I'm not sure if I could agree with the "Outside the valley" comment. I live nowhere near the Valley, and myself and plenty of my co-workers are not credentialed. As a matter of fact, my current workplace is pretty much in a rural area. My last 3 jobs have had a pretty equal number of credentialed and uncredentialed employees. These companies all pay very well, and are well-known.
I completely agree. I am self taught, started learning code about 6 years ago, and I get recruiters contacting me and job offers constantly. It's gets annoying actually. A guy without a degree getting calls about 6 figure jobs on a regular basis sure sounds like he'd be in a different industry than the guy who wrote this article. When I hear developers with degrees complaining about how hard it is to find work these days I'm completely baffled. Software engineering is one of the best fields to be in today with an overabundance of jobs available. I start to wonder about developers who say they can't find work. What's really going on?
Last time I used Neo4j in production with NodeJS we had only a few thousand nodes, and our heaviest query, which equated to a 2-table-join sql query, took up to 3 seconds to complete. We abandoned it and went with postgres...
I think what they are saying is the kind of tests they see in a corporate environment are not the kind that add any value to the refactoring process (or worse, inhibit it).
Agreed. I have only used TDD once as a front-end web developer, and I've found that I do struggle with the practicality of it. I spent half my time managing and maintaining my tests. When I did the math, It seemed that all that extra time spent was more than It would have taken to simply chase down bugs that would have arisen in a non-tdd environment. It just seems to take more time than is practical. Especially in agile startups.
Perhaps. The difference is that in one case you'll have the machine automatically tell you when and why your code stops working because of a regression, and in the other you have no clue until the customer hits it. It's not only about proving it worked once, it's about proving it with every commit.
