> Before you move, make sure to talk to your manager about performance and time zone expectations, as well as your availability for team gatherings.
Work from anywhere but ask your manager from where you can work. Also I want you here each three months for a one-week gathering, and if you're senior I want you to gather even more often. "The most flexible policy in the world" people are calling it LOL It's great a company like Airbnb does this, but come on!
I was going to interview at LandingAI. I was asked before the interview to install a spyware browser extension to monitor my traffic to detect if I was cheating during the interview. I respectfully declined and didn't have that interview.
Wow if you can “cheat” during an interview - meaning either that they’re asking trivial, google-able stuff or that they’re so bad at interviewing that they can’t tell if you actually know your stuff - then their hiring process is pretty bad.
> Wow if you can “cheat” during an interview - meaning either that they’re asking trivial, google-able stuff or that they’re so bad at interviewing that they can’t tell if you actually know your stuff - then their hiring process is pretty bad.
Not necessarily, at least on the first point. Someone could be getting coached.
A few years ago, a coworker of mine hired a contractor onto his team and was convinced the person who actually showed up was not the person who he interviewed (over the phone). He also thought the guy who did show up was getting a lot of help day-to-day from somewhere. The guy was a contractor, so it wasn't a huge problem because we could drop him quickly, but I would have never expected someone would do anything like that. However, it kind of makes sense as a scam: be a decent developer, get a stable of unhirable incompetents, and rotate them through companies while taking a cut of their salary.
You cannot really prevent those kinds of cheats. Even if you use the most insidious spyware a coach can advice the interviewee from a different device.
The only way to prevent those kind of scams is to put all employees in probation for the first months of work and fire them if they don't perform, like it's common in the UK.
I once heard where a dev literally offshored his work and had entire teams working on his tasks. He was employed by multiple companies at once and paid a small fraction of his combined pay to offshore team.
Eventually he got caught trying to manage all this
~80hrs on topic A squeezes the available time for being acquainted with the rest. [Edited because there was little way not to make the former formulation read, unwillingly, nasty]
Some of us believe instead on the advantage of being a polymath, (also) to be able to export wisdom from other contexts into the current work.
Also in terms of the proper ground to facilitate innovation.
It's literally our job to not just assume the possible solution that rolls off the top of our heads might not be the most up to date / best practice and to research it
Agreed. A decent interviewer can also determine a person’s understanding of a topic by simply talking to them about it. IE why did you build a model like this? What diagnostics did you use? Have you tried ____ before in your career?
I'd just note that if pushed by circumstances (if one was willing to be interviewed in spite of their ways), the interview environment could be (would be) on a throwaway virtual machine...
Possibility which, by the way, makes the interviewer's cautionary move generally useless.
It's fairly easy to augment a video stream to paste on eyes that always look in the direction of the camera. It's the digital equivalent of glasses with eyes on them[1].
I suppose if you’re clever enough to set up a VM in order to evade detection, that’s a pretty positive aptitude signal in its own right (though pretty negative on the behavioral/ethics side).
If you aren't able to estimate how much value somebody would bring to the team before hiring them, you maybe should oil your hiring process a bit. Also assuming you can trust somebody more or less depending on their legal jurisdiction says a lot about your company's culture
> If you aren't able to estimate how much value somebody would bring to the team before hiring them, you maybe should oil your hiring process a bit.
I can't interview someone for a few hours and predict how they will be as an employee. No one can.
Sometimes you hire people and are under-paying them, sometimes you're over-paying them.
> assuming you can trust somebody more or less depending on their legal jurisdiction says a lot about your company's culture
So are you saying that all countries have the same laws, and all those laws are equally enforced?
If one of my US employees embezzles money from a client using Stripe credentials, I can easily find and prosecute that person (as long as they're still in the US). Anyone US employee would know this and weigh it against their reasons for wanting to embezzle in the first place (if they have any).
If one of my employees in (let's say) Pakistan did the same thing, there is absolutely nothing I can do. I have no recourse. They would easily get away with it.
It is common and normal to trust people more when they're in the same jurisdiction as you and abide by the same laws.
You may underpay or overpay people, that can also happen with local people. I bet you don't leave much space for overpaying a foreigner if they are already getting 50% of what a local would get.
Regarding the criminal related comment, you should first and foremost trust and empower your employees independently of where they come from. And then you should also have controls in place to make it really difficult to steal your clients' money.
> I bet you don't leave much space for overpaying a foreigner if they are already getting 50% of what a local would get.
They are getting 50% of what a very senior dev would get.
They each make 4x the market rate for their country for this type of work (based on Upwork rates), which is 27x the average salary there.
> Regarding the criminal related comment, you should first and foremost trust and empower your employees independently of where they come from. And then you should also have controls in place to make it really difficult to steal your clients' money.
Thank you for the philosophy lesson. Do you have experience hiring people from many countries, or is this theoretical for you? It isn't theoretical for me.
What you are saying is exactly what I do. I trust all of my employees completely, but literally everyone who is betrayed made a mistake in trusting someone. I am not arrogant enough to say that my trust is 100% correct.
So how do I make it difficult for people to steal money? I rely on my country's law enforcement.
It is impossible to keep devs away from at least some sensitive data, like API keys. The "control" you're talking about is partly to hire people who have more incentive not to steal than to steal.
If that impersonal approach works for you and everybody is happy with it, that's fantastic.
I haven't hired myself but I have worked with people from all over the world with different backgrounds for many years and have had literally zero close cases of anybody misusing an API key on their benefit for whatever reason. It wouldn't have made any sense for them to do so.
And the control I talked about is security logging, monitoring, alerting systems, etc. I've worked for a banking company and also for a fintech one and all the money movement operations were duly logged and monitored. Literally nobody would risk doing anything malicious in an environment like that plus people are happy with their salaries
Agreed, globalized salaries should also consider people moving around and shouldn't depend on current location (unless of course money is not enough to live in the current location). I had an interview the other day with a local company that offered very sweet remote packages and a not-that-sweet on-site one. I said I would leave the country when I got the job and work in a digital nomad way, and they said that because of my current location I would only be offered the local package. Weird situations like this make me think we're not quite there regarding fair remote work yet
Living in a poor country shouldn't be a reason to get a low rate. But this is really common, mostly because companies look for people in third-world countries to get the same level of employees waaay cheaper. I'm from Uruguay and have had interviewers thinking they're doing me a favor for extending me an offer in USD, even if it's ridiculously low for my experience. In the end it depends on how the potential employee negotiates their salary
ha, I'm also from Uruguay. A couple months ago I received 3 offers. One of them explained their offer was "the salary from Philadelphia adjusted to the local market". The other two offers where comparable to what I've been making (similar to a US salary). I didn't go for the "local-market adjusted" one.
The only thing they're doing is missing on some talent, but that could be ok for them.
I live in Malaysia. I'm getting paid USD24k annually right now. If someone wants to offer USD40k, I'd take it right away even if it's the lower end of the US standard rates.
At some point, you're competing with other remote offers though.
Totally, and probably from there it would be easier to find a 60-70k job. That's why I think assuming people from "poor countries" will be necessarily cheaper is a huge misconception
In most countries to hire a remote foreigner requires to jump over some legal, and accounting complications. So yes, they do it because they want to find a cheaper deal abroad. It's pretty much the only reason why it makes sense for them, besides searching for very rare skills. And there's nothing wrong with it. Nobody is prohibited to try to negotiate the same rate as in an expensive city in US, and good for you if your qualifications allow you to have success with it, but in most cases it means a company would be better hiring a US employee instead of outsourcing.
Sometimes it's not just about finding people that work for less money, it's because they know there's also talent out there. Even for companies that pay good salaries it's very hard to hire local senior-ish engineers, most of them already have a job, so they have to hire somewhere else.
Maybe not an ORM but a query builder: Knex has been of so much help to me, it works pretty well and it's really easy to use. Used sequelize in the past but it can get incredibly complicated, really positive change.
The problem with asking about their culture is that they already know by heart what they should say about it. This is how they sell themselves as opposed to their real opinion about the culture which you will probably never know unless you ask it in an original way to avoid the response by the book
