Location: South America
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Depends on location
Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Node, React, TypeScript, CSS, NextJS, Postgres, etc
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u8lj0Hes9jugQt2l7_ZrMxgPVkk7zJU1/view?usp=drivesdk
Email: it's in my CV
My brother lives in a village nearby and everyone has solar panels there now. They pay 35 soles/month for it, which is cheaper than the generators they had before which they loaded with 5 soles worth of gasoline every night.
I'm working on a framework inspired by React/Next.js which turns Haml into Ruby. It's 100% server side, but it runs pretty fast. I'm currently working on a rewrite, I just wish I had more time to work on it.
Both! I needed something like JSX, and I found Rux [1] but I had some issues with it, and then I found syntax_tree-haml [2] which gave me an AST that I could transform into Ruby. This is what the transformation looks like: https://gist.github.com/aalin/c0e4b0360a1f84d0283149fe4b2ce6...
I have always liked Haml because it's compact and easy to read.
I had an external hard drive that I overfilled by accident while making a manual backup of media files, and after that I couldn't even mount the APFS volume. Apparently it's something that can happen.
Location: South America
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Depends on location
Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Node, React, TypeScript, CSS, NextJS, Postgres, etc
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u8lj0Hes9jugQt2l7_ZrMxgPVkk7zJU1/view?usp=drivesdk
Email: it's in my CV
Of course. But for the most part it's beautiful. My best friend used to drive taxi and when I had nothing to do I would go with him in the car while he was working, so I've been around. I like the architecture in the barrios.
Location: South America
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Only to Medellín
Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Node, React, TypeScript, CSS, NextJS, Postgres, etc
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u8lj0Hes9jugQt2l7_ZrMxgPVkk7zJU1/view?usp=drivesdk
Email: it's in the CV
I started using Rails in 2006 and React in 2014. I like TypeScript.
Yeah in past 20 years I would receive a job offer from nearly every company I interviewed with. Past few months have been really disappointing with rejections after interviews that I'd normally have said went great.
It's also true that you have now 20+ years of experience. The higher you go, the harder it gets - you might want a different role, etc etc.
If on the other hand you're competing with senior sw devs with 5+ years of experience, there could also be other factors to keep in mind (age, ability in very specific tech stacks, etc).
I think companies are still hiring, but more focused, unlike in 2021-2022 when they over-hired "just in case".
In-company recruiters are often quite helpful and accommodating, but, as soon as one single tech person gets involved, the temperature drops 30 degrees.
Standalone recruiters send me these breathless emails, extolling my qualifications, but, as soon as they find out my age, they ghost me. I have actually had recruiters hang up on me, as soon as I told them my age. I learned to just mention that up front, to get the ghosting out of the way.
Apparently, they aren't very good at math. I list 30 years+ experience, yet they seem to think that I'm under 35.
After a while, I just gave up, and accepted that I'm retired.
It's not the money; it's the "culture." Many folks, much younger, and much more inexperienced, are paid more than I ever made, in my entire career. I would have gladly accepted less money than I had made before. I don't really need it. The work is what interests me.
>I would have gladly accepted less money than I had made before. I don't really need it. The work is what interests me.
We need an acceptable way to express this, without desperately extolling you'll take less money. I think a lot of us "old guys" are in the same boat; I don't need 150k, I'll take 100k if the work is interesting, and I'm more likely to be loyal to boot.
The funny thing, is that I've been told that "Old people are just cruising to retirement," but it's OK to establish your entire business infrastructure on the idea that your young, energetic, engineers will not remain at the company for more than 18 months.
>but it's OK to establish your entire business infrastructure on the idea that your young, energetic, engineers will not remain at the company for more than 18 months.
Yeah, it's a tough nut.
It's understandable that SV companies want ambitious strivers that move on every 2 years, for the same reason many of these CEOs consider the "job done" as soon as they get "an exit". The life of the company is measured in months.
But if you're building a company for the long term, you need smart, loyal people who build institutional knowlededge within the company. This isn't something you can fast track, I don't care if you're the brightest MIT AI grad.
I was just struggling, this morning, with the Apple App Store Connect Web interface.
We're in the final stages of releasing an app, so we're spending a lot of time on that Web app.
It's...challenging. I know that they have big issues with security, privacy, and sheer scope (I'll bet they get millions of submissions, every day), but the site is dog-slow, the CDN breaks constantly, I need to refresh the page quite often, and they seem to forget where I was, the last time; necessitating that I follow the breadcrumbs back to where I was (I have admin accounts on several orgs).
I've released over 20 apps on the store, and have dealt with this, for a while. It's actually getting worse.
But Apple is a multi-trillion-dollar company. I think they could afford for this to work a bit more smoothly, and, quite frankly, I'm surprised, as they have some of the best, and most experienced engineers on the planet, working for them. These are the types of things that lots of sites seem to be doing quite well.
It seems that many startups don’t actually have a product, other than the startup, itself.
A “successful exit” means that the company is sold. The company is the product.
I have spent my entire career at companies that made actual products, for use by actual end-users. These corporations never had any “exit strategy,” because they were meant to be ongoing, perpetual, concerns. They had “future planning,” and “growth strategies,” that often looked a decade into the future.
Isn't age discrimination literally illegal pretty much everywhere? Proving it is always hard, but "they hang up on me as soon as I tell them my age" seems pretty clear-cut.
It's probably not even legal to ask in some jurisdictions.
I suspect that it's not so easy to prove with external recruiters, and that may explain the difference in demeanor between the two types of recruiter. The standalone ones aren't on the hook for $MEGACORP's brand and legal.
They just start saying "Hello?, Hello?, Are you there?," etc. It's a convenient way to hang up on people.
That's why I like the "make it illegal to even ask"-type of policy. At some of these American firms they asked me things like my sexual orientation and religion, aspects you often can't infer from appearance, and that always seemed rather odd to me – I'll just have to trust it won't be used to discriminate. If I don't tell this information I know they can't.
Things like age, gender, and ethnic group are harder because you can't always conceal that. Still, "don't ask, don't tell" during the hiring process seems like the best option here.
I don't lie; especially in my profession. It's a thing. I know that personal Integrity is considered a "quaint anachronism," in today's world, but I won't compromise on that.
You’re right not to compromise and even if you were less ethical, that’s something which is easily detected and could lead to being fired with no recourse. It’s very reasonable for a company to say someone who lies about simple facts can’t be trusted with anything else.
You certainly don't have to lie, but there's no reason you can't simply calculate your age differently. The common 365 days to a year for age isn't a universal given.
The higher you go, the more expensive you get. And the fewer places see the value you bring compared to a cheaper "senior sw dev" with 5 years of experience.
If you want to be paid more than someone with 5 years, you have to generate more value than they do, and you have to persuade the hiring manager that you can generate more value. The fraction of places that can see that is smaller than the fraction that can see the value of a senior over a junior. (On the other hand, for those places, the competition for the jobs is also less severe - there aren't tons of people with 20 years of experience on the street at any given time.)
So it takes longer than it did when you had 5 years of experience. But keep looking. There are places that will see the value in what you provide.
The job category you're looking for is "principal software engineer" or "staff software engineer".
The mere statement that a 5 year ‘Senior’ software engineer has more perceived value than a ‘Senior’ software engineer with 20 years of experience is just crazy. Let’s replace ‘software engineer’ with ‘electrician’ and then tell me this is sane.
A 5 year software engineer may have more perceived value per cost than a 20 year software engineer. Sure, if they have the same salary, you hire the 20 year engineer, but they don't. The 20 year engineer expects more pay, and (rightly) won't work for 5-years-of-experience wages. So you have to find an employer that perceives the additional value of the additional 15 years of experience.
Have you seen the salary requirements for these jobs? People are being paid way more than they were being paid 10 years ago. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is turning down jobs because of insufficient wages. The perceived ‘value’ that an employer sees is the ability of being able to exploit a younger engineer with ridiculous timelines and all night ‘coding sessions’ because they don’t have a family waiting for them when they get home.
