The assumption that you need to lock down student's devices is the root of all of your issues.

There's a lot of clueless in marketing... and there's also an equal number of creative geniuses. In a lot of cases, marketers make mistakes for the same reasons developers do: underestimating how long work will take, assuming something works without testing it and not talking to users. There's also a strong not invented here bias, people taking way to much personal ownership of their work, HIPPOs (HIghest Paid Person's Opinion) and irrational mandates (i.e.THIS WORD MUST BE IN THE COPY).

Do you think that giving the POS terminal the GNOME name was just a piece of viral marketing tactic to begin with?

I think that in marketing it is better to be lucky than good. If they are smart they will call it Groupon POS because any other name will squander the brand identity that this little kerfuffle has caused.

Hate to say, but marketers can be the most oblivious people in the wold. They also create things and have the same feelings of ownership that many of us do when we cook up a heaping helping of awesome code. So, I'm not surprised by Groupon taking a minute to figure out where they stood.

Last year, the people at my company's marketing department emerged from their cave with a Hire Veterans campaign. Awesome. Except for the fact that the helmet they choose to cap the M-16 with was a Nazi Stahlhelm. When I pointed it out I got the "what do you, developer, know about marketing" response. I answered, "Three of our board of directors are Jewish."

Redshift is a fantastic way to get started... the kind where you end up not needing to migrate to something else.

Right now, if you are starting with "Data Warehouse" you probably are using the wrong answer key to score your wrong questions.

You can find out a lot in a few hours just by going to a Big Data meetup. Traditional database vendors are trying to hijack big data and make it their buzzword. Real big data players are using tools like Hadoop, Spark, Solr, Elastic Search and other tools that allow you to use commodity hardware to get a much more performant platform for big data. The appliance vendors have some interesting off the shelf stuff... you should really take some time to see what is going on... it's wild west time.

It's the same thing as JQuery(). It searches through the DOM for any elements that match the provided selector and creates a new jQuery object that references these elements. Here's a very simple example:

$("div > p").css( "border", "1px solid gray" );

finds any div wrapped paragraphs and puts a solid gray line around them. Docs here: http://api.jquery.com/jquery/.

Go to meetups (i.e. javascript, python, ruby, .NET, whatever). There are hiring managers there. Just talk to everyone. Learn what everyone is into, and you'll find out who's hiring and the hiring manager types will probably ask you for your contact info. Give it to them, and ask them for theirs. When it's time to go around the room, just say you are a recent graduate and looking for work where you can hack on whatever you love to hack on. Make sure you call the hiring manger types within 48 hours of your meeting. You'll bypass the HR department and bypass the applicant tracking system.

Suggestion: if you get an interview, bring code to the inerview. Show people what you have done. If the person is non technical then just demo an app you've written. If the interviewer is technical then show the code. If your code is criticized, be positive about it and even discuss how to make it better with the interviewer. The interviewer is trying to see what it will be like working with you in the future, not trip you up.

Finally, if you are offered a lower position than you expect, it's pretty normal for companies to hire junior developers as interns, part time or on a trial basis at lower wages. If you are a good fit, you will be promoted within 90 days. For senior people, you often have to take a haircut on salary to get in the door, but if you are good, you'll be quickly promoted. The reason it is this way is that most companies just don't know what they are hiring until they've been working for a few weeks.

is code you can download, review and modify. The moment a third party or a internet based service is involved, there can be on trust.

It's not fear driven development. It's incompetent, obsolete management.

Three issues going on here:

* Not enough IT professionals who can code.
* HR people are still looking for people with 23 years of experience with Ruby on Clouds
* Really awful management that either has no tech experience/education or is someone who sucked at IT who got promoted.

Non developer positions are having issues.
Finding developers is getting more and more difficult.
Devops is growing.

Maybe time to learn to code and not just click away at control panels?