delphinius81

Absolutely! I feel like once you get out of your 20s, finding the right work-life balance and general quality of life becomes more important. You can also better appreciate cost of living - gross salary isn't as important as what you have left over after you pay all your bills. Once kids come into the picture, the big expenses in the US like child-care, school, and coverage for your family on your health insurance plan takes a huge chunk out of your salary anyway. It's not a tax like in many European countries, but it's not money going into your savings either.

Agreed. I interviewed a few QA candidates at a previous company that used a term completely differently than we did. When I rephrased the question from defining the term to "what kind of test would you run in this situation" I got the kind of answers I would expect. It's far more important that a candidate understands the concepts needed to solve a problem, than that they have memorized a term.

Hell, someone could be able to define MVC and explain how you would use it, but have no idea how to actually implement something using it for a given programming language.

8% less than a Bay Area market-rate salary to be able to work from wherever I want? Sounds great. There are co-working spaces all over the place now. Get a floating desk at one of them and you can still get that office atmosphere when you need it.

I dunno, I've personally spent on average half a day (3-4 hours) with on-site interviews as a candidate. When on the other side of the table, it's been about the same (~3 hours). With a tractable enough problem, I think you can fit it into a half-day. You could also begin the design/research process as part of a phone screen, have the candidate further prepare on their own time, and then present/discuss as part of the on-site, along with the more in-depth technical stuff.

After you've run this process enough times, your interviewers will have a good grasp on the various solutions and technical problems. Most people's training on how to interview comes from how they themselves were interviewed - which was probably poorly done. Improve the interview process and you can train people to be better interviewers just by being interviewed. :)

Once you have an engineering job, a typical project tasking involves: some team design discussion, some engineering research, some work, some review, more work. The requirements are either known upfront, or determined as a team.

I do not understand why interviews are not conducted in this manner. Pick some arbitrary idea and have the candidate work with the interviewer to design something, then let the candidate do a little implementation research/design, review with the next interviewer, wipeboard code and review some part of the project with next reviewer. Have a coffee break at some point to get to know the person. Treat the interview process like a normal day at work.

On the engineering/product side of things, a lot of it boils down to the technical challenge of their interview process. Essentially, getting a job offer from those companies (and others of their ilk) show that you have very high capabilities. Their interview bar is so much higher than most other places, that you are proving yourself capable of the technical side of things.

That doesn't mean you have the soft skills or personality to succeed somewhere else, or even that your technical skills will matter to the new company's product, but it's attractive to the recruiters/hiring managers trying to fill roles.

That's a good point. I would hope to see evidence of the increased responsibilities on the person's resume then - whether it is through project leadership or personnel management, depending on what they are applying for.

It gets much, much harder the later in life you get (and even after retire, you just can't travel/live the way you did when you were young). Some get lucky and can swing remote work while living in another country for a bit, but that's an exception to the rule and isn't always steady.

Also, if a future company didn't understand why you went on this trip, it's likely that they wouldn't fit well with your personality at some other point anyway. So you might be better off not getting sucked into that kind of place anyway.

So go on the trip and mostly worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. Just make sure you have enough money saved that when you get back you'll be able to afford the 1-3 months a job search and potential relocation can take/cost.

re 5: Or they live in the SF/Bay Area and that one job pays them enough that they can afford to pay their mortgage (if they are lucky enough to have one), children's school/college, car, etc. and still have money left over for date night. Once all those expenses pile on, there are very few companies that will pay you enough. You aren't going to hop to a risky startup @100k/year when you have those kinds of expenses.

But then, if you finally got that job at Google, you can probably move on to wherever you want afterward no matter how long you were there.

> Curious why someone would place an upper limit on time served?

If the person has the same title at a company after 4+ years (unless they are already in a lead/senior role), it's a bad sign. If this is in the first 10 years of someone's career, it tells me they might only be doing enough to get by. Whether it's because they a) are not ambitious enough, b) aren't talented enough, or c) the company they work for is terrible at recognition/promotion is something that I would have to find out during an interview (if everything else on paper looked ok).

I think that's one of the problems with traditional resumes/CVs. They focus on work experiences, and not the entirety of your experiences - work/social/etc.

Because here is what leaving a job to go backpacking tells me: You are willing to take risks when the opportunities present themselves. The unknown (will I find a job later) doesn't scare you. You value learning about other places/cultures, which will give you perspectives other people might not get (let's be real, 2 weeks in a resort hotel on vacation does not teach you about another country's culture).

If you can honestly translate your backpacking experience into qualities that a company would look for, you'll have no problem. In fact, you should probably explain that in your cover letter to potential employers anyway.

There are companies that already let people go before their 1 year cliff (or do other types of restructuring that results in the vesting period to reset).

However, I think it would be appropriate to give fewer options as a consequence of this change, since the options would be a more realistic part of the compensation package when you have a longer-period of time to determine if you want to exercise them.

I could definitely see the 1 year cliff going away too, else you'd have people collecting 25% of their options at various places and moving on to other companies each year. Eventually one of those companies will do well and your "work" investment will pay off. You can do shotgun investing with your employee options.

But a lot of this misses the point that your company's growth is entirely reliant on a productive employee base. If you back load vesting or start firing people right before their cliff, or do any other practices such as this, why would anyone choose to work for you?

I worked at a startup for 2 years (left without exercising my options). I objected to options right from the start and during negotiations with the CEO said they should max out my salary in lieu of options. Options are funny money to trick potential employees into thinking their lower salary will pay-out in the end. But the reality is most start-ups do not have exits where rank and file employees get anything for their stock. Investors get paid first, then founders, followed by employees if anything is left - and usually there isn't unless the company has an IPO or was bought out because of superior growth.

That said, I am now co-founding a company and we plan to give future employees a long time period to decide whether they wish to exercise their options or not. If employees are willing to take lower salaries for equity for the sake of the company, companies should reward that sacrifice by letting the employee keep their equity options.

Also, if there is anything officially linking you as an officer in the company (you state you were CTO), you could be held partly liable for the tax/wage fraud if you don't report it. (IANAL)

Even if that were not the case, I say report them. You'll be helping the other people in the company that you like by preventing the CEO from walking over them in the future (if the CEO would do it to another officer of the company, they would certainly do it to the rank and file). It will also set an example to other start-up founders not to screw over people they want to employ.

Check out InstantVR [1] as one input integration solution. I'm experimenting with it for switching between Kinect, Leap, and Hydra for hand/arm support. A completely native solution would be much better, but this is a decent stop gap until we get that.

[1] https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/23009

I'm waiting on that as well. But things are so early on and some of the SDKs Unity has to integrate haven't even hit v1., so it's a bit hard to support.

Also, even if they do automate handling the rendering and input aspects of each VR SDK, you will still have to deal with the various different platform / store level aspects. Google Play versus Oculus Home versus Steam versus whatever else comes in. It's already a struggle maintaining separate Rift/GearVR builds in Unity, when I have to maintain 4 different environments and their platforms? Yeah...

That's what I figured. Still better than tapping my forehead on the GearVR.

The fact that there is a controller for input instead of having to tap my forehead will increase usability a ton. Though I hope they provide a way to clip the controller to the HMD when not using it.

Was anyone able to glean from the video if the controllers/HMD provided positional tracking, or just orientation tracking? Either way, a more open mobile VR platform sounds great (though a little disappointed in that Daydream feels like an "us-too" announcement). I was hoping they would announce solving positional tracking on a mobile device. Nothing all that earth shattering here at the moment. :/

This has potential to be a really engaging and useful platform, especially if you can connect with the various partners/affiliates. One of the things that I always try to do when traveling is stay in more local friendly neighborhoods to experience the real life of a place. If you can figure out how to integrate this into VR, all the better. I'd even suggest having a mobile app for once you get to a location. It could dynamically curate content based on things happening that day/time, that season, or similar times in years past (e.g. major yearly festivals).

My biggest concern is about how many pieces need to hit "critical mass" to be successful. You need digital content to attract users, but your model relies on users to provide the digital content.

For example, to cover a new/off-the-path location, you'll need to seed your platform with media. How much media can you scrape from publicly available locations to do this? What incentives would locals have to generate content for the platform for expanding to a new location? Would you pay freelancers or hope for people to upload content for free?

Really cool idea though and something that I could totally see using to plan my next trip!

We spent a few days investigating alternatives and then decided to just wait and see what happens over the next few months. We want to switch to DynamoDB instead of MongoDB due to cheaper hosting costs through AWS for the amount of data we use. There's already someone working on cleaning up the DB code to allow for switching DB providers.

How are you a junior developer after 10 years of experience? That's pretty mid/senior level at that point.

My satisfaction as a programmer comes and goes with the project and the team. While I love building programs and working through the logic, the thing that I am building matters more to me than solving the problem. So as long as I and the people I'm working with personally care about the project, I'm happy. If I'm not interested in the project, I'll do the work (work ethic is always important) while finding another job.

I totally agree with this. Tech waves can come and go so quickly that you could be obsolete before you even finish building something with the popular tech stack from last month (ok, a bit of hyperbole, but it sometimes feels like new things replace the last new thing before you even know why you would need the thing in the first place).

Not only do you need to try and save as much as possible (which is really hard if you are not single and able to live with roommates), you need to be constantly learning.

Same. If you get the impression management feels threatened by your skills and experience, it is not a place you should work at. Management should recognize what you can bring to the company at an individual and corporate level and groom you for a tech/business leadership role. If a company isn't prepared to do that, then they probably just want to use you.

In the magazine industry, those are the only "jobs" at all. There are very few paying jobs (and those that do pay a non-livable wage) so you have people with degrees and a year plus experience still working for nothing (or next to nothing).

Some PhD programs (at least in Psychology) require a certain number of peer-reviewed journal articles. In some cases, the dissertation is just 3 or 4 journal articles linked together. It's completely up to the graduate program to decide what the requirements are for completing the PhD.

Research papers funded by US Government agencies that spend more than $100M on R&D requires that the papers be made publicly available within 1 year after publication. Unfortunately, this does not apply to works published before 2013. NIH has had this policy in place for longer, but it still doesn't go back far enough.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announce...

I think there is still an expectation to stay up to date on technology, even if you do have a long tenure at a single place. You will very likely work on multiple projects over a 4 year period, let alone 10 years, and requirements will change from one project to another. Plus, if you don't know about new technology, you will likely spend a lot of time trying to develop something that has already been solved.

Staying up to date (at least aware, if not proficient) should always be a job requirement, whether you are a new grad or industry veteran.