cesarbs

I work at Microsoft and the number of Indians there seems disproportionate to me. I too wonder why so many of them come to the US. Maybe IT education in India is really strong?

Two funny things I observe regularly:

1) Sometimes I take an MS shuttle to work. The shuttle is full, and I'm the only non-Indian in it.

2) Sometimes I'm in my building's lobby and when I look around, I'm the only (or one of 2-3 people) non-Indian there.

I pity those guys because they have to wait for 10+ years to get their Green Cards, even if they're EB-2.

> while Chinese does the opposite

Can you elaborate on that? I'd never heard of such a thing.

> As for the code itself, its perfection came as the result of basically the opposite of every trope normally assigned to "coder." Creativity in the shuttle group was discouraged; shifts were nine-to-five; code hotshots and superstars were not tolerated; over half of the team consisted of women; debugging barely existed because mistakes were the rarest of occurrences. Programming was the product not of coders and engineers, but of the Process.

Serious question: where do I get a job like this? It's my dream way of programming professionally.

You have the option to justify your absence if you can prove that you weren't close to a place where you can vote. That is my case.

For lack of a better option. I left Brazil, so I don't vote anymore, but had I still been there, I would probably have voted for Dilma even though I'm strongly against her party. She was the "least worse" alternative.

That's really awesome. Which town is that?

How much of a math background do you need to understand it?

For a fantastic bio of him and a good overview of the beginnings of aviation, read Wings of Madness, by Paul Hoffman [0]. A really fun read not only with technical details but also a lot about the personalities of the people of the time.

It must have been a blast to see Santos-Dumont "parking" his dirigible in Paris when he went to restaurants and cafés.

BTW if you ever go to Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil, you can visit his summer home. There's also a replica of the 14-bis in the city.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Wings-Madness-Alberto-Santos-Dumont-In...

1) Everything I hear about American police in the news and from people I meet. Ever since I got here I'm amazed how much I hear the "never talk to the police" advice. I don't know how accurate that is but because I hear it so much I'm afraid of even greeting them when I'm walking around.

2) The whole thing made us feel very uncomfortable. Sure, they could have been looking out for us... But if that was the case, why didn't they just pull over and tell us that? Our relaxing evening walk became tense with us wondering why the police was watching us.

My wife and I have been in the US for 2.5 years and we had a surreal experience while taking a walk at night once. I must say, we were walking around late at night because we love being in a safe area were we can finally do that - back in our home country, we simply couldn't do that because of the absurd crime rate.

So we're walking around downtown just enjoying a nice summer night, when a police car shows up in a corner. No big deal, it's actually nice to see them around. We walk a block and there's the police car again... and it was like that for basically every block we walked until we got home. Fortunately we were not stopped, but we were definitely being followed and watched.

We come from Latin America but we're both white (German ancestry). I can't help but think the experience would likely have been a little worse if we had more typical Latino looks.

I like coffee but whenever I drink it I get all shaky and start having anxiety attacks. Also, diarrhea.

Green tea seems to have just the right amount of caffeine to not make my body upset.

> but midnight to 8AM is exempted.

That reminds me of old times in Brazil. Phone calls where charged for a single pulse from midnight to 6am or 8am (can't remember). Dial-up was the only option available and we'd all go online between those times, usually sneaking to the computer so our parents wouldn't see us, because we had class the next day :)

I was trying to make an analogy. JoeAltmaier's comment implies that it's justifiable for a nation to invade another and kick them out if the latter does not have a military, because it's not really a nation (by his definition). So my analogy meant that by that line of reasoning an unarmed neighbor has no "household" and it should be no problem if someone armed invades it and kicks the family out.

Of course this is all messed up. There's no reason a nation shouldn't be considered a nation just because it doesn't have a military.

Same here, kept me engaged the whole time. But I did skip the last few paragraphs.

That was a troll post (see other comments in this thread).

I mute the TV when ads are playing.

By that line of reasoning, I should be legally allowed to invade my unarmed neighbor's house, kick him out and claim it for myself.

On a somewhat related note, I find it interesting to note that a lot of technology per se is not very family friendly. Family Sharing was only recently introduced by Apple. Before that, it was very cumbersome for a couple to share their music libraries. The same applies to most subscription services. Take Amazon for example: my wife can share free Prime shipping with me, but not Prime Music.

I wonder if this is for legal reasons (licensing, etc.) or because of the people that create such services. My wife's hypothesis is that since a lot of technology is created by single, young and not very social people, it doesn't even cross their mind at design time the fact that a couple (or a whole family) might want to share some of their contents while still keeping their own individual accounts.

My experience regarding my religion hasn't been very happy so far too.

Because of my religion, I avoid working from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday (the 7th day Sabbath). I do work if something went bad and people will be blocked because of me, but that's an exception.

I always try to come clear about this with any new team or manager, but I've never had a very understanding response from that. Mostly people will not say anything, but I can tell from their faces they're not happy about my strict non-availability at that time.

My current team has started doing deployments on Saturdays. That was imposed without anyone being consulted on it, which I found very disappointing. I wish religious considerations were taken into account in the workplace, but since so many people in tech are so removed from religious knowledge of any kind, they probably don't even know there are religions where working on a specific day of the week is not allowed.

I think the point of the article was to point out that while tech companies supposedly have perks for people with families, those are rarely enjoyed to their full extent due to diverse factors. And also that those tech companies might say they offer a family friendly environment, but depending on your team, the culture will not reflect that.

I've experienced a bit of that. It's hard not to feel bad for going home at 5pm to be with your family when all the driven single 20-somethings around you will continue to work late into the night and produce a lot more than you.

I've just started taking advantage of Subscribe & Save. The products are cheaper than what I pay for them at the local grocery store, plus I've made sure to include at least 5 items in each order so I get the 15% discount (instead of 5%). Subscribe & Save is really great for items that are hard to carry when coming back from the store and that don't degrade quickly.

Thank you. I wish every single article on the Internet had a tl;dr like this.

I pretty much agree with him. Although I am a smartphone user I don't think they are as practical as usually portrait. I'd rather press a single button on my washing machine to get more detergent than go through the hassle of pulling my phone, unlocking it, trying to type into an on-screen keyboard (where I'll get it wrong 4 times) etc etc. Actually, I HATE pulling my phone to look stuff up on it, it's usually a huge hassle caused by the combination of shitty wait times til things happen (not just connecting to stuff - why do I have to watch a 0.5s animation of stuff sliding or fading for everything I want to do on it?) + clumsy fingers.

I had a doctor back in my home country who was fascinating. He would give me hard facts about everything and he would explain all the reasoning behind his recommendations with numbers, probabilities, etc., putting everything down on paper. I loved being treated by that guy. I wish every doctor were like this.

Here in the US I've only so far had the tipical experience of:

1) Telling my symptoms. 2) Observing that half of what I'm saying is being ignored - this pisses me off because I'm very obsessive about my health, so any interested doctor can hear me give them extremely accurate descriptions of what I'm feeling, and how those things relate to daily activities, eating habits, exercise, other symptoms and a number of other things. 3) Being diagnosed with something I'm very sure I don't have (and I'm right most of the time). It's usually something super generic, like "upper respiratory infection".

> There are also many areas zoned for a maximum height of zero feet.

The smartass in me wants to say, "then build subterranean homes/buildings" :)

Would suck in terms of natural lighting but it would be nice to see the faces of people who want those zones to be like that.

I'm curious: what kinds of things would those be? I've always thought Singapore was a quite westernized country, but I guess I'm wrong.

Why? Honest question.

I was very sheltered as a child and today I try not to be so with my daughter, because I know the consequences of growing up being sheltered. I really push for her to be independent, to deal with her own problems, and to go through the pain/sadness without much caressing when something bad happens (say, she hurts herself while playing and it's not really a major injury that requires going to the hospital).

L1 is a work visa for company transfers.

Keep in mind that many companies start sponsoring an H-1B employee's Green Card as soon as they start working at the company. When considering those companies, H-1B is about immigration.

Hey all, not sure anyone is still active on the thread, but thanks for all the replies! They certainly gave me a lot of insight and now I have a lot more things to consider in deciding whether to take this job. Thank you!