Stupid Job Postings*
Max received one of those automated ‘hey, saw your resume on monster’ emails this morning. Someone in Boston is looking for a Senior Ruby on Rails developer. The person should have 3+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails. Salary range is 45-80K.
As far as I know, there’s one person who has even *almost* 3 years of Ruby on Rails experience, and I’m pretty sure he’s not doing any work for anything in that salary range.
*Job listings are so often ridiculous I think I’ll make this a weekly feature.
Moms make great employees.
The Boston Globe reports that not only should I have been making about 140K for each year I’ve been a stay-at-home-mom, but that everyone wants to hire me as soon as I decide I no longer want to stay at home:
“Mothers are not only talented; they’re experienced managers, motivators, decision makers and client specialists after spending time in both the work force and as a mother,” Salary.com senior vice president Bill Coleman said in a statement.
That’s why I list hausfrau on my LinkedIn profile. Unfortunately, like most hausfraus, i am grossly underpaid.
Where to Buy Office Equipment
We are in the market for one of those scanner/copier/fax machine/printer/microwave thingies. Today we were looking at some at Best Buy.
“Oh,” I said, “We can’t buy one here, though. Best Buy just did a hideous thing.”
“What was that?” asked Max. “Fired a bunch of their sales associates because they had too much seniority and made 50 cents an hour too much money.”
“Ick,” said Max. “You’re right, let’s not buy from Best Buy.”
“And I’ll post a blog entry explaining why.”
Except that when I got home and started writing this blog entry and tried to find a link to the news item about how Best Buy laid off its workers, I couldn’t find one. How come? Because it wasn’t Best Buy, it was Circuit City.
Which is good, because Best Buy is conveniently close to us, and Circuit City isn’t.
JSON, XML, and REST
Last time I paid attention, XML-based web services were the next big thing. My informatics department was very cutting-edge, implementing web services for our apps to talk to one another and to our company’s intranet portal. XML was the big thing you had to know. It seemed enormously complex and confusing, and yet at the same time, simple. At the bottom, XML was data. People piled more and more stuff on top of the data, and made more and more tools to parse the XML that surrounded the data, and insulate us all from the XML, even though the whole point of XML was that it was supposed to be human-readable data.
It got to be that every single job posting you ever saw demanded that you be an expert in XML. This was ridiculous, since to the extent that XML is simply data it means nothing to be an expert in it, and to the extent that it was all the crap you threw on top of the data, it was impossible to be an expert, because even the experts weren’t experts.
Anyway, now all the cool kids are throwing XML out the window, and using JSON to send data back and forth to each other. JSON sounds incredibly dubious since it’s based on Javascript, and you all know what I think of *that*. But even javascript can’t quite manage to screw up the basic data structures, so maybe it’s fine. In addition to throwing XML out the window for data transfer and remote procedure calls between apps, the cool kids now hate it for configuration files (Rails people use YAML, for example.) And also, everyone’s web apps must be RESTful, a thing I don’t totally understand yet but which definitely means *hyperlinks should never, ever have side effects*.
The moral of this story is that by ignoring the world of software for a couple of years while being on the mommy-track, I have avoided, I hope, ever having to figure out what all those fifteen thousand XML standards meant, and jumping in now, I am no further behind on technology than all those other people who are still trying to grok what it means that Rails Edge now supports fully RESTful URL routing.
Math and Programming
Sometimes Max worries that he must not be naturally technical because he always hated his math classes, and his brother and his father are both brilliant math people. ( I have a powerful memory of sitting in the garden on a brilliantly sunny day, idly reading a book, while my father-in-law sat next to me and worked through some multivariable calculus problems for the fun of it.) Max is not as bad at math as he insists on believing, but I also don’t think math really has much to do with run-of-the-mill software development. Sure, it’s helpful to know when a problem you’re working on can’t be solved by a brute force algorithm because it’s mathematically ridiculous, but not everyone is writing algorithms.
Anyway, here’s my new favorite person (well, Al Gore still comes first), _why, on his new supercool programming learning tool for kids, and why he doesn’t start his programming lessons with math.
Obviously there is a ton of math in a ton of different kinds of programming. But you can be a great, successful software developer and never get deeper into math than knowing that floats don’t come out of the database exactly the same as they went in. (No, we don’t quite get why either.. But we know not to use floats in situations where you’d like things to add up the same every time you add them. And we know it without ever having written our own compilers. Does this mean we aren’t hard-core? Then so be it. What’s wrong with a little airbrushing, anyway?
