Dhaka is in Bangladesh, not India.
66 karma · joined March 10, 2012
Townsquared is a private network for businesses in the same community to meet one another, share advice, and form partnerships. We are Series A funded by Floodgate Capital and August Capital.
We are ramping up quickly and hiring for engineering and product roles. Please get in touch directly (abhi@townsquared.com) if interested.
Why work with us:
- We are passionate, talented, and curious
- We believe in risk taking and action
- We collaborate closely with our users
- We love local
- Help shape our product and company culture
- Ample opportunity to grow as we grow
- Form deep connections with local businesses
- Create meaningful change on a large scale by empowering individuals and communities
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We're hiring:
* Senior Backend Engineers: Experience building cross-platform APIs; Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, microservices
* Frontend Engineers: Experience building delightful single page applications; AngularJS, CSS
* iOS Engineers: Experience building shipped iOS applications; Objective-C
* Product Managers: Experience driving projects through the ideation-to-ship lifecycle; analytical, A/B testing experience
Cringely is also wrong in at least one important respect about the EB-2 visa: its numbers do indeed fill up every year, just like for the H-1B, for Indian and Chinese applicants. So if you file an EB-2 based visa application this year, it will take you about 10 years to receive your EB-2 based green card if you are Indian, and 5 years if you are Chinese. The US Government was, as of February 2015, processing EB-2 applications received in September 2005 for Indian applicants, for example [1].
Is Cringely then suggesting that companies wait 5-10 years for new foreign employees to join them?
I've posted about this before on Hacker News, but it's a common misconception here that H-1B workers are somehow "indentured", or that they cannot switch employers. Under the AC-21 act of 2000 [2], H-1B employees can switch employers with a single H-1B transfer filing, and even start working at their new employer while their H-1B transfer application to their new employer is in process. Further, the H-1B transfer application is not subject to the yearly cap (which has been regularly reached in recent years), so there is almost no chance of it being denied. In practice, this means that H-1B workers have as much job mobility as native American workers.
The bad actors in the H-1B program are indeed the Indian outsourcing companies, which need to be investigated and punished for violations of the program, including paying below market wages. But there are many more good actors who use the H-1B program extensively -- Google, Facebook, and similar reputable American tech companies -- and they don't use it because they underpay their employees, but because they can't find enough qualified employees even given their high wages. There was a recent post on HN about the very high salaries paid by these companies to their H-1B employees, as disclosed in their H-1B visa applications.
Summary: For someone who claims to have written a long running series on the H-1B program, Cringely is disappointingly misinformed. The H-1B program has violations, which need to be properly investigated, but the EB-2 is not even close to a viable replacement for it. H-1B employees are not indentured labor and have high job mobility, except in the case of a few large outsourcing companies which do indeed deserve to be punished.
[1] Monthly Visa Bulletin from the US Department of State: http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy...
[2] H-1B Visa Transfer: http://www.usavisanow.com/h-1b-visa/h1b-visa-resources/h-1b-...
I think the concept of employers applying for a green card for employees is fundamentally broken. It pits the interests of the employer directly against the employee, since it's in the employer's interest to drag out the process for as long as possible, and reduces job mobility (which brings down wages for everyone) because the green card process needs to be restarted if employees switch jobs midway, before the I-485 step.
A system where any legally employed foreign worker can file for a green card for themselves seems much more sane.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that wages for H-1B visa holders are only lower when the employer files for a visa for an employee who is outside of the country. In my experience as a student who went the F-1 -> H-1B route, salaries are the same whether or not you have an H-1B. The much wider set of employers that you can interview with when you are already in the country probably makes it infeasible for employers to pay their H-1B employees who were already in the US under a different visa less than employees who don't need a visa.
I think this trend will accelerate as web applications are increasingly broken into loosely coupled services, with a rich client tying them together in the browser.
It doesn't make sense for a country to have a "CTO". Do all technology decisions made anywhere in the US have to have her approval?
Logically, if she were the CTO of the US, she would have as direct reports all the CTOs of all the companies in the US.
Contact me at abhi@trulia.com for more info, or send me your resume.
Positions are available on multiple teams at Trulia, including on the rentals team that where I work. We're growing very quickly and aim to hire the highest quality people while doing so.
How we work:
The engineering team is about a hundred people, and we break into small teams of 2-4 to focus on specific projects. The rentals team is a small, vertically-integrated team within the larger engineering team. We are responsible for the entire Trulia Rentals product, giving us the speed and flexibility of a startup with the resources of a public company.
We release weekly, but new features are always under development and often span releases. Our local QA team writes automation tests and does hand testing of your features, working with you to ensure that only high quality code gets to production. Organizationally, we're pretty flat, though you'll have a mentor with whom you'll have weekly 1-on-1 meetings, to review code, exchange ideas, and ensure we're doing everything we can for you to thrive in your role.
Behind the curtain:
- 'Innovation Week' every quarter - work on any project you like for one week each quarter, recruit others to work on your project with you, present your work to other engineers (if you feel like it)
- People you're happy to see every day
- Stocked Kitchens and two kegerators
- Unbeatable SOMA location with penthouse roof deck
- All IDEs welcome
- Aeron chairs
- Great benefits (untracked time off, variety of health plans, 401k match)
You: - You have experience working on high-traffic, scalable internet applications
- You love solving hard problems and working in small teams with smart people
- You're comfortable with everything from bash scripting to javascript
- You're a great person
- You love making fast websites
What you'll work with:
Our base web stack is LAMP, but that rides on top of Solr/Lucene, Hadoop, Memcache, Python, Couchbase, Open Street Maps, and more. We’re rewriting our website to use Javascript on both client and server using Rendr.js, Node.js and Backbone.js. We use jQuery on the client, d3.js and Raphel.js for our charts and Git for source control. If there's something that's a good idea for the team, we'll do our best to implement it.
Why work at Trulia?
Engineering gets respect.
We use the phrase 'we're a tech company that does Real Estate' to emphasize how important engineering is to the company. Engineering is the department that drives our apps, tools, data, and interfaces forward. This attitude comes not only from the Engineers, but from our CEO and other top management. They believe in us.
We have awesome problems to solve.
The housing market provides a fantastic blend of problems. We need creative people to help us combine the data about every address in America with the soft side of helping people find a home that makes them feel safe, happy, and comfortable.
Stability is wonderful.
We're that rare company that holds the culture of its startup roots, while blending in the sanity of a regular work schedule with an emphasis on work/life/family balance.
Trulia is a successful rapidly growing Internet technology company, redefining the home search experience for consumers and changing the way real estate professionals build their businesses. Our marketplace, delivered through the web and mobile applications, gives consumers powerful tools to research homes and neighborhoods and enables real estate professionals to efficiently market their listings and attract new clients. Trulia was founded in 2005, backed by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, and had a successful IPO in 2012. We are headquartered in downtown San Francisco with offices in Denver and New York and voted Best Place to Work in both San Francisco and Denver.
Positions are available on multiple teams at Trulia, including on the rentals team that where I work.
Why work at Trulia?
Engineering gets respect.
We use the phrase 'we're a tech company that does Real Estate' to emphasize how important engineering is to the company. Engineering is the department that drives our apps, tools, data, and interfaces forward. This attitude comes not only from the Engineers, but from our CEO and other top management. They believe in us.
We have awesome problems to solve.
The housing market provides a fantastic blend of problems. We need creative people to help us combine the data about every address in America with the soft side of helping people find a home that makes them feel safe, happy, and comfortable.
Stability is wonderful.
We're that rare company that holds the culture of its startup roots, while blending in the sanity of a regular work schedule with an emphasis on work/life/family balance.
You:
- You have experience working on high-traffic, scalable internet applications - You love solving hard problems and working in small teams with smart people - You're comfortable with everything from bash scripting to javascript - You're a great person - You love making fast websites
What you'll work with:
Our base web stack is LAMP, but that rides on top of Solr/Lucene, Hadoop, Memcache, Python, Couchbase, Open Street Maps, and more. We’re rewriting our website to use Javascript on both client and server using Rendr.js, Node.js and Backbone.js. We use jQuery on the client, d3.js and Raphel.js for our charts and Git for source control. We're learning OOCSS and are folding SASS into our workflow as well. If there's something that's a good idea for the team, we'll do our best to implement it.
How we work:
The engineering team is about a hundred people, and we break into small teams of 2-4 to focus on specific projects. The rentals team is a small, vertically-integrated team within the larger engineering team. We are responsible for the entire Trulia Rentals product, giving us the speed and flexibility of a startup with the resources of a public company.
We release weekly, but new features are always under development and often span releases. Our local QA team writes automation tests and does hand testing of your features, working with you to ensure that only high quality code gets to production. Organizationally, we're pretty flat, though you'll have a mentor with whom you'll have weekly 1-on-1 meetings, to review code, exchange ideas, and ensure we're doing everything we can for you to thrive in your role.
Behind the curtain: - 'Innovation Week' every quarter - People you're happy to see every day - Stocked Kitchens and two kegerators - Unbeatable SOMA location with penthouse roof deck - All IDEs welcome - Aeron chairs - Great benefits (untracked time off, variety of health plans, 401k match)
Trulia is a successful rapidly growing Internet technology company, redefining the home search experience for consumers and changing the way real estate professionals build their businesses. Our marketplace, delivered through the web and mobile applications, gives consumers powerful tools to research homes and neighborhoods and enables real estate professionals to efficiently market their listings and attract new clients.
Trulia was founded in 2005, backed by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, and had a successful IPO in 2012. We are headquartered in downtown San Francisco with offices in Denver and New York and voted Best Place to Work in both San Francisco and Denver.
Living in a country that may get a few hours of weak sunlight in winter doesn't appeal to me, no matter how high the standard of living might be otherwise.
Your personal preferences will vary, of course.
These changes are still in the future for me (thankfully), but I imagine they will happen some day if I live long enough.
I think a world in which people would keep remain mentally and physically fit, but simply die (maybe from a lightning bolt type event) at some point, would be much better than one in which your body and mind slowly fade with time.
I'd be happy with medical advances that let you keep the mind and body of a 25 year old till you're 80 and then simply die one day. Unfortunately, some period of old age and infirmity seems to be present no matter how much lifespan extends.
I think a better question for most people might be: how do I get a job where work on the job is itself interesting, rather than a job that allows me to do my own interesting stuff in my spare time.
In an ideal situation, you're speaking with someone who will allow you to probe them on the subject with a series of "stupid" (sounding) questions till you have a good basic understanding of the topic.
Unfortunately, many people are not like that. They will simply think that you're stupid and move on to the next topic. Sometimes these may be people you want to make a good impression on, for a variety of reasons, so some diplomacy is required.
Companies like iSwifter have tried to do server-side-rendered, streamed Flash games for years with limited success. The local machine in that case simply transmits input and displays video.
I think the difference here is that there will be some client side computation as well, but I'm not sure how much. If the GPU is in the cloud, that seems to indicate that they are bypassing WebGL, which would provide access to the local GPU. So my guess is that the JS does the typical setup work of a CPU in a rendering pipeline (setting up the scene, constructing draw batches), transmits it to the cloud GPU, and then transfers the rendered frame to the local GPU for display.
For interactive applications, it seems like the CPU-cloud GPU latency could be a deal breaker, though John Carmack famously said that it was faster to ping Europe from the US than to draw a pixel to the screen.
> It seems likely that without the British having brought "Anglo civilization", India today would be like most of Africa today.
India was keeping pace with the rest of world, and leading in many ways, quite nicely for thousands of years before the 1600s. It happened to be under continuous foreign occupation at just the time the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe, and British policies were explicitly designed to stifle the same changes happening in India. Most things that you see today are a consequence of that missed opportunity.
Without the British, it's more likely that India would have been like Japan today rather than Africa.
It's easy to be thankful for British influence when the US got rid of it so early in the industrialization game.
1. The fact that the (very large) number of Indian soldiers in WW2 was slipped in without comment into a statement about how NZ, Australia and other Anglosphere countries were joined in some kind of glorious kinship. India was not, and is not, a part of this cosy club and should not have been in that list.
2. Attributing the participation of Indian soldiers in WW2 to some kind of personal decision, and not the fact the British ruled India at the time as an imperialist foreign power.
Here are a couple more statements that are false:
1. "What do we mean by Western civilization?...Third, representative government. Laws should not be passed, nor taxes levied, except by elected legislators who are answerable to the rest of us."
This was patently false in the large parts of the world where Britain ruled illegally for two centuries. Taxes were routinely levied on citizens of the colonies without representative government. (I seem to remember this having something to do with the American Revolution, as a matter of fact.)
2. "Yet Peru—indeed, Latin America in general—never achieved the law-based civil society that North America takes for granted. Settled at around the same time, the two great landmasses of the New World serve almost as a controlled experiment. The north was settled by English-speakers, who took with them a belief in property rights, personal liberty, and representative government. The south was settled by Iberians who replicated vast estates and quasi-feudal society of their home provinces."
There were several other differences between North and South America, including the climate, the relative times at which they achieved independence, and (perhaps most importantly) the attitudes of the imperialists towards their subjects. In colonies where the ruled were racially different than the rulers (South America, Africa and Asia), their treatment and eventual outcomes were far worse than in places where the colonial power and the colonies were both racially the same (North America). The author is ignorant at best, and probably deliberately dishonest, in not mentioning this as part of his argument.
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The tone of the article is clear enough that point by point rebuttals like this are a waste of time, but since you asked...
Notice how casually the number of Indian soldiers in WW2 -- 2.4 million, more than the other countries combined -- is slipped in, well after NZ and Australia. And of course they all volunteered out of their love for the Queen -- unrelated to the fact that a coercive foreign power was ruling their country at the time.
Honestly, the world should be too evolved to be accepting thinly veiled racist garbage like this any more.
There is very little distinction made in the public discourse about the difference between these two categories of employees, but they are very different.
The overwhelming majority of H-1Bs directly employed at large American companies will be of the first type: they came to the US to study or at an early age, and were hired while they were already in the US. These employees are likely to be treated identically with American citizen employees and paid exactly the same in the same roles. They are not "cheap foreign labor" -- they are employees who just happen to be foreign citizens. They are very mobile because their skills are in high demand, and other employers are more than eager to transfer their visas over.
However (and this is where the rhetoric comes in), the majority of H-1B visas go to outsourcing/offshoring companies that bring in workers by the thousands to fill mostly lower-end positions in IT or back office departments at American companies. These workers fit all the H-1B stereotypes: low-paid, bound to a single company, living 10 to an apartment etc. There are significant violations and gray areas in the way these workers are brought in and paid.
The problem is that both sides of the H-1B debate do not define which group of workers they are talking about.
Google, Microsoft etc are correct when they say that they do not want more H-1Bs for cheaper labor. In the employee pool they are looking at (foreign citizens already in the US), this is true: they pay all employees identically irrespective of whether they are foreign or US citizens.
The opponents of more H-1Bs are also correct when they say that H-1Bs are being used for cheaper labor: the types of employees that offshoring companies bring in are indeed being chosen because they are willing to work for lower wages than workers already in the US.
The solution is clear: have separate visa categories for employees brought in directly from outside the US, and foreign citizens who are already in the country. Make it as easy as possible for the latter group to stay in the country, through a quicker green card process or other methods; at the same time, have higher scrutiny for the separate category of visas that apply to foreign workers brought in directly from outside.
It sometimes amazes me that even on a relatively knowledgeable forum like HN, this distinction isn't made often or at all.
H-1B employees are currently quite mobile. I have many friends who've switched jobs repeatedly during their H-1B period because it's so easy to transfer the visa. I honestly don't know where this whole "indentured servitude" idea comes from.
The part of the system that's fubared is the green card process, which can stretch for up to 10 years if you're from India or China. During a part of that time (not the entire duration), you can't switch jobs unless you want the green card process to be restarted, which affects mobility. But that is not related to the H-1B, and the solution to that is to fix the green card process.
SO is more useful when you have a problem that you're trying to debug, and official docs are more useful when you're trying to understand new concepts. Unfortunately Google doesn't allow any way to differentiate between these modes.
I've lived in the Bay Area a long time and this sort of attitude puzzles me. There are plenty of rich areas up and down the Valley, and many places where a $6 breakfast is not something to write an article about. But yes, because it happens in SF it must be special.
I haven't been able to figure out a repeatable way to get this to happen, but it seems to have started happening in the last few weeks. Rebooting the phone usually makes it go away, but only for a short while. I haven't seen this weird keyboard disappearing behavior in any other app, so it makes me think it's something specific to Google Maps. It's making the app pretty much unusable.
Anyone else seeing this?
A few things that I can think of that they may already be considering:
1. Asking the developer to specify explicitly which screens should be recorded. From the article, it seems like it's opt-out (the developer specifies which screens should not be recorded), rather than opt-in.
2. Showing long recordings at high speed, slowing down/pausing at "interesting" portions
3. Data aggregated across multiple users: for example, a report of places in the app where most users pause the longest
4. Displays of multiple users' interactions with a single screen, overlaid on top of each other
5. Dealing with user offline scenarios where data may need to be locally stored and then uploaded when a connection is available
They must be doing some sort of frame delta on the videos to save bandwidth, I'm assuming.
Very cool idea!
Very few edtech companies have managed to avoid this fate, and often come down to one or two people keeping the product going as a labor of love. There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that sales are inherently high-touch and expensive, and that the users (teachers/kids) and payers (administrators) have different perspectives and incentives.
Great article. Congrats on sticking it out so long.
Entering something like _ is especially poor because it requires two keypresses to get the keyboard into the right mode. So entering even a small bit of code on an iPad is painful if you use underscores in variable names.
Quite apart from the tactile feedback, I think mode switching is very disruptive to getting into the flow of typing -- "where did all my keys go?"