I would recommend these two courses by Harvard in order:
1. CS50's Introduction to Computer Science
2. CS50's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript
Even if you know programming, you should still go through the first course. You can choose watch the lectures on 1.5x or 2x but definitely do the assignments. The assignment and project based approach of these courses will definitely make you learn the stuff deeply and will make you a good full-stack developer. All the best!
This is definitely better for employees who are on H1B than a regular lay-off. At least, they have the option to keep their job while looking for a new one. Otherwise, the 60 day clock starts and the employee may have to leave the country. Which is much worse than relocating to another state.
Sorry but that's not how it works. $500k/year would mean roughly $250k base+bonus and $1 million of stocks vested over four years. And at most companies, the vesting starts after 1 year. So at the end of year one, you would have made $500k in base+bonus+stocks. And after that you would usually get the stocks every quarter so $62.5k worth of stocks every quarter. I am not sure where is your figure of 200-250k Total Comp coming from?
Also, it is possible that employees were putting in extra effort so that they won't be one getting laid off in case their company decides to do a layoff. It was a scary environment in the beginning with a layoff being announced almost every day.
> but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English
This is interesting because in India schools do teach grammar and grammatical terms. I thought they copied it from the UK school system. May be UK used to teach grammar before 1947 (when India got independence) and then they stopped teaching it.
What uncertainties exactly? Just interview normally and if you get an offer then you can accept the offer and they will start the H1B process. You will get the H1B approval in about three weeks. Then you can put your two weeks notice. Overall it will take around 5 weeks from your offer date to your joining date which is pretty reasonable. If there is a delay in the H1B or it does not get approved, then you can continue to work at your old place. Pretty much everybody on H1B these days is following this process.
Link to Ants AI Challenge: http://ants.aichallenge.org/
Winner's post mortem: https://web.archive.org/web/20151117155824/http://xathis.com...