I'm 21 years into my career myself, so the web is younger than my carrer. At this point, I do full stack development as well.
And... I think you are taking on more than you need to for the discussion at hand.
If you are an excellent JS programmer, you don't need to keep up on the latest libraries. You can code what you need yourself. Sure, maybe you do something from scratch that could have been done with a newer library, but the 10 hours you lose there is more than made up by not having to do those 15 hours a week keeping up.
Likewise on your other tech points. Constantly churning your toolkit doesn't speed you up. It slows you down. There is a balance to be found where you keep up "enough", but still focus the majority of your time on delivering work.
I choose to spend a day or so each month trying to keep up, then roll with what I know for a while.
Likewise with some of your other activities. Meetups and business models? They may help you be a consultant, but that is adding yet a 4th role to the topic at hand.
Many of your other points also apply more to a consultant than a heads-down designer/coder.
In general, it sounds like you are trying to be an even rarer breed. More power to ya, but it may be overkill for most people.
I had a course in grad school in which we wrote our own database system, including having to calculate the storage to disk... as in, calculate the sectors, and where you had to break fields to a new sector, and read/write the raw binary data to/from the hard disk.
I have not really had to re-learn file IO since then.
Clearly there are new things to be learned... (do usb sticks even have sectors?)... but having that low-level experience tends to be more than enough for a front-end web developer.
You are missing the point. There are established mechanisms for change in this country. I grow weary of people acting like we need to rise up and take drastic action, when most people have not even gone through our established processes.
And the new bosses can change. Obama's election was the result of almost nothing other than: "I'm not the status quo." And he won.
So vote out every incumbent in the next election, and the message will get across loud and clear. Maybe the next generation will start with similar problems, but they just got told clearly that if they want to keep their jobs, we want CHANGE.
And politicians do what it takes to get re-elected. A clear message that change is desired will change this country.
This article raises red flags on the author's credibility. This looks less like a truthful account of a story, and more like a frustrated small company who had a partnership go bad, and are trying to defame their partner.
A whole web site, with linkbait headlines, set up to tell one story? Their about page doesn't even say they are trying to start a discussion... it just rehashes the story. With a few other pages to give a token appearance that they will tell more stories later.
I am sure there was fault on both sides, and I am equally sure the other side would have a vastly different story.
But this whole site sure looks like juvenile vengeance.
If you complete phone screens on 1 out of every 10 inquiries you send, you are doing very well in my opinion.
If those phone screens do not turn into full interviews or offers, that is a statement on how they went, not on company responsiveness.
Frankly, I don't think your stats show a lack of response at all. I think they are very reasonable, as some level of non-responsiveness is natural, when you account for the fact that you gave them enough information to summarily dismiss you from consideration if you don't match their needs or culture.
I also wonder what may have been different if this was not placed in the context of a very public experiment. How many of the purchases were political statements?
I think the same model needs to be employed, without any commentary, to get a true measure of the mechanism.
1) If you are going to suggest such a massive scope of changes, offer to help instead of just dumping a list out there.
2) Check to see if the poster on HN is actually the author of the article. Doesn't look like it in this case, so you may be talking into a vacuum.
3) I love that timeline widget. But it is one of the most un-intuitive and complicated things I have ever seen. I recommend re-coding its functions into a simpler library vs. adding even more complexity to timeline.
4) Dependencies can get evil. Your suggestions add quite a lot of complexity into footprint of plugin. I fear that the end result might look good to a coder, but be a bit of a nightmare to actually use in a production environment.
Highcharts' zoomable graphs are a killer feature at the moment. They are not difficult to use, and I use them to show 30 days worth of data (2880 points per graph) in my monitoring apps. They work on mobile and web out of the box, too.
I'm unlikely to even considerer another library until they match that feature.
I don't see a serious problem with a low retention rate from reading HN articles. I do not come here to memorize every item that flies through... I probably read 50 items a week on HN, but the reason I come back is for the 2-3 items per week that make me re-evaluate what I am doing, and cause me to do it better.
Asimov hashed through all this quite thoroughly in the Foundation series.
But it is always interesting when we catch up to classic sci-if and work towards actual implementations of what was pure imagination only a short time ago.
People are missing the underlying root cause of the lower quality programmers in India -- Culture. There, upward mobility is the goal, not being the best programmer. People take a programming job for a year or two, then look to "advance" into management/leadership/etc. So the result is a large number of junior programmers.
That, in turn, is why you need to give very explicit instruction, and why much of the work needs a lot of QA.
Knowing this also makes it a lot easier to interview firms or individuals, looking to their own personal motivations to see whether they match the overall cultural trends or not, and thereby you can build a better team.
The fact that you keep jumping in and defending yourself after every negative comment makes you look like you are seriously lacking confidence.
Nobody is questioning that you believe in what you do and are doing well at it, and enjoying your work. What we are questioning is your methods.
Let me put it into perspective (my perspective):
If you want to donate $2000 dollars to heifer.org for each employee, just do it. Don't put it in my name. I have my own charities, and would prefer to make my own choice.
Don't buy me a bike. I am disabled and that perk just slaps me in the face with it.
Don't buy me beer. I do not drink, and find the implication that drinking is required for your culture to be a little creepy.
Don't say that I am getting $2000 for R&D. That is pocket change for true R&D, and makes me worry that not only do you not handle budgets well, but that the companies future innovation funding could get messed up in HR negotiations.
The bottom line is that most of your perks scare me. Not because there is anything wrong with offering them, but because it shows a severe lack of empathy for the diversity of people in this world.
When I first saw his headlines a while back, I had the same question...
But there is a very reasonable answer - he is bringing to light a gap in the availability of bone marrow for his particular ethnicity. It is not that he is personally more important than anyone else... it is that he, and others like him, are under-served. Using his connections to raise this issue not only helps him, but should help anyone in his same situation.
Yes, it is ridiculous. They are ensuring that they get people who are interesting... and all the exact same flavor of interesting. It feels juvenile, even if they intended it sincerely.
Maybe they are find people, and maybe it is a fine company. I have no way of knowing. But this approach does not appeal to me, personally because is feels like it is trying too hard.