I used to play role playing games in High School. Namely, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Role Playing game. I was the GM. I played almost every weekend with my brother and my best friend–the center of the football team. I loved those games. I think we ignored half the rules, but the stories we created are still some of my best memories from that time. Jump to today and my kids have gotten to the age where they are starting to stretch their storytelling wings a bit.

Take a look at this email and think about what it would mean about your career. What about this email is different than most of the job postings out there that you routinely see? Obviously, I put a big fat outline under one of those aspects; that they don’t care if I even know the language. The thing that most starting or junior developers are most worried about–“I need to know XYZ”–a hiring business in my area doesn’t even care about.

I’ve been running a few tech interviews for the consulting company that I get work from and I’m realizing, most people aren’t very good at it. But that’s understandable. It’s not like we do it very often and it’s hard to get practice in on the interviewee side (interviewers do this all the time). Here are a couple of mistakes I’ve seen recently: Being non-chatty Yes, I see this as a mistake.

When talking about interviews, most programmers are interested in the technical interview. And why not? It’s what we know. We think that if we can solve a problem on a whiteboard, we should get the job. Meritocracy for the win! But at most companies, it really doesn’t work like that. The management in charge of the programmers will always have the last say in whether you’re hired or not. What they want to know is, “Can this person do this job?

When my Dad got out of the Army in 1971, he got a job with AT&T as a repairman. He worked there his whole career for 41 years until he retired two years ago. This was normal for his generation and the generation before his. You got a job at a big corporation right out of college (or the Army) and they took care of you, treated you like one of the family and carried you through your career to a safe, and funded, retirement.

With the latest news that Reddit, of all places, is now forcing all of its employees to move to San Francisco to work in their local office, or go find a new job, I again thank my lucky stars that I have the option to work remotely. It’s a great time we live in when all of the tools we need and all the collaboration we want can happen anywhere in the world at any time.

I was browsing Quora recently and came across a question called What are the best kept secrets of great programmers?. These kinds of questions always make me cringe a little. Everyone’s always looking for secrets and shortcuts and the simple fact is, there aren’t any. There’s never just one thing that people-who-get-stuff-done know that no one else can’t figure out. And I cringe because I do it too! I wonder what all these other people putting out tutorials and stuff know that I don’t know and if I’m good enough to teach what I’m trying to teach (not in the technical part of it but in the actual teaching and learning theory part of it).

The dreaded technical interview. The bane of any programmer that’s not sure of themselves. I’ll admit to being nervous in every interview I’ve ever been in, even though I’ve gotten an offer nine times out of ten. (I’m very good in an interview). I know that I typically make it worse on myself than I need to though. I get nervous over stupid stuff and flustered when I’m asked about something that I don’t feel like I know enough about.

The call came in around 3:00 PM and I ran outside to take it in private. The call was from the start-up in Michigan that I had been interviewing with for three weeks and they had finally made a decision. They were going with someone else. I was more than a little surprised. Things had been going great and we were already talking about future strategies and how I could get them to where they needed to go.