tatvamasi
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
Note - the key is to approach these candidate companies more or less in parallel, and not serially. If you have multiple offers, you have a much better chance to make much more than what you are making today, compared to learning a new skill at this point.
It is hard to make it work, but is very beneficial and can be a competitive advantage when you get it right. Hey, you can now hire top talent regardless of geographical boundaries!
1. Have the conversation in a public place where professionals meet. For example, coffee shops. If you in the bay area, it would be best to have it in coffee shops known for startup discussions, such as Coupa Coffee in Palo Alto. Just choosing the right place for the conversation will make sure that the discussion does not go out of hand. 2. Come to the discussion with an open frame of mind. There may be some issues that she is feeling - you should be willing to listen. 3. Alert her in advance about the general topic you want to talk about. So that she is not surprised and is mentally prepared. 4. During the discussion, make sure to lay out specific behaviors/situations/examples that you find objectionable, and listen to what she has to say. Again, be open - perhaps there is another piece of the puzzle here that you have thought about fully, and she explains it to you. Example: "I put in 60-70 hours per week" is a very general statement. A specific statement would be "Last week, we launched feature F. I did X, Y, Z tasks over night to make the launch successful. However, you contribution over that week was only implementing a simple bug fix B. I would like to listen to you to know how can I help you contribute more to the project." 5. You may have some counterpoints to the arguments she makes. Be specific and encourage her to be specific. Hopefully after some time you'll sort it out amicably and you both have a good understanding of how each other works. 6. Contrary to what others have said, I would not bring a third-party to the discussion. You need to own resolving this problem. Getting third-party involved too quickly can be detrimental - they don't know the situation as much as both of you do. Most problems like these can be solved by honest and open communication.
Good luck!
Given you want to make search visually appealing, consider displaying thumbnail of a prominent image or video from the target page in the results page. However, although this will improve the UI, you will take a hit on performance unless you are crawling top news sources and caching image thumbnails yourself.
In parallel, start cultivating relationships with Google employees in the area of your interest. Attend meetups where they may be present. Tell them things that you are working on and get their advice on how you can improve.
Somewhere along the way in this path, you will be a better and well-networked programmer that great tech companies won't afford to ignore.