“How does one get experience developing high volume websites?” and other stackoverflow.com links…

Besides my deteriorating “presentation skills” during job interviews, my long-term (and respectable) problems are in lacking “high traffic” and e-commerce experience. It just recently occurred to me to search stackoverflow.com for these issues. I am somewhat relieved because what I found there was not too unexpected—but there was one surprise.

In “How does one get experience developing high volume websites?,” Nic Wise answers, “Join a big company which has one or more of them. Eg I’m working at the BBC, which is a fairly large site :)” Not bloody surprising. In my Southern California market, after about 12 years, I am unable to meet with any company here with a high-traffic, public-facing presence—except for Yahoo! Santa Monica (my first, 2009 interview). I’ve done high-traffic stuff behind the firewall but that’s not “good” enough—clearly I’m not working for Yahoo! in Santa Monica.

In “What does eCommerce programming involve?,” I was bizarrely relieved for the lack of answers. Too many answers would have meant that I’m just outclassed and my information is outdated. Stackoverflow.com user, “unkwntech,” responds with “eCommerce has one big word that goes with it Security” and a few important technical details that I will certainly look into later… A related question, “How to test eCommerce software for credit cards?,” does remind me of the importance of Paypal.com and its ecommerce sandbox. Based on my knowledge (which is limited), without Paypal.com (or Google checkout), we would have to secure merchant bank accounts to play most ecommerce war games. The last time I checked into merchant accounts, a figure of US$10,000 popped up and spooked me.

“5 years experience == 100k+ salary? Really?” is a very popular question in this particular genre. This question need not be answered by me but I liked many of the responses. Gabriel Isenberg tells an old, sad truth: “Switching positions nets a far higher merit increase than sticking at the same place. Measuring average merit increase at the same place for 5 years isn’t going to get you real-world information, I don’t think.” DarenW sounds almost like me: “Hah! With 20 years experience in software development, I’m still making relatively piddly for the industry. My personal pitfalls were: working tiny start-ups with minimal cash flow or capital, working for non-profits, working in the academic world, and returning to grad school at one point.”

Another very important question to me is, “Old Developers—any future?” Very inspiring… and surprising!

rasx()