Eric Spiegel

Is there anything better than lying on the beach, shades on, with an icy drink, listening to the waves crash and kids playing in the surf?  The smell of salty sea air does something special to the mind. The sea air clears it of all the junk that piles up in the brain during every […]

Should software developers do customer support? Post your opinion in the Comments section below. A ringing phone can be a developer’s worst nightmare. If you’re lucky, it’s just a ticked off significant other. Or your mom calling because you haven’t called in a month. Or even someone selling a hot piece of property in the […]

What kind of boss do you code software for? How do you handle them? Leave your comment below. “I don’t give a sh!t what you think.” That was the answer I received the very first time I asked for a raise. It was stated matter-of-factly, as if I was just another irrelevant cog in the […]

“I can’t believe my manager stole my second monitor!” My buddy Dave was beside himself. He simply could not fathom that his manager had taken away his precious second monitor. He was seething so much that I thought he looked a little like Gollum pining for “my precious” – except this was no fantastical ring, […]

ALSO SEE: IT and Developer Salary Levels: Staffers vs. Superstars AND: Are these Developer and IT Salaries Believable? I was staring at the salary of every single one of my developer teammates. A small gasp was forming at the back of my throat. When I saw that my salary was next to last on the […]

What’s the dumbest interview question you’ve ever been asked? Write it in the Comments section below. If you were required to write code after becoming intoxicated, could you do it? Would you write better code? Worse? This is exactly how Facebook selected their first interns, if we are to believe The Social Network movie. Who […]

“But I can just Google it.” I was staring across my desk at a mop-haired young man who was interviewing for a Java software developer position on my team. He was responding to a question about memory management, but he wasn’t really answering the question. He hemmed and hawed for a few seconds and that’s […]

“I heard Facebook is paying new computer science graduates over $200,000.” I was shocked. Were new graduates really getting these offers? The person I was talking to told me a friend of a friend (first warning sign) said he was offered $220k at Facebook just out of Stanford’s comp sci program. Even if true, this […]

“If you make me do this I will quit.” Dmitry looked at me, not with anger, but more with a determined angst. He was obviously shaken by my request that he take a call with a customer who had technical questions about our company’s software product. Dmitry was one of the leads on our development […]

ALSO SEE: Does Every Developer Deserve a Mental Health Day? Let’s face it, working as a developer can be a daily grind. If you’re a developer and feel like your workload is increasing, you aren’t alone. RBS announced 1,000 technology job cuts in September 2010 and HP announced another 1,300 jobs being cut in October […]