I went to one of these courses about a year ago. Now I work at a company full of smart people where I maintain the financial research tools on the website of one of the biggest investment management organizations in the world. I have friends who did the same course and have jobs that are cooler than mine. Point being, one can become a developer in a 3 month course.

This... Actually seems like it would work.

I think these examples are actually unintentionally insulting to women. On the left we have the famous fast inverse square root function, it looks like, which is a truly brilliant and classic piece of code. On the right, an implementation of max which contains some redundant logic and a lot of unnecessary comments.

Anyone have any idea what "£2000 p.a." means? All I can think of is "per annum" but that can't be right.

@missionearth: That's a good point. I would think the best thing would be to bring in help who do know about the new technology.

Moving to a new platform that no team member has experience with can be rough. They're doing it on the dev team my sister is on right now, and the project has been going for months with very little in the way of completed features. Of course that won't be representative of every scenario like this, but it is a hazard.

Non-negative integer! :-)

lodash has a deep clone function which handles all the tricky corner cases. It's an expensive operation, though I find it hard to imagine it's more expensive than serializing and then parsing. If performance is critical you should probably write your own special purpose clone function which makes use of your knowledge about the structure of the object.

My PM is wonderful. It's part of his job to make my life go more smoothly, and he does. My client certainly does a lot of the things people on here complain about their PMs doing. My PM tries to push back against the bad behavior.

I think part of being a good PM is trying to make developers happy and effective, and so the PMs that people complain about on here probably aren't good PMs.

Learn functional programming. The technique of avoiding mutable state as much as possible is very important and underappreciated for writing maintainable code which is easy to reason about.