gain_sky

I know how often I interact with such people precisely: 0.17% of the people I interact with have this, whether online or in real life.

0.17% of the population have DSPS.

Its 2018, normal people do not have money to blow. The "normals" are the ones delivering your food, driving you around, doing your laundry, walking your dog, cleaning your house etc.

I'm sure it is an interesting problem, but what happens when the majority of our technical talent goes towards solving useless but "interesting" problems?

Look at the engineers credited at the bottom of the article: "graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in Computer Science", "Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley", "Ph.D. in statistical machine learning from Duke University" these are some extremely intelligent and educated people but they are using their skills to help you choose between Chinese food and Indian?

We've already seen this situation described as the "Internet of Stuff Your Mom Won’t Do for You Anymore” and stuff like this doesn't really help. I really think that innovation is dead in silicon valley, its more about catering to needs of nerdy man-boys with lots of money to blow.

Reminds me a lot of the show Silicon Valley, where one of the characters has something like a Phd in artificial intelligence but ends up writing code for an app which dynamically turns your face into a smiley face (i.e. snapchat)..

Use a thing called google? Most uk job sites let you specify remote only in the search options anyway. You could really find this out in like 2min.

I'm unaware of the Johnson & Johnson example you mention, but to me a company with a "good" culture code (are they ever bad? or even different?), is like Kim Jong Un saying that North Korea is free and fair.

I'm not saying that culture doesn't exist but it exists in the decisions that are made by the people who run the companies themselves, they set the tone and precedent for how the company works and the employees take note and follow.

Sounds like another obnoxious silicon-valley wannabe company. The kind of place that is "changing the world" one internet search at a time.

"Define your company values and mission" 90% of these are tautological marketing catch lines, anybody with a brain will be able to smell the bullsh*t on this one.

Also keep in mind that their tagline is that they "create enterprise-level search visibility tools for internet samurais of the future". Samurais - enough said.

Maybe you need to focus on what you are building rather than how? Programming is a means to an end and not a means itself. I think this is a trap many of us fall into and you see it play out when people end up trying to learn as many different frameworks or languages in order to be a "better" programmer.

At a senior level the difference in programming ability becomes negligible, its what you do with that ability that matters. Here are somethings that a programmer could specialise in:

- building web apps to handle extremely high loads of traffic

- web apps with a heavy focus on security

- embedded systems / low level programming

- computer graphics

- machine learning (warning: the hype around this may skew things)

- blockchain based technologies (warning: the hype around this may skew things)

All of those fields require specialist knowledge beyond the programming language being used. You should focus on gaining specialist knowledge like that at this point in your career. Otherwise there is really not that much difference between a generalist programmer with 15 years experience and a generalist programmer wit 5 years experience.

> Web developers are a dime a dozen, so I doubt if companies would really want to pay for a remote worker when they could easily get a handful just round the corner.

What exactly do you consider a web developer? If you're talking about the kind of web developer who codes a web page for his grandma's flower shop in html & css then I think you'd be right about that.

But if you're talking about one who writes backend code to scale, parse data and interact with external services or writes frontend code using whatever the latest javascript framework is these days, then those web developers definitely aren't "a dime a dozen". And they certainly won't have problems getting a remote job.

Computer Science. Always choose CS over a specialisation when it comes to degrees.

The reason is that nobody expects you to really learn the tricks of the trade at university, those are learnt on your own time and on the job. Universities are for education, not technical skill.

Are you still lonely though?

This article is weird. His resume looks impressive and it looks like he has done some solid work but from the article he sounds like he feels entitled because of it. Also I find it annoying how little he mentions about the kind of companies hes applying to or even what country he's in (apart from one reference to a company in California so I guess we can assume he's in the USA).

> If an HR person says to me “Oh and we administer a coding test” then my first response is “I’ve taken a bunch of those, which one do you use?”.

If I was hiring and a candidate said that to me on the phone I probably wouldn't invite them for an in-person interview.