"I'm in a very remote place, so options are limited."
This is the challenge. If you had other options then you can genuinely use them as a negotiating tactic. E.g. "I'd love to stay here. The team and culture is great. But I am also curious about company X and they're offering me 20% more..."
Can you explore working remotely for someone else, perhaps as a lead engineer?
"Their speculative approach was essentially unheard-of locally, but the two believed that if they built the office space, tenants would come."
That's awesome; "built it and they will come" - an approach I have recently overcome the fear of, due to them never coming on a couple projects I learned from.
I appreciate how they disliked borrowing in the early stages, too.
Very cool. A website to find the missing ingredient. I can see using this for two of the three irons I have in the fire. The third one I was fortunate to find my complementary opposites at a Christmas party.
Python/Django and Ruby/Rails are both clean frameworks and have fantastic communities. When I did the "Hello world" on both I was drawn to Python/Django. When it comes to moving away from the framework I tend to like Python more than Ruby. But it's just personal preference.
Thanks autokad. base698 has the right interpretation: My response was the smarmy answer I have given in interview situations where I just felt rebellious against the energy of interviewer combined with the test questions. I actually agree with base698. An understanding of the basics is required. And the companies I've coded for - for long periods of time, and loved working at - figured out I knew the basics based on our conversations alone. I hire people without testing. It has not backfired yet. I have also tested others in the past, had people pass the test, only come on board to be dangerous to production environments.
I always interview the company interviewing me. The closer I've mimicked Peter Gibbons from Office Space the quicker the job offer arrived, provided I passed their tech tests.
I agree technology will save us from the mad max scenario that we repeatedly have read about over the last 5 years. However, it will be interesting to see how the "Technocracy" plays out.
First define what "good programmer" means to you. Good programmer could mean having the skills to lead and code a functioning start up venture that can scale. For others "good programmer" could mean being an amazing architect - building products that are complex, yet in simple concise code and in a way that is easy to extend down the road. Yet for another person it can mean becoming a great hacker. What does "good programmer" mean to you?
Start with a niche group and personally reach out to them with an amazing product. For example, Facebook was for Harvard Students only. Airbnb started getting hosts and guests in only New York. Ben Silbermann of Pinterest began by recruiting users manually by literally walking into cafes in Palo Alto and asking random people to try out Pinterest while he gathered feedback over their shoulders.
Thanks for the write up. It's the perfect time for me to be reminded about starting simple and changing the architecture as needed. I have prematurely optimized on one project in the past. It was painful. And after all that pain the mythical millions of unique visits never arrived.
Merica!