esonderegger

One of the things I rarely see mentioned when discussing career prospects of startups vs large corporations is how different their hiring filters are.

If you are self-taught, lacking credentials, and don't live in a major market, it can be difficult to get in the door at a FAANG. Whereas start-ups can be much more likely to take a chance on someone with a non-conventional background.

So for some of us, large corporations aren't even an option until after we've taken that startup job and the startup has done well enough that people have heard of it.

I suppose it depends on the method used for backup and restore. If you replace the entire graph.db directory with one from a backup, ids are kept intact.

I was relying on this just yesterday. We use graphenedb for our production database and I needed to load a production backup locally for testing. It was really useful that I could query a node by id both locally and on prod and get the same result.

I feel like the pattern of "solve this puzzle, get an interview" has fallen out of fashion in the past few years.

In 2012 I got an interview at facebook by solving a puzzle that involved adding weights to a recursive arrangement of levers on top of levers. I remember both having a lot of fun with the puzzle and knowing that I would have never landed the interview any other way because I was coming from a non-traditional background and still relatively junior.

I think Google's foobar came out a few years later. I had some fun with them and got through the first rounds, but by that point I already had a job and never got around to finishing it.

I also remember doing some fun puzzles on codeeval, hoping their business model of linking people to companies would gain some steam, but the companies they signed up never seemed to be very interesting.

Is leetcode essentially the new codeeval?

Unfortunately, all of the programming jobs here are either in publishing (low pay) or government contracting (bureaucratic headaches).

And while the cost of living is less than NYC and SF, it ain't exactly cheap either.

Amazon's decision to come to Crystal City makes sense to me because there are a bunch of young college grads and no competition from the other FAANG companies.

If you're a young, ambitious, programmer trying to decide where to start your career though, I'd suggest going to SF/SV, NYC, Seattle, or Boston because those places provide more options.

I spent a lot of time asking myself the question "would this company be successful if it had been started in St Louis?". On the one hand, they could offer an incredible salary to cost of living ratio. However, when I thought about my coworkers, a good number of them had spouses/significant others who worked for Facebook/Apple/Google. Also, there was a lot of value in knowing that if this company went belly-up, there would always be another company nearby to work for.

At least in this case, the decision to be located in the valley was rational at the individual level, even if it may be irrational collectively.

I think Seattle, Boston, LA, and NYC also have critical masses of talent that make them acceptable for starting a tech company, but unfortunately those places aren't really affordable either. The decrease in proximity to talent and capital probably isn't worth the marginal savings in cost of living.

If anyone is going to break the chicken vs. egg cycle and set up shop somewhere truly affordable, I think it will have to be one of the big companies, opening up a satellite office and offering employees the ability to choose where they want to work. They're all so profitable that they don't seem to mind the money that's going to Bay Area landowners. I wonder how expensive things will have to get before they start to get creative.

I tried doing something very similar to this. It ended up being so draining I couldn't do it long-term.

Specifically, I was in Washington DC and the startup I wanted to work for was in San Jose. My then-girlfriend (now fiancé) has the kind of job that can only be done in DC. I agreed to fly out for a week every month or so and work remotely the rest of the time. I did it for a little over a year but the travel wore me out and I struggled to find a healthy routine working from home.

I see threads like this and think that the solution to this problem has to be more remote work. I just wish I could be one of the people for whom it works as well in practice as it does in theory.

My video conference rig is a Micro Studio Camera 4K, Video Assist 4k, and Arduino shield all going into a Decklink card on an Ubuntu desktop machine. The Studio Camera, Video Assist and Arduino shield all get pretty hot, so I don't run them continuously. The Video Assist does weird things when it's hot like having the audio meters stop working, even though it's still transmitting audio to the SDI output just fine.

That said, the Decklink has been rock-solid in the 5+ years I've owned it and we had a VideoHub at a past workplace that worked great. I actually recommend all the Blackmagic stuff I've worked with, but have seen heat consistently been an issue.

If this works as described, it will be a lifesaver.

I've been running nuts on Heroku for my Electron app and never got it fully working. (It was very good at being able to tell there was an update available, but performing the update wouldn't work)

Does it work for Linux AppImage installs?

One (perhaps non-representative) data point: I have teammates who live in Villa La Angostura and Cordoba and I chat with them using Google hangouts every day. Their bandwidth has never been an issue for video chat.

There are definitely designers who are going for pop by looking for a new font, but I've worked on a lot of projects where the designer just wanted a good, legible, sans-serif that looks the same everywhere.

Who am I kidding, what they want is Helvetica and for the website to look exactly like the comps they made in Photoshop. Sometimes they're willing to find the money for the license fee and sometimes they're willing to accept Source Sans as a substitute. I've never once had them say "the difference between Helvetica and Arial isn't worth the 250ms delay caused by using a web font."