The sad part is that it's Carly Fiorina's fault for turning HP into the mess it was. And now she touts that as the reason why she should be president. It's a sick joke that she thinks gutting one of Silicon Valley's preeminent companies makes her worthy of being president.
HP was the first company to pioneer Silicon Valley culture, ie. The HP Way. It was only after Fiorina's tenure that HP turned into a shadow of its former self. They were one of the first to aggressively lay people off in the US and hire in India, and under her, they lost "The HP Way".
Every CEO since Fiorina has been a complete joke. Now Whitman is coming in to finish the job.
Degree is not relevant, no one in SV cares. There are plenty of people that don't have college degrees that have very good jobs. All that matters is your skill and competence.
You are in an awkward position. You know Javascript, but you don't know front end. There aren't very many purely backend positions that require only Javascript/Node. They probably expect a complete fullstack knowledge, so not knowing front end will hurt you, and not knowing a more back-end language like Python, Java, etc will also hurt you.
Keep interviewing, but learn a new language, like Python or Java, and try to get some experience in it, through open source projects, freelancing, etc.
Don't waste your time flying in October. Companies will be applying for H1Bs in April, and they usually run out on the 1st day. And even if you get an H1B in April, you can't start until the following October. Very few companies (probably zero) will allow you to work remotely until you get your H1B and then can start working.
Your best chance is to get into a Master's program and then apply for internships, and eventually a job that way. Then they can apply for your behalf while you are on OPT, rather than randomly while you're in Columbia.
Your other option is to get a job locally at a big Silicon Valley company, like Facebook or Google and then transfer to the US. If you are manager, then you can get your L1 visa which is really fast.
Internships in Silicon Valley are most certainly not unpaid. The company I work at pays our interns really well.
It sounds like you need to increase the breadth of your knowledge. No one hires for Lua, and although Node is pretty popular right now, you not being able to get a job indicates that you are probably missing some fundamental knowledge, like algorithms, etc. You probably need to increase the quality of your coding, and increase your preparation for interviews.
You are 1 hr away from SF, which suggests to me you live in Livermore or Tracy. You probably need to study up on things that companies are expecting. Go to sites like leetcode.com and glassdoor and work on your skills, maybe that's where you're lacking.
Not that error handling is unimportant, but my opinion is that C is about focusing on resource usage, and keeping very close track over giving back any resource you take, including memory, etc. If you do that, then the number of hard-to-debug runtime bugs drops significantly.
This is a quote from Michael Lewis' The Big Short, I'll never forget it:
Obsessing over Household [Finance Corporation], he attended a lunch organized by a big Wall Street firm. The guest speaker was Herb Sandler, the CEO of a giant savings and loan called Golden West Financial Corporation. “Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model,” recalls Eisman. “And he said, ‘Turn off your tape recorders.’ Everyone turned off their tape recorders. And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people — in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks.”
Eisman asked, “Are any regulators interested in this?”
“No,” said Sandler.
“That’s when I decided the system was really, ‘Fuck the poor.’”
I used to use Ninjatrader. It has integrations with a lot of brokers, and you can write C# algos. The GUI is pretty good the last time I used, it so overall I would recommend it.
Articles like this really strike home how huge this world is. I feel ignorant when my first thought is that we should be able to locate a cruise ship in the ocean, but I clearly underestimate how huge this world really is. It's also hits home when entire planes like the Malaysian airline plane can disappear and literally no one knows what happened to it.
The comparison was between self-driving trucks vs drones, not human-driven trucks vs drones. Obviously those are going to be cheaper than whatever current technology we have.
And there's nothing preventing drones on the rough order of magnitude of trailers from flying around, as long as it's done in a safe and regulated way.
Drones have the capability of delivering directly to the final destination, unlike railways.
In fact,Amazon could redistribute their inventory between warehouses overnight depending on predicted popularity of various items. Or it allows them to have a gigantic single warehouse with every single item in it, and just worry about distribution centers as opposed to warehouses that hold inventory. Then every hour they could send the packages via drones from their central warehouse to distribution centers where they are immediately put on trucks and sent out.
There are a lot more technical challenges associated with self-driving cars than self-driving drones. Self-driving cars aren't even fully solved at this point. However, even very cheap hobby drones can accurately fly to specific GPS coordinates. Even most plane flights are auto-piloted and even auto-land, so I believe that drones are a lot closer in terms of implementation than self-driving cars.
If there is a business case that determines that drones, while being potentially more energy-intensive, can save a company money due to speed, I believe it will win. For example, imagine Amazon could redistribute inventory between two warehouses with a click of a button and overnight, that sounds like a definite competitive advantage to me.
I think drones will leapfrog over self-driving trucks. Why even bother having things that drive on roads when you could fly them directly to a warehouse, over hills, forests, rivers, etc?
This is why drone technology is very interesting to me. If you have drones flying around that deliver things directly from docks to warehouses, or warehouse to warehouse, not only would it be faster, but potentially safer too (the drone could take paths that have no or minimal human population). There's probably a bunch of ways to regulate this as well, such that in the case of disaster, the cost of human life is extremely unlikely.
How much do you want to bet that "someone" was actually your boss, but they didn't have enough guts to say it themselves? That sounds like a terrible place to work, good on you for leaving.
You could get sued, but in the US you can get sued for anything. But you would win the lawsuit.
"Revenue" can mean anything. Look up the term online, for example http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/revenue, and you'll see 6 different definitions. One of them is: "an amount of money regularly coming in". How is this definition of revenue wrong, or how could it result you getting sued? The answer is you won't.
Sure it could cause misunderstanding, but that happens all the time. As long as you don't misrepresent it as "GAAP revenue", you're perfectly fine using it in any reasonable way. Unlike what Sam Altman says, it's not a felony. My wife is a CPA and she laughed out loud when she read that.
Unless you specifically state that you are using the GAAP term "revenue", revenue could mean anything, just like "made" could mean anything, like saying "we made $1M last month".
I highly doubt if you were making a presentation and you said "We had 1M in revenue last month", and it wasn't actually GAAP revenue, I find it hard to believe you would be subject to lawsuit or arrest. In fact, arrest is even more of an over-exaggeration.
Even Groupon had a hard time defining exactly what its "revenues" were pre-IPO, and yet no one got sued or went to jail.
How exactly do they do a fair comparison between 1880 and today? I'm assuming the temperature readings today are very accurate, but how accurate were the measuring devices going back in history, and their standards for taking temperature? Most of the thermometers I have in my house are +- 2F, which would eliminate the differences entirely.
Try to get more sleep. This happened to me when I was sleeping less than 5 hrs a day for months on end. It's probably a combination of sleep and stress. When I decided I would sleep more, that day I left work at 2pm, and slept for 13 hrs straight, and that's when I knew i was sleep deprived.
HP was the first company to pioneer Silicon Valley culture, ie. The HP Way. It was only after Fiorina's tenure that HP turned into a shadow of its former self. They were one of the first to aggressively lay people off in the US and hire in India, and under her, they lost "The HP Way".
Every CEO since Fiorina has been a complete joke. Now Whitman is coming in to finish the job.