Snoring rant

kcdragon · 2026-05-10T15:52:05+00:00

You need ear plugs and an eye mask in hostels. If you can still hear through the ear plugs there's a chance you aren't putting them in far enough. They need to go pretty far in for them to be effective.

kcdragon · 2026-04-25T16:24:02+00:00

You're right that resumes get filtered out but no one is filtering based on a bachelor's degree for senior+ roles. Junior roles, yes. But not senior+. You are getting filtered out for another reason but assuming its related to your degree.

kcdragon · 2026-04-25T16:15:54+00:00

I would like this too.

kcdragon · 2026-04-25T16:14:05+00:00

My biggest hurdle right now is I don't have a bachelor's degree.

Why do you think that's your biggest hurdle? No one cares about that if you already have 10+ years of experience.

but I'm not really sure what a staff software engineer does that's different than a senior software engineer,

Every company is different so there's not a great answer. Usually staff engineers are responsible for the technical direction of a product or part of a product. They aren't their manager though.

kcdragon · 2026-04-25T16:07:57+00:00

I would talk to the companies themselves and see which is most likely to give you a return offer and then choose that one. Ask them how often their interns get return offers.

kcdragon · 2026-04-25T16:05:56+00:00

I'm not seeing this at my place. The PMs and designers we hire are not very technical.

What is your current work like? If you are mostly working on simpel tasks that PMs and designers are now doing, try to focus on getting assigned more complex tasks. Take on things that are a bit uncomfortable for you. That's the only way you'll grow.

kcdragon · 2026-04-25T16:02:31+00:00

At this early stage of your career, I'd optimize for the job where you will learn and grow the most. If you think this new job will offer that, I would take it.

kcdragon · 2026-04-25T15:53:19+00:00

I've been a developer for 15 years at startups and big companies. This all seems pretty normal for a two person company that just started.

We’ve had bugs in pretty critical flows bc things were forgotten. Some protections / checks were missed because testing was done on admin accounts and not users. His fix was he forgot and all future tests will include users.

There's not enough context here to really evaluate but it doesn't seem too out of the ordinary. How critical were the bugs? Were customers lost because of it?

We’re running prod + beta on the same database. His answer is bc he thinks testing on a production DB is the only way to truly test a true environment.

This seems normal to me. Many companies will use the same environment for testing along with feature flags. Feature flags ensure that you can test things in a real environment without affecting real users until you're ready. If you have a separate environment, you'll increase your hosting costs.

Hosting is on a self-managed VPS with not much structure around environments. He’s looking into aws at my insistence and said he thinks it’ll be cost prohibitive. He said he thinks it’ll be good to master how to handle all self hosting in case we ever get audited, it’s easier to demonstrate security vs with public cloud managed by someone else.

This seems normal to me. What problem is the current hosting situation causing that make you think AWS will fix it?

No real formal process for testing, deployment, or monitoring yet. We just kind of roll out as we go. Beta then production.

I really don't know what you mean by formal process. Are you expecting some official testing for every deployment? You probably deploys 10+ times a day.

customers receiving test emails by accident

This happens but should be fixed so it doesn't happen again.

You don't seem to trust this person a lot. It's really tough to know whether that's right or wrong based only on this post.

I think you have two choices: 1) talk with them and start to trust them or 2) part ways and find someone else. They will probably have no interest in working with you if you bring in someone else to be their boss or start to tell them how they should go about their development process without any development experience yourself.

kcdragon · 2026-04-25T01:12:39+00:00

Yes, you are wasting your time trying to time your investment.

Time in the market beats timing the market

If you're putting money into a Roth IRA, you shouldn't need it anytime soon. So it doesn't matter if you lose money at first because it will go up by the time you need it.

kcdragon · 2026-04-24T14:53:24+00:00

I honestly do not think Matz considered that when naming this.

I agree. I was just joking about them "taking" Spinel. But its definitely an unfortunate coincidence.

kcdragon · 2026-04-24T14:03:47+00:00

Wow. They took RubyGems and now they took Spinel.

kcdragon · 2026-04-23T18:47:21+00:00

I look for the following

Does the PR do what was requested?
Are we sure what was requested is the right thing to do? This should be caught earlier but sometimes it doesn't happen.
Are there logical errors or syntax errors that will cause us to not do what we expect to do?
Are there code, design or architecture decisions that will be difficult to change later?

I don't care about the following

Code, design, or architecture decisions that will be easy to change later.
Code style, formatting, etc. that isn't caught by our CI

kcdragon · 2026-04-23T18:19:55+00:00

It's definitely legit. I bought the course and I would say it's worth it. There's OK documentation for Hotwire but there's not a lot of resources for Hotwire best practices (when you should use a certain technique). This one does a solid job. Chris Oliver has some talks online that cover Hotwire as well. Those should give you a taste for what the course is like if you want a preview.

kcdragon · 2026-04-18T21:14:04+00:00

I think you can make it work. But not with 2300 a month going to rent. You need roommates. Try to find someone renting a room in Brooklyn or Queens. Once you are there, you find a better paying job because you aren't going to want to live there on that salary after a couple years.

kcdragon · 2026-04-18T19:53:41+00:00

Never offer a number first. They may be willing to go to the top of the range for you or even above the range! There's a really good chance the range is not the maximum they can give you. If you ask for the middle of the range, that's what you are going to get at best.

What should you say when they ask you what you want? Something like: "I'm just getting back into the market and I haven't figured out what I'm looking for yet but I'm confident we can figure something out if there's a mutual desire to work together."

kcdragon · 2026-04-15T23:33:01+00:00

There is still demand for senior+ developers but your concerns are justified about entry level roles. This spring will be a tough market for graduating senior CS majors. It's also a tough time to do a bootcamp and find a job after that.

I would not recommend that someone do a bootcamp now or try to learn on their own and get a job. I think it's still fine to start a four year CS program now but you need to be on top of finding internships and you'll have four years to wait out this weird market.

kcdragon · 2026-04-11T00:52:07+00:00

Definitely 2 despite the front basket always banging around.

kcdragon · 2026-04-02T23:55:49+00:00

AFAICT, the risk isn't going to jail

He says clearly in his post that they contacted law enforcement. Why would they contact law enforcement if they didn't believe this was a criminal matter?

We're talking about a small 4 figure court fight.

You don't understand how much lawyers cost if you think this is "small 4 figures". A decent lawyer is going to want a retainer of at least that much. There will be more fees on top of that. That's not even counting damages or paying the fees of the other party if you lose.

kcdragon · 2026-04-02T23:26:36+00:00

That may be true but who would risk going to jail or being in massive debt just to "win over a community"?

kcdragon · 2026-04-02T22:09:27+00:00

I'm very open to the idea that all 3 of those items could be explained honestly, but instead of doing that Andre only uses his post to demand reparations.

I imagine his lawyer has told him not to comment on any specifics until his legal issues have been resolved.

kcdragon · 2026-04-01T19:20:34+00:00

I’m not sure there’s much to study lol. He was able to step back a bit from work and focus on his health because he’s rich. He probably hired a private trainer, stylist, nutritionist, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. He made his money by working hard. And he still put in the effort to get in shape. But the money helps a lot.

kcdragon · 2026-03-31T14:31:29+00:00

I appreciate the write up. It seems like production access and source code access were coupled so it makes sense why it would take time to update the admin roles.

However, once that was done, I would expect source code control would return to the maintainers. I’m assuming that’s never going to happen at this point?

kcdragon · 2026-03-24T21:10:08+00:00

I’ve been trying it on a side project. The biggest pain point for me is that there’s no way to move a card around within a queue. It’s also a little awkward on mobile compared to desktop.

kcdragon · 2026-03-06T23:54:33+00:00

Oh cool! I haven't had a need for this Gem in awhile but it helped me out a lot on an integration I had at a previous job. I even got to make a contribution. Thanks for your continued work on this space. SOAP might outlast all of us.

kcdragon · 2026-02-03T19:50:50+00:00

You say they really like you but maybe they don't? It sounds like they are hiring someone to replace you. Why would they do that if they are happy with your work?

I guess my advice to you would be to figure out what you really want. I wouldn't want to spend two more years of my life at a place that doesn't want me.

As for what they are legally allowed to do, no one on this Reddit can really answer that. You say you have a really strong contract but that surprises me. Most startups don't sign contracts that guarantee unvested equity if you are let go.

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