Code for a Living

When a developer first begins to consider moving jobs, most of us start by firing up some job boards and checking out the options. The thing is, most of us don’t actually know what we’re looking for. When I looked for my first job, I thought, “Hey, I’m just looking to see what’s out there.”…

At Stack Overflow, we often talk about why we believe in remote work, and we’ve been extremely successful with our results. In fact, our 2016 company-wide survey revealed that 88% of remote workers felt high overall engagement with the company (as compared to an overall response of 85% among the whole company, with the average…

If you’re a veteran developer looking for a new role, you’ve probably bypassed plenty of postings because you felt you were too experienced. Sometimes that’s valid—you have no desire to go backwards in your career.

We’ve all heard the advice: the best developers live and breathe programming. But you’re also a human being. Maybe you’re not the stereotypical 22-year-old with no ties or responsibilities, happy to work 18-hour days. Maybe you’re a mother or a father, a husband or a wife, a caretaker of an elderly relative. There are millions…

We’ve just released the 2017 edition of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the largest and most comprehensive survey of software developers on earth. As a company our sole mission is making the lives of developers better, and we can’t do that without hearing from you. Take the survey now. Why We Do This The Stack…

Pair programming, where two developers share a single workstation, has grown more common and less controversial over the years, but many still haven’t tried it themselves. In pair programming one participant is the “driver,” who actually writes code, and the other is the “navigator,” who checks the driver’s work as it’s done and keeps an…

Your cover letter is usually the first impression you make to the people at a company. Even if you got your foot in the door with one person, a bunch of people are going to see your cover letter and resume before you actually get hired, and that’s going to be your first impression with…

The ideal job-hunting situation is simple: You have a job, your bills are being paid, you’re comfortable, but you’re looking for a step up or a new challenge. You quietly apply for jobs while continuing to excel in your current role, find one that represents a comfortable advancement in your career, give your two-weeks notice,…

When you’re a developer looking for remote work, the last thing you want is to land on what seems like a dream job only to find you’re the lonely island of the company. Sure, they have some Slack channels where, ostensibly, you’re part of the team. You can hang out in them and hear about…

Mohamed Said got his first computer at age 13—they were just becoming commonly accessible in Egypt—and started learning to code almost immediately. Flash was what drew him in, he says, with its animations and color and, well, “flashy” stuff.

Last week we wrote about whether a college degree is a necessity for a developer in today’s market. We came to the conclusion that what you can do is more important than how many framed diplomas you can hang on the wall, and the most important thing you can to do make yourself hireable as…