Yes indeed. It helps, but still not as much as it used to before they changed the searching methodology a year or two ago. I liked the older syntax as well (using the plus instead of quotes) - not as bad on the desktop, but quoting things on a phone is a pain.

- Tim

I agree. I felt Google results were the best and most accurate (for what I was searching for) about 2 years ago or so.
I could be very specific and get back exactly the results I wanted.

Now that's pretty impossible for more obscure searches.

'scuse me - SEO, not SOE. :-)

- Tim

... and what appears to be its associated features.

Eg. When I search on my Android phone, there is *no way* to force it to do unweighted searches for keyword prevalence, or even a reasonable approximation thereof (while trying to avoid SOE-seeding keyword-heavy websites, for example).

I always get stuff that Google "thinks I want", and I get that little nicely-formatted shorthand result set up-top as the first result (a map, a fact or figure, a schedule), and it waits around for awhile before returning the rest of the results.

I don't want Google to give me what it thinks I want, or SHOULD want, or even what "most people" want - I want a pure result set basic on simple pattern matching in the dataset.

I know it's a lot more complex than that under the hood, and subject to all kinds of definitions of what a "match" is. But now I am inundated with "apps you may be interested in" and other items for sale or marketing tie-ins or "latest and greatest", and not very often what I'm actually searching for.

I wish Google would let you turn off all those pre-guessing "features" for folks like me who just want to search for particular, unweighted things.

- Tim

Since you're posting anonymously, would you mind saying what they offered you, and the salary you eventually accepted? I'm curious what people are considering insulting these days, versus acceptable.

*snort* The huge company I'm working for now still uses *gasp* CVS. They want to move to Perforce, but things move very slow there, and they're afraid that changing the versioning software will slow down the development cycle for too long. It really wouldn't - could be done in a snap, at least for people who have used many versioning systems - but they haven't done it yet. Hell, we're still using Bugzilla. *sigh*

PS I mean just base salary - I'm not including the worth of other benefits.

Well, as mentioned, I've been programming for 30 years and have plenty of meaty projects under my belt, always get good reviews from my managers, etc. etc. and I've yet to be offered anything above $150k. BESIDES Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook (which are very hard to get into, even if you're good - they want SUPER good) - where are people regularly getting $200K for non-managerial jobs? I have not seen that (or perhaps I've not been demanding it :-) ).

Good advice - sadly, I was one of those self-taught computer teens; I took a programming job right out of highschool, went to college for a year after that, decided I didn't like college, and have been working ever since. I'd have to go back for both a BA and an MBA for that - 6 years at 48 is nothing to sneeze it. Hard to say it's worth it at this point (esp. since the biz side of things would indeed be - as you say - for me, something to 'grin and bear'). I can't say I did a lot of 'career planning' earlier on. :-)

I live in San Francisco, and have for many years.

I'm a Sr Software Engineer in enterprise Java development these days (been programming professionally for 30 years). Never wanted to get into management or team leadership, tried a bunch of startups that failed, and am not much of an entrepreneur, though I still love programming.

So at 48 years old, I'm still a Sr Software Engineer, but my salary (or yearly based on hourly, since I'm contracting right now) ends up being about $145k w/bennies, MAYBE $155k without bennies (contracting used to pay up to double what salary could get, but no longer - it's barely more than salary now).

Unless I were to head to a management track, or team leadership, or software architect roles, I'm pretty much stuck at this point. It's not horrible, not at all, but feels strange how one gets to a certain point in this field and wages just STOP, pretty much. The only people I know who have stayed in pure engineering who's salaries have gone higher (but who didn't strike it rich at a startup and aren't entrepreneurs) got there by taking a reasonably high wage at a big company, and going up through small yearly cost-of-living increases.

For some reason, I thought - when starting this career - that my wages would just continue going up and up and up the more experience I got, but that ended up not being true after a certain point.

Just giving my perspective anyway.

I'm 48, so my story starts around 1977.

When I was around 13, my brother was going to UC Santa Cruz, and he showed me how to play games on the PDP-11/45 running RSTS/E. I was fascinated, but it wasn't until the next year, when someone in my Jr High mentioned games on the University's computer that I went up there and tried them again (the university had a free "games" account anybody could use)

I ended up getting frustrated, because I couldn't stop playing the game "Animal" (I didn't know about Control-C).

After learning a bit more, I was determined to teach myself all I could about computers. I got a book on BASIC, then one on Boolean Logic, and I was off to town.

It wasn't until I got to High School that I found a computer class I could take in my own school - it was FORTRAN using the school's IBM 360/30 mainframe (had to learn a little JCL for that too). By that time I had already taught myself Pascal and C and some other languages, but I wanted some extra credit. Towards my Junior or Senior year, they started giving classes on Apple IIs they had bought, but I thought of them as little toys compared to the DEC and IBM machines I was using, so didn't bother.

All the people I knew who were computer geeks when I started were mostly 18-21-year-olds who were studying Information Science at UCSC (they didn't have Computer Science there until later). A few kids who came to my highschool when I was 17 or 18 had home microcomputers, but that was still pretty rare among people I knew.

I'm curious about this too - I do mostly Java development, so I'll be developing with Eclipse, running a full stack (Apache, JBoss, MySQL and perhaps some other smaller servers), might be doing some GWT development (which at least used to require very fast single-threaded processes, so multi-cores didn't help much - not sure if that's changed).

My current home dev laptop is a Core 2 Duo, so a couple of generations behind. I was wanting to upgrade, but wondering if putting it off until Haswell is available would be worth it, since performance gains (and getting trigate debugged, if necessary) seem like they will be pretty damn significant with that generation.

Or do you think soon-to-be-released Ivy Bridge mobile processors will suffice for that kind of thing?

- Tim

I know the feeling. I used to hang out on soc.singles (and before that, net.singles, before the Great Renaming).

I still read my email on my ISP's shell server, with Pine, still use trn.

I get the usual "Oh, is that DOS?" comments when people look over my shoulder. :-)

I'd thought it was DejaNews, which Google bought back in the day.

Yeah - I taught myself Basic. Then I was told that C was the language to learn next. But the symbols scared me (I was 13 or 14), so I took the next recommendation, which was to learn Pascal.

Learning C was very exciting for me, as it seemed all arcane and mysterious. You're right that the symbols were difficult to understand, but pointers were worse. I'd ask one of the programmers at the university I hung out at (to use their PDP-11/70s and Vaxen) what a pointer WAS. Their answer was invariably something like "It's something that POINTS to something else" or "It's a variable that holds a value that points to something else."

It would have been nice if they could have said something like "You know how a variable can hold, say, an integer or a character value? Well, that variable is stored in memory. All bytes (don't confuse a kid with the concept of word-size please :-) ) have an 'address'. *draws typical picture of a memory layout* So any variable you create has an address. What if you want to know the address of that variable? In C, you can say '&variableName'; the value that you get from that is the address of the variable. If you store that value in ANOTHER variable, THAT variable is a POINTER to the 1st variable."

THAT, I would have understood, but nobody seemed to want to take the time to explain it to me.