kat

I think it depends on the size of the company rather than the city the company is located in.

I moved 800 miles to my current location, a city of 80000 in Oregon. My Employer paid to fly me out for the interview. I was also re-reimbursed for the move as well. The company is an international company with HR policies in place for moving people, there was no issue about my move. The only constraint from the actual city was the fact that vacancy rates for rentals is < 1%. Its pretty near impossible to find some where to live.

The secret approach seems to happen in America as well. I've seen it several times. Some quits and no one is told until a few days beforehand. People on other teams are not told until later, etc.

In Canada its much more open. Everyone knows, you give more 4-2 weeks depending on how senior you are. Usually there is gift-giving/going for lunch/etc.

Couple of my favourite performance review processes:

- "do your job" should be one of the goals. I want credit for doing my job, rather than having all my goals be tasks that are slightly outside of my job description

- Include soft skills and technical skills in everybody's review. Technical skills are not very useful if you can't explain why or what you've made.

- If you have to work under broad company goals, make examples of what this concretely relates to. ie "make quality software" becomes "maintained 80% test coverage" or "gave a presentation on TDD" etc.

- cost-of-living raises are given for "average" people. The market for developers is too hot to keep people at their existing salary. The company needs to keep salaries at market level which means increasing salaries for everyone, except the "below expected" people.

- quarterly reviews instead of one annual review, keeps people motivated and less surprises

FYI, the Legacy code book is: Working effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. Its useful, I also strongly recommend it when you're feeling overwhelmed by a large sprawling code base.

https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fe...

There are a lot of other reasons for wanting to freeze eggs besides wanting to put your career first.

I know women who have gone through chemotherapy, and froze their eggs before their treatment. I imagine there are a lot of other drugs and medical produces that adversely effect eggs and aren't covered by traditional health insurance. There's also family obligations, rather than career 'obligations', or simply working now to save money for family later. I don't think this benefit is a one-sided item.

I agree that cash is some times better than putting in the time, but there are a few other options.

A lot of the environmental nonprofitsare staffed by people who don't have a lot of technical experience. I've built websites, helped organize CRMs (tracking volunteer membership), helped setup email templates, etc. I know free computer help was deeply appreciated, and I got a lot better with my communication skills in the process.

Have you asked HR or your boss if they have an explicit mentorship program at your new job? Also, when I'm feeling overwhelmed, and don't know what questions to ask, I usually grab a coworker and ask "Do you have 30 minutes? I'd like you to sit with me and review what I'm doing. I would like more direction to get this task started/finished".

If there is nothing formal at your current place, you can try the informal route. Ask a coworker to join you when you go for a coffee break, and informally chat about work. Ask a few questions to see how they respond. This process is slow, but personally I've had the most success with this approach. (Yes, its politiking)

In my opinion, formal mentorship programs are uncommon. Usually the senior devs are under pressure to ship and don't have the option to help the new people (junior or not).

If you're Canadian, 100% back is not possible. Here's the CRA page with an example: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/charities-g...

Find a book that introduces to programming patterns. I read 'Design Patterns' from the Head-First series when starting out http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfdp/

My advice for Vancouver: - Tech Jobs: look on craigslist (surprisingly good!)

- Salaries: Look on glassdoor. Also look on the CRA website (CRA is the IRS in Canada) to see which tax bracket you'll be in - you'll notice lower salaries and higher taxes, as many people have already pointed out

- Interesting Companies: Lots! Microsoft, Amazon, Hootsuite, and more. There is an increasing number of big tech companies that have figure out its cheaper to have a Canadian office than an American office. There are less tech jobs but there are also less tech people - It sounds like you have a niche background, so it might take a little longer to find a job.

FWIW - My lawyers said renewing your TN Visa, when you live in the States is expected to be difficult - as opposed to living in Canada, and crossing the border every day for work.

My company heavily suggested I switch to h1b simply because they expected my TN visa renewal to be denied (I am now on a h1b1)

Totally agree! My current team always asks increasing complex questions in an interview until we the candidate admits 'I dont know that'. People with good soft skills can easily say 'I dont know, what does happen in that case?'. They come off as polite and self-aware. My other favourite interview question is what do you do when QA says they can reproduce a bug but you cant? A lot of developers don't have the soft skills to explain how they work with QA instead of against QA.

I agree. I have friends who wear makeup to work that reason. The confidence from looking like they are put-together. I imagine wearing a suit can be the same mental confidence.

I have a unique background, I have experience with A and with B which means I can navigate ambiguous/conflicting situations etc

Usually A and B are opposing skills, like "I can code" and "I enjoy talking to people" or "I know backend programming" and "I have experience doing HTML design work"

I agree! If you're including a cover letter, don't add it as an attachment to your email, put the contents of the cover letter into the email body.

I think email messages are especially important if you're trying to preemptively explain resume issues like career switches, geographical relocation, taken a gap-year, etc

To add to this, Canadian Universities also have co-op programs.

You don't have to have an engineering degree to get a co-op job. The student gets paid well over minimum wage (and learns on the job) and the employers get financial incentives from the gov't to hire students. Its win-win for both the student and the employer.

Atlantic salmon are larger than native species on the coast, so more business value. They also grow faster than than native salmon.

This article is frustrating because it shows how misunderstood computing and math is. She feels that coding is a fringe skill that you don't need in life. she completely misses the point of teaching troubleshooting skills.

It also interesting that she equates computers with cars and toliets, ie trade work that you should take for granted. I don't know if that is classest or simply her personal distaste for machinery. This dim view of coding is what holds people back from entering the IT industry. I've had this view thrown at me before, but I never know how to respond.

How do you convince someone outside of IT, without any STEM background, that IT is as important as knowing how to use a toilet plunger?

There's a few new questions on this list I haven't seen before. They definitely gave me pause and forced me to think. I think they are two great questions for a more senior position. It makes you reflect on leadership and the ability to admit you're terrible at something.

- What’s something you’re bad at that you really wish you were good at. - Tell me about some people you’ve helped in your career.

Quick math. If a person is paying 1654 /month in rent, and 12 months in a year, and you're paying 30% in taxes. 1654 * 12 * 1.3 = 25802

25k of your gross salary is going to your rent!

I think its because coastal BC is very resource heavy. It use to be fishing and logging (think bumper stickers with the slogan timber dollars feed my family). Both of those industries pay well but have been in decline for the last few decades.

It shows exactly how dependent we are on resourced-based economies. The west coast is all red, forestry and fishing crashed on the west coast, and the prairies are all green, oil boom from the last few decades. I'm a little surprised that immigration between provinces did not even out incomes between the two resource boom/bust cycles.

White girl here - I totally agree with this approach.

Look for the egos! Ask what happens if a developer disagrees with PM requirements, ask if they do code reviews/how they run code reviews, ask how they interact with QA (some times unfairly perceived as lesser teammates), etc

I find workplaces with a wide range of backgrounds, ages, married/unmarried, kids/no kids, university educated/self taught, are the most accepting/professional environments.

Very much YES! Being able to read the code is a required skill for working on enterprise applications. Fixing bugs and adding features will have to play nicely with the old code. If you don't understand the old code, your new code will make matters worse. You may accomplish your short term goal, but without the ability to read and understand the old code you will create a very brittle solution.

Bootstrap! http://bootstrapdocs.com/ Their documentation is great. They have useful code examples that are simple enough to copy+paste into your own code, but are complex enough to show off the entire feature.

That's actually one of the neat things I discovered when I moved to the States. Its not uncommon to meet a fellow developer that started after servering in the military. I've also met a lot of developers who started out in QA and other positions, so they were older when they got their first developer job. Any reasonable company will see your life experience as a advantage .

The .codes amuses me. I like the idea of having my resume on http://kat.codes (although sadly I don't own that url)

If you're living in Canada on a savings account that is in USD, then yes, you're ahead by 30%. Otherwise you're making cdn dollars and spending cdn dollars, so you don't see the 30% difference in cost of living.

And as far as I know the big companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, do pay more than market salary in Canada. Their Canadian offices are not nearly as large though, they don't influence the wages/benefits culture as much as they do in the States.

As someone with Canadian and American work experience, I think US wages are higher because there is more capital in the States. Both Canada and the States struggle to find qualified software devs. The companies that can afford to pay more, get their pick of devs out of a very small pool, so the wages increase. However, in Canada, the companies won't/can't pay as much, so the devs end up making less, or moving south. Brain-drain is a problem in Canada for a lot of different industries (healthcare is hugely impacted).

The cost of housing in Vancouver, Canada is right behind New York and San Fran. I don't think wages has anything to do with cost of living. In general I think Canadian investments are less risk tolerant, the market doesn't shift as fast as it does in the States, and therefore less cash flow. Also, its in the employers best interest to keep salaries down and convince their employees that living in Canada (Vancouver instead of San Fran) is better (how ever you define better).

I worked at a company that started having code reviews. We started off by just "presenting" code to the team. The team would point out any thing that looked like a bug or areas that required extra QA effort. Just knowing you would have to present your code was enough to increase code quality. We didn't worry about style/best practices/subjective feedback at the beginning. Over a few months we all became more comfortable receiving and giving feedback and that's when we started to solidify the style guidelines. Also our ability to catch bugs without QA cycles helped increase buy-in for code reviews.