notsag-hn

Don't do this to yourself in 2022

> Before you move, make sure to talk to your manager about performance and time zone expectations, as well as your availability for team gatherings.

Work from anywhere but ask your manager from where you can work. Also I want you here each three months for a one-week gathering, and if you're senior I want you to gather even more often. "The most flexible policy in the world" people are calling it LOL It's great a company like Airbnb does this, but come on!

I was going to interview at LandingAI. I was asked before the interview to install a spyware browser extension to monitor my traffic to detect if I was cheating during the interview. I respectfully declined and didn't have that interview.

Uruguay! First?

The apology of Socrates by Plato

If that impersonal approach works for you and everybody is happy with it, that's fantastic.

I haven't hired myself but I have worked with people from all over the world with different backgrounds for many years and have had literally zero close cases of anybody misusing an API key on their benefit for whatever reason. It wouldn't have made any sense for them to do so.

And the control I talked about is security logging, monitoring, alerting systems, etc. I've worked for a banking company and also for a fintech one and all the money movement operations were duly logged and monitored. Literally nobody would risk doing anything malicious in an environment like that plus people are happy with their salaries

Totally, and probably from there it would be easier to find a 60-70k job. That's why I think assuming people from "poor countries" will be necessarily cheaper is a huge misconception

Sometimes it's not just about finding people that work for less money, it's because they know there's also talent out there. Even for companies that pay good salaries it's very hard to hire local senior-ish engineers, most of them already have a job, so they have to hire somewhere else.

hahha no waaay who are you?

You may underpay or overpay people, that can also happen with local people. I bet you don't leave much space for overpaying a foreigner if they are already getting 50% of what a local would get.

Regarding the criminal related comment, you should first and foremost trust and empower your employees independently of where they come from. And then you should also have controls in place to make it really difficult to steal your clients' money.

If you aren't able to estimate how much value somebody would bring to the team before hiring them, you maybe should oil your hiring process a bit. Also assuming you can trust somebody more or less depending on their legal jurisdiction says a lot about your company's culture

Agreed, globalized salaries should also consider people moving around and shouldn't depend on current location (unless of course money is not enough to live in the current location). I had an interview the other day with a local company that offered very sweet remote packages and a not-that-sweet on-site one. I said I would leave the country when I got the job and work in a digital nomad way, and they said that because of my current location I would only be offered the local package. Weird situations like this make me think we're not quite there regarding fair remote work yet

Living in a poor country shouldn't be a reason to get a low rate. But this is really common, mostly because companies look for people in third-world countries to get the same level of employees waaay cheaper. I'm from Uruguay and have had interviewers thinking they're doing me a favor for extending me an offer in USD, even if it's ridiculously low for my experience. In the end it depends on how the potential employee negotiates their salary

Maybe not an ORM but a query builder: Knex has been of so much help to me, it works pretty well and it's really easy to use. Used sequelize in the past but it can get incredibly complicated, really positive change.

The problem with asking about their culture is that they already know by heart what they should say about it. This is how they sell themselves as opposed to their real opinion about the culture which you will probably never know unless you ask it in an original way to avoid the response by the book

Hi, wtracy! I was thinking of something lighter than the well-known CMSs. Just a boilerplate project with some really basic CMS capabilities. Maybe I should do it myself hah

Hi, dvt. Thank you for your answer! I should have clarified that this for now it's a low-scale project in a country where eBay/Amazon/Etsy are not widely used and that her budget for this is very low, I will be hosting the web catalog on an existing server of mine, and that initially it wouldn't require to provide any ecommerce capability other than showing the catalog.

It makes a lot of sense to devide front-end and back-end. Javascript is shared but it is just a part of the stack, while there are a lot of specific frameworks and libraries for one or the other that makes it really difficult to share code. Also in general you can expect back and front to be separate projects with their own best practices. At the same time, you end up doing quite different tasks that provokes that people naturally want to stick to their favorite one instead of trying to work on both of them

I'm going to recommend you the last one I read and loved so much: Ghost in the wires by Kevin Mitnick. What a legend OMG!

Cheatsheets are helpful when you already studied the thing, but not as your only source of info. The way I used to take notes at uni for example was to do it in layers. First, take a lot of notes, including your own impresions about what you're reading/writing/listening, be very verbose. Then start going through your notes and generate a summary of them. And then a summary of the summary over and over again until you get to something that is as short as a cheatsheet. This is indeed time-consuming but when you do have time it's very effective, at least it worked pretty well for me.

The only mistake of the procedure is that if you don't have enough info you should ask for help before. This is very common and I have done that so many times to understand it's a waste of time. The only exception IMO is when you really need to understand certain parts of the codebase at a very low level so spending time solving things by yourself it's well worth as an exercise and helps a lot. If it's a part of the codebase you're not likely to be working on any time soon, just don't do it. Talk to whom reported the bug and also talk to the last person that worked on that piece of code (git blame is your friend here)

Hi, jakearmitage. As a senior engineer that was able to get jobs/visa sponsorship abroad more than once I feel I can give you the following pieces of advice:

- Start with what kind of job you would love to have. Do you want to work for a blockchain startup? maybe a gaming one? Or fintech? It may be something you never did, don't limit yourself.

- If you don't have a Github project related to what you want to do, create one. Put a lot of emphasis on the README of the project and on code quality.

- Read a relevant book before starting looking for the job. That alone will give you a lot of stuff to talk about and it's going to be really fresh in your mind. People that read books have much more chances of standing out.

- Create 2 or 3 generic CVs and do customize them when applying for a job. I used to customize mainly the top paragraph(s) of the CV I use to introduce myself. Describe your skills and interests from the perspective of that particular job.

- Regarding CV style, I'd prefer a sober and minimalistic one. Google "best fonts for CVs 2020" and pick up one you like.

- Highlight keywords so it's much easier to understand your skills at first glance.

- Don't just list technologies but also explain in a higher level what you have achieved.

- Nowadays there are ML-based tools that analyze and even discard your CV before a human takes a look at it. Glassdoor had some time ago a CV analyzer that literally gave me hints that allowed me landing a job, after simply changing a bit its wording my CV got much more visibility. Find some of those tools and give them a try, if the feedback you get is reasonable edit your CV accordingly and see what happens.

- Have a lot of interviews! If it's difficult for you to get them (which I doubt if you are a principal engineer already), apply for jobs that you would just take in an emergency situation and sit those interviews. At some point I was having like 2-3 interviews a day. That helped me be sharp on selling myself after some weeks and that is crucial!

And that would be it, I hope this helps. Good luck with your search!

Open source itself does not encourage that kind of behavior, it's just there are a lot of arseholes developers like in any other area and because it's much more transparent you can actually see the toxic discussions. But that depends on the project, it's not fair to say it's connected to open source

I am really amazed to read so many people talking of chinese companies as the greatest threat for our privacy as opposed to american tech companies, do you guys even read the news or just Trump's Twitter account? This is not about the US or China, they are part of this game but (illegally) harvesting data is a global trend that most likely includes you and the company you're working for. Do you want to change the world? Challenge your boss on the information you collect on your users and the practices you use to facilitate them being tracked instead of fighting China 24/7 on the internet, be smarter than a 20-lines-of-code bot, please.

It is worth reading for people that are in the same situation feeling there's something wrong with them just for not fitting in a certain academic environment. There's bullshit everywhere, but when you're not experienced enough to have seen that by yourself you are likely to think you're the problem, so it's good somebody points that out, even if the actual cogs say it's not worth the read.

I would put Google there for sure! Google is nasty at other scales anyways. As search engine I use Duckduckgo, but sometimes we don't have much of an option with Google, do we? Mainly on mobile, which the option is Apple, not great.

I struggle to understand how people work hard to build they dream technology, they are also lucky enough for it to take off like zoom in this case, and then they go ahead to do nasty stuff and to fuck up their users! I hope one day we'll really condemn and stop using apps/social media for things like this.

Nice post! I'd say it's not the simplest thing in the world though to find a part-time job that is interesting enough and that has a decent pay. But I strongly agree with this post anyways, full-time jobs with fat salaries are your way to be used far beyond your physical and mental limits, and you have no life! I have also been working an insane number of hours a day and it's not worth it because it's not sustainable, I end up quitting like many others. It's funny then companies seem really surprised and cannot understand why people leave when they have a great salary and other rockstar benefits. Maybe we leave because we didn't have a life, mate :D

When the developer is inexperient, programming is similar to art. You see hacky stuff and sometimes "innovation" that a senior engineer would just call dirty code. Senior engineers however don't do art unless they are explicitly doing it like with computer graphics or other kinds or computer-based art generation, or through movements like hacktivism that are certainly quite poetic. Otherwise it's so far away from art, regular APIs aren't art, databases aren't art, operating systems aren't art. Many engineers have the need to call themselves artists, you should have taken drawing lessons if you wanted to be artists because regular engineering for business is maintainable just if it's as standard as possible and let me tell you that is the opposite of art.

Would you read through that book and generate some material that can prove you did it? Like a project on Github with a nice readme or some blogposts? If you have that knowledge and sell it properly you're grand, you'll get the job.