Were you hired after someone contacted you?
Did you receive responses that weren't recruiter-spam from your posts there?
I really wish these threads were more active -- and received more upvotes -- relative to the "Who's hiring" threads, as it seems like the signal to noise is so much better, and also seems like the success rate would be quite a bit higher.
I'm not sure if a) people aren't aware of the threads, or b) people don't have confidence in their success rate.
But as someone whose career -- and as a result, life -- got a big boost from it, I highly recommend anyone considering a move to try posting there. Seems like it could only help!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685170
Here's the link of this month's edition, if anyone wants to give it a go (I finally did!)
The Who's Hiring Thread would help me keep my search more private.
Then factor in people also like me in Indy, that do not live anywhere near the bay area or other large tech center and have no interest whatsoever in relocating.
I've been there for about 10 months and it's been a wonderful experience. Working remotely has literally changed my life, and the team members I work with are all fantastic people.
There are great companies out there and it's definitely worth posting. Good luck!
But I know people who do 25 miles each way by bike for their daily commutes. Just depends how much you care about it and what you’re willing to sacrifice to do it.
This however is precisely why I have some ebikes in addition to human steam powered ones - its so nice for commute or journeys when you want to arrive feeling refreshed but not need a shower or change of clothes.
I wear my gym shirt while bicycling which I sweat into profusely. I get to work and lock myself in the family bathroom, where I take my gym shirt off. Then, I take out a linen towel I bought that packs super tiny, get it wet, and wipe down. I stand and cool and dry off for a bit, then put on the shirt I packed. The linen towel gets a soapy wash in the sink and then wronged out. Then, towel and gym shirt get hanged on hooks in the office near a window (as far as I can tell there's no bad smell and I have explicitly asked others in the office) and both are dry within a couple hours.
Change into gym shirt after work and bike home, take a shower.
It's a process but it's worth it, I've lost 7 pounds without much else lifestyle change.
The linen towel is fairly critical - packs small, light, dries quick and is odorless (allegedly linen is anti bacterial). They're also great for travel in general.
You know how motorists sarcastically refer to cyclists over here? "Crunchies", or something like that.
My work trip is 5 km and all the way is bike roads and pedestrian paths. One of the advantages of living in the nordics, I suppose.
I don't even wear a helmet in the summer - I just pedal intentionally slow.
Anecdote: I was with a group of tourists and we were about to rent bikes for a guided tour. We were offered helmets, but only some were taken. Before we even departed, a girl managed to fall of her bike and injur herself. A second offer to use helmets was met with much more acceptance.
Statistically speaking, dutch don't wear helmets and they don't get much injuries. It's as much about how you cycle and what the routes are like than having or not having a helmet.
In some cities it can be quite dangerous to ride around.
I happily biked for years in London (considered a dangerous cycling city).
I gave up in fear of my life in Fiji (tiny and sparsely populated).
I wouldn't even consider it in Dublin (which has a lot of cycle lanes).
I cycled for 6 months before I could afford a car, and counted 11 separate incidents that could have ended with me hospitalized if it weren't for some adrenalin fuelled swerves. Had one accident where someone failed to indicate left as I was crossing the road of a roundabout, and I ended up on her bonnet. No amount of apologies make up for a broken rib unfortunately. How that was my only "major" injury still baffles me. Had another where someone failed to check their mirrors as they randomly swerved out and forced me into oncoming traffic. Never tried to overtake from that point onwards. I had 4 instances where people tried to overtake me way too close and forced me to bail onto the pavement (not fun with clip-on pedals). As soon as that bank balance hit the magic number I went and invested in driving lessons, insurance and a car.
Unless my future commutes have bike paths from beginning to end, there's no chance I will ever cycle to work again. It was the most miserable part of my day. I'll stick to my morning spin class and get to work early to avoid the traffic instead.
The local council (local government in the UK) have had a massive drive to get new cycle lanes in place - problem is, they're also completely inept so have put them in places where nobody cycles anyway. I've been told they are where they are purely to fulfil a quota so they don't look so statistically bad when compared to other municipalities, which honestly wouldn't surprise me. They painted road markings for nigh-on 10km of unused road, whereas all of the roads leading to the major industrial and office estates where people travel to daily have been completely neglected. It's beyond infuriating.
Never mind we had it rain nearly every day for like a month and that this week it's in the 90Fs with air quality alerts and 60%+ humidity every day and just walking to your car gets you sweating and NO ONE wants to smell you all day because you biked to work... and then come winter it'll get below 0F many days with varying amounts of snow and ice. I think we had -35F windchill this past winter on a day or two it was -12F.
The additional 5km wouldn't make a huge difference with an e-bike (just 12m longer ride), as long as the altitude you have to climb isn't significantly more (you can check that on Google Maps).
Maybe you can rent a (proper!) e-bike from a specialist dealer and give it a try.
I am considering a slightly longer bike commute (mostly on bike paths) and I had a kidney transplant 2 years ago
I replaced a pretty good road bike with a Greenspeed GT3 Series II five years ago and have happily used it ever since, including three multi-week trips (two and a half weeks mostly through California, USA in 2014 before the Strange Loop conference; three weeks from St Louis, USA to Philadelphia, USA last year after Strange Loop; and a couple of weeks around this Easter in western Victoria and South Australia). Until I moved from Melbourne out into the country two years ago, cycling was my primary means of getting anywhere, augmented sometimes by public transport. Now I don’t cycle so often because I live in the middle of nowhere, 40km to the nearest town that I go to for church. For the last two long trips, I was essentially not fit beforehand (e.g. not having ridden at all for two months in one of the two cases), and doing something like that immediately on an upright bike would be murder on the buttocks, back and hands, but doing it on a recumbent trike was completely fine. I would not have done any of these solo cycling trips on an upright bicycle. Since this last trip I’ve even started vaguely planning to cycle around Australia at some point.
Recumbents tricycles are much safer. For example: they’re inherently stable; they’re closer to the road; they’re wider, so cars can see them better from behind despite them being lower, and so they can’t sneak by in such dangerous ways as they do in many parts of the world with bicycles; when riding one, it’s easier to be watching the road (especially compared with a road bike where you’re constantly craning your neck up); your mirror (necessary, since you can’t look over your shoulder) will be well-mounted and clearly in your stable field of view, you can constantly keep an eye on upcoming traffic, too; and as they’re unusual, cars pay them more attention and act more carefully.
On a good surface, a trike is much more comfortable than a bike. On a low-quality surface, such as many cycling paths, it can be less comfortable, since the seat and frame are providing suspension and not your legs as they can on an upright bike.
I personally like to go fast, and am not afraid of roads on my trike; I didn’t worry much about roads on a bike either, but in high-traffic scenarios I definitely feel happier with everything on my trike than on a bike. I generally just ignore cycling paths and ride on the road.
Another negative point on the recumbent tricycle: having three wheel tracks instead of one is occasionally troublesome: highway shoulder often has corrugation at the edges (the Australian style of adding <15cm-wide bumps on top is unpleasant to ride over; the US style of ~40cm-wide gouges is intolerable and dangerous to ride over at even 20km/h, and it’s so wide you can’t even straddle it properly), and a 90cm wheel base sometimes doesn’t fit on narrow country highway shoulder, and so I sometimes have to go in the lane where a bicycle might not. Also dodging thorns growing in the shoulder can be more difficult—with the slick Greenspeed Scorcher tyres I had in my first long trip, I gave up counting how many punctures I had (it averaged more than one a day—I became skilled at repair!); I haven’t had any punctures other than the ones on that trip (I’ve only ever had two punctures since adulthood in Australia), and for subsequent long trips I’ve used Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres.
One more: trikes take more space. Greenspeed specifically pioneered and uses a folding frame, which is great for transport. I’ve taken my trike to the US twice now, just folding it in half and wrapping it up in a tarp, no extra cost with Qantas since it’s sporting equipment (otherwise it’d incur an oversized baggage fee).
But back to the positives: a recumbent tricycle is much more fun than an upright bicycle.
Why aren’t they more popular? They’re generally more expensive: in part because there actually is a bit more to them, but mostly because they’re less popular so the cheap junk category doesn’t exist, which will skew price perceptions. And not many people even know about them. This may be in part because of UCI’s ban of recumbents in 1934 (a sordid tale of political intrigue, commercial interests, wounded pride, and arguably bribery and corruption), which basically crippled the recumbent industry. http://www.pjrider.com/BentHist.htm has some details of the history and story. (For racing, you’re talking about recumbent bicycles, but recumbent bikes and trikes exist in the same “human-powered vehicle that isn’t an upright bicycle” category.) But recumbent trikes really should be more popular, because in most ways they’re just better than trikes.
Also, "jeziňka" is a Czech fairy tale being [1]. Did you know? Or perhaps it's a Polish word play on "jeżynka"?
Given a provided mockup of a react component implement it to the best of your ability. In my case it was a stopwatch (which has non-obvious edge cases in javascript) with some curvy UI that's tricky to do in CSS.
90% of the readership of Hacker News are Web Developers, either front end only, or full stack. As such the hiring threads are mostly jobs in that discipline.
I'm an oddball on Hacker News, I have a keen interest in all tech development, but my official skill set is Windows Server Applications based Architecture[1], and Identity & Access Management Design with a bit of Azure and Office 365 thrown in for good measure. I've posted a few times in the 'Who wants to be hired?' but not surprisingly had no responses.
For what it's worth, I am looking for work, remote/wfh only. My LinkedIn is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattowen/
---
[1] Although I do hands-on admin as well. I'll design it for you, and then build it as well.
So I guess I'll say this (to anyone here): If you have experience with AD, C# and SQL Server optimization (nice to have) get in touch. I don't care if you have a formal education or you're 15 or 55. In Berlin with German skills, I can get you an interview almost immediately, for other languages and regions I'll redirect you to the appropriate contact.
I don't post in the we're hiring threads because we'd drown in the ML/ad etc company profiles. We don't save the world. We don't stop climate change. We don't use AI to be the next Uber of X. We need somewhat skilled devs working on (what HN would consider) boring problems, to help tens of thousands of companies/IT people get other boring shit done quickly.
minxomat[at]gmail.com
> We don't save the world. We don't stop climate change. We don't use AI to be the next Uber of X. We need somewhat skilled devs working on (what HN would consider) boring problems, to help tens of thousands of companies/IT people get other boring shit done quickly.
I tell people this regularly - the low-drama jobs that pay well, have good working conditions, and are straightforward to get are in boring, unsexy business logic jobs. Market forces exists everywhere, even in tech jobs, and the sexier the company, the greater the supply of workers. Companies that have to work a little to hire good people tend to treat them well; companies with hundreds of brilliant engineers knocking down their door, maybe not so much.
> The real problem here is the WFH requirement. That's just a no-no.
Thank you for the positive comment! Unfortunately the remote-only thing is due to personal health. I wish it wasn't so, but it is.
My skills are deep in engineering/physics/biotech, but aren't really in Web-Dev. As such, I've only ever had one person reach out to me via the 'Who want to be hired?' thread in the last two years, and they just ghosted me after one email.
Granted, I'm not really the 'type' for HN and the roles posted in the 'Who's hiring?' threads aren't really in my wheelhouse. But the companies are good to look through and then contact for other roles. I've applied to companies through them, but the results have been a mixed bag for me. Things like insane HW assignments that I submit, only to be ghosted.
I love the discussions on algos, programming/comp-sci, and EE, as such things are directly relevant to my work and career. There really isn't anywhere else on the web that has the userbase that HN has, despite me being only tangentally related to the core users here. That said, you find a lot of people here that are really super smart in some tiny niche too (like actual rocket science, oil painting, 12th century Indian hymns, etc) and I love reading that stuff and learning about some tiny little bit of the universe that ends up being facinating.
I'd love to see a HN type site that was more biotech focused.
uh, how could you know that?
No, I'm an oddball. No degree, no STEM background, no interest whatsoever in CS as a career. Still quite interested in building a better future for humanity though.
However, it seems tech companies/VC firms/think tanks/philanthropic entities forget (or outright ignore) the fact that it requires more than coders and degree holders to make society happen. sigh.
In the past few years I've come to be incredibly shocked as I discover more and more how myopic the tech-leaders/teach-wealthy/younger philanthropists are whether intentionally or unintentionally. A significant percentage come from families where education was stressed, where the families were financially comfortable if not wealthy, a lot of them started working when they started their first startup in college or their first job was out of grad school, people that went to k-12 schools in privileged areas or went to varying levels of private schools, went to top-tier colleges to either drop out when they became millionaires or to graduate and go on to become billionaires long before their peers even finished paying off their crippling student loans. The companies, and empires, they run after obtaning a modicum of success almost entirely require a minimum of a 4 year degree for entry-level positions with most wanting to see at least one major accomplishment or project under your belt to even get a skype interview. They want people of a specific mindset, they want people with a specific background, they want people with specific accomplishments. Even those that go on to help those that are underprivileged via their philanthropic efforts, just look for the cream of the academic crop, they look for those that have somehow defied the odds and are still already exceptionally bright on paper, to help them get their de facto dues card (a degree) so they can have yet another like-mind to join their ranks.
But those of us that have different experiences? We get told things like (these are actual quotes from rejection emails to me in the past year and a half):
"You obviously have many of the skills we're looking for. However, for the Customs Brokerage role we require a BA/BS degrees" at the time I had 12 years of experience doing the job, but no 4-year degree in ANYTHING so wasn't good enough for an interview.
"We know that our process is far from perfect, so please take this primarily as a statement that we have limited interview bandwidth, and must make hard choices. We'd welcome another application in no fewer than 12 months - the best way to stand out is to complete a major project or produce an important result in that time" thank you for comparing me to bits and stripping me of all humanity, also what 'major project' or 'important result' should I produce for an entry level position in a field where I'd literally be assisting in creating the initial framework for AI policy research? I mean, must everyone that helps with AI policy be a CS type? Should the common man not be consulted when deciding how our future robot overlords will rule us and how are personal data may or may not be used by such projects?
I am the oddball. I'm John Q Public, not C. S. Programmer.
I just want to see a better future for myself and our species. I can't write fancy code, nor do I have any desire to. I'm not going to be the guy that creates the first AI or the first cyborg prosthetic indistinguishable from a human limb. I'm not going to crack cold fusion or bring C4 rice to market. I can sit back and go "that's a good idea BUT here's 17 ways I can exploit it in its beta phase, if you get it fully functional and the company scales I can exploit it even more ways and use it for personal gain and to cause great pain and suffering to individuals or the masses, maybe we should stop and think about this, and these 3 features are all but guaranteed to be used more for bad than good" I can go "so explain to me exactly what you are trying to do... oh, hey, yeah so I know your world is only CS but this was done by such and such in 1973 and I know I've read about it in a few books, let me check my evernote references... ah yes so here's a science fiction story where it was done but here is where some students did something similar, does this give you any ideas for getting past your current roadblock?" and I can go "man, you look burnt out, you need a break, come on let's go walk for a few minutes and talk about something else so you can come back with a new point of reference".
I am the oddball.
I got three responses through HN, one from a company in the city I live in, one from a fully distributed team, and one from a holy s__t SV company I had fantasized about in years past.
All three were amazing opportunities and the people I spoke with were so awesome--genuine, authentic, enthusiastic, and of an altogether different caliber than what I had been anticipating.
I interviewed for a few weeks with all three and was honestly agonizing about what I'd do if I got an offer from more than one. I don't know what exactly I was expecting, but what I was not expecting was to feel so much like I was in the driver's seat of my job search experience. It was almost like I was interviewing them for the job, or more accurately, it was as if we were on an equal footing (I don't delude myself that that was actually the case, but it's how it felt dealing with such awesome point's of contact).
I wound up accepting a completely different offer from a co. in my city that I connected with through a different channel and that really ticked all the boxes for me--I mean--I feel really lucky, I truly love my job. It would have been an insane opportunity to take the role at the SV unicorn (had they extended me an offer, I'll never know) but at the end of the day I just wasn't ready to pick up my whole life and move cross country in my 30's.
Wow did I ever get derailed. The moral of the story is, while I didn't technically get hired through a "Who wants to be hired" thread, I did have an altogether highly positive experience, and I imagine, if anyone else's experience is like mine, that lot's of people get hooked up with awesome opportunities through that channel.
What seems to happen with hiring is good companies very quickly get overwhelmed by bad applicants. Consequently, they have to instate barriers to try filter out the hundreds of unqualified people who apply. Unfortunately, the same filters also affect the people you want to hire and make it less likely you'll be introduced to a good engineer.
If you've already been in the industry a while you'll probably suffer from the same problem: A hell of a lot of low quality recruiter spam; Bad companies wasting your time with sub-minimum wage offers, and so on. Sometimes you just need 10 minutes to speak to a real person and you can both tell straight away if it's a good fit or not.
Good luck to people looking for their next opportunity. There are some great companies out there.
Edit: I find it amusing hacker news works so well for this compared to traditional career websites. It probably works so well precisely because it doesn't market itself as such, and on a dice roll the signal to noise ratio is far higher. Hopefully this doesn't change any time soon as having a high-quality service like this is very, very useful for people!
As a noob I would just like to say...it isn't limited to experienced professionals.
As soon as I landed my first job my email and linkedin caught fire. Non stop spam, bad matches, and etc.
"I was looking at your resume..."
No way you were looking at my resume and came up with this job... kinda stuff.
This is mostly because it system makes it easy to apply to multiple listings, so people upload their information then click 2-3 times to apply to each job.
So, compared to getting a whole lot of those, or "I can find someone for you" responses, I can see why people have more luck reaching out to a community of people with the rough skill set
It's not your fault, but the industry has relatively few entry-level positions, especially for the bottom 75% of graduates.
One was in college, one fresh grad 2-year degree, one with degree and 1 year experience.
But I need someone who's actually better than me to help with weird issues that you simply don't get in school... Like adjusting the DNS resolver process.. or dining out why gnome won't start in a virtual infrastructure (which most people don't even know where to start looking in logs)
So I'm very open to entry level people, but I need another experience person to help
People get people who aren't right for the job applying.
Recruiters out there gathering up people not qualified.
throws up hands
"Remote" tag is often confusing since in many cases it means: 1) Remote but USA only 2) Remote but only 1-2 days a week 3) We put remote just to grab your attention and to get more candidates but we actually prefer onsite
Personally this often discourage me to apply even if otherwise I could be a good fit. Also if you put REMOTE I guess for many companies you are no-go candidate since you haven't gained trust yet.
As for me I wouldn't mind relocating somewhere for the first few months for higher bandwidth communication and to gain some trust but that rarely works if company doesn't have remote culture.
I once talked to a CTO of a local company without the primary intention of working there purely out of curiosity. I did end up working there as the other company I was accepted at had a hiring freeze for a month or more. I turned out to be a great place to be. New (to me) Rails stack, Go microservices when it wasn't so common and scaling challenges.
They just wanted to get people to test a product from an unrelated company.
That’s not how HackerNews works.
I have an alternate account from which I have posted a few times in different “Who wants to be hired?” threads, and every single time my post is marked invisible (aka. shadow banned). I only realized that some time ago when, by chance, I checked my post with a private browser session both with and without logging in with a different account to the one used to post the message.
I’ve resorted to contact companies instead, that way I can handle my options a bit better. Most of the time when I get contacted to interview at a company is recruiters trying to position me in a company that I have absolutely no interest in, or startups that don’t even know what they are doing.
1) Some amount of professional experience in the technology we were looking for a contractor in.
2) An attitude that boiled down to “I write software to fulfill business objectives.” (The opposite attitude is what I characterize as the “hipster coder,” who says “I couldn’t possibly work on your legacy system unless you agree to rewrite it from scratch in $hot_new_stack.” Yes, I have literally had a contractor tell me that before, about a webapp based on a 5 year old front-end framework.)
People often say that's a killer combination, but actually I have problems finding concrete positions I would fit in. I fear I have to somehow create that position myself, which is also not that easy. Ideas or hints would be appreciated!
Many clinical jobs I am qualified to take are paid so badly that veterinarians qualify for social rent assistance.
Bovine, porcine and poultry pay better, but I'm not that interested in those fields.
And yes, I am legally qualified to start a practice and render virtually any treatment services I want. But I would suck. That's why you need more experience in places where the buck can stop with someone else.
She gives me to understand that changes in the legal landscape have resulted in US doctors mostly abandoning the idea of having their own practice in favor of being hospital employees.
I got like a ton of stuff in my home... I guess I could trash my furniture and buy new one, but what about my other things?
Does relocation include transportation for that too?
It depends on the company, of course.
In my case, when I interviewed at Booking.com —just to give an example— I was offered a relocation package to move from New York to Amsterdam, this package included transportation of some of my belongings, support for my partner, and two months of rent. They also offered me some help to find an apartment, and was told I would get a discount in my taxes for the first year, which they also offered to take care of for the first year (assigning one of their accountants).
I know they offered a similar —if not the same— package to other candidates.
For other companies, no matter how big or small they are, the relocation package depends on how important your position is going to be. For a regular software developer, you may get the plane tickets which may or may not include a budget to bring a some luggage, but you’ll probably have to bring the rest on your own. For more relevant positions like managers and specially a CEO, CTO and the like, they may offer you to pay for your accommodation for certain period of time, will assign you a budget to move your belongings, and similar benefits to what I got offered to move to Amsterdam.
If you are Apple’s Tim Cook, they will move absolutely everything you need no matter how expensive, troublesome, or delicate.
I am currently* a “Senior/Lead SWE” that’s flirted a lot with SRE.
Earlier in my career it was a lot harder to get responses, but still managed to get an interview or three out of it.
My last job before that was found by getting contacted after uploading my resume to craigslist in 2010, so I consider myself 2/2 on the post-and-wait strategy.
I get lots of recruiter spam (mostly via linkedin) but I don't really want to ever think of it in complaint. It's kind of nice to know if I need a new job fast I have a lot of contact entry points to try before playing the submit-application-here lottery or post-and-wait game. And occasionally I've been very tempted to reply to some anyway. It's "spam" in the sense that I've listed not being interested in jumping ship except for having a few rare details that would at least make me consider, but we all know most everyone's technically on the market regardless given the right offer even if it lacks certain 'requirements'. Recruiters just have a job that depends on believing they always have the right offer.
I also just reached out to someone from the “Who wants to be hired?” thread about an open role on my current team.
Compared to some of the other people in those threads, my resume is not stellar, so it's not surprising that they can wait or find someone else that's better.
1. I already asked. He wants Rust and probably won't leave Albuquerque. Bummer. He'd be perfect.
2. Argentina... nope.
3. Barcelona... nope.
4. One might work. I probably already asked, but don't remember.
5. Remote only... nope.
6. Lisbon... nope.
7. Paris... nope.
8. I already asked. He won't leave southwest Florida, even for Tampa or Melbourne. Bummer.
9. Bay Area and won't relocate... nope.
10. He's hesitant to relocate. Hmmm, I could try.
11. Paris... nope.
So that is the situation as of now, with 155 comments 7 hours after the post. I can email a couple of them.
Austin and the DC area sort of count. No, they aren't the Bay Area, but nothing else is.
Specifically for low-level security work, there are a number of competitors both large and small in Melbourne, FL. There is also embedded work related mainly to aerospace.
And they are all competing for the services of assembler programmers living in Melbourne FL, population 80,000.
Wouldn't it be smart to widen that pool?
EDIT: obviously you have security constraints, I appreciate that - but most businesses in similar circumstances won't, and still won't consider remote, to then bitch about skill shortages.
This area has a ton of tech jobs it seems...
Even with a home office, my family or dogs and up demanding a lot of my attention through the day, and it's difficult/frustrating since it takes me out of my mental zone/thought process.
That was a while ago.. now, as a manager, I could try some remote employees, but I honestly prefer having face time with my employees... Most remote workers never want to use webcams (in my experience with 5 remote working peers over my career), which severely impact my communication capabilities (I can't get facial ques or body language from the interaction).
I also delt with a supervisor that hid a work impacting personal problem in his remote working... Over 2 years he did less work and supervising, was hard to reach most of the time, and would (eventually) only communicate by email. If he came into the office, people might have seen that HR needed to provide assistance sooner.
So I think issues like these make the idea of remote work scary to employers... What interview questions can you ask to very "dedicated remote workers" from "easy paycheck remote workers"? How to you improve performance in remote workers if they consistently perform much slower than in office workers?
That's a failure of upper management to demand accountability from him. A lot of people hide a lot of stuff even when they are at the office.
> What interview questions can you ask to very "dedicated remote workers" from "easy paycheck remote workers"?
The same you ask to discern between "dedicated office worker" and "minesweeper-champion office worker"?
> How to you improve performance in remote workers
Promote accountability based on deliverables and targets. Establish always-on communication channels and systems, keeping remotes involved in the decision-making rather than being recipients of orders. Have periodic reviews, particularly if things are slower than expected. And at the end of the day, don't be scared to let people go if they are not meeting expectations, or to put your foot down on things like webcam usage if you really need it.
Edit: I looked at their profile and saw the citizenship requirement, and more of a description of the kinds of stuff they work on. I get why remote might not be encouraged for it :). The point still stands generally though; remote hardware work is possible and not a huge burden for most situations.
If you're doing consumer hardware, different story.
In general, it's also embedded systems that are (a) most difficult to remotely flash and test and (b) most easy to irreversibly damage if you're not in front of them during the testing process.
I happen to like the side-effect on work-life balance. Nobody will ever expect me to do a bit more work at home. When I go home, I'm totally off work. I also get paid overtime, so I'm not getting cheated at the office either.
It's also somewhat about physical hardware. Remote use of screw drivers and soldering irons is difficult.
There's no problem with work-life balance while working remote. You can even have better work-life balance as you don't need to take half a day off from work to attend to a 10-minute chore that can't be rescheduled. It needs maturity and trust on the part of the employers and the employees. You're almost boasting about calling a bug a feature.
Depending on what you mean by "a day", each commute direction is 2 to 3 hours. (or I suppose 6) You have a very long distance, or severe traffic, or something else unusual. It sounds like you would be driving over the mountains to reach a place like LA or SF.
I've been a software developer at 5 different work locations in 2 different states, but I have never commuted more than 20 minutes. Currently it is almost that if I walk, or 3 minutes if I drive.
This is because I choose small cities with affordable housing and low traffic. Big urban tech hubs are popular, but they mean you probably won't get a large property right near work.
But traffic is insanely bad in places like Bangalore and people just can’t choose to live in smaller places because 99% of the jobs in India are in places like Bangalore. The half-a-day case is much more the norm than the living-closer-to-work case in my experience.
Yet you list 11 people with 1 "ideal". There seems to be lots of people.
Souprock! you still have austin office right? not looking for work right now but is the sec clearance still a requirement?
I got 2 interviews + 1 follow-up not leading to an interview out of emails sent to 6 companies. Didn't convert either of the interviews but I think I was very close with one of them. I think talks broke down over salary expectations when speaking with the VP of Eng.
> Did you receive responses that weren't recruiter-spam from your posts there?
Yes. 3-4, of which about half were promising, in response to 1 post. They didn't work out for other reasons.
You can find my recent post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20326583
What each month brings is very diverse. Companies are of all shapes and sizes, from different locations and different lines of businesses. It's fairly interesting by itself. I've gone through multiple interview hoops through the years and those tend to also be very diverse. I've done HR chats and tech chats, phone screens with code and phone screens without. I've done take-homes and I was twice flown to on-sites. There is also a fair amount of spam, canned recruiting emails and the automated "CTO bait-n-switch", but the overall positive far outweighs the negative in my mind. If you are considering to post - just do it.
I've learnt a lot from those postings. Reaching out is not easy and I'm thankful to whoever does. My main take-a-way is this: by reaching out, a person shows that they are the proactive kind who cares for their organization and tasks. That fact by itself is a very positive signal to me. I'm thus always trying to put best effort into whatever organizational recruiting process follows.
I have yet to be hired as a result of those posts.
P.S - ... but that one from last month that is still in process would be perfect for me. Especially if it goes south... ;)
Thanks!
Meanwhile, I'm STILL getting rejection notices from companies where my application has been sitting in their queue for over a month.
On a whim, I responded to just one such thread on HN. I got no recruiter spam, but rather an email from a company (I won't say which for privacy reasons) that totally changed my life. Great recruiting process, interesting and challenging interview gamut, and they made me an excellent offer contingent upon relocation, which I was hoping to do anyway.
So, the answer to the question is YES those threads work IF you work them. Stay on top of your emails, follow up, be diligent, study hard. It's so so worth it.
Maybe I've obfuscated my email address well enough, but I don't get any recruiter spam from the listing. Now that I look back on that, it's something of a miracle.
That said, I've only been contacted once per the thread. After one email I was ghosted by the company. Not uncommon really.
I'm not really the niche for HN, I'm mostly a bio/medtech and engineering person. I love the discussions here, but my expertise is on the edges of the Gaussian that is HN.
Except there's no MX record for the website (Image: https://elixi.re/i/oamrerwz.png ), so I can't reply to them asking them to remove my email from their list.
If the person behind those emails is reading this: Please stop, it's annoying and I will not give you my money, even with a discount.
I've written mine out as : robert.heffern (at) gmail
I suppose that the way that I wrote out my email address is just a bit more difficult for a computer to parse and scrape, hence my lack of spam. However, it may also be screening out people that want to talk to me, and I would never know.
That said, you have a very impressive gitlab resume! Great work!
My current "steady" (albeit less than 100% of my time) client found me through that thread several years ago.
An engineering manager noticed my post and passed it to their internal recruiters. I was interviewing with multiple companies and they came out on top.
It turned out to be a great experience. After 4 years they were acquired and most of us have moved on, and several of us formed the engineering team at a seed stage startup.
Also some companies asked me to do some puzzle style tests, that at the time I didn't pass.
Went directly to on-site interview stage after a quick call and am still happily employed here 5 years later.
Definitely the most important post I ever made in my life :)
I don't think I got any additional recruiter spam around the time of that post. Maybe back then recruiters didn't watch those threads yet?
It would be nice if we could maybe break up the threads into different types of roles perhaps?
When I'm looking it, I just normally search for Ruby or Rails and see what pops up. I almost never get turned down for an interview if they are using one of those, which is likely due to having ~10+ years experience with them now.
"If you were to meet a very rich man *?" "-Does not matter: you are not rich anyway and once we are married...."
I'm from Europe and these jobs were all in the US. It's doable, you just have to be a reasonably strong candidate.
This is me - https://www.simongilbert.net
I wouldn't be surprised if people had similar luck on all such threads.
It's almost always at least 1 response. I don't think I've ever gotten more than 10 responses. Something like 4 is typical.
On average I think I find one that is good and one that is minimally acceptable. Several have been hired, but at least one of those was redundantly discovered elsewhere.
Definitely changed my life!
Which would be rude and off-topic. But by all means, make a fresh post where the goal is to learn by commenting on excerpts of peoples posts. Not sure if that will work but why not try?
I own a domain so I create an email address such as career2019@example.com where example.com takes place for my actual domain. I recommend this. I also use this temporary email to sign up for linkedin for the duration of my employment seeking.
After having secured employment, I delete the linkedin and then never use the email again, nor look at whatever may arrive into its inbox.
Rot in my trash bin Martha.