Reading HN is really weird for me. Everyone is talking about how the industry is struggling to find new people. Meanwhile, being in Central Europe, I almost can't find a junior position to even apply to!
I am a 2nd year CS student looking for a web-dev job to get experience and learn new stuff and every ad I see requires a couple of years in the industry + knowledge of a huge amount of frameworks. From my viewpoint, there is no real need for beginner devs. Companies are looking for really experienced AND cheap programmers.
the upper house of parliament yesterday voted to support an amendment to a draft economy bill that would require search engines to display at least three rivals on their homepage
That's just absurd. Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this? Simple populism and lobbying from local businesses or something else?
Not the answer you're looking for, but French protectionism (agriculture, film, etc.) is consistently stronger than the Western norm in the rest of Europe and the US. In those cases it is to protect domestic interests, which of course comes with its own consequences.
> Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this?
Hard to explain, even for a french person. That's why I basically want to move ASAP, at least abroad I'll care less about politics.
It tragically funny, there is like 10% unemployment rate in France right now, and instead of trying to give businesses some air, ie less laws and regulations, they keep on coming with ridiculous ones.
I've found that whenever the media or lawmakers get caught up in some absolutely useless bullshit, they're almost always trying to distract from something more important that they can't address (or caused). It seems to hold no matter what country it is.
A bit more absurd. A closer analogy would be if Windows was required to ask you on first startup if you wanted to install Linux (i.e. advertising a competitor to the thing you're using vs. a thing bundled with the thing you're using).
They did it to Microsoft in Windows to do the browser selection, so its a pretty small step in their minds to do it to Google. Its still absurd, but it fits their thinking.
Absolutely, I agree with you! It's time to deregulate the taxi industry, because needing a license to drive people around is absurd. Yes, you should need insurance, but in most EU countries, the already required insurance covers all passengers. Each car must also pass an yearly technical review. What more do you need? Someone posted that drivers aren't vetted - there is no better vetting system than the instantaneous feedback from the app. Feedback, given by tens or hundreds of clients.
How do you know that people can't live on the wages you are talking about? Why would people drive for Uber if they aren't profiting enough from the job?
How does Uber exploit its employees? Nobody is making drivers sign-up for Uber. Nobody is keeping them signed-up by force.
The whole problem with Uber can be solved if governments deregulate the taxi industry. I absolutely agree that you need an insurance that covers the passengers, but what else except more frequent technical checks? Taxi licenses are an artificial way to control the supply, so I am adamantly against them.
I thought of a kind of a 'structural explotation', i.e a big corporation & customer vs. an individual driver. He/she has almost no defence if e.g. the rating is bad. If you need the money, you don't have the option to just jump ship. Of course I like people do their work well but this immediate consequences is not good and not social, there should be some shelter, like e.g. unions, a taxi company with collegues etc.
Government regulates a lot of things and if sensibly done, this is imho a good thing and protects the citiziens. A completely deregulated taxi industry would probably bring a lot of overcrowding, put a lot of stress to the drivers and their salaries would fall even lower (they are not high (in Berlin)).
I hope that I'm not wrong, but I've never heard that here in Germany we have something like $700 000 taxi medaillons as in New York. With such conditions a deregulation is probably a good thing, but here?
I am pretty much a beginner dev, so can anyone briefly explain how this works? It's not really clear to me from the code.
It's mentioned in the README that packets are being sent as base64. Let's say I would like to send a GET request to google.com. How does Facebook Chat serve me with google's page?
Some of us like that you get cross-browser and device tested code that is super easy to use. You can choose what parts of Bootstrap to include in your app, so you don't bloat it.
Would you elaborate what you mean by fighting? Bootstrap is extremely simple to customize and I am no front-end guru.
In my experience, the fighting comes in when the designer (who generally has less understanding of the Bootstrap modules' intended roles) extends an existing UI concept that came out of the box. This is a perfectly reasonable ask on their part- it's a component on our site, why shouldn't we be able to customize it?
A specific example: Bootstrap expects dropdowns to be unordered lists with anchors as the top-level element, so having a fixed-position header as the first item while its children scroll is difficult. If this has been our CSS based on our markup, it would've taken fifteen minutes, because we could have gone in and done a bit of basic surgery on our module, making it more flexible. (This may not be the best example, but that's the general idea.)
There is also a strange obsession with consulting. How do you find customers that aren't mom and pop shops looking for someone to build their site for $200?
Write online, ask your friends to refer clients, ask people for work at meetups/conferences, cold call and email companies, look up the dozen remote job boards that crop up every other week, subscribe to every industry mailing list you can.
There are about a 1000 ways to do it. But you have to actually do it.
Here's a business plan: someone build a site for us developers who despise marketing and/or who suck at it.
(I mean, if I loved marketing, I would have become a marketer).
Pair us with someone who loves marketing. S/he finds high-paying consulting jobs, I build awesome sites and/or mobile apps, and we split all the income 50%/50%, minus fees for the company.
Have some kind of rating system, where both your peers and customers rate your work. The higher that you are rated, the better marketer you can get paired with. I imagine the top marketing experts could find clients willing to pay $1000/hr rates for the top developers.
Mediocre developers are often charged out at $1000/hr rates by big name tech companies to their big name clients, who themselves sub-contracted to mid name developers under quite careful contract terms (client liability). Sub-contractors sometimes sub-contract themselves.
I'm thinking from an enterprise type technology stack: A smaller startup offering PaaS or SaaS to enterprise clients, perhaps replacing an in-house system could benefit from the indirectly acquired knowledge and expertise pool of enterprise developers, where the barriers to entry are sometimes slow and expensive.
Cold call and email what companies? About what work? I doubt most of the mid-sized and big companies will hire a contractor with no recommendations from someone close to the execs.
I am not nitpicking, just sharing that what you've suggested works only for very experienced people with a big network. I am still in University.
Unless you've actually tried and failed at cold calling, that sounds like a typical excuse (which I used to use as well). If you're scared, you'll have to get over it by just trying it a few times.
And contrary to your belief, being in university is a great advantage. You can say you're a student doing some research/looking for help, and people are generally much more willing to help.
They simply ask what is your previous salary and offer a 5-25% increase. You skills are simply a pre-requisite, but they don't define your starting salary. Depending on your risk appetite and potential background checks one can lie and get a fairer deal (the firm is always protected since they have a notice period).
I am a 2nd year CS student looking for a web-dev job to get experience and learn new stuff and every ad I see requires a couple of years in the industry + knowledge of a huge amount of frameworks. From my viewpoint, there is no real need for beginner devs. Companies are looking for really experienced AND cheap programmers.