They saw the cookie-cutter AS degree and passed on him. Not broad-based enough. Probably in a downturn.

Both items are deal-breakers when you're dealing with someone with the levels of experience that were available during the latter condition. (Why get a fresh AS grad, when you can get an SME for roughly the same price? Mainly because the SME's desperate...)

Yeah, you're technically old-school. You were taught a discipline- which, in truth, is little different than learning a trade, to be bluntly honest.

Colleges have lost their way...or worse, they've taken to strip-mining students for all the cash they can bleed from them and the government through student loans.

How many of them are doing embedded Linux and Android projects- and when they weren't, how many of them were using ThreadX, VxWorks, pSOS, Lynx, QNX, etc.?

If you needed to know VS, you were working in the wrong circles. I didn't need to know VS even though it was one of the bigger deals for doing Windows development- I knew how to code C++ and understood and used ATL, MFC, etc. Which, by the way, is the way everyone should've framed it. Not, "do you do VS"?

Which is pathetic for the CC, honestly. Python's doable because it's *free* just like Java was then- and worse, you didn't need VS to do C++...

Dev C++
With MinGW or Cygwin, Eclipse

Sure, it didn't have some of the glitzy stuff MS was shovelling- but you could have pretty much done Windows or Cross-Platform C++ development back when Java was the big rage at the Community Colleges. And this doesn't even get into them doing Linux for all of it, including Java, Python, etc... They're guilty of some of the same mentality that spawned the notion that these idiot "bootcamps" are a good substitute for a discipline or vocational education. The problem isn't quite the thing Mike Rowe's fingering on this- but he's close enough to not disagree at all. They're guilty of trying to strip-mine all the students for all the money they can. Actually teach something? That's too much into our "BoM" on those grads we're pumping out.

Part of the reason you had problems getting a gig was that they saw the "cookie-cutter" Associate's degree and passed on that. You've nothing to offer except coding for them at that stage, regardless of whether that's true or not- because that's the only metric they've got to go off of. If you actually have ability and can pick up the Engineer's trade, you should get the rest of the BS degree you should get (which won't assure you the job...little will, honestly, unless you've got 2-3 decades of the bleeding edge, self-taught through the school of hard knocks...but it'll HELP, all the same...) and work on teaching yourself any gaps in anything they didn't teach you on your own. There's always something that they won't/don't teach you. You have to learn it on your own. Whether it's C++, OOD/OOA, or the like, you're going to have to be able to grab the ring yourself repeatedly to keep employed. The reason they passed on you is the AS degree- because of the "pathetic" I opined on at the beginning. They're not teaching a trade. They're honestly not teaching a good base to work with at most Community Colleges these days. They're teaching you the in-vogue stuff right then (You shouldn't be learning VS, you should be learning C++ which doesn't really and honestly give a tinker's damn where it's being implemented if you've done it right... You shouldn't be learning Java just because the College is too cheap to get proper Windows tools (which, again, is PATHETIC because the tools have been "there" within reach for nearly 20 years...). You shouldn't be learning Python because that's the big main big-deal in dynamic content websites in there with Java and PHP... You get the idea...) In all honesty, it wouldn't endear you to me if I were to hire help with either my Game Porting interest or my Agritech one. In the former, I'd need a self-starter that understands C and C++. They'd need to be adaptable to pick up Lua if they didn't already know it. They'd have to be able to debug code on X86, ARM, and MIPS. The requirements for the Agritech business I'm starting...are similar in nature, along with "getting" embedded coding. That's the kinds of jobs there's currently work for that's sustainable. An Associate's isn't going to help you there unless you can show you putz with that stuff already and can prove you might grow to fill those shoes in a 6-18 month timeframe being allowed to do it. The same goes for a "bootcamp".

And, unless they were wired to move on to other things, either on their own or by way of a proper (mind...) college education, they'll be technically obsolescent in 3-5 years.

Bootcamps are useful for teaching you some new buzzword skill, but they're not the same thing as properly learning a trade or a discipline- they're only truthfully useful for quickly picking up a new set of tools for the trade.

I wouldn't put mine to the curb because I'm still playing game titles on the console. Having said this, the world being awash in $100 and less boxes that do a better job of Netflix (AND the others...), it's also awash with devices that with a decent BT game controller or similar can manage just shy of the PS3 titles as well.

It's not a wise move on their part. Google's going to eat their lunch if they do this.

It's still a hack and a workaround there. Just because it works "okay" and it's "easy" doesn't mean the yanking of the functionality in the PS4 isn't problematic. I know I'm waiting for a critical mass of PS4 titles before I contemplate a move- and with GoogleTV or an Android HDMI stick, it became stupidly easy to do the others. It's another box, but still- Sony's not getting me to sign off on this crap and at the rate they're going I might just give the PS4 a pass as well.

There is a reason I am keen on seeing if Valve can manage something with SteamBox/SteamOS/Linux. I'm a bit tired of the BS and lies about this stuff.

The problem with USB MSD is that you can't operate against the store with the OS on the device at the same time the Host OS is doing it. MTP was chosen so that you could do things on the store while the device was able to use it at the same time. The fact that the implementation of the whole notion's flawed (Hey, Microsoft came up with it!) in the manner that it's single threaded (You can only act on a single object request at a given time), is irrelevant to everything. Now, if they could come up with a 2.0 that was multithreaded, and have proper USB IF compliant implementations of the same (MTP is an IF spec, mind...) then it'd be great. You need SOMETHING like it in place- just not what we've got in it's current form.

O_o

What security problems? You can't autoexecute stuff off an SD under Android. The only time there's a security concern (and it's going to be the SAME on the on-device eMMC...) is that you can execute code off of an SD that vendors didn't intend for you to run. That's how people side-load in the first place. They didn't change anything with this little change they made in KitKat and didn't break anything any worse than it was with this change back.

The reason that they quit including SD slots was because they want everything on Drive or similar and it lowered the BoM cost to peel those out. It's not security- quit deluding yourself and everyone else with this tripe.

Openness? Please...lay down the crack pipe before posting. Seriously.

What gets me is why they didn't lead with this to begin with. What they did with KitKat was effin' stupid.

As for Verizon getting their updates out? Heh...you're kidding, right? You'd just bend a 6' digging bar all to hell trying to surgically remove their head. I quit trying to hold my breath on that one when they got a Nexus and promptly treated the damn thing like a red-headed stepchild; and then made it...difficult...to obtain dev edition devices. (Ever thought that maybe a dev wants to be ON your damn network since it's reliable compared to the others, Verizon? There's legit reasons to have root permissions on the phone...even if you don't see them and keep deluding yourself that you're "protecting" the users...)

He should outright sue. It isn't anything except a very high quality micro-CNC machine. It's called a Ghost Gunner because of one of the intended purposes. As such, they just breached agreement on their end without cause and he has cause.

Heh... You sound like you have the same attitude most of my preferred staffing agencies have. Most of them, sadly, don't have this attitude. (For example, I will deal with Oxford International, but they're last option for talking to on things... There's a reason for that, which includes excessively low-balling me on past jobs, offering me just any old gig that they think I might be able to fill, never mind that while I'm skilled in Windows development, I flatly DON'T want to do that if I can... And they're just one of dozens I give last chance to or won't at-all talk to/with.)

The agency is supposed to do what you're saying. More often than not, unfortunately, they do what people are posting to on /. on this subject today.

Entirely too many "headhunters" are eager to get a warm body into a gig so they can get billable hours or get their percentage of the annual salary as a commission/finders-fee for the job in question.

Then there's hiring managers willing to do the same thing to get *someone* in to help them out, regardless because even an ill-fitting posting will move the project along quicker than nobody being there in many cases.

Heh...I've seen both. I will work for the latter, in many cases. One comes to mind, that I won't mention, who'd be on that list. I could do both what he had me doing and the embedded Linux low-level stuff. But...unfortunately, the upper management has this notion that they're better off with Offshored stuff. (Never mind that I had a good time and swiftly un-did the mess they made- and would happily keep it from happening again if they'd hire me and two other devs and not offshore the stuff...)