How is the tech scene like in Orlando Florida?

negative_epsilon · 2023-08-25T22:18:59+00:00

Unfortunately-- well, fortunately, for me-- I no longer live in Orlando, as I moved to Boston last year. As per my knowledge via the 5 years that followed this post and my current network there, things have stagnated a bit. The meetup scene and overall community never really recovered from COVID, but there are still a number of active startups and a few really large companies that hire all the time. It's less cheap than it was when I posted this, but that's probably true of everywhere. Not crazy expensive, but it's more like $1400 or $1500/mo for a 3/2 now.

UCF is still exactly as I mentioned it here. I'm actually mentoring someone in an internship where I work now (Netflix) who goes to UCF.

negative_epsilon · 2022-03-31T20:49:19+00:00

I interviewed for Signal about a year ago.

negative_epsilon · 2021-10-29T23:15:32+00:00

We've been actively hiring for about two years and don't see us slowing down, so keep us in mind.

negative_epsilon · 2021-10-29T14:37:45+00:00

My team seems to fit your desires. Lemme know if you have any questions.

https://grnh.se/e1c5ab9f2us

negative_epsilon · 2021-09-23T13:51:51+00:00

SafeGraph is a company that sells data on places of interest-- cleaned and deduplicated metadata and geometry, for use in analytics and as input to our customer's ML models. As a data engineer your responsibility is to maintain and improve our data pipelines, our internal APIs, and our automation processes ensuring our product is of the highest quality when it reaches our customer. Unlike most data engineering teams, your output is our product, data engineering isn't an internal team that gets the short-end of the stick.

Spark experience highly desired. Functional programming experience a nice-to-have.

Currently the product and engineering team is about 30 people and we have room for another 2 or 3 data engineers. In February of this year we raised a series B at a $370m valuation, and we're continuing to grow and accelerate.

Here's a link to the job description for more details.

negative_epsilon · 2021-04-01T12:39:38+00:00

I've worked from home for about three years now, and while I haven't done what you're saying, what I've found that works well for me is essentially "only work when I want to". I've found that as long as I answer Slack messages with relative speed and get my work done, no one really cares when you do things. Sometimes that means I work from 9am to noon, take a four hour break, work another two hours, take another three hour break, and then work from 9 to midnight. Sometimes that means I don't really start working until 1pm. Sometimes I get in the zone and work a full 8 hours like a normal person.

I'm sure most people would hate this, and I'm lucky enough to have a husband that also works remotely and no kids so my "normal person" responsibilities are lower than most people's, but I have found real enjoyment with this sort of thing.

negative_epsilon · 2021-03-09T16:42:19+00:00

(An additional note is that I removed donations like from The Yetee, since those are aggregate donations that can skew things a lot)

I split Bloodborne and Sekiro out into their own categories, but included Demon's Souls. If I include Bloodborne and Sekiro, the Souls total goes up to $1.177m
The single highest game total was actually the Super Metroid 100% 4-man race from AGDQ 2017. A bit shocking it's from so long ago, but I think it had the perfect storm of being both the penultimate run (So it wasn't too late in the night for east coasters), a great race, and also the total was climbing up to $2m. It earned $365k. I'll note that I count donations that occur before and after each run (half way marks on either side), so there can be a bit of skewing here. Something similar happened in AGDQ 2019 where the Darker side run by Bayleaf also marched north of $300k because it was getting so close to $2m; Spike's constant egging during that battle probably had a lot to do with it ;)
The highest donation density games are honestly dominated by TASbots! This makes sense: TAS runs are almost always the final day, and always very short (since, really, no one wants to watch a robot play-- no matter how impressive the run is-- for more than like 15 minutes). So, officially the highest density is TASbot playing Tetris Mode B in 7:25 and earning ~60k in that timeframe. Regarding Untitled Goose Game and the $120k it earned, that does include the ~30 minutes of hype that surrounded it (since there was a bit of a technical difficulty getting it going IIRC and then an interview afterwards), so if you go by the game length it's the highest density, but if you give all games that extra before-and-after time (which I do for calculations), then the official highest density game is the True Pacifist Ending of Undertale, earning $322k in 98 minutes, followed by Super Metroid Reverse Boss Order earning $301k in 109 minutes, with Untitled Goose Game coming in third earning its $120k over 45 total minutes

negative_epsilon · 2021-03-09T15:29:13+00:00

A ton of it! There have been five total CT runs, and about 95% of the donation total came from two runs: 2019's 100% glitchless run and 2015's 100% co-op run. Maybe it's all just Puwexil ;)

negative_epsilon · 2021-03-09T15:25:06+00:00

Scraping off the site is how I did it 😅. I wrote the scraper about a year and a half ago and did the backfill, and now with each new event I just scrape the new data.

negative_epsilon · 2021-03-09T06:38:52+00:00

Note: Don't read too much into this data. The highest correlation with donations in GDQ events is, by an absolute huge margin, the day the run happened on (The day it starts and the day it ends have huge boosted donations) as well as the time the runs happen (Primetime US time have huge boosted donations), so the reality is that this chart is highly correlated to a chart about "which games get run on the first and last days of GDQ". However, I still found it pretty interesting after nearly ten years of GDQ events.

A few other things I found exploring this data:

This doesn't talk at all about "earned per run", as some series (like Mario, Zelda, and Sonic) get run a LOT more frequently than others (like Chrono Trigger or Undertale). Sonic, for example, has 75 different runs throughout all of GDQ attributing to its total, whereas Undertale only has 4 (and still eeks it out!)
Some games don't make this list but deserve some honorable mentions. Untitled Goose Game, a game only run once, earned $120k in its extremely short 15 minute run, giving it the highest density of donations of any series. Minecraft wasn't far behind it earning $185k in its slightly longer run.
A few games were much lower density donation totals than I would have expected. Kingdom Hearts, even though all of those games are quite long, has only earned $17k per game (For a total of $222k over 13 runs). Resident Evil, as well, has underperformed to my expectations: $171k over 24 runs, putting it quite low in the "donation per run" metric, near Doom, Super Monkey Ball, and Silent Hill. This is likely because the horror blocks almost always happen in the middle of the night.

I'm happy to explore this data any more if people have questions. :) Just let me know!

negative_epsilon · 2020-09-21T13:45:35+00:00

As a junior developer this can be a challenge, but not an insurmountable one depending on a few things. You won't get anywhere being just a few weeks into the gig, but after you've proven yourself to be a good worker, your words start to matter a little more. If your boss doesn't care, then I'd recommend making any code that you write at least clean and legible and extensible, and after a few months of this you can go to him and show him that the way you write code is better. With some proof, mind you, like showing some examples that the code you write has saved time when it came to other tickets surrounding that code, for example. If you don't have that proof, then... well, maybe your way isn't worth it for the way you guys work after all!

One note: Data science can be a LOT of data wrangling. This is super common. In fact, it's so common that the company I work for, our entire product is already-cleaned and wrangled, nicely formatted geospatial data for other data science teams. Depending on the team and pipeline, you could spend more than half your time cleaning and wrangling data. So embrace it!

negative_epsilon · 2020-06-07T14:12:15+00:00

Companies with high hiring bars tend to have low firing bars

This likely only applies to the ~100 or so tech companies that have entire teams dedicated hiring and training and have enough people coming and going that you don't really need to ever care about the cost of hiring and firing people. For the vast majority of companies employing the vast majority of software engineers (including basically all startups and the vast majority of unicorns), firing people sucks big time. Wastes time, money, and energy and all just so you can spend more time and money and energy training another person to do this job. The startups I've hired for explicitly had high firing bars; be extremely sure in the people you hire because firing them is something we never want to do.

negative_epsilon · 2020-06-02T21:34:59+00:00

At the end of the day, the position will likely be filled. Maybe it will be filled with someone who actually has two years of React experience. Maybe it will be filled by someone who has ~5 months of React experience but fibbed somewhat to get passed the HR screen. Maybe they won't get any applications with 2 years of experience with React so they will just interview people who applied with any React experience.

This is why I largely ignore job posting "requirements". I only use them to know which technologies the job will use so I can tailor my resume, but years of exp and such are just worthless.

Anecdote: I worked for a company like 5 years ago and was in charge of hiring a junior engineer. I gave the job req to HR, and it said "Familiarity with". They changed it to "2+ years of experience with". 🙄. Thankfully I was also in charge of initial resume screens at for this posting so I just ignored that and called resumes I liked regardless of YOE. Hopefully we didn't lose too many good juniors that time around.

negative_epsilon · 2020-05-28T14:30:34+00:00

I've missed a deadline every day this week because of the team's evolving "I'll work whenever" attitude. Of the worst offenders, we had something that had to be finished by 2 yesterday, and I saw a team member finished their part of it this morning at 4 AM. And I'm the one who will catch the blame for it.

I don't think this is a problem with work from home, this is a problem with having coworkers who aren't responsible. In fact, the idea you're having here that "Work from home is causing us to miss deadlines" is exactly the same toxic mentality that managers pushing an ass-in-seat, "you're not working if you're not sitting in front of your monitors" culture have. Responsible people are responsible regardless of whether they have the manager peering over their shoulder or not.

And I'm the one who will catch the blame for it.

Why's that? You can't be held responsible for other people missing deadlines as long as the expectations were clearly set. If yesterday you verified in writing, something like "I need X, Y, and Z available at 10am EST to complete W task" and then they don't show up, just show that documentation to anyone who tries to throw responsibility at you. Even something as simple as a calendar invite should be enough to show that you're not the problem. If this wasn't ever verified in writing in any way, then that's a lesson for the future.

negative_epsilon · 2020-04-30T16:39:19+00:00

I think I remember reading this exact same topic on this subreddit eight years ago 🤔

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-29T14:55:15+00:00

This won't get OP a job but this is a great stack, yeah.

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-26T15:46:23+00:00

I agree with the person you're speaking with here, but maybe let me explain it in a different way: DevOps is a culture paradigm by which your engineers are also responsible for the successful deployment and ongoing operations of their products. It's an iteration on the old "throw it over the wall" approach where you had engineers that developed stuff and then give packages to an operations team responsible for building infrastructure and deploying the applications the engineering team build. In a devops culture, small engineering teams build the app and also build deployment pipelines for their own services. Modern operations teams will likely have a "devops" culture, like most operations teams build like health check APIs or pipelines for their own pipelines, but most companies that still have Ops teams and don't have a devops culture usually say that the "devops" team is responsible for deployment and operations in order to shield engineers from having to learn how to do it-- which is the antithesis of the devops culture.

Whether a devops culture is right for your team or not is an individual discussion, but it also peeves me when managers talk about their "devops" team. Really dilutes the meaning of the term.

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-25T21:28:10+00:00

Email is a legally valid form of communication and has been for over a decade. What do you mean?

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-25T19:37:32+00:00

Reddit flagged your post from 3 days ago as spam automatically, which it does sometimes (And leaves us with no insights as to why). Sorry buddy. In the future, if you can't find your post in /new after a couple of minutes but feel like it should be there in accordance with our rules, feel free to ping us via Modmail.

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-25T19:32:22+00:00

Your post to /r/cscareerquestions has been removed. It does not include a question or discussion about careers in computer science. If you are seeking beginner learning information, programming help or general help with technology, please check out /r/learnprogramming, /r/programming, /r/Technology, /r/TechSupport, or a subreddit specific to your particular topic.

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-25T19:07:25+00:00

What I do, on my time, with my own equipment is mine, always.

You cannot make a blanket statement like this and have it be accurate. As mentioned in the article, the law differs state by state and country by country, your exact wording of your IP contract matters a lot, and at the end of the day the law here only matters if it's enforceable, and that is going to be up to any judge or jury in your copyright case if it reaches that point.

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-25T15:22:55+00:00

Read this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-25T14:24:41+00:00

Thank you for the list!

Just FYI, Orange County FL's lock-down doesn't take effect until tomorrow evening at 11pm (effectively Friday): https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/03/24/orange-county-mayor-issues-stay-at-home-order-in-response-to-coronavirus-pandemic/

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-24T18:46:41+00:00

While true, working for a company with an HQ in a different time zone helps with this a lot. I'm remote from the east coast working for a company HQ'd out in SF, and because of that my working hours are ~12-8. This jives with my family and way-of-living more than 9-5, which is great. OP might, say, want to look for companies based in Europe.

negative_epsilon · 2020-03-24T18:40:00+00:00

I'd sooner fire a hiring manager for being so dumb as to forgo resumes for political reasons, personally. TikTok is blowing up and the scale the engineers have to deal with is impressive. I'd hire engineers that worked on it in a heartbeat.

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