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Back when I applied for an H1B visa, the chances that I'd be outright rejected was 30%. The next few years I believe it climbed to 60%. Just the fact that I found a company willing to apply to my visa involved a lot of luck. Even me being on the US before the H1B involved a lot of luck. Then luck to get the visa. So much of my career was based on luck. Sure, I seized some opportunities when they flew by, but it's not like I was steering super hard to make them happen. Some people will make success happen because they're super smart and relentless, but for a lot of people like me, I believe there's an incredible amount of luck involved.

It kind of grinds my gears when some people give lessons on how to be successful and don't acknowledge that luck was a part of it.

It would also favor really large companies, that don't necessarily hire better engineers, but pay substantially more.

There are multiple ways to make a project fit into a deadline: - change/reduce the scope => lowers the value of the product - cut corners: for ex. skip testing, ignore bugs, work faster, skip code reviews, etc. => lower quality - work longer hours (lower quality + human cost) - throw more resources at the problem: may scale poorly if at all, as well as usually results in lower quality and more friction, aka human cost

It's all about weighing everything and making the right trade-offs. Sometimes short term solutions are the right approach, maybe you need a POC more than a polished product to get that next round of funding or something.

I've struggled with that in the past, and next time I'm presented with this kind of project, I'll clearly explain the trade-offs, for example translating lower quality to: this may increase the number of bug reports significantly, increase the maintenance cost, prevent the addition of other features with significant overhauls, this and this engineer may start looking for another job, etc.

At my company we've used for a few years each: Hangout, Bluejeans, and Zoom. We got acquired so now we're also using Skype and Teams alongside Zoom. Zoom didn't really invent anything groundbreaking, they did the same thing but with a better execution, it's more pleasant to use.

Similarly, we used Hipchat before Slack, and now we have Teams and Slack. Slack serves the same purpose, but it's more pleasant to use than the other two.

Neither Slack nor Zoom were groundbreaking products, and they had significant competition. They both do the same thing as their competitors, and you could argue the difference isn't crazy, but the user experience improvements are enough to justify switching products.

I guess I'm just confirming that I had a similar experience to yours.

I think it's a common theme of how fraudsters get caught, they get greedy.

This is unacceptable. Any competitors you guys can recommend?

https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/ it looks like it would? I'm no expert though.

It would be really surprised if this were compliant with the GDPR. I live in the US but I tried email accounts of relatives in Europe and they had data in there.

Knewton @ Wiley | Full-stack, Frontend, Backend, SRE | Full Time | ONSITE (Hoboken, NJ) & REMOTE (US) | https://www.knewton.com/

Knewton is an affordable adaptive learning platform for higher-education. We're competing with product like ALEKS or MyMathLab. We're looking for software engineers to help improve our product! As the company is not 100% remote, remote roles are better suited for more experienced candidates. We're part of Wiley, and we are working as an entity within the tech org.

We have a flexible work schedule with WFH days, a collaborative culture, and a strong commitment to building a product with a measurable impact on student outcomes.

Tech Stack:

* Frontend: React/Typescript, node

* Backend: Java/Python, PostgreSQL

* Infra: Mesos/Marathon (working on Kubernetes!), CI/CD, Gerrit

Hit us up at recruiting+hn@knewton.com !

It does, I moved to New Jersey from France, and my phone was in French. Navigation was kind of funny because it was attempting to pronounce English words as if they were French. For instance, street was pronounced "stré" ("streh", if you are not familiar with é).

Google maps was struggling with Roman numerals in France: many streets and avenues are named after kings, say "Louis XVI", "Henry VI" etc. Back in the days it wasn't able to pronounce those, VI would have sounded like "vee". It's probably been fixed since, that was almost 8 years back.

I like asking what their definition of a senior engineer is. Good candidates will have answers that are multi dimensional: eg. ability to drive technical change, mentor junior engineers, design system that solve complex problems in a simple way, etc.

There's plenty of possible answers, but it's interesting to know what their vision is (whether it's in line with your view or not, it should still be enlightening).

Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. I was a huge Jules Verne fan when I was a kid.

Knewton | Software Engineer, SRE/Infra Engineer, Senior Security Engineer | NYC | ONSITE | Full-Time

We build adaptive learning software that powers our online learning platform. We work with universities and community colleges to provide an affordable alternative to text books!

We're hiring for the following roles:

  * SDE ideally with a few years of experience, full stack or backend.
  * SRE ideally with some experience
  * Senior security engineer

Our stack is React/Redux/GraphQL on the frontend, node/java/python on the backend side.

Come help us bring personalized learning to the world!

Questions? recruiting+hn@knewton.com

I've been asked about why my boarding pass didn't have the same name as my passport once, back when I didn't put a middle name. I'm from France where we traditionally have 3 first names: <actual first name> <godmother|father's first name> <grandmother|father's first name> (at least that's how I was named). For paperwork purposes in the US I had to make up a middle name so I use my second and third names. Say Albert Bernard Charles Dupont would be: "Albert" "Bernard Charles" "Dupont". This way it's also consistent with my passport.

I also don't put my name's accent in most computer systems in the US (é). I have it on Linkedin though, and it trips a surprising amount of automated recruiting emails.

"Sources said that the tests were ordered by senior Kremlin officials despite objections from the program's engineers, who voiced concerns that the system was still in its infancy.". Putin's press conference was on March 1st. The Russian presidential election was on March 18th. I think it's pretty clear that this was a marketing move.

It's all about what they bring to the table. Some people are clearly senior level after 2 years: they communicate well, they can mentor other engineers, they can criticize an existing design or plan the implementation of a new feature, have good organizational skills etc.

After 2 years I wasn't able to provide constructive feedback without being a little too brash, I couldn't have designed anything distributed, I wouldn't have been able to break up a gigantic feature into smaller problems etc. I've worked with people who were technically competent and mature 2 years after school.

In the US, the skilled worker visa (the infamous h1b) requires a bachelor's or masters, or 12y relevant work experience, or a mix of the two.

Ouch one of my jobs was like that. I was supposed to log _when I was going to the bathroom_ in their homemade time tracking app. Then every evening the "standup" was the CEO berating everyone on how long it took them to finish their tasks for the day. There are lots of sane companies with healthy work conditions out there.

My advice to someone interviewing now: if something smells funky during the interview process, trust your gut.

Whether you work with a monolith or microservices, decoupling is the key, and the best way to ensure decoupling is using the proper abstractions and APIs.

I wouldn't say uncontroversially. There are political issues around what to do with aging nuclear power plants (see Fessenheim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant) and whether to invest more. I don't know much about it, but nuclear energy was a talking point during the latests elections.

Personally, I think it would be an enormous mistake not to invest enough to at least assess the feasibility/practicality of cleaner nuclear sources. I really hope France keeps on investing in nuclear energy & research.

I've heard Death March more meant as a crazy period before a deadline.

It's super creepy and the interest rates are outrageous; but you have to give it to them, public shaming as a collateral is good "outside the box" thinking.

That's a sad looking crocodile

I'm running it on a 5X and it ran just fine.

According to CreditKarma, getting "excellent" on the number of open accounts factor means having 21 or more open accounts. Assuming you have 4 cc, 2 student loans, 1 car loan and 1 mortgage you would still be in the "poor" category. I don't think I'll ever get out of the "very poor" category (0-5).

Usually you're there for a couple hours, it's easy to sneak out in between 2 interviews for 2 minutes.

This is the state making sure that uninformed customers are not taken by surprise by a gigantic data bill. Sounds like the state trying to protect its citizens. They're not bullying Niantic, just raising a concern. If anything this could prevent backlash from users against Niantic.

To me it looks like these people are doing their job.

I just wrote our API layer with redux-saga too, I started with thunks but I didn't like dispatching thunks and actions, also it was hard to reason about flow and side effects: If I update my search form, the results need to be updated, but the action is "update form", not "update form and update search results", the search result update is a side effect more than something that should be actually fired from the update form.

Saga is making side-effects (workflows) possible by subscribing to events.

So in this case I have a saga waiting for 'SEARCH_FORM_UPDATE', then it waits for 300ms, then starts the ajax request flow: a request start action, then a request complete action (or request error).

The code reads almost like synchronous code once you understand yield.

It also allows you to listen to actions that you do not control: we wanted to do something whenever a specific redux-router action happened. You can't do this with thunks, we would have needed a middleware to do this. With sagas you can simply hook up a flow to the action.

They don't block foreign VPNs?

Even ignoring the cost, H1B candidates need to file their paperwork 6/7 months before starting, which means interviewing 7/8 months before October. And then you get a 50% chance that the application is going to be rejected by the initial lottery.

This doesn't apply to companies "cheating the system" (looking at the consulting companies that apply for most of the h1bs w/ a lower salary), but most real companies that apply for real h1bs would much rather find a similarly qualified US person.