leap_ahead

At the very least you should inform the company about the upcoming conflict of interests on the horizon. Let them know you won't be able to start work on that project until you've both figured out your legal ground.

As common advice goes, seek a lawyer's advice. Alternatively talk to the company lawyer whose job may also involve sorting out things like this so you can save on fees.

Something I also wanted to say. Consider changing your scenery. It might give a boost to your morale and supply you with new and better ideas. Perhaps find a job on another continent for a change.

I was there some years ago. I realized that the root cause of the problem was focusing on the wrong things (at least they were wrong for me).

Tools are just that - they are tools. Granted, there are many of them, new and shining, coming in all packages, but that gets tiresome after you've spent a substantial period of time with them. They are all essentially the same and sooner or later you lose interest in them.

What never gets boring is using tools to create things that affect people's lives. And I gather from your message that you've missed that joy.

My advice is simple. Think of some thing that would be helpful to (non-technical) end users. Come up with some kind of service that would solve even a small problem for them. Then see your eyes light up as people are adopting your offering and giving you their thanks.

In short, your work must have a meaning. You should know that somehow what you do improves the world we live in, even if in a small and seemingly insignificant way. For as long as you're just finishing tasks prepared by somebody else for somebody else's meaningless projects, you're not going to be happy. As with all creative professions, in programming too you have to take matter in your own hands.

You've just realized (subconsciously) that your work has been meaningless. You basically need to find your path. What you could do:

- Forget about the tools, just pick up something you're comfortable with and create something useful for people

- Change jobs until you find a project you can personally identify with and where you'll see you work affecting the outside world in a tangible way

- Change profession or role to the one where your need for meaning will be satisfied

That's hard I know. I wish it weren't but it's just the way things are in life.

It may soon be time for extraterrestrial emigration. This planet is done.

I'm sorry you're going through that kind of feelings, they're pretty heavy to live with on a daily basis. A month under that stress counts almost as a year.

I've always liked France and its culture, and I speak French on some level, I guess that's why I take personally all bad things that I hear from France, as if they concerned mon pays natal.

If you'd like we could exchange privately, I could attempt to cheer you up (from the position of a person living in a place that has fallen much lower than yours), though I realize there's not much I can say to remedy the gloom you're seeing around you.

From what I heard French are obliged to surrender encryption keys at the request of authorities or go to jail for a few years for denying their request. The only thing that may be left is to pack your things and go.

(Russian here). I so much understand you brother (or sister). We've got an even harder wave of prohibitive laws and the local IT industry has been brought to its knees. Companies have been leaving, people have been leaving. I haven't seen any appealing job openings for close to two years. I myself am thinking of emigrating, even thought about France, but now I'm not sure it was such a good idea.

>> So much potential is wasted... That's the most tragic thing indeed. You can import food, clothes, cars and so on but you can't import talent. When it goes, it's final.

>> shuffle at the company completely rendering myself and a couple of others redundant

>> I have a good relationship with the company.

Do you see how these two facts don't match up?

The company used you. They most likely promised you a great career path and are about to toss you out.

Use them to buy yourself some time and then toss them out.

Don't worry about it. It's just business.

Never left them in the first place. Great products actually.

Also lots of hardware available, everything is upgradeable. Not like MBP with soldered RAM, soldered SSD, weak ventilation system, no LAN and just 2 USB ports. Can buy a laptop or assemble your own desktop workstation.

Linux I don't know. It still looks ugly and no great apps available for it. Visual Studio for Linux? Adobe tools for Linux? Of course not. Just amateur toys and fonts with ragged edges. Thanks but no thanks.

No, the disk is fine. I just wish that VM cost $20, perhaps $25, but not $57 which it costs now (I've corrected my original post, it was not $67 but $57 as I remembered wrongly).

I wish to publish a relatively simple app for a reasonable price and I'm sadly skipping Azure from my consideration. I'm seeing VMs similar to A1 cost about $12-15 with many hosting companies. And for $20-25 I can get your level A2 which costs $115.

I realize you may not be in a position to influence pricing. I just would like to point out that the pricing of Azure VMs is not simply uncompetitive, but plainly prohibitive. I hope Microsoft does something about it.

Saying it as a veteran Microsoft developer since the 90s.

VCs are overrated. They can take your company and throw you out if they don't like you. I have actually witnessed that happen. Stay clear of them if you don't want to lose your business.

Talent of SV is also overrated. Smart people are available everywhere, many of them not interested in going to the US. Pay them reasonable salary and they will build you anything.

Drop the prices for Azure VMs to the reasonable level similar to that of the other hosting companies. Right now the first tolerable configuration A1 costs $57 and this can be had for $15 elsewhere.

Please also make your payment processor accept virtual credit cards so I can actually pay you money with the means I have (not in a possession of a real credit card). PayPal will also do nicely.

I'd be more curious to see a salary range analysis. It would quickly turn up that of hundreds of Germany startups perhaps a ten or so pay some reasonable money while the rest stick with the 40-50K range and set for cheap workforce only.

It's not about the numbers. It's about people. Right now not a single individual can be trusted not to misuse somebody's personal details, through malice or negligence, and not create a severe risk for the owner. Being one in a narrow selection of computer professionals doesn't help much. One can be a genius and a person of low ethical standards at the same time. No solution until the civilization progresses much further than what we have now. Until then, lock down the Whois database. Even better, discontinue it altogether. Let individual registrars hold the personal details of their customers. At least it will remove the risk of compromising everyone's privacy with one action by not putting all eggs in one basket.

He said nothing of the kind. He said he was "an aspiring programmer". That type can find a good place in Europe as well.

It's not the place that makes you successful, it's your efforts. Getting into the US alone won't change your life. You have to bring something with you. If you've got nothing, then, well, you've got nothing.

You may want to consider Europe too. Many countries will give you their citizenship in just 5 years. No dependence on the employer, change them at your will.

You also get free education for your children, relatively free medical help as well as the cultural diversity.

Agreed. The mere idea of having to globally expose your personal details is idiotic. Or at least it belongs to a more civilized society we're not seeing a glimpse of yet.

So if one wanted to knock over a competitor's business, it would only take to arrange for the owner to be unavailable for a couple of weeks, send this email, wait for the deadline, grab the domain. Profit.

What happens if you become sick or get in an accident and must go to a hospital? Game over?

The way most companies conduct interviews is one sure way to never hire the best talent anyway, even if they actually wanted it. So they end up with mediocre people, those who have memorized all the right answers to standard questions.

At the same time, these hiring practices push away the real talent who has better things to do with their time than to play the game. This talent is now sitting somewhere and building a startup of their own. Perhaps even a competitor of yours.

Actually, hiring new colleagues is part of the job. Developers MUST participate in it somehow, otherwise you get a team composed from totally random people who have nothing in common. You don't want to work in such a place.

Companies use recruiters mostly because they feel they have no skills to perform hiring themselves, when they have no HR staff etc. Most of them are unaware that recruiters actually make quality hiring nearly impossible, through ignorance, misrepresentation of facts or open lies.

Companies seem not to know that developers generally avoid recruiters and seek a direct contact. I had it many times that recruiters ruined potential opportunities for me as a candidate, that is why I said them goodbye a long time ago.

With the way recruiters approach their work today, I'm convinced they have no place in the IT hiring process and actually do more harm than good. They have no qualifications to perform their job well and none seem to be even remotely interested in obtaining the necessary knowledge. Recruiting seems to be a short term job - today they hire programmers, tomorrow they end up in the sales department of a manufacturing company and will be selling tires, the day after that they'll be doing something else. It probably makes no sense to them to be wasting time learning something weird when they can spend this time cold-calling and selling whatever stuff they're on today.

Update. Almost forgot. Sometimes people go to recruiters to relieve themselves of the responsibilities for a potential bad hire. Employing the services of a staffing company will make the person look like acting in the best interests of the company, and if a bad hire happens here, it can easily be attributed to the failure of the staffing company, not to the mistakes of the person who hired recruiters.

>> recruiters have the network?

They do not. Their "network" comes from scraping resumes from Monster and similar sites.

They store this database of resumes and addresses then send out a wave of emails for every next position they get, then process the replies from whoever replied to those mails and there you have your candidates.

I found that unsubscribing from those staffing firm mailing lists doesn't work but in some cases. In that regard UK agencies seem to be the worst of the bunch. Eventually I had to report those emails as spam and after a while the spam filter learned to catch those email automatically saving me the trouble.

I was trying to highlight the fact that if you intend on improving your Russian by hanging out on Russian community sites, you're going to be learning broken language and will be doing yourself a disservice in that regard.

I realize I talked about a local problem that the global community is unaware of. In short, people are becoming increasingly illiterate, as in they cannot compose grammatically correct texts, coherently express their thoughts and sometimes cannot understand certain words from the imaginative literature from just 50 years ago. People used to have large bookshelves at homes during Soviet times, now the majority doesn't read anything except what they can find on social networks. As it is, they unlearn correct language and learn broken language from their own illiterate fellows. If you attempt to interact with the community online, you will learn wrong things. And I cannot say if it would be possible to relearn the corrected variants later. Better not go down that road.

Basically I'm talking about: wrong spelling of words, non-existent words, wrong expressions, wrong combinations of words, ways of constructing sentences that are wrong and incomprehensible, not to mention a large amount of curse words. You really don't want any of these.

As to the language itself, while it is massively different from English and related languages families, it is a natural language derived from the lifestyle of our ancestors. Words are sufficiently different from each other to be easily recognized and sometimes their sounding alone can give you an idea of what these could mean like something good or bad or whatever emotions they might express. Way better than learning German words for instance.

I'm struggling to give you some useful advice, not being a language teacher however I'm not quite sure where I can help. I'm dwelling on that though.

Not quite giving you any tips, but a word of warning. Avoid learning Russian through Russian-language community sites based on user-submitted content such as comments, posts etc. For the last couple of decades we've been seeing a trend of getting more and more people who are illiterate in writing, with the last three years seeing an explosive epidemic on our hands. It is now very rare to see user-submitted content written with the quality ready for publication. Speaking of reasons, there are many. Young people don't like to study and become smart so they don't read books anymore. Basically they hang out online and learn illiterate language from each other, such that these incorrect forms of speech have now proliferated to every corner of the web, polluting everything and affecting the rest of the Internet users, gradually replacing the correct forms with the wrong ones in their minds.

If I were to take HN community for example, this level of quality writing many display while expressing their thoughts cannot be found on the Russian community sites anymore.

There is also a staggering amount of hate speech and insults of all kinds. Most of it is not moderated as this style of interaction has become the standard way for most users. If it were to be moderated, it would mean wiping out over 90% of the user-submitted content resulting in a substantial drop of traffic, so nobody is doing it.

Many people (myself included) are now ignoring Russian sites seeing them as dumping grounds, preferring to stick with the international community instead.

Read books, not the modern ones, but those from at least 30-40 years ago. That's where you find a rich beautiful language in all its colors and the depth of thought.

It basically amounts to two alternatives:

1) they make it intentional for whatever purpose - stop scrappers, prevent search engine indexing, pull in ads etc.

2) they make it out of incompetence - probably somebody with insufficient web development skills just used some popular JavaScript framework to quickly cook up a site

Now the majority of the customers won't care, but if you're targeting a professional audience, this will not score you any points. If you were a software development company hiring and I were to reply to your invitation, I would first go to your website. If I saw a blank screen in my browser, my first question to you would be why a serious company does have a broken site. Depending on what I heard I might skip you altogether.

Personally, I don't think there are any difficulties in doing a "text-only" version as you call it. That's how I always approach things - do a classic version then add some gradual enhancements. I can't imagine doing it the other way around actually.

And yes, you can call me out of touch with the times, but text pages rank higher and more credible in my eyes then all of the JavaScript toys I see around.

I see you're accepting PayPal. Keep in mind they're known to arbitrarily freeze accounts so this is a risk for you. Also businesses in Europe prefer wire transfer rather than anything which is rather a customer payment solution. I assume you're in Europe or targeting European clients since you're billing in Euros. You may want to register a company and open a bank account instead.

The largest problem however is that you're anonymous. While this may work in countries like Russia and Ukraine which are used to everyone hiding from everyone, this is unlikely to take off with German customers for example. They want to know your name, your official address, your phone number, the official registry number for your company, the bank account number and the location to settle legal disputes clearly stated. Your photo and the listing of your diplomas and certificates would be needed as well. The .tk domain name doesn't really help either. You GMail free email address makes no sense given that you already own a custom domain.

As it is, you appear to be just another guy from a freelancing site who's trying to stand out against the crowd. But since you're anonymous, I can't see why anyone would fall for you.

No offense intended, just a honest opinion of your offering.

P.S. Your copyright notice also makes little sense. It basically says that the domain name owns the copyright which is not possible. A natural person or a legal entity can hold the rights, a domain name is an object and cannot own anything. You may want to put in there your name or the name of your company, if you've got one registered.

>> The DEA is looking out for our safety by implementing this well-intentioned protocol

Criminals have a large body of very smart people working for them to develop new creative ways or hiding money flows across different legal entities and different jurisdictions. These people don't travel with cash. You won't even find out their names.

These laws don't help with serious offenders just catch some small fish on occasion and also terrorize ordinary innocent people.

This is a complex question and not the one I can answer in five minutes. But I'll give you some pointers.

1) Focus on broadening your skill set, not deepening it. If you like some tool and wish to explore it to the depth, that's fine, but do not stay there for a decade. Learn a full stack. Get things done from start to finish single-handedly. Several times over.

2) Adopt a certain mental state and attitude. Consider your job just a temporary assignment, an instrument for you to acquire valuable skills and meet important people. Know it can end at at any time, so can the next job, such that you will just be buying your time until your ship comes. Don't become a slacker though, do your job well, just don't expect it to secure your future till the retirement.

3) Adopt a critical view of the things. Get to form your own opinion and view on a variety of matters. Don't take anything for granted, check and verify things, try to guess problems and prepare for them so that they don't catch you by surprise. Learn to be in control. The trick is not to overdo it and not to start doing it too soon before you have acquired sufficient experience, otherwise your run the risk of turning into an arrogant all-knowing jerk impossible to work with. Be careful here.

4) Actively look for opportunities to try things on your own, be it taking a charge of a small project, helping a customer or building your own thing. Learn to feel being "one against the entire world". Don't let it scare you but instead excite you.

5) Invest in social skills just as much as you invest in technical proficiency. From a certain point of your professional growth your work becomes more social than technical. Learn to communicate well with various people.

There is more to it of course but this should get you started. I'll add to this post if anything else crosses my mind.

You might be right that I'm being irrational. But I've really developed some apprehensive attitude towards the US over the last few years. And the worst thing is, any new day brings some new information that reinforces this fear. Things are objectively getting worse, not better. Somehow I'll have to live with it. But at least I'm not doing any business in the US, so this is not a practical problem for me.

>> Another example would be to see how long someone could shout obscenities at Putin in front of the Kremlin without getting thrown in the back of a truck. In the US, we have the freedom of press to put out articles like this.

You are correct. US rates better on the freedom of press. The only problem, the articles like this, do they have any power to change things or is it just talk and talk and nothing gets changed?

>> I'm sure the everyday life of a Russian isn't totally miserable, and the US has its major issues, but I can't think of a single civil-rights issue where Russia is a leader.

We do have free medical service available to everyone and also free higher education. They're not as good as they once were (sometimes terrible) but they are available to everyone.

I'd call these basic human rights, access to medical help and access to education.