For all of those who are now offering to hire the guy, could you be any more stereotypical? It's just like in music - every record label or tech company wants somebody to show up on their door already famous and/or already with a reputation of success - you know, basically the total package. Invest and develop new talent? Well, that's what unpaid internships are for - slave labor, and then we pick the best of the bunch...maybe! Same old song and dance. "Come back when you're famous."

This example is truly good for him, because he invested in himself when big-time names and others wouldn't bother at first, and now I hope he takes his time to pick and choose his opportunities now that he's earned his industry status.

As a teacher on a local technical university, I completely understand what you're talking about here. However, the purpose of technical universities is to teach broads concepts on computer science (or computer engineering). Therefore, we have to start somewhere, building from basic concepts such as the need for digital "codification" up to the dozens or hundreds of concepts which will provide students with a better understanding of the field.

In your case, you pretty much decided that you would want to do frontend web development, so you made a choice. Where I teach, students only have one course which they will ever learn about html/css/js, and on a very basic level (there's a lot of information to fit into 3 years!). Assuming that most technical universities are like this, I think you made a good choice for you. However, if someday you decide to switch to backend development, making your way down the stack for DBs, or eventually up the stack for higher-level things, such as data analysis, ML, etc., you may probably find difficulties related to the lack of breadth on your understanding of the field.

All in all, just to say that you made a good choice for you, but that technical universities can provide students with a breadth of information which allows students someday, after some years of experience, to grok the similarities between most CS subfields..

Which might be a fine way to teach in those nations where college is free, but even there, ignoring the interests of the student, and sticking with a standard canon of course work, undercuts the uniqueness of each student.

And in those nations where college is not free, then the cost of spending time on broad topics needs to be balanced with the student's ability to pay for it.

The style of teaching that you describe is criticized by Paulo Freire in his book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed".

"In the book Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed

This is a model of teaching that can work well if the student is affluent enough that they don't have to worry about money for several years, but it is a style of teaching that really breaks down for 2 important groups:

1.) adults who need to learn a new skill

2.) just about everyone who lives in a poor country

Freire developed his ideas while he was teaching adults to read and write.

There is a teaching style that caters more to the full circumstances of the students, taking into account their age and their economic situation and their interests, so that the teaching empowers them with knowledge, without also disempowering them in other ways (such as crushing them with debt).

Public college here and throughout most Europe is almost free and most students attenting public universities do not incur much debt (if any at all). That is a trap that you have set up for yourselves (assuming you're from the US).

Nevertheless, every student (computer engineering, that is) can chose is own courses, so, they can follow their own interests. We just make sure that each student starts from a good technical point so he can be a "true" engineer (as in having an engineering degree).

> There is a teaching style that caters more to the full circumstances of the students, taking into account their age and their economic situation and their interests, so that the teaching empowers them with knowledge, without also disempowering them in other ways (such as crushing them with debt).

1 to 1 teaching, although desirable, would not come cheap in any place in the world!

I had a sorta-similar path to getting involved with Redux over the last year and a half, which I wrote about at http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/09/how-i-got-here-my-j... . I'm also pleased to note that Max has been one of the biggest supporters of my efforts to improve Redux's documentation and provide help to people learning React and Redux, and I really appreciate his encouragement.

If you happen to be in a position of authority in a tech company in the bay area, I would personally contact this guy and ask if one of these companies was yours. If it was, you have some serious work to do because your hiring practices are costing you more than you can easily imagine.

If I were a hiring manager and the candidate couldn't write very basic vanilla JS I wouldn't hire them either. I don't care that they have a bunch of github stars. The inability to solve simple problems without a framework is a liability.

The #1 repo by stars is FreeCodeCamp. I have not used the service, but if https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911647 is to be trusted then the count is inflated:

> GitHub part is so flawed... because FreeCodeCamp inflate their popularity by requiring during onboarding for the user to star their repository yet keeping them at the top. It's like if I told everyone to vote up my Hacker News posts... and gave them the link to do it and GitHub has no remedy for that inflation.

I'm also guilty of starring repos that seem cool but have not read the code or tried to use it. I've never used D3 in a project and can't speak to its quality, but I've seen some wicked cool demos and starred it as a bookmark of sorts.

Full list of the Top 1000 Repos, freshly queried from BigQuery: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11bGpZq6ixlhrmQnzEUqb...

Did he list his projects at this time? Did he email to info@?

Do people hiring for tech positions (esp out in the bay area) still filter just on school/degree, and weed out folks like max before learning anything else about them?

I'm not trying to "blame the victim" so to speak as much as figure out what steps he took. Did he actually talk to a real person, and did that person review his resume/repos, and still pass (or... as is the case with almost all companies, just go silent and never respond again)?

It might also be reviewed by people on a hiring panel or the hiring manager depending upon the company.

Or they would just have some marginal returns for extreme opportunity costs if they improved them to also manage to get such persons.

No, I'm referring to the extreme restructuring and HR effort required to ensure you don't lose any such candidate.

for many programming is about creating products, which often has more to do w/ people than w/ math

also if he currently wants to spend most of his time contributing to open source and giving talks/lectures to share knowhow let him be

disclaimer: know max in person, studied CS myself, think that the comment above is a shame to this community

Max worked with us to create an interactive course on React/Redux[1]. Just wanted to say that he's an awesome guy to work with. Always willing to help and giving constructive feedback.

Keep doing the good work Max. Congratulations again. Looking forward to 2017 and beyond.

[1]: https://www.educative.io/collection/5642398931615744/5741031...

----

I have a discount coupon for the course... It was originally meant for my friends, so I hope Fahim doesn't mind me sharing it, but if you enter "au-christmas" during checkout you can get yourself 60% off the original price! (I hope it's alright to post this, if not let me know mods and I'll delete this part!)

I hope you enjoy the course and Merry Christmas!

Really super sorry for the horrible experience.

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Your story is an inspiration to people who think they're too "green" or "new" to contribute :)

I absolutely agree, many junior developers are afraid to jump into open source – even though they totally don't have to be!

The pain points you have while developing, no matter at which level of experience, other people probably have them too. Some of them are already solved, but many of them aren't! If you solve one of them, it can only be good for you to generalize it a bit and push it on GitHub and npm.

Worst thing that can happen? Nobody uses your solution, oh well.

Best thing that can happen? It could change your live.

So why not do it?

Because giving your work away too freely devalues your work and that of your peers.

That may be offset by the benefits depending on the circumstance.

Not even to just new developers, even to us old developers. Max has been someone I look to as inspiration and I've been doing this for almost 20 years.

Keep up the good work, Max.

https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/786478628829814784/photo/1

[1] http://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator [2] http://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/

[1]: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

Edit: ouch Operator Mono is $199 and up. I've purchased quality fonts before, but that's well above my impulse-buy threshold.

Which device/browser are you on?

WOW. How did you find time for this?

It sounds like more than it actually is.

Thanks for your amazing work!

@mxstbr - Contact me at [email protected] and send me your resume/cover letter/cold email that you used to approach these companies.. You probably just need a few tweaks with your personal pitch.