read, but it's a very

how would you phrase it? Very full of knowledge. There's got to be a better way to phrase that. It looks like it's a lot of using console things to really help you improve and speed up your debugging. It looks pretty amazing. Yeah, there's a lot of great tips in here, though.

So it's compact, but it is full of good information. So we'll include that as a link in the show notes. I will be reading this soon. Great. All right. Sorry. No, I was just going to say we talked about stuff, but let's see what you have to say.

You might have some other way of describing it. Well, in this episode, we talked about stuff like careers, salaries, getting your first job, input devices, and of course, Pokemon. That pretty much sounds like it. Sure, I'll take that. I think we're probably looking at the same sentence

in the show notes. I was just going to sum it up with stuff, but yeah, yours is probably better. All right. So with that, subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app. And as Alan mentioned earlier, be sure to leave us a review. iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you happen to find us. You can head to www.codingblocks.net slash review to find some easy ways to get to iTunes or Stitcher.

Yeah, and they said that they might be reading the same sentence. I memorized all the show notes. Did you? Yeah, so that doesn't really happen here. Visit us at codingblocks.net where you can find the show notes, examples, discussions, and more. I feel like that's that Alan being full of himself part coming out again. I'm not.

I just naturally fell into a fork. Because for someone who has his show notes memorized, he forgot to say to contact us with a question or topic or leave your name or preferred method of shout out. That's actually Jay-Z's line. I memorized this. No, it has your name right there by it. Look at line 126 right there.

Oh, see, I memorized it. I memorized it. So, yeah, contact us with a question or a topic. Yes, leave your name or preferred method of shout-out. And, yeah, so now it's Jay-Z's turn because I memorized this. I'm telling you. All right, I've got to, like, like submit a thousand jiras now for this show just to like bugs that we've made in the end here. Yes.

Way to go, man. I'm so glad we don't do retractions for the show. You don't want to have to have a change log at the beginning of the show? No. And because of that, why don't you bring your feedback questions and rants to our Slack channel where people will be much better about responding to you

than if you email us. So, sorry about that. You can actually join automatically. You can send yourself an invite by going to www.codingblocks.net slash slack. Type in your email address and join the community. There's some awesome people in there.

Hey, but you can email us if you would prefer at comments at codingblocks.net. Be sure to follow us if you're not already on Twitter at Coding Blocks. There might be a little bit of truth to the delay in the responses. What? I don't know why i'm not sure i read my my email on the phone and i respond to it rarely dude that is so true that's exactly what i do and that's the biggest problem is i'll read it and i'm like oh yeah i'm gonna reply to that when i have a keyboard then i get to my keyboard

and i'm like man there was something i was supposed to do with this thing and i don't remember what it is now so i'm the same way i'm so bad about it i i will i hate replying on phones i cannot stand type well when you reply on a phone you must have i don't i don't know what it is you have to have the worst keyboard on your and are you using the stock android keyboard i don't know what i'm using i don't i don't like because sometimes i'll see like i'll get a text message from you or an email and i'm like i don't even understand what why is he speaking swahili what is this oh man i'm telling you right now like i i literally load them i mean seriously i've been trying to think of for a long time. What's the next input thing that's going to happen? Because at some point the keyboard's not going to be it, right?

Like this is an ancient artifact that is going to disappear in the decades to come. What is the next input thing? It's not going to be little leads going into your brain, but there's got to be something better than your thumbs on a screen that is three inches wide. That doesn't make sense. I don't know. It's certainly not voice, though.

Snapchat. A combination of face swaps and emojis. New language. Oh, man. It's seriously not going to be voiced though i mean siri is horrible she's gotten worse how is that even possible man i know right okay fine i thank god i'm not the only one that has noticed this because there have been times where like i'll

i'll say something to siri like hey play this song and they're like oh i can't find it but yet it actually will say like i don't know let's say let's say i i say okay siri play beastie boys no sleep till brooklyn and it will verbatim repeat what i said i couldn't find it on the screen and then say i can't find that in your playlist and it's are you kidding me it's right here no sleep till brooklyn like who messes that up right dude it is it constantly does that to me i had i had a time the other day where i tried to send a text message to a buddy i was meeting somewhere and i said okay siri you know tell so and so blah blah blah repeats it back. Okay, you ready to send it? Yes, send it. I get there to the meeting.

He never got the message. Dude, I'm serious. If somebody comes up with the next big way of doing communications like that, it's got to be easy and it's got to be low stress right well typing on phone keyboards actually stresses me out like it makes me well now who's got the weird stress thing no don't don't that if you get it stresses you out yeah it just it's attention it makes me anxious i don't want to do it. I resist it. Same here. I don't even want to reply yes on one of those things.

It makes me so mad. I hate them. I absolutely... There's got to be a better way. There has to be some way that we're going to be able to interact with devices. This should be your interview question, and then we'll see who gets stressed. Because... And this is another reason why I say the next input cannot be voice, is that you can type quietly around other people,

and you're not going to say a password by voice, right? Totally. Even though there's movies like, my voice is my password. What happens when you're sick? Next to me, knowing what i'm searching right totally i mean horrible dude like there's so many problems with it they're really just awful the i i dig the voice thing and i understand it's less distracting like if if you need to send somebody a text message you say hey sir you send a text message and she won't do it right right? Like, that's fantastic. Right.

But there's got to be something. The only time that voice seems like a legitimate use case for me is in the car. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. For dictation-type purposes where, like, I can't type, then let me use voice. But seriously, I mean, think it. How long has the keyboard been the main input? Like since they started, I'm shocked that it is still the predominant way to do any interactions with any kind of computer.

Here's another reason why that I don't think voice is going to be it. This whole time we have been sitting in this room saying, hey, Siri, play Beastie Boys, No Sleep Till Brooklyn, and yet my phone has done nothing the entire time. This weekend, I was in my garage working on a lawnmower, and because my hands were filthy from working on the lawnmower, I remember asking Siri to play some music, and I was shocked when it actually worked.

I was like, wow, I totally didn't expect that. I was just saying it because I wanted to hear the sound of my own voice. I did not expect that that would actually work. Yeah, I mean, in fairness, Siri is really bad. Google Voice has gotten a lot better, but it's still not perfect. Like, it's nowhere even close. Well, I mean, the beauty of like a full keyboard, though, is that you do have so many different input devices.

It's full control. Right? You have 10 of them. Well, I mean, you're not going to... No, it's more like you have nine, right? Because your thumbs double. But I use my thumbs for the alts and the commands and the... Yeah, okay, fine, whatever.

I have 10 digits that I use. All right. That's because I'm a four. I was thinking of the thumb doubling up on the space bar, though, which is why I was... Agreed. Unless you have the ErgoDocs, which you use your thumb for all the... And by the way, I read some bad reports on those.

So it's either a love or a hate relationship with that. No, no, no. I'm saying that I read reports of, and this was by no means a dig. I don't mean it to be a dig on Archodox. This might not be an issue for you, but there were some reports that I read where after a while, people were having problems with that

because of the thumb usage on a keyboard like that because there's six keys, if I remember right, there's six keys for your thumb on each hand to use on the Ergodox. But I still think that, yeah, I mean, I understand why the, and I don't think that gestures are necessarily it either. Like, you know, people like to look to them like a movie like minority report comes up as like the canonical reference of uh you know what future computing will look like right where but i don't see that because i look at that and i'm like no way man

that maybe it's just me but i look at that and like if i had to sit there for eight hours or eight to ten hours a day you know moving my hands around in the air and doing things like you're gonna get tired from that yeah now there's there's gotta be a better way hey one last thing seeing as how we've gone completely off script and way past our closing statement um i mean why not right virtual reality is this really gonna be that big or is it gonna be a bunch of people getting sick and having headaches and weird problems it's too hard to say man because we haven't seen it everything we've ever seen so far is you gotta wear some stupid goggles and you gotta wear some heavy contraption on your head and is it they're all like experiments i don't even know if i would call it a toy but

they're definitely no matter what version of it you're talking about they're still very experimental yeah and they're cool there are some cool ones out there don't get me wrong they're very neat but is it is it going to be a thing where everybody by the age of 30 is going to have optical migraine headaches every day of the week because they strap some crap to their head this is what i'm saying wake me up when when we get to ready player one have you read that joe you no i haven't read that one joe yep so you know just for alan's edification like just uh without ruining anything about the story, a big part of it is that normal people's daily lives to do a lot of your

normal functioning in that you wear a virtual reality helmet and that's where you do... Like if you were going to go to school, for example, you wouldn't actually have to... Leave your house. It's not necessary to leave your house right you could just you just wear your your virtual reality helmet and go to your virtual school and that's how you interact with the world now obviously if

you need to you know make dinner you're not going to do that with your virtual reality helmet on but yeah i wonder where it's all going it's gonna be things are gonna get crazy especially now with the new what titan that just came out that supposedly can do vr at some crazy frame rates so yeah i don't know who's by the way which one of you guys is dropping uh a k on that thing on it on the titan yeah no it's gonna be a monster no it virtual reality i mean it feels like we've been talking about virtual reality for generations oh yeah it's still it's still just a fantasy it's still just experimental it hasn't happened yet it's much like it's much like how 3D TVs like five years ago were all the rage. And it's like, why?

Do I really want to sit in my living room and wear these sunglasses to watch TV just so it feels like I'm right there? I will say there's one thing, and I think it might have been John that sent it to us, where there is a place, and I think it's in Australia, where there's a huge warehouse set up, and you strap on a virtual reality helmet, and it's like fighting zombies. And so the difference is instead of standing in one spot in a room, spinning around in circles and looking around and using a controller to move, you are actually walking around this warehouse, and you were peeking around corners and doing stuff like that.

All right. That's really interesting, but who's going to have space like that? Let me schedule a vacation for Australia real quick so I can wear a HoloLens. Totally. Oh, dude, I want a HoloLens. I don't know if it was a HoloLens that you had to wear. No, it was more like an Oculus Rift type thing. Well, no.

Please tell me it wasn't Oculus Rift. I hope for more. It was something similar. I mean, it was existing tech. So I think it might have been the Oculus. I mean, we both tried Oculus Rift. What did you think? So it was cool.

Part of the problem that we had was we were strapped to a laptop with a very short cord right and it wasn't a high-end video processing thing but it wasn't okay with that okay fine then maybe i'll reserve judgment yeah i mean i think that until you actually hook up to a rig that can actually handle this stuff it's it's hard to say but i don't know yeah i don't know man is it cool for five minutes cool for 15 right for four hours right right and that's the problem right we all remember the virtual boy you guys remember that thing oh yeah they scrapped it because people were having migraines oh was this the uh this was like the handheld uh thing no this was the nintendo one that was all uh red like uh infrared or not

infrared but it was red stuff and it had great depth like this is old yeah but that's what i meant like it was like a nintendo game boy or something but it was it was yeah you go to blockbuster you stick your face in the smelly little thing and then you play tennis with mario yes i love how you put wow it's so true but yet so accurate we are totally going the wrong direction guys i mean stranger Yes. I love how you put that. Wow. It's so true. But yet so accurate. We are totally going the wrong direction, guys. I mean, Stranger Things just came out.

You just talked about Ready Player One, which had huge 80s influence. I mean, I think we're going back to 2D games, riding our bicycles, and hairspraying our hairs. Heck, yeah. I'll just have to settle for hairspraying the hair on my arm. Oh, man. I was so looking forward. I was like, what kind of job is Alan going to do here with his hair that he's going to need hairspray for?

I will pay to see this. I'll have mohawks on my forearms. Oh, man. This would be awesome. Like little spikes. You'll look like some kind of weird dinosaur. Absolutely. That's what I said in Pokemon and Guns N' Roses.

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you this, though, because I mentioned Ready Player One, and I so totally cannot wait for that movie next year. Oh, is it coming out? 2017. Okay, cool. If you have not read the book, you should read the book. All right.

I will go download it on the Kindle. Because I think we've talked about my book preferences before, but I very, very much like books that are heavy into technology, right? Like the more technology the better. And I don't mean like

it's all robotic, you know, robots or things like that, but realistic. More computer type It's all robotic, robots or things like that. Realistic. More computer-type technology is used and is a core piece of the storyline. Ready Player One is one of those where it's not nerdy tech, where every sentence you read, you're you're like wait what was that acronym but yet uh there's enough you know technology into it but then as joe mentioned a lot of uh 80s flashbacks take a stab at how many reviews are on amazon for that book for ready

player one look oh yeah take a stab at it. $14,000. I'm going to say $25,000. I'm surprised that either one of you guessed that high. There are 10,331 reviews on that book. That is insane. Because if you think about the fraction of people

who actually review something versus actually go do or buy something, it's usually a very small fraction that is a lot of people so i searched that on amazon and the number two result was actually uh the title is i kid you not armada colon a novel by the author of pretty player one yeah isn't that ridiculous and that one only has three and a half stars they deserve it for cheating like that wait so ernest klein put a review in you're saying let's say if you search ready player one the second result is uh the title is armada colon a novel by the author of ready player one so he's definitely trying to uh cash in on these oh cash in on his seo there

yes he is fine but just funny yeah it is fine I guess it depends on your Google search there Because No on Amazon Oh on Amazon Nobody searches for books on Google What? What you do that for? Wait

Hold on let's see We have totally gone off the rails Oh yeah I did We even skipped a section i totally did it's a quarter after 12 we're just rambling on yeah but it's got out of those 10 000 reviews man it's got a 4.6 star rating oh it's impressive like there's no doubt never come let's see here. Oh, sorry. In the year 2044, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the Oasis. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within the world's digital confines,

puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them. But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's going to survive,

he'll have to win and confront the real world he's always been so desperate to escape. And by the way, it's only $9.99 on Kindle, and I'm buying it right now. The Audible book's really good. Oh, really? You will not regret it. Man.

Get them both. I can't do that. Ways Per Sync. Yeah, man. How much is the Audible book? $7.49. Oh, really? I'll give you credit.

No, it's not going to be $7.99. It's going to be like $17.99 at minimum. What? No, it actually says $7.49, dude. That's cheap. That's crazy. I know. It's never that cheap.

No, it's always one credit or like $40. Add Audible. Oh, no, that's bull crap, dude. It is add Audible narration to your purchase. So it's $7.49 on top of 999 still isn't horrible still isn't horrible i don't know man i got buy with one click for 749 what are you talking about 31 50 is how much it actually costs on audible if you're a member you can get it for 2205 or one credit actually i don't think audible narration is the same. Maybe I don't know how to use Amazon.

Narrated by Will Wheaton. Yeah, all right, hold on. Let me just, I wonder, I think I might already have this thing. What is the difference? Instant Wesley Crusher. What is the difference between audible narration and the audio book? It's got to be different. Well, I don't want the computer reading it.

Right, that's what I'm saying. I don't think it's the same. See, all 14 formats. They got serious about this. Oh, the audio. All right, so the audio CD, audio book CD on a bridge is $21.50. That's not terrible. Not horrible.

On CD? Yeah. That's horrible. Well, no, no audio CD audio book CD on a bridge I don't know if that

here let me see so you can do alright I feel like Amazon is hard to navigate nowadays too much stuff there is

too much everything there really is alright so with that are we actually going to end the show tonight well I mean

I was actually going to see if I had it I was going to buy was actually going to see if I had it. I was going to buy that audio book and see if the $7.49, what that did. But whatever. We can save myself $7.49. First, we should talk about Stranger Things because it's amazing. I do like it.

You can't go to sleep. Not after thinking about Stranger Things. Actually, I've only watched the first episode, and it was really cool. But then I had to go watch Ballers. Dude, no, you've got to watch the show. It's amazing. It's amazing. The Rock, honestly, The Rock is the best acting he's ever done.

It's probably because it's real close to what he is like in real life, more than likely. I feel like my Audible account, something is wrong here because it's saying that I don't have anything so uh maybe i can't but uh oh well no there is this is a don't so let's find out what this 750 does are you buying it you're just gonna wait seven dollars and fifty cents i'm gonna i'm... Can I expense this? Alright, just kidding. I'm not approving it. Oh, come on.

Wow, you guys. You guys are cruel. I'm just going to explain what narrative by Audible means. Well, that's weird. It says I just upgraded with professional narration. Oh, I wonder if it was because I already owned the Kindle version. Yeah, I wonder if it was because I already

owned the Kindle version. Yeah, that's what it was. It says you had to own it and then for an additional $7.49 you can get narration. Oh. Yeah, I wasn't listening to you. Yeah, apparently. Well, okay.

Now I am the proud... Let's hear it. Stick it up to the mic. Alright. You asked hear it. Stick it up to the mic. Alright, you asked for it. And Wade Wilson was walking down the street and... Okay, hold on. I feel like you guys are conspiring

to keep me awake past midnight. Dude, it's way past midnight. You might as well just stay up now. There's no point going to bed now. That's right, man. Random House Audio presents Ready Player One. Is that the narration? That's the audio book.

Read for you by Will Wheaton. Yeah, it's the audio book. Dude, that's actually a good deal. Chapter Zero. Starts with Chapter Zero. I mean, that's all you need to know. Yeah, that's amazing. Index equals zero. I mean, that's all you need to know. Yeah, that's amazing. Index equals zero.

I mean, I'm playing this from my iPhone, so I could at least crank up the volume so you could hear it. Announcing that James Halliday had died during the night. Is that what it sounds like usually? I heard of Halliday, of course. Everyone had. All right, I'm buying them. I mean, that's exciting. exciting yeah that was playing it at

single speed though yeah nobody can handle that yeah no we gotta crank that stuff up steve jobs ghost is gonna kick us out of the apple store for uh hey man leo leo does it all the time we're fine I think Audible is a sponsor for him, though. Hey, Audible! Right? Hey, there's this podcast called Coding Blog. Alright, so we'll include a link to Ready Player One because why not? It's an amazing book.

Yeah, totally. Are you still recording, Joe? Yeah. Are you eating your microphone? Are you still awake? You know what? Logic stopped on me and I don't know when or how or what all right so that would have been the third episode in a row that you would have had problems with logic so this was already a worthwhile investment cool all right so with that let's just say subscribe to us on itunes

we're done i memorized all this We can do it again. Okay. All right, guys. It's been fun. This is a long episode. All right. Later. Later. See you.