Although people weren’t used to scrolling in the mid-nineties, nowadays it’s absolutely natural to scroll. For a continuous and lengthy content, like an article or a tutorial, scrolling provides even better usability than slicing up the text to several separate screens or pages.

marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love

He said that the rock-star model makes sense only for people with “unique talents, which most people do not have.” Talented coders are like heart surgeons: “I’d rather have one really good heart surgery than three mediocre ones. This is what an economist would call indivisibility.” Like Tom Cruise and heart surgeons, the best programmers will probably always be in demand. The rest of us are more replaceable, Autor said, which means that, in general, given the choice most of us would probably choose to have an employer shield us from the vicissitudes of the marketplace.

don’t need help finding work; rather, they need people to help them navigate their options.

front-end guys—designers and user-interface engineers—make products that interact with what he referred to as “normal” people. As a result, “they’re sort of hip,” he said. “Especially designers—they dress nicely.” The further you get down the “stack,” Guvench explained, “the more . . .” He paused. “ ‘Neckbeard’ is the word that comes to mind.” Back-end engineers, like data scientists and system administrators, “are the most brilliant people,” he said. “They may not be the most fun to talk to at a party, but they’re really fucking good at talking to computers.”

“A bad programmer might write a function that makes a hundred different ‘calls’ to the database,” Guvench said. I could almost see the dreaded spinning beach ball on the screen. A good programmer would find a more efficient way, or “hack.” “He could write a function that would just ask the database one question: ‘Give me these hundred people, along with this data about them.’ ”

“There’s a programming principle called DRY,” Guvench said. “Don’t Repeat Yourself.” A bad programmer might copy and paste a command—“Make this wiggle”—a hundred different times. But a good programmer would turn the command into a handy little function.

“there’s always this pattern that the creatives start out at the bottom of the food chain and are exploited.”

The first quality of good code is that it’s “readable—both by computers and by humans.” Humans, after all, might have to fix it at a later date—when it crashes and there are thousands of angry customers on the phone.

In response, many startups have devised offbeat measures for luring candidates: offices that resemble a Chuck E. Cheese’s, with a music room (at Dropbox) and an indoor tree house (at Airbnb). Scopely, a mobile-game publishing company, rewards a new hire—or anyone who can deliver one—with eleven thousand dollars wrapped in bacon, an oil portrait of himself, and a harpoon gun.

“In their minds, you’re not just paying them to do their job,” one tech executive told me. “You’re paying them for the opportunity cost of not becoming Mark Zuckerberg.”

To prevent a programmer from defecting to Facebook, Google paid him three and a half million dollars in restricted stock options. Facebook has also become known for the “acquihire”: paying millions of dollars to acquire a company in order to poach its tech talent. The company gets shut down, and the engineers work for Facebook.

The computer science taught in colleges still focusses more on theory than on commercial application; the business of teaching practical coding skills has the whiff of trade school. So-called coding “boot camps,” such as General Assembly, founded in 2010, are trying to fill the gap, teaching crash courses in how to design Web sites and write code. But Jake Schwartz, the co-founder and C.E.O. of General Assembly, told me, “There’s simply not enough senior people in the system.”

plaintive “meowww” can indicate worry, annoyance, or objection to something. This version will often have a throatier quality to it, almost as if she is saying, “oh, come on.”

the frequency of meowing is an indicator of a cat’s frame of mind; rapid-fire meows mean hey, pay attention to me, I’m talking here!

cats in domesticity tend to think of themselves as our eternal offspring, they maintain this endearing vocalization throughout their adult lives.

Microsoft has launched a new smartwatch