My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was originally supposed to be Perl, the job interview was something like:
Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site
Owner: You wrote this?
Me: Yeah.
Owner: This is in Perl?
Me: Yeah.
So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use PHP instead of Perl. Sure, cool, whatever. He told me that I had to start being productive in the first couple weeks or he would have to let me go, couldn't afford to keep people that weren't working out. I was down with that. He had some HTML pages that he had created in a WYSIWYG editor, I think it was Dreamweaver, and I was going to add some PHP scripting to those pages.
How hard could that be?
So I get to work and open these HTML files and I don't even remember exactly, I think like the login page HTML was 20 pages of code long, maybe I'm exaggerating, I've blocked most of it out of my memory but I seem to remember nested tables inside of nested tables inside of nested tables with spacer GIFs and s all over the place and I remember looking at it and thinking: What. The. Actual. Fuck.
But I did it! I managed to get the guy to take a look at what the editor he was using actually created and get him to simplify some things, I fixed a few bugs and was working on features and he came in around noon and told me you know what I said about being productive in the first few weeks? Forget about that, we're good.
The week before I was doing manual labor in a factory. It was like going from the 1800s to the 2000s over a weekend. I made $9 an hour, less than I was making stacking boxes on pallets, but of course totally worth it in the long run. Good times.
Back in the day, HTML usually came with its own built-in version control. You could view source and see exactly what thought process the web designer (read: the person who figured out HomeSite first) had gone through, like:
<font color=“red”>
<font color=“blue”>
<font color=“green”>
Hi there
</font>
</font>
</font>
because the editors didn’t actually understand HTML beyond what was required to wrap a tag around a block of text.
I bet this is what a word doc looks like under the hood.
Especially if you see what kind of crap code something like frontpage produced. Lots of boilerplate muck and stuff cancelling each other out.
We used to call it Strontpage at a place I worked. Stront means shit in Dutch.
Dreamweaver was so much better and it embraced CSS instead of trying to avoid it. Though I liked coding in just an editor, for me as a non-graphics person it was nice to have WYSIWYG. Of course soon after that actual graphics people started doing that work but in the beginning it was all techies.
Funnily enough you can see what a word doc looks like because the x in .docx is “XML” so save the word doc as .html and bask in the flaming dumpster fire of the font definitions at the top inline CSS.
I was in a class where week one was “create a blog to keep track of the rest of the projects this semester” and for many of us, no big deal, static site generator, pick a theme for a wordpress, whatever. One of my classmates tho had never touched HTML and was super stressed about the assignment until they stumbled upon the fact the Word can export HTML - and its easy enough to highlight text and add hyperlinks to other html website so, bingo, whole semester’s work published in Word. Yes the auto-generated markup is horrendous but it gets the job done, full marks.
If you dig deep enough, Word can still directly publish to blog sites such as WordPress using the MetaWeblog API as well as native SharePoint publishing (but who uses that?!)
Well, actually :-) docx is a zipped container, so if you rename it as .zip and open that up, you can see the xml files inside there. No need to save as, it's all right there as OpenXML [1].
If you save the doc as xml, there's some overlap, but that's an older technology called WordML [2].
I've spent way too much time creating spreadsheets on ancient legacy unix systems, in dozens of different ways. OpenXML is not the easiest, but it is the best of a lot of bad options...
There is a 'Web Page, Filtered' Save As option in Word, which saves the document in MUCH cleaner HTML than the standard 'Web Page' version. Granted, it's not as good as it could be, but it's definitely way better. It's clean and predicable enough to run it through stuff like PanDoc and get acceptable results.
Yes, versus the old school .doc format, pre-xml, which was a proprietary format, but was reverse engineered by most of Microsoft's rivals. at least wordperfect had pretty good support.
I think Microsoft introduced .docx in what? Office.NET.
Great story. I feel like many of us from the 90s have similar stories.
I was a CS undergrad, and was introduced to someone who needed a software person. Got hired at $8/hour part time to write VB, Access, and MSSQL software - none of which I had ever touched. Same deal, either I figure it out or he would let me go. Couple weeks later my boss came in, loosely described an application, and then asked if I could have something demoable in 2 hours. He had a client meeting and need to show something to get partial payment. Got it done and almost immediately got a raise to $12/hour. Obviously the place had a lot of issues and was out of business in the next couple years, but it gave me the mentality early on of execute and ship. Good times indeed.
And yeah...I was waiting tables in a fine dining restaurant a month before...
Love your story, it reminds me of my first long term software gig, where I was actually stacking boxes and writing software. I was managing an eCommerce site for a local gym! Best of both worlds?
I think everyone should get some grassroots software work under their belt, it's a really different experience working as a team member in an unrelated industry and providing a unique value to an otherwise non-software company.
I don't want to soapbox too much, but it is part of my hope for the eventually reduction of software salaries, so that software can become a more integrated and boutique part of life. There are so many problems that would be better solved with small scale software instead of impersonal SaaS.
Yeah. I'm enjoying the current inflated salaries but this is not sustainable, and it really shuts smaller, non-software companies out of having inhouse fulltime developers.
it's a really different experience working as a
team member in an unrelated industry and providing
a unique value to an otherwise non-software company.
This can be the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever. It all depends on whether or not management is willing to learn about how the software development process works and adapt to it.
I remember the days from 2000-2015, I worked at a few places like this. Doing "revolutionary" things like actually introducing source control, offsite backups, etc. to places that had never heard of such things.
At some places this was challenging, but rewarding. At other places ownership was constantly aghast when they had to shell out for some random software licenses or SaaS subscriptions. I view it as a part of my job to explain and justify expenditures, but going to war with management over every rando $100 "what the FUCK is 'git hub???'" purchase gets old fast.
Heh, I remember an owner coming into my office (doing warehouse picking software at a warehouse company) asking wtf was this $300 charge. I told him “yeah, that’s a license to use this software for a year.” He went “oh, for the year. That’s only $25 a month? Carry on!” the nostalgia is real.
I hear you - the 90s were insane. In the space of six months I went from a factory worker (12 hour shifts, all night-shift, 7 days a week) to a computer lab assistant to a entry-level software developer.
First day on dev job, the owner displays a hodgepodge of Perl code that was originally an open-source thing called MRTG (before network admins heavily modified it), tasked me with porting it from Solaris to Windows NT and using MSVC 5.0 to build the CGI binaries.
Good times were had by all due to the boom money floating around everywhere[1].
I remember being so excited when I figured out how to hide the borders of frames and do a layout with nested tables.
Probably the one trick I learned back then that I still use today is naming the target in links. I remember noticing Yahoo doing it on their Fantasy Football setup so that if you clicked on the news beside a bunch of different players and clicked the same one more than once, it would only load the player into its specific window. Since I’ve always been a person that opens tons of links as I’m going through a page and then reads each of them after, it was nice to not have duplicate windows (tabs) everywhere.
Still works and to this day I never use target=“_blank”.
In fairness it isn’t a great filter. As someone that had a similar story - I got a very well paying job out of high school based in part on some home grown apps 20ish years ago - the field of people doing small scale stuff was small and any basic CRUD app, let alone embedded hardware hacking made you instantly look like a wizard - since getting started then was much harder - any output was proof of a certain level of skill in acquiring knowledge that was above average even if the overall scope wasn’t huge. In this day of Arduinos/RPi and git pull boilerplate, a small app or hardware project doesn’t prove much of anything. The scale of side project to really differentiate is beyond what most people reasonably have time for if they wish to have a life. I think compensated take home assignments still have some merit though.
FWIW, that's how I structure my interviews typically, so they still exist in some places.
For anyone reading along I highly encourage that; there's way more signal to noise hearing about some project they worked on and why they were proud enough to put it on their resume than 'did they remember the algorithmic call/response'. You can't beat an almost post mortem discussion where you let the interviewee lead on what they think went well and what they'd have done differently with hindsight.
Shockingly low percentage of people have built
something they are proud to talk about. All them were good hires tho, as long as the explanations are detailed enough that it was work they actually did or adopted well enough.
If you put a little work in, you can talk about nearly every project. Even stuff like classified satellites have been discussed; you just act respectful to the interviewee's boundaries (which you should be doing anyway).
Yes. If people talk enough they can’t help but share all the relevant details if you know enough about creating medium or large sized systems. Also I ask questions for stories about troubleshooting bugs, and when to log, some story when logs And I would rather hire someone that iterates well over the weeks or months time frame than can solve something quickly.
100% this. All you really have to do is get people talking. Have them tell you a story and ask for details. If they have trouble when you get into details then they are making it up. If not you should have a fun conversation.
As a recent interviewee I can say that I'd be asked about code I was proud of. The last place I worked for was well-known enough or could be looked up easily and was small, so I explained what our main solution did, a particular issue we faced and how I planned and implemented a fix. Led to some good conversations with pseudocode, and didn't break any NDAs.
I try to drag this out of candidates, but it's often very hard... Surprisingly few people actually code outside their jobs/education... Job code is obviously a no-go, and academics are usually pre-skeletoned work, So when I ask them to show me their favorite project, they often draw a blank...
I was lucky and I did a side project my last year of college abusing Hadoop to make a web scraper & analysis tool on one. Probably got me my first 2 jobs because I LOVED to talk about that project, and it let me break out of my fearful and introverted shell to show a wider range of skills
I got hired on at a Fortune 500 company in the early 2000s. One of the reasons I've stuck around (besides the great pay and benefits) is that I've read all the horror stories of leetcode interviews. I have zero interest in participating in that nonsense. One benefit of this is, when I am interviewing people to fill development position, I never do any of that leetcode nonsense.
You should still check out to see if your pay is competitive for your role, level, etc.
Even an awesome environment might be worth moving away from if your pay goes up 50-100%. Especially if you're not super frugal or have expenses due to other reasons.
The problem is I don’t want to move (great house, low mortgage, great area, etc.). There really aren’t any other major companies within 300 miles and all the smaller companies in the area don’t pay anywhere close to what my company pays.
But is it worth doing leetcode? I find I can’t bring myself to do it even if it would guarantee me a FAANG position and probably triple my salary overnight.
But if that tripled salary enables you to do things you love you can't do now and it enables them both today and long term... then it might be worth it :-)
Well you can interview while you have your job and no one needs to be any wiser. You can be sure that at least annually the company is looking to stay lean and mean and right size you if it fits their economic goals for the company.
My first program (that wasn't just printing 'you suck' over and over in basic on the C64) was in Turbo Pascal. It used showed how light defracted in different materials using Snell's Law.
For my very first interview I was told “write something in php” so I put together a few scripts to parse templated txt files into html and made a little baby version of a cms. Wasn’t exactly scalable or ground breaking but I thought it was cool. But the engineer that interviewed me was like so this imports text files and it took you all afternoon to build it? …didn’t get that job.
So the next one was pretty similar “hey use this language called Sikuli to build something.” Now, I’d never heard of Sikuli but it was basically python so I built a little app that, based on the screen, could offer up context sensitive hotkey chains…kind of like a baby version of Alfred that literally only worked with Microsoft office. But the guy thought it was cool and hired me anyway :)
Went from working in a gas station over night to working in my kitchen or the coffee shop. I thought it was sooooo cool
Requiring coding tests etc just wasn't filtering more than random chance when I was hiring. I ended up pulling in people who had the most preposterous CVs to see what they were actually like.
One guy was a ninja. A black belt in ninjitsu, apparently. I asked him about his ninja skills (he looked like Harry Knowles). He said he could make himself invisible. I was like O_O. I asked him to demonstrate. He said he couldn't do it right now as we already knew he was there. I told him to leave the meeting room and "come back in invisible." He said it didn't work like that. I asked how it works. He said "Let's say I'm at a party.. I can enter the room and walk completely through the crowded room and not a single person will notice me." I think I know what was happening....
One problem is that the big companies (that, for the most part, pay the big bucks and people care about and other small companies look to) are market movers. If they are known to be doing some alternative to leetcode then leetcode-type websites and study programs will pop right up to optimize for whatever new metric they have. If they start to prioritize things you've built over ability to perform, you can bet your bottom dollar that within a week there will be a million guides on crafting the optimal cookiecutter project to get in the door at Facebook available on the web. And the signal will lose its value. A signal has to be costly to acquire and algorithmic prowess, although made easier through things like leetcode, is costly for everyone to acquire which is why it holds its value.
I'm thinking of changing jobs and the need for me to do leetcode and answer trivia gotcha questions vexes me. More than 10 years of professional experience and like 5-6 years of hobbyist experience as a web master for 00's websites, and managing ecommerce sites with >$1M's in revenue doesn't count for anything.
At my first webdev job (1998) I built websites for seafood companies. Microsoft FrontPage was the tool my boss handed me. I was appalled at the HTML it was producing, and succeeded in convincing him to let me use Dreamweaver instead; for a 20th century WYSIWYG editor, it was pretty good.
The best was when they wanted you to throw a curved border around something in an age before floats or border radii. You could do it multiple different ways, but usually it just involved slicing up an image and throwing the image elements into a table which wrapped your content.
Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site
Owner: You wrote this?
Me: Yeah.
Owner: This is in Perl?
Me: Yeah.
So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use PHP instead of Perl. Sure, cool, whatever. He told me that I had to start being productive in the first couple weeks or he would have to let me go, couldn't afford to keep people that weren't working out. I was down with that. He had some HTML pages that he had created in a WYSIWYG editor, I think it was Dreamweaver, and I was going to add some PHP scripting to those pages.
How hard could that be?
So I get to work and open these HTML files and I don't even remember exactly, I think like the login page HTML was 20 pages of code long, maybe I'm exaggerating, I've blocked most of it out of my memory but I seem to remember nested tables inside of nested tables inside of nested tables with spacer GIFs and s all over the place and I remember looking at it and thinking: What. The. Actual. Fuck.
But I did it! I managed to get the guy to take a look at what the editor he was using actually created and get him to simplify some things, I fixed a few bugs and was working on features and he came in around noon and told me you know what I said about being productive in the first few weeks? Forget about that, we're good.
The week before I was doing manual labor in a factory. It was like going from the 1800s to the 2000s over a weekend. I made $9 an hour, less than I was making stacking boxes on pallets, but of course totally worth it in the long run. Good times.