You have probably seen a lot of buzz surrounding software engineering jobs that offer amazing benefits just to attract and keep "rock star" talent. The first ones that come to mind for me are from Hedgehog Labs and perhaps What else do companies have to do to keep Software Engineers?. You probably know (dream?) about Google 20% time. I was just talking with a friend about how great his benefits were over mine yadda yadda yadda… It has become a big bragging point in our industry.

What I’m wondering

The thing I’m wondering here is: How far does it go? I am trying to consider in what other jobs benefits like work-from-home programs, free conferences, multiple monitors, and flex time are almost standard. I know that we don’t all have these nice things but doesn’t it seem like this profession goes further than most? I know that I’m already at the point where I would have a really hard time adjusting to a job without these benefits. Are you?
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For many of us designing fluid layouts, which are generally based in “em”s (pronounced like the letter M) you end up not really knowing how many pixels an “em” is while you are deep in the DOM tree. This is especially confusing if you increase/decrease text size with your browser.

For this reason, I have created a simple Javascript function that you can use to poll any element on your test page and figure out what size an “em” is.
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You see it in Google search results and a lot of other sites that have good search functionality. When you perform a search, your words or phrases are highlighted in the search results making it easy for you to find the most relevant content.

Today I’m going to show you a simple way to add this to your website or blog so your users can find what they need in style. I think that this kind of thing should be implemented more often for how easy it is to implement.

Here we go! Continue reading →