Feel like you only received half of, possible good, advice:
I used 'two years, up or out', in my career. Who cares if you work somewhere for a longer period of time as long you keep progressing in all the various metrics of career progression?
It's when things become stale that out is a good idea
Completely agree, Knowing what you don't know and being able and willing to learn are the most important things
You're the second person to mention no vcs, I've never seen a company like this and I was a professional job hopper for ten years (consultant, then freelance dev)
Are there still 'developers' out there using an ftp client to develop their php app directly on prod like its 2002? I simply can't think of a normal, workable project without some kind of vcs
Dont want to call anyone out, because most of the questions are good. It's the sheer quantity, I counted between 10 and 20 questions. An interview should be fun, don't stress me out please
Although I would say that one list is far too focused on financials, you're a dev, not an investor. Some other lists make me want to ask, 'who hurt you?'
Maybe it's because we're a small company focused on hard problems with unknown solutions with a bunch of intelligent and flexible, fast thinking people. We do all the various buzzwords, microservices, clusters, resilience, automated testing trophies, reproducible dev envs, machine vision, machine learning, various p=np problems, etc.
But if the lists are too detailed and rigid I might wonder if you're better off at a more standard company tackling standard problems in a standardized manner. If this comes of as derogatory. The reverse can also be said, that we're a bunch of incompetent cowboys. It's a style thing as well :) (slow is smooth, smooth is fast is a principle I like. We follow all the useful best practices when it comes to cicd, testing and code. I do not have the time for rework)
I enjoy not knowing what I'm doing, if you don't enjoy the cutting edge (and falling of said edge once in a while) you're not going to to enjoy working here :)
Edit: about your list in particular, they're good questions, just try to ask them conversationally instead of slapping a sheet on paper on the table and rattling them off. Except for the macOS thing. We're a Linux shop, noob ;)
As a company owner and lead dev of 15 years, I'll be honest. If someone started with some of the barrage of detailed questions I see here I'd start to wonder whether I'd want to hire that person.
Although then again, I don't even ask all that many questions myself. Prefer to get a (technical) conversation going whilst gauging intelligence, speed and flexibility of thought and general character.
Thrn again, we handle all the main (software development) concerns I see here and I tend to be very flexible as long as someone is productive.
What I'm trying to say is, relax? :)
I'm self taught, been at it for 15 years now and am currently the director/part owner of an IT company. There's only seven of us, but it's barely been six months so growing quite quickly.
I'd be interested in hiring someone like you, I like the spirit. Keep at it, like others have said, you'll get there. The only thing is, I'm not sure about more all remote devs. We have one all remote dev already and it's hard when most people are in the office regularly and one isn't to not have that person feel a little left out. You might be better off with a true all remote company
Feel free to dm me though (can you? I'm new at this lemmy thing)
Tbh, these days WSL2 might be slightly better than macOS at being Linux. As it is Linux (in a very transparent vm) instead of posix or *nix
But for most dev work all three are good options. I've noticed that once you start deploying against stuff like kubernetes or, less so, doing docker stuff you run into limitations on Mac and wsl2. Just random weirdness, especially with new the m1 chips and say cockroachdb. At that point there's no substitute for the real thing :)