I upvoted you and I hope your story ends up higher up in this thread as it shows how the Software Dev industry can be ruthless and merciless [Not long ago I thought it was all about solving complex problems and having fun doing it].
I also decided to quit my last job before finding a new one and I have spending more energy than I ever imagined explaining a much smaller gap on my CV compared to yours. In one of the interviews I had recently the interviewer only stopped asking questions about my current situation when I "proved" to him it was possible to survive in an expensive city like London having no income. It was very sad!
Thanks for sharing your story and it was definitely a wake up call (at least for me)!
I feel for you and I hope you find something you'll enjoy very soon. Best of luck!
The open positions listed on your website don't mention specific languages which is a good thing I guess. Am I right thinking that the main languages used for a System Developer are C++ and Golang ?
Go and Java are the main languages used by us. We don't want to pass great engineers because they may not have experience with a specific language. We expect them to be willing to learn it if required (same for other technologies).
The results displayed on the website correlate with my experience that C++ is not a popular language in London specially for web [back-end] development.
Possibly not web development, but a C++ programmer in London, can get pretty good money either fulltime or contracting. Mostly in finance, but also Google, MS, Facebook actively seek C++ programmers.
I'm not sure I would consider them power users but it's somehow expected because everyone knows how people can be adverse to change... (It's still fresh in my mind when everyone complained about the new Gmail UI or even G+...).
This is great news for people like me that continue to use Flickr after a very long time... Unfortunately the new UI reminds me a lot 500px which I think offers, at the moment, a much better community and user experience if one is really a photography enthusiast.
Anyhow hats off to Yahoo for trying to make things right after several years of stagnation. I'm aware the Flickr team have lost some valuable members and that probably affected future plans but that's a different story.
Living and working in the UK for over a year now as a Software Engineer in a medium-sized company I see this article as a bit of a shock because every month I'm aware of available positions (including graduates) for developers that "want to get their hands dirty", i.e., working on core software tools like compilers and linkers and despite working closely with universities it's not easy to find new recruits willing to work on low-level development.
I guess the reality can be different if we take into account the percentage of programmers that want to work on "web technologies" and that's a completely different market.
All in all I think if one is a good developer, he/she will not have any problems finding a suitable position working on very interesting problems.
Well, low-level roles are harder to come by, for one, but they also tend not to pay terribly well; especially as they're competing against Finance in London, which does.
Here's my top tip for attracting amazing candidates: pay them a lot of money. Simple as that.
Speaking as someone who used to hire low-level developers in the financial sector (i.e we could pay them an above average salary) I'd disagree.
There's only a handful of universities now which teach C to a decent level, and if a candidate doesn't know C already it's very hard to tell if they'll be able to conceptually handle pointers and indirect referencing. So there's actually a very small pool to recruit from compared to the number of vacancies.
If someone can't understand pointers, recursion, etc, then paying them extra money isn't going to make them understand.
Well if we're talking about grads then yeah you're going to end up with programming newbies -- whether it's the right thing for CS programmes to churn out academics and not developers is a different discussion altogether -- but there's plenty of greybeards out there with C skills and what have you; and if they're smart, picking up C shouldn't be a huge challenge, nor should the other issues you mentioned. Again, with grads, it's hit and miss (is it ever not?) -- but senior developers who gun for low-level roles? Pay them enough and they will come.
A lot of finance companies have rejected me for placements for low A level grades despite high firsts in all my CS modules, solid extra curricular's etc...
The problem with unit grades is that they're not standardized across universities, so what might be a first at a lower-tier university might be a 2:2 equivalent at a top-tier university.
Hence companies relying on A-Level scores and university reputation when filtering.
What ECs do you have ? - that's probably your best bet of getting visibility. Assuming you're a second year student you might want to apply for a GSoC on a low-level project.
ECs are Formula Student (Mostly embedded systems stuff, also did a lot of sponsorship getting organisation type stuff last year), Cyber Security Challenge UK (Got invited to a conference, have been told to keep the dates of two more face to faces clear...) and general member for one of the uni's bigger societies.
I'd recommend contributing to an open source project that aligns with your interests, as that's much more understandable and verifiable to someone reading your CV.
At the moment me and two fourth years are basically writing all the code for a single seater formula style electric race car. This means Motor controller, battery controller, HUD, sensors, telemetry and getting it all to communicate. (on the way having to learn a lot about control, signal processing and learning a new platform) Its by far the most complex system I've ever worked on and coming together really well - the guys I'm working with really know there shit.
Understand the key word here being "placements" whereas we were talking about a, sadly, today, niche skill: low-level programming. Generally finance companies are exceptionally picky and the only way to get a job in finance is to have worked in finance. Yes, that is indeed a catch-22.
All I can say is keep at it but remember, especially for grads, they get a million CVs.
What A levels did you get? I'm doing them now. It's looking like I'm going to end up with AAB, kind of disheartening seeing people around me with A*AA though...
I got BBC(Maths,Physics,Chem), My attitude to A-levels wasn't exactly great...Its not that bad tbh - Work hard at uni and you'll easily leave people that did much better then you at A-level behind in the dirt :) Also AAB gives you 340 ucas points which would be fine for every job I've seen.
Hey, do you have an email/twitter I could contact you on? I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind. Or you can shoot me an email (it's in the profile) if you prefer.
Given that 50% of the posts talk about skeuomorphism and honestly I didn't know what it was, here's the definition from Wikipedia: "A skeuomorph, or skeuomorphism is when a product imitates design elements functionally necessary in the original product design, but that becomes ornamental in the new product design".
It's a new word for an old concept: a decorative anachronism. Obvious examples from outside the world of computing include stone pillars in front of important buildings, and rivets on jeans.
It's abused here on HN as short-hand for app decorations that people don't like, like the infamous leather treatment on the calendar.
But there are plenty of "skeuomorphic" aspects to iOS that I never see anyone complain about (and sometimes compliment), like inertial scrolling or sliding on/off switches.
I think you're absolutely right and it's not the first time and I'm sure it will not be the last time that a very verbose post (read well structured with references and mentioning technical terms) gets much more credit than it deserves.
It would be nice to have some statistics about the number of lines of a reply on SO or HN and the amount of 'upvotes'. I think a lot of people would be surprised...
Are you serious? A well designed ecosystem is much more important than trying to increase the number of gigahertz/megaflops every release. Just because a corvette is more powerful and way cheaper than a Ferrari/Porsche it does not mean that you will have a better experience than buying one of the latter.
The iPad 1 has serious usability issues due to the limited amount of RAM. After experiencing this, I would be nervous about the lifespan of an iOS device with only 512MB. On some level, specs really do matter.
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-bugs/2020-June/084028.h...
Bugzilla: https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46194