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kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

wilderthanmild posted:

Anyone have experience with fully remote positions? I live in an area where there aren't a lot of good development jobs that aren't a 45+ minute commute but the CoL is dirt cheap, among the lowest in the country. I was looking at fully remote development jobs recently and it seems tempting to start applying to them.

I have plenty of friends outside of work, so I wouldn't think the social part would be too rough. I'm mostly curious how hard the transition is with communication, meetings, day-to-day schedules, etc. Also, if there are any red flags for bad remote development jobs? Signs that a place may be a good place to work remotely? Maybe personal red flags that would tell me that I wouldn't be a fit for remote work?

I've been fully remote for the last 4 years, and had a 1.5 year-long remote job back in 2008-2009 as well. I will definitely say that ten years ago the job was a ton harder to do remote without the tools we have now (slack, stupid easy video calling, etc).

Here are things I consider when interviewing for a remote position - these are the things that make the difference between a job you'll love doing and a job that frustrates you into quitting.

  • How are major decisions made, do developers just have an ad-hoc discussion over lunch and go back and implement it? Or is a meeting called and the decision is written down and logged along with the supporting reasoning for it? This is good practice in general, but especially so for remote people who weren't present for that lunch discussion.
  • Do people use the same communication tools in the office the same way you do when you're remote? I spend a week in my team's office every few months and we basically are heads-down at our desks, using slack, outside of lunch and happy hour. It means I don't miss anything. I've been at places where if a remote is on a video conference, everyone takes the call from their desk just like I would.
  • Are people accessible if you have a question? If you're blocked with something and aren't physically present, it's harder to get a question across.

Also at least for me, there's a personal discipline element that makes a big difference to success. I have a separate room in my house that is a home office, and I use that room exclusively for work. I still need do my normal morning routine as if I'm going to drive to an office. It puts my head into work mode, and similarly leaving the office at the end of the day takes my head out of work mode. What you don't want to have happen is for work to invade home and you overwork, or home to invade work and you slack off.

This isn't a problem for everyone. I've got a friend who will often pick up a couple hours in the evening from bed, and toss her laptop on the night stand at midnight. She wakes up in the morning, rolls over to grab her laptop, and works from bed in her pajamas until noon. It works for her.

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jun 3, 2017

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kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

When I get a linkedin friend request from a recruiter, it typically has a job posting embedded in the message.

If the recruiter is trying to do an end-run around paying LinkedIn by sending a posting as a friend request rather than a paid email, that tells me they'll probably try to do an end run around getting me paid too.

gently caress em.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Rex-Goliath posted:

Consulting is great if you're doing actual consulting. 90% of the time though what they actually mean is you'll be doing implementations for a vendor which sucks. They look kind of the same from the outside but there's a huge difference in both the work you'll be doing and your relationships with the customer. If long term you want to climb the leadership ladder then in a few years consulting will give you more exposure to different styles of management / company internals / client-vendor relations / ground-up chaotic implementations than many people get in their entire careers. Very good for sharpening your teeth in those aspects. If you're more interested in long-term development of products and being more focused on the technical aspects of things while others handle all the 'soft stuff' then you probably want to stick with engineering.

Agreed. I was a "consultant" for a big ERP firm, which amounted to flying to client sites every week and doing implementations. The actual consultants were the people from Deloitte/Accenture/IBM whom the customer brought in to deal with us, so they didn't have to.

That said, I still learned a lot about soft skills, navigating chaos, and how to prioritize 100 things when each one is all on fire. Also how to communicate bad news -- how do I tell a customer "yes, I know the salesperson promised you this HR software could do X with nearly zero additional effort, but your Byzantine union contracts make doing X harder without significant custom logic and he shouldn't have promised you that without discussing that with an engineer first. We can do it, but I'm 100% sure you will not like the price tag."

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

One place where I worked, they'd send you a series of emails at 30, 60, 90 days post hire. They'd have reminders like "by now, you and your manager should be looking at goals for the next 12 months," and surveys to find out if new hires were missing stuff that should've been covered in orientation.

The 30 or 60 day checkpoint mail also included a request to leave a company review on Glassdoor. That's when you're still totally smack in the honeymoon period with the job, and the only bad thing is that the free blackberry Hint water in the kitchen doesn't get restocked as often as the pamplemousse La Croix.

Employee turnover in engineering was extremely high during the last year I worked there. Their Glassdoor page had a constant stream of fresh, positive reviews from new hires, while not many of them would bother to update their reviews when they got fed up and quit.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

Did you work at Oculus or Facebook or something

no just random palo alto tech company #65535.

I was remote and only went into the office once every three months or so, the rest of the time I had to stock my own refrigerator and on a software engineer salary that can be quite a hardship

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

https://twitter.com/SFGate/status/885766217180381184

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Doghouse posted:

I'm applying for a job at a company in NYC but I live in St Louis, they say you can workremote or in the NYC office and that half the team works remote. In this type of situation, are they going to try to offer me a St Louis salary, or a NYC salary? I have 3 years experience.

Depends on if they think they can get away with it. If they're advertising a position, they have budgeted for it. If they are willing to hire an employee physically located in New York then the budget for that open req is obviously going to be for a New York salary.

Anecdata time: I live in St. Louis and my current job is with an NYC-based company, as was my job prior to this one. They didn't flinch about paying NYC money.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

I've had lots of former colleagues ask over the years if they could name me as a reference, and outside of one instance I've always agreed. I only turned that down because I had an employment contract that said I couldn't participate in the hiring of current or freshly-former (< 1 year) employees elsewhere, and I wasn't sure to the extent that being a reference would be participation.

The only time I've ever been called is when the individual in question was working with a staffing firm. The recruiter decided to call me not to do a reference check, but to pitch openings to me.

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Aug 8, 2017

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

necrobobsledder posted:

Instead, they want to pay at or above market and offer bonuses with stock grants, not options or RSUs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this mean the grant is immediately taxable based upon the on-paper valuation of the company?

This sounds like a back door way of avoiding paying bonuses. If I'm already making market I would decline any "bonus" that required me to pay taxes against imaginary money.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

necrobobsledder posted:

Grants are taxable upon receipt into your own brokerage account but I think you can avoid taxes by having something else hold it away from your personal accounts but under your control. There's a lot of funny accounting that can be done.

Does that protect you from having a tax liability if the shares become worthless? Even if you could defer the taxes until the shares are liquid, it'd suck if your "bonus" became worthless and you still have this tax liability hanging over your head.

In that case you could deduct the loss, but since you have to offset capital losses like-for-like against gains (except for $3K/year), it could take you a while to recoup the taxes.

At least with options nobody's forcing you to exercise them and have a taxable event.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

minato posted:

I've seen descriptions of a "DevOps role" as someone who is responsible for making the DevOps practice happen. It's like Agile: team members may get the training and say they're on board with the idea, but it's usually up to a single person to make sure people adhere to the ideals and the process. E.g. when SWEs have a meeting to design a new service, the "DevOps role" person is responsible for ensuring that someone from Ops is present.

On the flip side, I worked in a place where "DevOps" meant "we now have a 'DevOps Guy' who is the gatekeeper between devs and infra, he will only respond to pull requests containing puppet manifests, and he will actively prevent you from engaging with infra team so have fun with making decisions on system sizing and design."

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Loutre posted:

So on that note, anyone have any tips for landing a remote job? I'm on Flexjobs, Stack Overflow, and LinkedIn, but I haven't figured out a good way to find jobs that are totally remote. I need to spend some time taking care of my parents and they live in bumfuck, nowhere.

Also check out weworkremotely and wfh.io, and maybe search Twitter as well.

IDK where you live but are there local developer meetups geared toward whatever work you do, or language/platforms you use? At least where I'm at, there are usually always a couple people at those who work at some remote-friendly company and are always hungry for referral bucks.

Also I think you'd be surprised what companies are in fact remote-friendly, so don't be afraid to just ask "is remote okay."

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Sep 10, 2017

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Pollyanna posted:

Not to mention all the other issues surrounding remote work, e.g. loneliness and possible time zone differences. It can be hard to pull off, and I'm not sure I can handle it yet.

The time zone aspect was actually a really nice bonus when I was working remotely for a west coast team. The rest of the team wouldn't roll into the office until 10:30 or 11am their time, which meant I pretty much had four solid hours of work time in which I was guaranteed not to be interrupted. That time was precious gold. I had 4 hours of time in which to schedule meetings and such, and then I'd "go home." I liked to open PRs just before quitting for the day, because then my colleagues had some time to look them over without me breathing down their necks about it.

The trick to the flip side of this is to immediately calibrate expectations, that you're not responding to queries after (your) work hours unless things are literally on fire. There is a temptation to answer a message on Slack at 8pm your time because there are still people in the office. "Whatever," you think to yourself, "I'm just sitting on the toilet reading twitter anyway, it doesn't hurt to respond." This takes you to a place you do not want to go.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Doh004 posted:

Be careful trying to jump titles too early. I don't know how long you've been working professionally, and while years of experience isn't the only qualification for seniority, but having too big of a title can screw you when you try to go elsewhere that has very different standards for the same title.

I got bit by this, even within the same company.

About a year and a half into my first job out of college, they saw me having mopped up messes created by a terrible teammate. My boss complimented me on rescuing us from problems and told me I had a raise coming. What they did was fire that teammate and give me the "Senior Engineer" role that he formerly occupied. The new title came with a 10% pay raise.

Subsequent to then, they had significant trouble getting any sort of further merit raise for me. The HR office that reviewed raise requests said "we're not approving this higher salary for a senior engineer with such few years of total job experience."

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Hughlander posted:

That’s when you just bounce. Start of your career should be greatly raising your salary each year or you’re doing it wrong.

Should've done that. Did it wayyyy too late because I didn't have the self-confidence to think I could do any better.

I got up the guts and quit that aforementioned job in 2013, for a 40% raise at the new place. I hopped twice afterward. I'm now in a job I love and I'm making more than double what I did in 2013. The amount of money I left on the table is kind of staggering.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Keetron posted:

In the Netherlands, if you want to make bank you will have to work as an independant contractor to get close to 100K Euro, but that is also because the labor protection laws in this country are such that as a permanent employee it is almost impossible to get fired and if that happens due to down sizing, you get a ton of benefits. So a lot of the pay is matching the risk taken. Kind of similar to the US, with the right-to-work laws...

Right-to-work in the US doesn't mean you need a higher standard to fire someone. Right-to-work laws prohibit employees in unionized workplaces from being required to join a union or pay the union to represent them. States that don't have right-to-work can have "union shops," where you must either already be a member upon hiring, or you have to join within some period of time after hiring on.

Even in a right-to-work state, you can be fired for any reason or no reason, unless you have a contract in place with your employer that dictates the ways you can lose your job. There are exceptions with regard to discrimination, but they're narrow. You can be fired for being gay in quite a few states, for example.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Good Will Hrunting posted:

My entire team, even the senior engineers, have spent time working on stuff that my boss just ended up rewriting himself, on his own, without talking to us, and committing over us to master. It's frustrating and discouraging and how do we even learn this way?

This x 100. I had a boss who was otherwise the nicest guy in the world and totally great to have a beer with. But he also had this unbreakable habit of logging on at 1am, making huge changes that were poorly thought out because it was 1am. Then he'd go punching that straight into master, bypassing any kind of code review, because he could say so.

Don't be that guy.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Pollyanna posted:

Since I’m gonna be remote for my next job, I’m thinking I should get a monitor/keyboard/mouse setup for my desk, and my new employer is willing to expense it. Any suggestions for a home setup, within reason?

If you don't already have a headset for video conferencing, get one. Or you can grab a USB tabletop speakerphone too, like one of these.

Video conferencing with your computer's built-in speaker and mic sucks if you're doing it on a regular basis. There's no echo cancellation and you ruin it for everyone else on the call.

Ralith posted:

The common wisdom seems to be that glassdoor biases low due to old data, happy employees not reporting to it, and inconsistent reporting of non-salary compensation. Paysa is a newer service that gives more detailed information on salary distributions and might provide an interesting counterpoint.

Where does Paysa get its numbers from? They seem to have trouble disambiguating companies (my company, for instance, is listed under six different names) so I'm guessing scraping H1B filings and the like?

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Nov 2, 2017

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Pollyanna posted:

Pouring a 40 out for my former coworkers who got politicked out of the company :( Maybe I’ll grab them on LinkedIn...
Dollars to donuts there's probably a slack team with them all in it, because this has been the case for the last three jobs I've had.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

edit: nm

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

piratepilates posted:

What are some ideas for interviewing QA people?

Let's say that it's more for manual QA, instead of automating tests.

Main idea I have is to create a simple but lovely app (let's say a todo app) that has a bunch of bugs and poor usability, and let the candidate loose and have them just play around and generate ideas on how to improve the app.

I'd give them a wireframe of a simple feature and the requirements, same as a developer would get to build it, and ask them to write a test plan. See if they can understand what the feature is trying to do enough to test it, and see if they know to test for odd cases (say it's a restaurant ordering app, can you order a burger with negative slices of cheese).

Generally where I've worked, QA writes the test plan in parallel to the developer implementing the feature, so we're both working off the same info.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Munkeymon posted:

I don't like changing jobs at the end of the year because getting a new job then loving off even for normal holiday vacation makes me nervous. For bullshit puritan work ethic reasons, sure, but it's still there.

Yeah last year I accepted a job on December 15, and that was a day before I was going to take off the remaining two weeks of the month. I thought that'd be a dick move to just give 2 weeks notice, so I just gave 4 weeks notice instead and quit the Friday before MLK day.

Of course then I go to give notice and my boss tells me he's quitting too and he's got zero compunction himself about taking 2 weeks off, working one day in January, and bugging out.


Pro tip, your FSA plan is fully spendable starting on Jan 1, and they can't come after you for the shortfall if you quit before fully paying it in. So go get those $500 glasses or whatever.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Pollyanna posted:

I'm going to have to ask basic loving questions like "what's your workday hours" and "do employees get lunch breaks", aren't I? :bang:

Things I definitely ask during interviews:

- How are the hours?
- How often do you find yourself in crunch time?
- How much PTO are you offered, and do you use all of it?

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

rt4 posted:

Fully remote or nothing imo

This, because SF/NYC money with St Louis cost of living.

At this point I've priced myself into a situation where I work remote or I take a $40-$50K pay cut.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Love Stole the Day posted:

I read in this book last year that the only way to have steady work when becoming a freelancer is to already have a reputation when you go into it so that there are already people there willing and able to work with you at the prices that you want. Is this true for your situation? How did you come across your first 10 or so clients or whatever? Did you start with a super low fee just to get work and then increase it as your network grew, or did you maybe start with a high fee because your initial few clients already knew you well enough through word of mouth somehow?

Can't help you on the freelancing bit as I'm a full time W-2 employee, having worked remotely for companies in SF and NYC.

I sort of "bootstrapped" this by attending a local developer meetup and speaking once or twice. The person who ran the meetup also was working remotely with a company in SF. He referred me in to his group, a team based out of Palo Alto.

From there on it's been referrals from people I've met at developer meetups in SF/NYC or at conferences. I make a point of it to attend meetups when I'm in town for work (I go in every ~3 months), and I attend a few conferences a year, so that helps quite a bit.

Also between my experience and those of others I know, companies will often bend a "no remote" rule to "remote, for the right person" if someone there knows you. You're likely not going to ever see a management title doing that, but you can go climbing the technical ladder.

I guess I've built up enough network and results behind me that I could go freelancing, but I'm making great money and it's stable, so I don't want to rock the boat.

Pollyanna posted:

I've also heard Des Moines, IA is alright. Unfortunately, that also means you're in Iowa.

I know Des Moines got some press like 5 years back because Dwolla, but I haven't heard a whole lot else out of there.

Thirding Denver/Boulder though. Boulder reminds me of Palo Alto in a lot of ways, but with cheaper real estate and snow.


LLSix posted:

Any advice for finding remote openings? I worked remotely for about a month over the holidays because the main offices were closed down and it was pretty nice. I got more done than usual too because I was able to get started right at 7:30 or however earlier I woke up.

For job boards, maybe consider Stack Overflow or WeWorkRemotely. But also as I mentioned you may find people locally at meetups and the like who are working remotely and can refer you.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Skandranon posted:

If they are external recruiters, they are probably just fishing for people to spam.

A friend was getting a job as a W-2 employee with a staffing firm, and he gave my name as a reference.

The person from the staffing firm calls me, spends like 90 seconds tops on discussion about my friend, and then immediately goes into trying to sell me on how he's got chairs that need warming all over town and how do I feel about J2EE.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Pollyanna posted:

This means it's an hourly job with health benefits and 401k but no PTO, and when I interviewed with the client they said they all stick to 40/week - so I'm not concerned about being sent home with no work to do. (Should I be?)

Yes, I would clarify whether "stick to 40 hours a week" means "we don't do overtime" or it means "if the client doesn't have 40 hours of work to bill then we don't have 40 hours to pay you."

But yeah I'm going to join the chorus here, I guess if it's "take this job or sell plasma" then take the job, but otherwise I see this as being fraught with peril.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Munkeymon posted:

Is there like a meme generator for that?

https://m.photofunia.com/effects/retro-wave

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

mrmcd posted:

In my experience, CS masters programs are useless, and exist only as cash cows for milking foreign students, or for people with non-technical degrees to get academic cred. PhD programs can be legit but not necessary if you don't want to work in academia or some corporate research labs.

I only have a BS and have been gainfully employed for almost 13 years and no one has ever asked or cared about not having advanced degrees.

I was dumb and thought I'd do a CS masters' immediately after finishing my CS undergrad.

90% of the people in the program were people who had biology or similar backgrounds but wanted to go into bioinformatics and needed to learn CS skills. The program felt like a re-pack of undergrad, just at a faster pace.

I dropped out midway through the first semester because I realized the opportunity cost of taking the masters' degree versus the important first-few-years career ramp-up.

15 years later I don't regret it, although it was a hard lesson that cost me a few thousand dollars in tuition.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Pollyanna posted:

And I don't think it's so strange to specifically seek out companies, projects and products that might expose me to new and interesting things. I am garbage at finding new stuff on my own, and actually I am pretty garbage on my own in all respects. Blame my executive dysfunction or my need for therapy, but I benefit from structure and organization around me.

Why not scratch this itch in ways that don't involve immediately jumping into trying to get a job doing that tech. Go as a tourist to technology meetups and the Women Techmakers chapter in your area, watch people's talks, and hang with others who are doing "new and interesting things." It's a zero-commitment way to get an idea of what the new and interesting things are, is and decide if that is something you're interested in doing yourself. If you come upon some tech/product you like, it's a place for you to learn more about growing those skills, and to keep in touch with people who you might want to work with.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

hendersa posted:

Speaking of a masters degrees, I've always been of the impression that they're good and cool if you get them at the right time. So, I guess the question is "when is the right time?" Some folks like to get them while still in the school mindset. 4 + 1 programs (graduate with a masters degree in just one year after your undergrad) are good for this. This is OK and convenient, but you're missing out on a few things by doing it right away:

plus :words: about an MBA


Yep. Several years later I went back and did an MBA. I paid for most of it with Other People's Money and I had years of seeing the "how" under my belt so I had a frame of reference for learning the "why."

As an engineer it's been quite valuable in terms of helping me speak better with product managers and such, understanding business numbers and forecasts, and being able to put together a strategy and communicate it to others.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Good Will Hrunting posted:

It's not even efficient! Just lmao if you think working more than 40 hours will do anything besides burn someone out

For serious there are plenty of shops out there where you can "put in your time" and not work 50-60 hour weeks.

If I were Pollyanna I would start looking at academic labs or departments that need developers. Many offer very interesting work because often times you're writing software to support research, and even they need CRUD apps. It's also academia which is a nice steady lowkey 9-5. Finally she's in Boston where there are probably more academic labs than Dunkin Donuts locations.

There will come a point in such a job where you dead-end because universities hate advancing people without PhDs, but by the time you approach that wall, you will have leveled up enough as an engineer to transition to a mid-to-senior position elsewhere.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Mniot posted:

There's a big difference between "we hired someone who seemed fine, but they turned out to be an rear end in a top hat" and "we hired someone who described himself in the interview as 'a gaping rear end in a top hat'".

Job I had a while back:

A candidate comes in for an interview. Afterward, all 8 people who participated in conducting the interview unanimously say that the candidate was an rear end in a top hat and vote "no hire." Boss still thinks they talked a good technical game, so he calls references anyway. Reference says "yeah, they were a major rear end in a top hat in the beginning, but over time they had really shaped up." Boss makes an offer on this basis.

New employee shows up. By week 2 it's plain as day they're not just a mere rear end in a top hat but a truly distinguished sort of rear end in a top hat, and also pretty questionable in their technical skills. After five months of them screwing up at work and being a dick to everyone, they're finally fired. In the meantime two good people on the team quit, because management has demonstrated they give absolutely no fucks about the wellbeing of the team.

The best outcome of this situation is that the person reveals themselves to be an rear end in a top hat and gets fired before too much damage is done, and even then, you can't trust the boss not to make a bad hire again.

Get yourself a new team where management cares.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

the talent deficit posted:

companies hire generalists because they want someone who can set up monitoring and deployment for the rest api they wrote that talks to the db they designed the schema for that powers the other api they wrote that powers the spa they maintain and the mobile app they are working on

Full Spa Developer™

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Shirec posted:

Super sorry to butt into the oldie thread but are all the NYC jobs that crazy with their interview process???

I can't speak for Google/FB/whatever, but I can tell you with a sample size of 2 (my current job and my past job) other "household name" companies, not all NYC jobs are like that.

$current_job has a small takehome assignment to decide whether you can actually write code. Took me an hour to do; it was a task on the order of "build a mobile app that fetches from this API endpoint and renders the results in a list view." It's like 'Fizzbuzz for mobile' in that it's a simple fundamental task but a surprising number of self-professed senior engineers can't do it right.

If you make it past that and get brought in to interview, I feel like a significant part of our in-person interview process is aimed at making sure you're not a toxic team-killing jerk, not at making you perform at a whiteboard for our amusement.

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Jun 13, 2018

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

There's also ageism in play where you might be better off shaving your head than having gray hair.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Munkeymon posted:

Meetups and clubs. If you have any skill or propensity for them, live talks at conferences. Clubs like Toastmasters can help there, if that's a thing you'd like to try.

It's probably more time-efficient than trying to memorize the optimal solution to every algorithm, but might be less pleasant, depending on your personal level of gooniness.

Speaking at meetups and conferences is like career rocket fuel. I am making 50% more than I was 3 years ago, and I directly attribute much of that to the fact that I wouldn't have my job if not for having being a "known quantity" from networking at conferences or speaking.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

New Yorp New Yorp posted:

I've done a bunch of conference/event speaking over the past 4 years.

Just like with job interviews, don't pre-reject yourself. Find a local conference (or a not-so-local conference that will pay for speakers to fly out!), submit an abstract, and see if you get a call back.

Also, you can start small by finding and joining or starting a local usergroup and doing some presentations there, to get some credibility and experience as a presenter.

Yeah, I would definitely start with local groups. It's great practice, and even if you're an established speaker it's also a good place to trial balloon your talks before taking them to a big conference. And the bar for entry is low -- from running a local group myself, it's often hard to get speakers; if someone is offering to give a talk, I'm going to take them up on it and I'll be grateful for it.

Quite a few of the conferences I attend have also started doing Skype workshops or some sort of help for novice presenters in terms of preparing a proposal. Reach out to the organizers and ask. Conference organizers want a healthy mix of "the usual suspects" and new speakers, so it's in their interest to help out.

Also you're gonna get rejections, even if you're a super well known and established speaker. It's nothing personal, it's a content curation decision more than anything. Just keep sending the abstracts out.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

raminasi posted:

Only if you release the product, right? If it's purely for internal use there's no release required.

Yeah, essentially the idea is your end user has to be able to rebuild/modify the source.

If your company is the only end user, then you don't have to publish it.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution

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kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

i've known people who work at both amazon and bridgewater, and tbh it's kind of like comparing the mormons to the heaven's gate cult - amazon may dress you up in weird underwear and push you to succeed, but bridgewater will cut your balls off and make you drink poison.

Scientology has Dianetics, Bridgewater has The Principles.

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