It sounds fine in theory but leaving Vancouver to go to St John's for affordable housing is not really an option for any one with family here. I may as well go to Thailand for affordable housing, it is more affordable and flights are the same price. People have obligations with family and they want to be close to their friends.
It's not like Europe where you can do 60 minutes from a big city and prices fall off a cliff. In bc you have to go four hours drive from Vancouver to find cheapish housing (Hope it's the spot) and that's not a commutable distance. The complete lack of public transport makes it worse but the sheer scale of it is the biggest problem.
If I was going to start again there is no way I would choose Vancouver but people get stuck in cities for many reasons but the biggest one is either relationship commitments or where the work is.
100% agree with this sentiment. People should not have to justify having other passions, charitable, artistic or political pursuits. All the best teams that I have worked on, are/were big mix of backgrounds and the fresh blood brings new ideas to the table.
I'm always worried about that but have been since about 2012 so it is hard to know what the future holds. Best hedge plan is to live well within means and save lots so if/when there is another big crash have savings to last until the economy gathers steam again.
See my point I added today bait internet interview skills to @ccajas. It is a whole different skill set to learn and not necessarily taught through traditional schooling but worth the effort so that your skill set can be shown in the best light. Good luck!
I can definitely relate to your position and I imagine a lot of other engineers would also relate as our skills sets tend to mean the engineering part comes more naturally but the soft skills take a lot of work.
I would recommend reading books or forums about non CS specific interviews, body language and soft skills.
I'm in my mod thirties now so have had quite a lot of experience interviewing and recently being the interviewer so have noticing a lot of patterns. It is amazing how often the questions get repeated, if you spend an hour writing down all the likely questions I am sure you will cover 80% of the questions of any interview. Then spend a few hours writing two or three ideal answers to each of the above questions. Such questions would include :
-what has been the proudest project you have worked on?
-what have you been doing the last few years with your time while not working? (I'd, recommend referring to your open source contributions or doing background learning here)
-what are your goals?
- how do you deal with confrontation?
- how do you deal with pressure etc?
You could say all boring questions but you are very likely to come across them in an interview and crafting a positive response to each one and practicing it out loud, ideally with a friend or two in the mirror will help tremendously.
Also get an experienced friend to review your resume, it is amazing how many talented engineers get overlooked because of lack of attention to detail on their resume.
It was good advice above by @saganus about interviewing a lot as it is definitely a skill which takes practice . After each interview push for feedback, some will say they can't say but a lot will give you honest feedback which is very helpful. You can also try this with a friend or someone online over video chat.
Finally I would consider getting a less glamorous CS job in the interim to help pay the bills through school and get back in the industry. Tons of web agencies are crying out for engineers and while it may not be your long term goal, a role like that could help you get your foot back in the door, pay the bills and give you time to get setup for your end game or save for more expensive university.
I've thrown a lot of advice here but hope some helps, as mentioned above getting interview and career ready is an ultra marathon not a sprint. :)
Side question to the main focus but I'm curious, have you found it to be profitable writing a book? Don't need to go into specific numbers but just roughly. It seems that for the amount of time it takes to write a book and the profit made it would work out less hourly than doing contract software work and the value in writing a book is more in self growth. I may be completely wrong though so just wondering from your point of view if you would recommend writing a book to someone else? thanks
Most definitely you can write good code in soho like anything it is a language which you are free to write in however you like.
However Php allows for really sloppy code (not failing on index misses, undefined variables still running, each core part of the language handling errors completely differently) which unfortunately often gets pushed out when not ready because of business pressures. This often creates insurmountable technical debt later on. The amount of confuaing, messy code I've seen in PHP that would not even run on other languages is shocking.
The fact it has a super easy initial learning curve but progressively harder is not a benefit on big apps it just hides how many headaches it will cause you later trying to figure out the inconsistent core library once you are trying to do more than hack WordPress templates together
Not sure about that. Most companies biggest problem is finding talent employees and most experienced engineers will not want to work on a Php codebase especially one full of technical debt due to the variety of other options in languages which compile and miss out on a huge percentage of php problems before you even run basic tests.
plus like you say PHP might be faster to get started with but becomes much slower on larger projects due to inconsistent error handling and language design.
you could definitely argue that a company using PHP nowadays would find it harder to find good engineers because the best ones who care about quality, performance etc don't want to work on a PHP app
Those sound like good figures. How are you getting those numbers? Estimations or have you managed to speak to there book keepers. I always won D we about coffee shops, they seem to be popular but I wonder how much profit is actually made.
Yep, I noticed that. A completely biased view to a very important matter. Completely overlooking the dangers of weak crypto, government invasion of privacy and safe control of access to information.
I wish more were as progressive as you, with different languages the syntax changes bit the patterns and computer science is exactly the same. A good programmer can adapt very quickly as even within a language ylthey have to adapt all the tome to new libraries and new problems.