A good pair of IEMs. Headphones still leak outside noise even with the best noise cancelling. A good seal with a good pair of IEMS pretty much cancels out any ambient noise in the room.
This is the #1 distraction remedy for me that helps me maintain focus.
Given an empty room and nobody around I can get a lot of shit done.
From this engineers perspective every b-hole with VC funding thinks `open floor plans` are awesome and exposes their engineers to the constant distractions throughout the day for little or no reason other than to be trendy.
If I were an investor I would never invest in a company that puts their engineers in an open floor plan UNLESS that floor was only 100% engineers in which they would all be telling each other to STFU if they were too loud. Telling people in other departments to PLEASE STFU rarely ever happens, and when it does it is usually scoffed at.
So many companies in the bay area are pissing their money away faster than our water can be consumed because of this.
I really don't understand the higher level objective.
Conway's law still applies - open floor plan or not. Companies should maximize productivity - they seem to only realize the benefit amongst marketing and sales teams, leaving engineers wondering "WTF mate?"
Full mouse support enabled for Iterm2/Tmux/Emacs so I can click and drag windows/frames, etc.
Clipboard access is seamless with respect to the fact that Emacs has different Cut/Paste commands than OSX - but when I do cut/yank in Emacs the results are available for me to Command+v inside OSX.
For me there is almost nothing missing from using anything in GUI mode for my development purposes. I live in the console and have found very little reason to switch.
Using RubyMine for Rails is awesome and I used to be a die-hard fanboy... but I made the jump to the console 2 years ago and haven't missed _anything_. I have found no productivity gains over living in RubyMine/Intellij vs. Emacs/Iterm2/Tmux.
I found out around the same time as you that I was a victim of identity theft. I live in S.F. and this punk lives in Las Vegas Nevada.
The person(s) in question opened several accounts using my Social # and my name. They applied for loans and linked all these accounts back to the same address in Las Vegas.
I am in the process of fighting it. You need to go here and do what they say https://www.identitytheft.gov/ (FTC sponsored site.).
I suggest you go to https://www.identitytheft.gov/ and complete the FTC affidavit. Once you have done that take it with you to the Police Department in your area and have a police report filed.
I live in S.F. and the police department seemed perturbed to have to make a police report for me - the amount of information I provided created too much paperwork for them I think. They stated many times they aren't the ones who would be investigating it and asked if I still want to file a police report - to which my answer was YES ITS REQUIRED BY THE FTC.
I have found resistance throughout the entire process, from the crediting agencies to the businesses that had the accounts in collections all the way to the collection agencies and the Police. They all assume you are FOS.
The burden is completely on you and likely nothing positive will happen for a while.
After paying $1 to get my TransUnion credit report they gave me identity theft insurance (through TransUnion) which covers certain expenses... so save all your receipts and file a claim against that insurance to get your money back. I'm using this to get reimbursed for all the trips and time spent away from work as well as the expenses of using FedEx's services/computers to get the fax work done.
You need to check your Social Security account to make sure it has not been compromised. http://www.ssa.gov/ DO THIS BEFORE you place a credit alert on your accounts or you will not be able to accss your SSA account online and you will need to go to a brick/mortar location to gain access to this information. Once a credit alert is placed on your account you are one step closer to being safe... so do this right away.
A few key pieces of information you are going to need is
- Dates of all fraudulent transactions,
- Phone numbers tied to the account,
- Addresses tied to the account
You are going to need to provide proof it was not you - so you need some sort of transactional proof that you were NOT in Brazil using a credit card. Anything can help here - bills paid, rent, etc... I only hope that the period in question was long enough to show that you could not have possibly been out of the country for that long.
> There are many indicators I see, people who talk about being manages during a technical interview, etc. all bad signs.
What if you were proud of the promotion to "manages" and you want to highlight the fact that you were given this promotion because of the level you were performing at?
Is it not a sign of a quality candidate?
I feel like you just watched last week's episode of Silicon Valley and internalized it.
What I have found that helps with this behavior is to listen to my content instead of read it. It is like a safety net to stop my mind from wandering.
The part of me that is prone to wander cannot - because the podcast I am listening to won't let my mind stray past the topic on point. In times where I need to focus on what I am reading it is very easy to let the podcast slip into the background.
If my focus gets interrupted the podcast is there like a safety net.
The key is to pick the appropriate podcast that is sufficiently dull enough.
I love hardcore history for this. Dull isn't the right word because it is interesting - you'd have to listen to it to understand though.
I don't have much value to add... but I have felt this since I arrived in SV 5 years ago.
It has only gotten worse.
I don't have a degree from a prestigious school. I do have a bachelors in Computer Information Systems though. What this means is I have hands on practical experience in what to do and how to do it - but I don't have the deep theory tutelage that everyone in SV seems to require.
Unfortunately I was duped in to thinking you build a career and build ontop of what you have done. In SV - nobody even bothers to look at my resume.
I've never been asked about my experience. I've only been shown a whiteboard and told to jump through hoops.
It is B.S. because the white-boarding ability has no bearing on how good of a colleague you are. How much you contribute, and whether or not you are a good engineer.
IMO all it does is validate that you went to a top tier school - and allows for the the hiring company to add 1 more million onto their valuation on exit.
Case and point: a few years ago I interviewed at a company that wanted to build a Learning Management System focused on re-educating senior-citizens. I had 4 years of relevant experience in that industry, which included working for the top two companies in that verical. I happened to be a Rails engineer which they wanted to leverage. It seemed like a perfect fit and they were on the cusp of giving me an offer - but they passed me up to hire someone from MIT that had never worked for a company and had never touched ruby. His MIT degree was more valuable to them.
If merrit was a thing in silicon valley - that would not have happened.
I really don't know how I feel about this but in a sense I think it may be good for the company and bad for others who weren't privileged enough to have rich parents to send them to a top CS school.
I second the Beyer Custom One Pro's - they are bass cannons and are the best sounding headphone I have purchased (I have many 200 dollar headphones lying around).
The Flex community (before steve jobs killed it) had the same issues - every week a new client-side framework would come out and try to re-define client-side MVC.
The best framework I found back then was RobotLegs, which was an MVC(s) framework which I loved because it was more of a set of patterns you followed. Dijon.js https://github.com/creynders/dijon is a port of Robotlegs to JS which seems cool. It just provides dependency injection and leaves the MVC part up to you.
Flux seems like the way to go, IMHO. It is more of a set of patterns rather than a "framework". It's a lot to grok at first though.
I would much rather bootstrap something than take outside money and loose the freedom of choice.
The hard part is - being ramen profitable in S.F. As an underpaid engineer at a startup I envy your position; but given that it took you 1.5 years to get there I feel like that sounds about right.
I am now inspired to dig in for the long hull and minimize my expenses so that my bootstrapped ideas can flourish. Having a girlfriend makes it nearly impossible to be ramen profitable - but I'm willing to try.