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Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

robertheaton.com

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Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#171

Post by pbiggar »

steven2012 wrote: post #80
ark15 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H1B Transfers don't count against the H1B quota. If you still have time left on your H1B (i.e. approved I797 petiton) and have not violated the 'leave immediately if out of job' rule, it is possible to have a new employer file a petition for transfer of the I797 (H1B) In fact, in such cases, you don't even need a new visa stamp for the transferred H1B. As long old H1B stamp has not expired, you can present this H1B a…

This doesn't appear to be an H1B transfer. Even if it were some sort of H1B transfer, I believe by leaving the US he might have abandoned his H1B. So I think the OP better get his immigration status verified by his new employer, because the last thing he wants to do is get a 10 year ban at the border.

There isn't a H1B transfer, but people often refer to it as a transfer, including immigration lawyers.

Basically, you must get a brand spanking new H1B to start a new job. However, if you have already recently gotten a H1B, then you can skip the quota, and get it approved pretty much immediately. This is commonly referred to as a "transfer" even though it is not technically a transfer.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#172

Post by Terr_ »

randomdata wrote: post #127
Terr_ wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that, as an employee, you are the seller in the relationship Very serious question: Is that actually true, and why do you believe it? Is it "I'm not the one with hard cash, therefore I am obligated to negotiate like a big box retailer"? Don't be fooled into adopting an unhelpful paradigm or power-relationship just because what you are bartering is harder to quanitfy. In many ways your employer is much more li…

> why do you believe it? The opposite of a seller is a buyer. Do you think an employee is better described as being a buyer? > In many ways your employer is much more like Walmart than you will can be. This is the commodity situation I mentioned. Try being a farmer for a while and see what it is like selling your crops. You'll then know exactly what I'm talking about. If you are just another person that is easily rep…

> Do you think an employee is better described as being a buyer?

No, I'm asking why you see yourself as a seller-like-Walmart, which is a subtype of seller who freely offers a public fixed price in advance of negotiations (if any.)

It's entirely normal to negotiate for different kinds of things in different ways... And your labor is quite different from anything Walmart sells.

> If you don't even know how much your time is worth, how is anyone else supposed to know?

Well, so what? That cuts both ways! If the company also can't price the tasks they need finished, how is anyone else (i.e. the employee) supposed to know?

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#173

Post by pbiggar »

hsantana wrote: post #145
steven2012 wrote: post #30

How is your H1B still valid after you lost(?) your job and left the country? H1B is tied to an employer and a specific job, so I don't know how it's still active. Are you sure that your H1B hasn't expired yet? If you try to enter on an expired H1B, you might get banned from entering for 10 years (this happened to my friend 6 months ago) so make sure your immigration status is rock solid.

I am working under H1B right now. My understanding is if I lose my job or quit, I lose my H1B Status automatically. I do not understand how could he quit his job and search for another job for 3 months using the same H1B. I might be missing something here.

See the other comments on this thread.

Technically, if you lose your H1B job, you're out of the country right now. However, in practice there is some leeway, though lawyers differ on what they expect USCIS will let you away with (there seems to be some consensus on "10 days" though).

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#174

Post by rhizome »

recursive wrote: post #142
rhizome wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like this built-in from Ruby's standard Array class? intersection = ary1 & ary2

Yes, exactly.

So, is that really knowing "enough" to avoid the things you mention, or can the heuristic be that you should know the standard library?

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#175

Post by ufmace »

RogerL wrote: post #161
danellis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you guys answer this one? I've had it twice. The first time, with Google, they were genuinely interested to know how deep I could go, so I talked about DNS, TCP, SSL, HTTP etc, but I also talked about application event loops and keyboard drivers and interrupt handlers. The second time, with Rackspace, I presumed they want the same, but they were a bit bewildered and wanted to keep it higher level (protoco…

Can you recommend how to learn this? I don't work with the web or networking, and would like to shore up that part of my knowledge. Are there any good books that gives the high-level overview of it all?

I find that the best way to learn it is to start poking at it. Fire up Wireshark, load google.com, and take a close look at the traffic. You'll see every packet going back and forth, and can try to figure out what each one of them is. Set up a proxy that can MITM the SSL connection, and look at the contents of the packets. Just setting that up will probably tell you a lot about how it all works, and you'll be in a better position to see the plaintexts of all of the handshaking traffic.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#177

Post by ahomescu1 »

mattmanser wrote: post #155
vinkelhake wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about knowing the complexity of every possible sort function. It's about having a good base to stand on, a nicely sized toolbox. If you're working on a solution to an actual problem, it's a pretty damn good to have an idea about the complexity of it. You don't need to be an expert, but developing some kind of intuition for it is very helpful. If your attitude towards these things is "I'll just Google it" the…

Again, what's the point of having a tool you never use? I have had to implement a sort once in 10 years of professional programming, it was in IE6's painfully slow js to fix a slow table sort. More than most. I didn't do a CS degree, the people around me with CS degrees didn't know the answer. I googled it. After the 15 minutes it took to find and implement it I mentioned it to one of the CS people, he promptly reele…

It's not about "sorting" or any particular algorithm, it's about whether you're actually considering the costs and tradeoffs of the code you're writing (which is actually a big part of software engineering), and are equipped to handle those. Now, one cost is execution time, another is memory usage, another is development time, another is maintenance effort and so on. These costs are spread across different domains, but it's important that a programmer considers them.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#178

Post by ahomescu1 »

potatolicious wrote: post #19
mgkimsal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect when they search for it they're going to find their own published writings/blogs ;) I do think some people at FB/Google need to know this stuff cold, but even that isn't going to be 100% of their engineers.

Agreed. I think there's a tinge of arrogance to the claim that Google/FB/what have you need The Best(tm) while everyone else does not. The reality is that there are some jobs (a small minority) at these companies that require incredibly deep algorithmic knowledge - they really do do some complicated things. But the majority of jobs at TwitGooFace are your run of the mill programming jobs, where the requirement and th…

> For the most part, barring a minority of highly specialized high-level positions, engineering ability trumps computer science knowledge.

Minimizing the CPU and memory usage of your application is engineering more than science; however, doing it requires a lot of CS knowledge.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#179

Post by rhizome »

mpeg wrote: post #9
sergiotapia wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work at Google or Facebook or any other of the tech giants, you need to know your algorithm-type questions. For the other 98% of companies, there's just no need. I've also never ever had to do strange things with binary trees.

Why? Do Google or Facebook engineers live in a magical world in which they need to know off the top of their heads the big-O complexity of every possible sort function ever mentioned in an academic paper? I see this argument used time and time again, but it makes no sense to me. Surely they can just search for it when they need it too :)

As evidenced by countless anecdotes and accounts by people who used to work at these companies, they don't. It's not about needing that knowledge, it's about removing those people from the employee pool available to competitor companies and the entrepreneur class.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#180

Post by Jach »

RogerL wrote: post #161
danellis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you guys answer this one? I've had it twice. The first time, with Google, they were genuinely interested to know how deep I could go, so I talked about DNS, TCP, SSL, HTTP etc, but I also talked about application event loops and keyboard drivers and interrupt handlers. The second time, with Rackspace, I presumed they want the same, but they were a bit bewildered and wanted to keep it higher level (protoco…

Can you recommend how to learn this? I don't work with the web or networking, and would like to shore up that part of my knowledge. Are there any good books that gives the high-level overview of it all?

The first question has had a semi-famous answer from this post in 2011: https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe I'd be interested to know what if any books people recommend as well, though my own strategy is when encountering a black box, and desiring to learn about it, I learn about it using whatever resources I can find to make it transparent (often revealing many internal black boxes...). Occasionally online I'll find someone who made really good visual diagrams that help summarize a thing that I might not have found otherwise in a book, e.g. http://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/ELF101 or http://brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
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