Fr0styMatt

I'm currently taking stock of my own weaknesses as a developer and one of the areas I've constantly had trouble with (that I think has hurt me professionally) is in estimating how long it will take me to complete a task.

I've never quite been sure how to overcome this and would love to hear from some developers on how they've tackled this problem in themselves and from managers on what you really expect from your devs in this area.

I know this is a multi-faceted issue; for me personally I think there's a few things at play:

- I can be easily distracted, which I tend not to account for in my estimates (which assume that fascinating time-holes like HN and Stack Overflow don't exist!). I know I need to work on this.

- When I think about it, despite being a dev for many years now, I don't really have a trove of historical data to evaluate my own performance against.

- I still have this mental roadblock that estimating often just feels like 'guessing' and I'm just really uncomfortable doing it. It feels more like trying to set myself a deadline and then compress the work into it, rather than actually determining how long the work will take.

- I feel pressured to give best-case estimates, especially when we're doing them in a Scrum where more senior devs disagree.

I really want to be a developer that can be trusted and relied upon and I think that my under-estimating is one thing that hurts me with regards to this.

So, fellow HN'ers, how have you tackled this?

I'm curious; what is the modern development process for creating the front end of a web app look like?

Are there drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editors for Web 2.0-style UIs? Do people ever touch raw HTML these days? What's some good starter (preferably project-based) learning material out there? Are the courses offered by Treehouse any good?

I'm coming from an app and games developer background, so while I'm well-versed in native development I have only a very vague understanding of what the web stack looks like.

This is probably a naive question but would love to hear some HNer insight on this one.

While pondering the prices being charged by many contractors on sites like oDesk and Freelancer and reading many people saying that marketplaces like these are a 'race to the bottom', a thought occurred to me.

If these sites are meant to make the market global (and thus a person in say, India, with an Internet connection and talent should be no different to a person in the US, with an Internet connection and equal talent), why didn't / why don't firms in places like India bring their prices UP to the higher rates generally charged by people living where expenses are higher?

I see the argument that contractors living in countries where the living expenses are low can afford to charge less, but why would they?

I know why they would _now_, because the trap has already been set. But why did it end up like that? Why didn't people see it as an opportunity to ask for more (as in some thought process like: "this site makes me equivalent to a US contractor, so I can now charge as much").

I realise there's probably a lot in this question; I'm NOT singling out any countries in particular certainly and I know there's definitely generalizations here (not all contractors from such places charge low amounts).

It makes me curious what would happen if there was a freelancer site that totally anonymized which countries its' contractors were based in; would this affect prices in the market? (as buyers wouldn't have an expectation of a lower price point depending on where you were, if that is in fact a reason).

I currently feel like I'm stuck in the CV-advice-from-hell-hamster-wheel and need some perspective from the tech community, if for nothing else than to save my sanity :)

One piece of resume advice that I see often repeated is "Don't use personal pronouns in resumes". Yet for the life of me I can't understand how this rule came about and nobody seems to be able to give a clear explanation beyond "it's unprofessional". Okay, but why?

Any hiring managers want to chime in on this? If you've seen such an offending resume, what exactly was your thought process? If you ever rejected a resume because of the word 'I', why so? What impression did it give you of the resume?

Besides that, what resume advice do you see floating out there that you actually feel is good? What about advice that is out there that's outdated? Coming from a small company / start-up hiring manager's perspective? I'd love to hear some thoughts.

Hey guys, thought I'd post this question after much Googling. I'm a software dev who's just been made redundant from his job. I've often thought about becoming an independent contractor for various reasons and now seems like the right time to actually jump in and do it (especially with a bit of a redundancy payout as a buffer).

I'd like to hear from any Aussie folk who've made the switch and how they actually went about doing it. What was your first gig like? Any war stories? What are the actual mechanics of making the switch (requirements, where to find work, stuff like that).

Basically this is something I really want to give a shot, but I have no idea where to start :)