I remember it well - thank you!
335 karma · joined August 31, 2010
As others have said, time to make a donation in his honour.
Remote: Happily
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Python, Django, Flask, Linux, shell, HTML/CSS/JS, SQL, PHP, etc.
Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vmlinuz/
Email: richard@vmlinuz.org
I'm an experienced senior engineer, currently in Hong Kong but relocating to the UK this month, looking for work starting early April, either fully remote or hybrid accessible from Leeds. In my last 3 jobs, I've worked for a pan-Asian logistics start-up as the 'code owner' of the core backend engine, a large European bank as the senior engineer in an informal devops team building internal tools to modernise operations, and freelance building sites for an accounting firm. In the past I've worked on websites/APIs, Android apps, the Unix kernel, and also spent a while working in a bra factory...
It's a bit of a cliche, but when asked I say I'm looking to work on a good problem, with good people, using good tech. Beyond that - I'm flexible!
It wasn't until I broke my toe and was told by the doctor to minimise my walking they they allowed me to (technically temporarily) work from home...
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vmlinuz/
Experienced engineer, originally from the UK, worked on a large variety of different products at different levels of tech stack. Recently, mostly backend Python/Django, but also non-code expertise like mentoring, code review, workflow, troubleshooting, etc. Previously: PHP, shell, C (Unix kernel and system utils), Android/Java, Linux, some HTML/CSS/JS, little bits of Kotlin and Golang, also bras.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No (possibly yes, in the medium-to-long term)
Technologies: Python (10+ years), Django/Flask, SQL, Linux (25+ years), bash, HTML, etc.
Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vmlinuz/
Email: richard@vmlinuz.org
I am an experienced software engineer, and I have mostly been working on backend/server-side code recently. In the past, I have worked with many technologies, from C in the Unix kernel, to Java for Android apps, plus various PHP and Javascript bits. I have recently finished a contract in an experimental devops-ish team for a large European bank, and before that I was a senior engineer and 'code owner' (responsible for code/design reviews and deployments, as well as making my own contributions and mentoring junior devs) at an Asian unicorn.
I'm flexible w.r.t. working terms - would be interested in discussing local, remote, permanent, contract, etc. opportunities.
I live a long way outside the US - UTC+8 - and these sort of numbers are utterly unreal for most of the world. In my recent experience, pre-, during- and 'post-'pandemic, the vast majority of remote companies aren't willing or able to consider people outside their local timezone(s) and/or tax jurisdictions, while my local market is masssively under-developed compared with most other developed parts of the world, unless you can break into banking.
My most recent income was a little over a third of this, and that was with a bank, albeit on a devops-ish contract. I am a senior engineer - you could say mid-senior if you really wanted to pick holes in my CV - and I'm pretty much ready to quit the local market, and then likely relocate due to inability to pay rent otherwise...
Meh. Have a good end of year and stay safe, y'all.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No (possibly yes, in the medium-to-long term)
Technologies: Python (10+ years), Django/Flask, SQL, Linux (25+ years), bash, HTML, etc.
Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vmlinuz/
Email: richard@vmlinuz.org
I am an experienced software engineer, and I have mostly been working on backend/server-side code recently. In the past, I have worked with many technologies, from C in the Unix kernel, to Java for Android apps, plus various PHP and Javascript bits. I have recently (yesterday!) finished a contract in an experimental devops team for a large European bank, and before that I was a senior engineer and 'code owner' (responsible for code/design reviews and deployments, as well as making my own contributions and mentoring junior devs) at an Asian unicorn.
I'm flexible w.r.t. working terms - would be interested in discussing local, remote, permanent, contract, etc. opportunities.
16 years later, I'm still in Hong Kong, having initially come to work for a bra company owned by a distant branch of my family, in more ways than one. Since then I've worked for an IT services company, amongst other things debugging SuSE servers in the back room of 7-11 stores, freelanced for a decade or so, built a few sites and Android apps during that period, worked for an Asia-wide 'Uber for cargo' start-up, and have now been contracting at a large bank doing devops for the past year.
Hong Kong is/was a very easy place to live as a Westerner. Everything official is bilingual, it is/was a transport hub so it was very easy to get home or anywhere else - before the Covid lockdown ended that - plenty of international food, brands, and other expats, and there is/was a fairly active local tech scene. It is/was fairly easy to get a work visa for a 'professional'-level job, but I actually got a special visa which allowed me to work, freelance, have my own business, etc. without needing to be sponsored by an employer, and after 7 years you become a permanent resident which means no more visa needed. That said, moving to Hong Kong was much more of a whim than a plan - it happened to work out pretty well, overall, but it would have been easy to back out and move back to the UK/EU if things hadn't gone well.
I have vague, but slowly firming-up, plans to leave Hong Kong next year, for all the obvious reasons (feel free to ask if they're not obvious!). Unfortunately(?), my local partner is very uninterested in leaving, so it's likely I'll be travelling solo, and my unformed plan at the moment would be to spend a bit of time in UK, maybe bum around Europe for a bit to decompress, then look into Israel - again.
I'm an elderly (mid-40s) non-USian techie, and I've never done Instagram. On Facebook I mostly follow people I've largely lost touch with in real life (particular these past couple of years), and on Twitter it's news sources and journalists, plus a selection of 'celebs' from various niche interests like tech, sci-fi, winter sports and comedy.
Am I likely to be missing anything interesting by largely ignoring Instagram?
The point is not a professional using a computer, it's a professional computer user - someone who doesn't just use a computer to do their work, but someone for whom the limits of the computer are the limits of the work they can do.
I have not met any of my team face-to-face, but they have also not embraced what I would consider modern temote-working tools. We don't have Slack (see above, 'Large Enterprise') but we do have Teams - except nobody uses it. We have a team email alias - except nobody responds to it. The only communication appears to be Skype for Business (i.e. Lync) calls - notwithstanding that some cow-orkers are in noisy environments, one regularly has unreliable enough Internet that he can't connect, and one has mic problems which means we hear about half of what she says. It also took a week and a half after I started for me to get my corporate approval to use Skype for anything but text, which meant we had to abandon my arranged first-week 'meet the team' session because I couldn't hear or speak.
I'm working in (approximately) devops, and things are, let's say, not well automated here, so they're justifiably terrified that if one or two people get infected, and others get quarantined, it could have a significant material effect on the company - so not only are people working from home, they are banned from entering the office. Except me, for some reason I haven't managed to ascertain...
TikTok is aimed at a wide market, and it's a content app - there are two worries with it, data and influence. If they are installed on a significant number of devices in the US/the 'West', and their user data is stored in or available to Chinese networks, that data is available to the Chinese government on-demand. Secondly, if they have significant enough cultural influence, they can use that to promote/demote certain topics or specific content, for a variety of purposes.
WeChat seems to have no serious ambitions beyond China and the Chinese diaspora, nowadays. It's used by people all over the world to keep in touch with their friends and families, and to do business, with people in China, and it's widely-known that the content is actively monitored and censored by/on behalf of the Chinese government. Although VPNs etc are available, it's really the only significant communication and social media platform available in (and into) China. There's also pretty good evidence (although mostly anecdotal, AFAIK) that it's a channel for nationalistic propaganda, government-coordinated action and similar amongst the Chinese diaspora - actively so, beyond the passive effect of censored content.
None of these things are to say that billions of people can't happily use those platforms, every day, all over the world! But they also cannot be completely ignored...
And before anyone starts with "but the American government is just the same!", it's not, it's really not. The Chinese government is a literal totalitarian, authoritarian, one-man dictatorship. However much Trump cosplays as a dictator, and however much authoritarianism he demonstrates, there are huge qualitative differences.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Primary: Linux/Unix, Python, Django, PHP. Secondary: SQL, git, AWS, JavaScript, Android, shell, HTML, C. Tertiary: Go, Kotlin, Docker
Email: richard@vmlinuz.org
I am an experienced engineer, mostly working on web/API backend in PHP and Python recently - but I've also done Unix kernel and OS work, and written a few Android apps. I'm available immediately, and good at making stuff work!
Hong Kong did not always belong to China, and was not leased to the UK - part of Hong Kong's area (the New Territories) was leased, but Kowloon and Hong Kong island were ceded in perpetuity.
China signed an international treaty with the UK regarding the handover of Hong Kong, a treaty which comes with certain rights and responsibilities. Sure, there's no real way to actually enforce such a treaty, but you can't really complain if other countries react to the breaking of a treaty with punitive measures, and don't trust the treaty-breaker not to break other treaties in future.
How about asking the people of Hong Kong what they want? There's about 7.5 million of us here, with a fairly unique history and culture, so maybe just being subsumed into another country wouldn't be the choice of the population?
Earlier this year, I had an interview with a fairly serious company which shall not be named. They'd sent a mass email on LinkedIn a couple of weeks earlier, so that was my contact with them. After a chat with their in-house recruiter, they asked me to do a couple of tests, one a simple server application, one an intermediate-complexity SQL query. I'm willing to say that my SQL is competent, but it's not a focus for me, so while I got the idea, my query didn't actually work. The recruiter told me that it would be a good idea to be ready to explain why, and how I would fix it, for the technical interview. I rustled up a couple of acquaintances with better SQL than I, we worked through it, I knew what I'd done wrong and was ready to discuss it.
Technical interview came, on Zoom, and it was a car crash. There were two interviewers, one was on time, one was late - the late one was also only on audio, and it turns out mixing one audio-only interviewer with one on video was a bad idea. They mostly asked me about my background and experience for about half an hour, then ended the interview - never asked about my tests, didn't go into anything technical at all.
I didn't hear anything back, so I pinged the recruiter a week later, only for him to tell me he wasn't working there anymore, but he'd pass on a message for me. I then pinged the one other person I'd had any actual contact with at the company, the HR/admin who'd setup the Zoom call, to be told "we will not go for further process as rejected by hiring team."
I was pretty unimpressed.