karuneshkaushal

I read 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond in College and it is single handedly the most insightful book I have ever read.

One of these days I will buy all of Jared Diamond's and Robert Greene's books and read them multiple times.

> I'm an immigrant, they helped me get Permanent Residency, and I've always been underpaid. The company has a chronic history of underpaying and undervaluing tech people.

Whatever you are considering at this time, please please please do not think in terms of gratitude for this company. They brought you to your current job because of your utility. They are NOT in the business of helping immigrants. At worst, if you leave, another immigrant will get their chance at a Permanent Residency.

> Three friends in the last three months have stood their ground and eventually just walked out, the company didn't try to offer them anything to stay on, even though they're doing the work of 10 people and are basically irreplaceable.

I would start looking for other options EVEN IF they offer me better compensation/benefits etc. Any time someone more can leave, leaving you with like double or triple the work. We can be almost sure there are no stock options etc. in your company for tech people. You can't go on negotiating pay every few months. It is hard, and makes you look very selfish: "the company is in a constant 'crisis', and this guy just wants increased comp/benefits." (No matter how self-made the crisis is)

> it's hard to not let this get to me.

I have not had something like this happen to me, but I am sure it will get easier after another round of interviews with another company. You will almost forget about this experience after you land a good opportunity, other than for the anecdotal value :-)

> .. the CTO has probably been whispering poison in his ear about you.

This just has to be true.

Are your family fine and with you? Do you get to meet/call/email these friends now?

I can't vote either. I am from India.

It is nice that you wrote about it.

Unknowingly, I used to think for a few hours (1-3 mostly) daily until I was in college. Never noticed it. But after I got into my first job in 2011, I started missing this time because of 10-11 hours of work and 1 hour drive both ways.

The following is something from your post I would like to write somewhere and read again and again, any maybe quote if I get to writing on similar topics.

<i>Passively creating a product won't cut the mustard anymore. It used to be that you could design something cool and tell your friends, and they'd tell theirs and so on. Then bigger companies got wind of this and started exploiting it with "Social Media contests" and the like. Now, if you try and tell your friends about something, they'll ignore it or worse, see you as a corporate shill.

In the days of the Altair, it was possible to wow audiences by making a game. Every new game has to live up to the greats of it's genera (hard) or create a new one (harder). And yet, books have been around for millennia and great ones still come out. I think it's safe to say that it's absolutely possible to come up with good material, perhaps even easier now that one can study the greats.</i>

You are spot-on with (not) trying to make your friends your first audience, I have been that way with my blog, and it just annoyed some of them.

A great post. Almost everything we do is broken in some way or another, but I am sure mostly it is better than before, and you writing this way means you want things to be better in the future.

Mingling with experts, or people who are simply better than us is underrated. Most of us would easily go for another job that pays more than the current one, and not only in terms of money. (I, for one, am going for a non programming job that I consider better)

So, you have made me realize something.

First of all, I should mention right now that I fully take your "theory" of 3 things to be true.

I think it is very, very difficult to have all 3 things. Most people would be lucky to have 1, really lucky to have any 2 and really, really lucky to have all 3.

But.... here comes the internet. IMO the net is a very good open resource for learning and programming. Just take our very own Rebolbot as an example. And like I mentioned earlier, you can easily find guidance from better people here.

Btw, I love your writing. Not read the whole of your blog, but I love it. Keep writing, keep enjoying it

:-)

What you wrote might not be true for hackers everywhere, because different places are moving at different pace. I say this because I am from India. For 1 teenage hacker here, I am sure you have 10 teenage hackers there (in US or Europe I suppose), and we are like, more populous. But I suppose this kind of stuff also has to do with a lot less people here having the "luxury" of having computers, but that is for a different talk/chat/thread :-)

Out of the three things that you wrote, I can only relate to one.

I started programming after getting into college, and still I am sure, lots of teenage hackers there (wherever you are) can very easily better me. Secondly, I have not had the chance to have a mentor. (But I think hostilefork and other guys in the Rebol room are changing it)

The third thing is, that I have worked at two different jobs for a period of one-and-a-half years. And I understand what you mean by exposure to reality. It means 2 things to me:

- dealing with politics.

- delivering despite the previous point.

And no matter how much I despise my two software jobs, I will say that the people skills I learnt there were more important than the programming experience. I no more work at a software job now, and I am not even sure if I would really do one in the near and far future.

This is a fact that the way we are teaching hackers is not the right way, but we are improving. Some places faster, some slower. Some places are moving backwards, but it is tangential to your discussion. What I loved about your post was that instead of enumerating 20,000 points on how the present hacker education system, you said what you thought should be done. This is positive thought, instead of passive thought.

:-)