You definitely don't need a personal website, blog, or even github for most jobs. If you're cold-applying to jobs online, and you don't have a linkedIn it will be seen as a red flag by some hiring managers - easier to lie/exaggerate about employment history, durations, title inflation, etc. Also more likely that you might be trying to work multiple jobs at once. LinkedIn doesn't need to be fully fleshed out with a ton of content or even any activity, but just a public list of companies you've worked at, rough timelines and titles, is enough to reassure most hiring managers.
The product page linked at the top of the article boasts about voice encryption as a feature, but that's still very much illegal on ham radio bands in the US, right? Or is it just referring to CTCSS/DCS?
solo.io | Senior Backend Software Engineer | Boston, MA (Cambridge), or fully remote (NA) | Full-time
Solo is an application networking company working with open source, cloud native technologies. If you are passionate about technologies like containers, Kubernetes/k8s, Istio service mesh, Envoy proxy, GraphQL, Cilium, eBPF, WASM (server side), serverless functions, and more, then Solo.io is the place for you! We strive to productize the bleeding edge of cloud technologies, contribute back to the open source community, and build solutions which scale globally. If you're interested in presenting your work at conferences and meetups, that is also encouraged and supported (although not mandatory!). We are a golang shop. Prior experience with k8s operators, Envoy proxy, or service mesh technologies is a big plus.
I think "bad people" is relative here though. The incentive structure is entirely misaligned. As mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, agents' best strategy for the highest possible payout is trying to close as many deals as possible, not taking the extra time to find each person the ideal perfect fit house (volume over value-add quality). It sounds like you found an agent who went the extra mile to get your business, which is great for you! But I suspect that there are other, less buyer-friendly agents out there out-earning your agent because they just drop the "difficult" customers and work with the easiest-to-close folks to get more overall commission.
Given that, my personal strategy when buying was to just do as much of the legwork as possible myself, rather than risk leaving due diligence to somebody whose financial incentives are not aligned with my own. My agent essentially ended up mostly relegated to docusign-forwarding duties.
Ok but you could replace the "Sending notifications about new listings in real time" duty by subscribing to zillow/redfin etc with specific filters... for free. It's hard to make the argument that that's worth 6% of a of half million dollar purchase? I agree it's a part time job to be a buyer in this market, but I don't think the buyer's agent really makes that job much easier in my experience.
"Answers a call at any time of the day" is definitely a great nice to have, but I suspect that puts your particular agent in the top 10% of the field. Most agents I have used will just let all phone calls go to voicemail and then text back or call you back hours or days later. YMMV a lot on this one.
The problem in this particular case is that the sensor may be confidently telling you there's something in the way, but in reality it's just a plastic bag. Hard braking at 70mph on a highway as if you were about to hit a concrete wall is probably not a great outcome in this scenario if there's somebody behind you.
The issue is that the number displayed on the dash can be toggled between "% battery remaining" or "miles remaining". The "Miles remaining" is actually "EPA rated miles x % battery remaining", and NOT "miles remaining based on last 10 miles driven, or current navigation destination".
If they removed the 'Miles remaining' number and only showed a percentage, you would end up having to do the exact same conversion in your head anyways. "Oh I have 43% remaining of my 330 mile battery, how much is that?" so this is really just a quick shortcut.
Tesla has a separate screen with very clear range estimates that the user can toggle (based on last n miles or based on current exact 'instant' reading). In addition, when navigating to a destination, the nav tells you the estimated battery % on arrival, which is also based on current driving and is generally quite accurate. In addition, it will tell you during & after the trip exactly why the estimated and actual range differed. Eg "0.5% extra battery used due to a 5.6mph headwind, 2% extra battery used by driving over 70mph", etc.
Having a count-down 'Miles remaining' on the dashboard doesn't always make sense, particularly when you haven't entered a destination, or if you're switching between highways and back rounds a bunch. Either way, it's never going to actually be accurate down to the last mile. In reality, you just have to know that the miles on the dashboard are "EPA miles", meaning if you're driving on a flat surface in good conditions at ~55mph, that's what you'll get. If you change your speed, or conditions get worse, you know you'll need to adjust it in your head (or use the dedicated in-car screen to automatically figure it out for you!).
I always disliked Irish (and languages, in general) in school. However, now that I'm over a decade out of college I find it to be one of the few subjects I wish I'd paid more attention to when I'd had the chance... Sure, it's not particularly useful in adult life, but neither is organic chemistry, for most folks.
The main difference for me is that it's relatively easy to "fill in the gaps" for any other subject we learned from the ages of 12-18. Irish however, is niche enough - and learning resources generally technologically behind - that it's still quite tricky to self-teach or "quickly google" answers to things. That makes it unique from most other primary/secondary school subjects which are more universally taught across the world.
One use case I'm psyched about for this - shared virtual whiteboarding for remote workers. No traditional apps have been able to reproduce the feeling of being in the room with a small group, collaborating on a shared whiteboard, feels like a huge opportunity!
solo.io | Software Engineer | Boston, MA (Cambridge), or fully remote | Full-time
Solo is an application networking company working with open source, cloud native technologies. If you are passionate about technologies like containers, Kubernetes/k8s, Istio service mesh, Envoy Proxy, GraphQL, Cilium, eBPF, WASM (server side), serverless functions, and more, then Solo.io is the place for you! We strive to productize the bleeding edge of cloud technologies, contribute back to the open source community, and build solutions which scale globally. If you're interested in presenting your work at conferences and meetups, that is also encouraged and supported (although not mandatory!). We are primarily a golang shop, although no prior go experience is required. Prior experience with k8s operators and service-mesh technologies is a big plus.
Why not both? They don't have to be mutually exclusive!
For example - I'd be in favor of abolishing the current H1-B lottery in favor of taking in the first 85,000* applicants with the highest paying job offers. Maybe have some carve-outs based on sector, weighted by demand, so eg academics aren't competing with SV-tech salaries. Not a perfect solution, but solves a lot of the major problems we have today.
I was going to say that FANG companies don't make up a very large proportion of H1-B visas and that the majority go to Infosys, Tata, Cognizant and the like... But I just looked it up, and it turns out that trend has been reversed considerably in the past few years, which is great to see!
As of May 2023 there are[0] over 300,000 tech job listings open and unfilled across the country.
There are an additional 65,000 H1B visas available each year to applicants with bachelor's degrees in STEM, and an additional 20,000 degrees available for those with masters degrees in STEM. So those +85,000 individuals wouldn't even cover one third of the currently open positions (and notably, more positions are opening every day right now, where the cap is only renewed annually).
In reality the bar to clear this requirement is quite low. E.g. "We put an ad in the (physical) local newspaper one time for this job, with every single esoteric skill this individual has, listed as hard-requirements..." is typically sufficient to check the box and say "We've tried, nobody applied!".
solo.io | Software Engineer | Boston, MA (Cambridge), or fully remote | Full-time
Solo is an application networking company working with open source, cloud native technologies. If you are passionate about technologies like containers, Kubernetes/k8s, Istio service mesh, Envoy Proxy, GraphQL, eBPF, WASM (server side), serverless functions, and more, then Solo.io is the place for you! We strive to productize the bleeding edge of cloud technologies, contribute back to the open source community, and build solutions which scale globally. If you're interested in presenting your work at conferences and meetups, that is also encouraged and supported (although not mandatory!). We are primarily a golang shop. Prior experience with Envoy, Istio, or k8s operators are each a big plus!
I don't think the problem is the subscription model exactly. If I'm paying $15 / mo for netflix, it's very clear that my $15 gets me one month of access, to whatever's available in their library at the time. Similarly, if I pay $10/mo for Gym access and the Gym decides it no longer wants to do business with me, that's fine because A) there's more Gyms for me to go to, and B) I never had any expectation that anything from that Gym would be 'mine' forever, it was always an ephemeral access to the service conditional on my recurring payments.
The problem is for services where I pay a la carte to build a "personal" library of things, like steam games, Google Play movies, Amazon Kindle books, etc. I've paid a one-off price for the digital content with the expectation that I will have access to that content indefinitely. If I am abusing the platform, causing issues for others, or generally and blatantly violating ToS in a major way, then I think that's a different story. But if I need to dispute one transaction, then the ability to immediately remove all access to previously purchased content immediately, indefinitely, and frequently without review or appeals - is very anti-consumer.
It effectively nullifies existing consumer protection laws. I will never issue a chargeback or complaint against Valve (Steam) or Google, even if I have a perfectly legitimate reason to do so - as loss of those accounts after all of these years would likely be more costly to me than most erroneous charges I'm likely to see.
The problem is that your accounts with these businesses can accrue innate value over time. If you have spent 4 figures on buying video games on steam, and then want to dispute a fraudulent charge, access to all previously purchased items can be suddenly and permanently revoked. No to mention data like friends lists, game saves, etc.
Even worse, for XL companies who force one account across multiple products, the two things can be completely unrelated. If Google is refusing to RMA my pixel 7 phone which arrived defective, I can't issue a chargeback on that phone purchase because they'll remove my access to the last 10 years of family photos, my email, my domains, and my GCP servers.
Sure you could argue that this is the exact reason you should diversify these things across different companies, but in some cases the tight integration between these products is a compelling feature. The price for that feature shouldn't include removing consumer purchase protections.