It bothers me that TC writers, when called out on their bias, claim to just be mere "bloggers" who are supposed to be expose their bias so you know where they're coming from, but now they're claiming to be holy "journalists".
HTML, JS, CSS, PHP, and Python all have steady increases, and ruby is mostly stable. It could just be that focus is more on the web (HTML in particular seems to have taken a biggish jump mid-2009 - related to HTML5?)
I think you may misunderstand what signing in with Facebook does.
1) It could, potentially, provide some value to you as a user. Quora gets to suggest people to follow for you based on your Facebook friends, so your experience on there is seeded with relevant information.
2) Nothing you do on the site you signed in with is published to your Facebook profile, without your explicit consent on a dialog box.
If you think of advertising as "traditional advertising" and "internet advertising", then FB and Google are certainly rivals. However, in pure marketing terms, they are actually very different.
Google search ads EXCEL in "Demand Fulfillment" - say you want need a plumber now since your toilet is overflowing. I don't think Facebook will ever beat Google here. Google sort of created this niche where they were better than any competitor that had ever existed.
Facebook, on the other hand, is better at demand generation. Consider advertisers who want to reach teenagers who would want to buy videogames - a new game is coming out, and they want you to know about it. Before, you'd have to find the TV shows that they would watch, or billboards that they would see, or queries that gaming-teens would search for, and advertise there. These are all competitive and difficult proxies for the audience you want to reach. Facebook is a much better place for that than Google.
In fact, you can imagine synergy between FB ads and Google ads. FB tells people, "you should listen to this band that you haven't heard of", and when you Google that band name, you see ads for places to buy tickets and albums.
I interview plenty of people, for fulltime positions and internships, and, basically, yes, you can definitely be hired.
It sounds like you're starting your 2nd year of college now, and most of your peers have pretty thin resumes, too. The fact that you have pursued personal projects beyond classwork already puts you ahead of the vast majority of candidates. Be sure to provide links to the source code for the projects you hacked together in your resume. Even though you don't think they're perfect, they show your passion, and that's what people are looking for.
In the cover letter, talk about how you discovered programming, how much you've learned in just 2.5 years, how much you want to learn still. I didn't start coding, really, until halfway into my freshman year, and I was still able to find internships.
Once your resume is strong enough (and providing links to good code that you wrote will look very good, for a college student), it's just the interview, and it doesn't seem like you're asking about that.
P.S.
Another way of doing things is getting to know some professors well (TA for them, ask them lots of questions, talk to them after class, etc.), and asking them to help you find an internship. A lot of companies trust professors' opinions of their students a lot more than resumes when deciding who to interview.
The rule of thumb to use in most interviewing situations, not just Software Engineering, is to dress one "degree" up from your interviewers. If you're being interviewed by jeans and a T-shirt, wear a dress shirt and slacks. If you're being interviewed by a dress shirt and slacks, you can't go wrong with a casual suit.
If you're being interviewed by a formal suit, though, don't go busting out the tux :-p. That's the top level.
As a side note on the conversation, I'm impressed by how well Best Buy is adapting to the changing demands of the consumers. Rather than desperately promoting the same stuff that has worked for them for decades, they see the writing on the wall and are changing their focus.
re: Forer Effect - one thing to do is to read all of the personality types, especially before taking the test. I find the these descriptors tend to be a little more specific about traits (especially weaknesses!) and there are many that don't apply to me.
re: self-evaluated multiple-choice - One thing I've done in these sorts of situations is to find concrete situations in which I can say, "when I was in this specific situation that the question was asking about, I did X", which hopefully minimizes the amount of "oh man i want to be an extrovert" sort of answering.
...but yes, agreed, this is really just sort of a goofy little thing, but it's fun and still potentially a bit interesting.
Can somebody summarize what he "lets it all loose" about? I am too lazy to invest the time in watching a video unless I have a vague sketch that it will actually be something I'm interested in.
I used K in an internship in college (DB stuff for a data company whose clients were mostly financial companies). The learning curve was really steep, but once you can parse it, it's incredibly fast to program in, incredibly fast to execute, and generally awesome.
We had a vague guideline at work that if any algorithm took you more than 3 lines, you were doing it wrong.
Legend has it that Arthur Whitney wrote the compiler in a few files - a.c, b.c, c.c, up to around q.c, with each file being exactly 52 lines and 80 columns so they could all fit on one page.
See "no stinking loops" at http://www.nsl.com/ which has some great examples of really good K code (scroll down a bit).
Given the 23.6 bn is probably low for 2010, and 10,000 engineers is probably a bit high, the resulting value of 2.36 million is a lowball estimate. The real number is probably closer to, oh, say, $2,750,000 / engineer :D