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joeax

1,201 karma · joined July 6, 2015

Long time coder. Sci-fi novelist. Cubs fan.

My book, The Final Six Days: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HYJ6D32 http://www.timecrossers.com

My open source SVG widget framework: http://www.svidget.com/

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joeax··on 'Ghost job' ads are getting so bad that lawmakers want to ban them
Instead of banning ghost job ads, job board companies like Indeed should consider "authentic job" badges for ads and require proof a person was hired to the position. When you have real, authentic jobs people gravitate to your site. If you let junk job ads (ghost or otherwise) run amok on your site, everyone leaves. This is why you don't hear about monster.com anymore.

You don't need another government ban. Let capitalism do its job.

joeax··on Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
What is happening is people who are being forced into RTO are demanding a higher salary. Basic supply and demand dynamics are coming into play. Those CEOs are now learning this perhaps the (not surprising) hard way.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240322-us-salaries-hi...

joeax··on Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. I read articles stating that "the majority want hybrid", but what people truly want is freedom to work wherever it suits them best. I've been remote for 15 years, and I've seen people that want the connection an office provides, and others (like me) prefer to never set foot in an office again. Just look around at the other comments and you read differing preferences. And that's cool. Just leave me and others alone and let us work how we prefer.

As far as your quarterly meetings comment is concerned, even that is a variation of hybrid. I worked at a company once that had the quarterly meetups. It worked, but sometimes it was a disruption to a normal routine, especially for some co-workers who flew cross-country. Another company (100% remote company) had the annual weekly retreat which I liked better. You got your face time/watercooler collaboration bullshit/whatever out of the way, then 358 days of peace til the next one.

joeax··on Tim Berners-Lee: Web3 is not the web
Sounds more like the early days of web 1.0
joeax··on Ask HN: Where are the good platforms for contract work?
I've been working in software consulting for over 10 years. I've worked for 5 different agencies, some small, and some household names. Every single one of these companies has hired out to independent consultants (or smaller agencies) willing to take on part time, hourly work. You have to remember most firms that are billing are constantly juggling the chicken and egg of having too much billable work in the pipeline or not enough.

My advice - figure out your core niche (i.e. GCP, Go, Rust) and reach out to 2-3 firms and propose your services and availability. Look in your LinkedIn network for any 1st or 2nd connections working at consulting firms.

joeax··on Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
I got a $10,000 raise and a $1,000 bonus for passing the GCP exam. All this for 3 weeks of studying in my spare time and 2 hours at a test center.
joeax··on Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
That's funny, because I've always felt the opposite when evaluating candidates. If a candidate comes in saying certs are "trash" and "pointless" it usually looks less favorable. It signals an unwilling to learn and/or strive for continuous improvement. Certs are not the end all/be all but they help round our your knowledge and open your eyes to things you never knew.

As far as side-projects and open source contributions, this is a two way street. When I look at side projects, I look for how well you are utilizing best practices in your code. If it's a sloppy, poorly documented mess it doesn't look favorably for you. If you use your side projects as a marketing tool they should be well-polished.

joeax··on Outdated Answers: accepted answer is now unpinned on Stack Overflow
One of my peeves has always been the accepted answer is one of those "That's not possible" type answers, only to become possible later on with a newer release.
joeax··on Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work
I once worked at a (open) office where sales people were constantly berating engineers, asking for a feature or pestering for a status update on a feature/bug in progress. It got so bad they installed a wall around that area.
joeax··on “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
It can be if they give you something to start with.

One company gave out sample code and asked me to optimize it so it ran under 5 seconds. The exercise was in parallelizing or caching/reusing what you could per the requirements.

it was great because:

- problem statement clearly defined

- skeleton code provided

- about 2 hours to complete

- solved an actual, real-world problem

joeax··on “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
I have several certifications from Microsoft and Google and, for the most part, mean jack to an interviewer. I am still forced to leetcode and answer mind-numbing questions.

On a side note, of all the choices I prefer a take-home, as long as it is timeboxed to no more than 1-2 hours.

joeax··on Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings
If the care facility is housing at-risk patients, they should have strict protocols in place for visitors. Shaming a wedding here seems irresponsible by the media considering these people could have picked up Covid anywhere like Walmart.
joeax··on I don’t have time for coding challenges
I've been on both sides of the table and I'll tell you a coding challenge is a much better solution than the whiteboard/leetcode/code-on-the-fly during the interview. Just keep it short i.e. 2-4 hours max.

As far as alternatives to a coding challenge, the OP did suggest walking through a prior project on GitHub. I think that's a great idea (in addition to a coding challenge though); an open source project on GitHub is a bonus for a candidate, and will in many cases steer the interviewer to ask questions about your project in lieu of abstract concepts.

joeax··on Politically-correct witch-hunt is killing free speech
I hate to remind everyone but PC culture is here to stay. We can all complain about but the fact is no one has a solution, except for staying off social media (which I generally have been doing, and I've never been happier).

Need proof? Go watch the movie PCU, made in 1994.

joeax··on Wells Fargo temporarily suspending applications for home-equity lines of credit
Two years ago someone I know was laid off. After a three-month climb to find a new job, they vowed to put together an emergency fund. After a sudden drop in rates, they took out a small cash-out refinance. Luckily they still have a job, but the fact that they now have that cushion puts their mind at ease.

Lesson learned: take advantage of cheap credit while you can.

joeax··on Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors
Just go to any paint store and you'll find yourself halfway there. When we were searching for gray tones we were stunned at the creative names we saw for the thousands of grays available i.e. "mindful gray" "blissful stone" etc.

That's got a be a dream job for some uber-creative artist.

joeax··on Working from home – things no one talks about
I figured it was only a matter of time before all the WFH "advice" articles would start. This guys's been doing it for 2 weeks and he's already an expert dispensing advice. I've been WFH for 8 years, so reading this is a bunch of LOL.

Regarding headphones, this is not an issue once you move into a dedicated office space in your house. One thing I use to hate is taking headphones on/off every time there's a call. Regarding set hours, that's totally a preference. I work late at night sometimes because I feel like it. WFH means flexibility and not commuting means sometimes I get a jolt of inspiration to work off hours. I don't mind because the trade-off is I get to take time off during the day to attend school events for my kids.

Remote work is a lifestyle change for sure. More loneliness, more discipline, less water-cooler gossip. It requires the right mindset and personality that some of you don't have, and I'm sure you're itching to get back to the office.

joeax··on A programming language based on the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger
Some possible language extensions:

NewObject = IT'S NOT A TUMOR

DeallocateObject = YOU'VE JUST BEEN ERASED

WriteToFile = COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE

joeax··on Stress That Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox (2004) [pdf]
I've been working remote for 8 years and so my commute is 0 mins. But in my experience companies that allow remote work have caught on to this commute time==money dynamic and have adjusted their offered compensation accordingly. More than once have I had or heard the conversation that "well, you have the perk of no commute + living in a lower cost area, so based on that the compensation target for you is X - Y", where Y is $10-20k less.

The question I wrestle with: is it fair?

1. For living in a lower cost area, no. If I live in SF I benefit/pay a premium for living in a nicer area. That should have nothing to do with compensation (unless they are located in SF and need me close by).

2. For not having a commute, maybe. I think it is fair for a company to pay a premium to have someone onsite. But that premium should be the same whether I walk 5 mins to work or drive 50 miles.

joeax··on Bedridden for 11 years, he discovered a surgery for his adrenal condition
The problem probably lies somewhere between afraid of getting sued and not wanting to shake the medical groupthink apple cart.

Last year I was suffering through a bout of strange fatigue that came about right after a mysterious throat infection. There were days I could barely go up the stairs without being winded or without assistance. I googled around and started reading about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and found this large, shadow community of millions of sufferers. Many of these people have had these symptoms for years, and when they go to the doctor they are simply told "It's all in your head," and if lucky, they'll run some tests and prescribe something that gives them temporary relief.

I asked my cousin who is a doctor about his opinion on CFS, and he told me it was difficult to diagnose and even harder to treat. The most they will do is refer you to a specialist or even psychiatrist.

After a couple months my fatigue went away on its own. But I did find that creatine helped. And this has been backed by others in the CFS community who have stated that eating raw meat relieves their symptoms (natural creatine in meat is destroyed once cooked). But a doctor would never tell me that, because if there isn't conclusive proof from a medical journal and/or a big pharma drug to prescribe, they are either too afraid or unwilling to say anything.

joeax··on White House weighs encryption crackdown
While the war on drugs is in its waning days, there is a (aging) segment on the right that worships law enforcement and is generally in support of more laws and heavy-handed police tactics.

I think the OP is calling some these people out as hypocrites who demand "touch on crime" policies that disproportionally affect poorer communities, while they themselves break laws.

That aside, I find the hypocrisy elsewhere, namely the people who want small government but who want everyone to pay billions for mass incarceration (and raise taxes for more police) as a result of these policies.

joeax··on I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
The whole "false positives" narrative is an example of the "saying something enough makes it true" fallacy.

I've interviewed dozens of people, and you can easily root out false positives by asking about their prior experience. Simply probing about things like design patterns to challenges with Javacript front-end coding is enough. If the candidate can go into explicit detail about past projects including bugs they fixed and limitations they came across in a Angular 6 project (as an example), then that's usually a good sign they know what they're talking about.

joeax··on Ask HN: Best Passive Income Method?
I self-published on Amazon. I got inspired by an author friend who had like 20 books on Amazon and quit his job to write full-time.

Steps I took:

- research the science for my story

- write an outline of my novel

- read a book on how to write a compelling story, for me it was "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass

- write the novel

- edit the novel iteratively, hiring an editor if necessary (strongly recommended for most people)

- send out copies to friends and family for feedback

- convert to Word doc to an epub file

- hire a cover designer

- publish on Amazon

- run ads on BookBuB, Facebook, Amazon

joeax··on Ask HN: Best Passive Income Method?
I'd like to add that SPY yield if you invested today is 1.9%, but if you dollar-cost average invested over the past 10 years, your yield-on-cost would be much higher ~5-6%.
joeax··on Ask HN: Best Passive Income Method?
My 0.000002 BTC: I've tried several side projects over the years, a productivity SaaS app, a dating site, monetizing an open source project. I eventually gave up on those and wrote a sci-fi novel that generated a sizable income stream for a while.

I will say that it's a crowded space and eventually your income will peter out unless you spend big on advertising. But if you say, crank out one novel per year, you could potentially achieve economies of scale and generate a sizable (salary-replacing) income stream.

joeax··on The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
The article is paywalled so they are also profiting from it as well.
joeax··on Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
This is pretty egregious, but in reality the only thing that was copied was the docs for the API, not the API itself. The other company still has the write all the backend code, and given their track record of just ripping stuff off, may not have the engineering chops to pull it off. In addition, as Smartcar continuously improves their product and API, the other company can only react to these changes.

If I was the OP, my reaction would be shock and horror too. But then I'd realize the old axiom of imitation is the best form of flattery.

joeax··on Why we’re switching to calendar versioning
Not only that, but the seasons have different meanings to different people depending on where in the USA you live. In my hot and desert climate spring means late February, but in Minnesota it could mean mid-May.

When you see a season mentioned in American marketing it basically means they have no idea. If a company says "spring 2019" it could mean sometime in April, or on June 20, hours before the summer solstice.

joeax··on Amazon makes 14 cents from every Lyft ride
Maybe I read the OP wrong but I've never heard of building out and/or holding data center real estate assets. I worked for a large data center and even they leased their buildings. Their customers included government, big banks, large tech (even FAANG level) and they either colo'd or leased space.

There are dedicated REITs that hold only high-tech/data center real estate.

joeax··on How to pass a programming interview (2016)
Neither does this famous guy [1]. All these interviews do is waste a lot of time and generate a lot of false negatives.

You can practice all you want to get better, but no one in the corporate world is saying "I need you to code bubble sort, and I need in the next 45 minutes" and then proceeds to stand over your shoulder the entire time.

[1] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/834146806594433025

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