Townsquared is a private network for businesses in the same community to meet one another, share advice, and form partnerships. We are Series A funded by Floodgate Capital and August Capital.
We are ramping up quickly and hiring for engineering and product roles. Please get in touch directly ([email protected]) if interested.
Why work with us:
- We are passionate, talented, and curious
- We believe in risk taking and action
- We collaborate closely with our users
- We love local
- Help shape our product and company culture
- Ample opportunity to grow as we grow
- Form deep connections with local businesses
- Create meaningful change on a large scale by empowering individuals and communities
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We're hiring:
* Senior Backend Engineers: Experience building cross-platform APIs; Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, microservices
* Frontend Engineers: Experience building delightful single page applications; AngularJS, CSS
* iOS Engineers: Experience building shipped iOS applications; Objective-C
* Product Managers: Experience driving projects through the ideation-to-ship lifecycle; analytical, A/B testing experience
Cringely doesn't understand the difference between immigrant and non-immigrant visas if he recommends the EB-2 as an alternative to the H-1B. The EB-2 is a green card application for a foreign worker who wants to live in the US permanently; the H-1B is for people who just want to work in the US for some period of time. All countries have similar distinctions between workers and long-term residents, and confusing them is a strong indicator that the writer doesn't know what he is talking about.
Cringely is also wrong in at least one important respect about the EB-2 visa: its numbers do indeed fill up every year, just like for the H-1B, for Indian and Chinese applicants. So if you file an EB-2 based visa application this year, it will take you about 10 years to receive your EB-2 based green card if you are Indian, and 5 years if you are Chinese. The US Government was, as of February 2015, processing EB-2 applications received in September 2005 for Indian applicants, for example [1].
Is Cringely then suggesting that companies wait 5-10 years for new foreign employees to join them?
I've posted about this before on Hacker News, but it's a common misconception here that H-1B workers are somehow "indentured", or that they cannot switch employers. Under the AC-21 act of 2000 [2], H-1B employees can switch employers with a single H-1B transfer filing, and even start working at their new employer while their H-1B transfer application to their new employer is in process. Further, the H-1B transfer application is not subject to the yearly cap (which has been regularly reached in recent years), so there is almost no chance of it being denied. In practice, this means that H-1B workers have as much job mobility as native American workers.
The bad actors in the H-1B program are indeed the Indian outsourcing companies, which need to be investigated and punished for violations of the program, including paying below market wages. But there are many more good actors who use the H-1B program extensively -- Google, Facebook, and similar reputable American tech companies -- and they don't use it because they underpay their employees, but because they can't find enough qualified employees even given their high wages. There was a recent post on HN about the very high salaries paid by these companies to their H-1B employees, as disclosed in their H-1B visa applications.
Summary: For someone who claims to have written a long running series on the H-1B program, Cringely is disappointingly misinformed. The H-1B program has violations, which need to be properly investigated, but the EB-2 is not even close to a viable replacement for it. H-1B employees are not indentured labor and have high job mobility, except in the case of a few large outsourcing companies which do indeed deserve to be punished.
Great story. Very impressed by your persistence and creativity, and congratulations on your success.
I think the concept of employers applying for a green card for employees is fundamentally broken. It pits the interests of the employer directly against the employee, since it's in the employer's interest to drag out the process for as long as possible, and reduces job mobility (which brings down wages for everyone) because the green card process needs to be restarted if employees switch jobs midway, before the I-485 step.
A system where any legally employed foreign worker can file for a green card for themselves seems much more sane.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that wages for H-1B visa holders are only lower when the employer files for a visa for an employee who is outside of the country. In my experience as a student who went the F-1 -> H-1B route, salaries are the same whether or not you have an H-1B. The much wider set of employers that you can interview with when you are already in the country probably makes it infeasible for employers to pay their H-1B employees who were already in the US under a different visa less than employees who don't need a visa.
The author's definition of "full stack" is rather strange, as others have noted. But as the client side of web applications becomes more complex, it's true that it's harder for the same programmer to develop both the client side code (which may involve developing a sophisticated client side architecture in Backbone or Angular) in addition to the server side code and API layer. I see more programmers now who call themselves "front end developers" and aren't just UX designers with HTML/CSS knowledge, but can program a complex client side MVC application, working with a separate backend developer who focuses on the API.
I think this trend will accelerate as web applications are increasingly broken into loosely coupled services, with a rich client tying them together in the browser.
I find this conflating of the US as a country and the US Government annoying. Megan Smith is the CTO of the US Federal Government, which is an entity separate from the US as a country.
It doesn't make sense for a country to have a "CTO". Do all technology decisions made anywhere in the US have to have her approval?
Logically, if she were the CTO of the US, she would have as direct reports all the CTOs of all the companies in the US.
Full-Stack Software Engineers - Trulia, San Francisco - INTERN, VISA welcome; REMOTE possible
Contact me at [email protected] for more info, or send me your resume.
Positions are available on multiple teams at Trulia, including on the rentals team that where I work. We're growing very quickly and aim to hire the highest quality people while doing so.
How we work:
The engineering team is about a hundred people, and we break into small teams of 2-4 to focus on specific projects. The rentals team is a small, vertically-integrated team within the larger engineering team. We are responsible for the entire Trulia Rentals product, giving us the speed and flexibility of a startup with the resources of a public company.
We release weekly, but new features are always under development and often span releases. Our local QA team writes automation tests and does hand testing of your features, working with you to ensure that only high quality code gets to production. Organizationally, we're pretty flat, though you'll have a mentor with whom you'll have weekly 1-on-1 meetings, to review code, exchange ideas, and ensure we're doing everything we can for you to thrive in your role.
Behind the curtain:
- 'Innovation Week' every quarter - work on any project you like for one week each quarter, recruit others to work on your project with you, present your work to other engineers (if you feel like it)
- People you're happy to see every day
- Stocked Kitchens and two kegerators
- Unbeatable SOMA location with penthouse roof deck
- All IDEs welcome
- Aeron chairs
- Great benefits (untracked time off, variety of health plans, 401k match)
You:
- You have experience working on high-traffic, scalable internet applications
- You love solving hard problems and working in small teams with smart people
- You're comfortable with everything from bash scripting to javascript
- You're a great person
- You love making fast websites
What you'll work with:
Our base web stack is LAMP, but that rides on top of Solr/Lucene, Hadoop, Memcache, Python, Couchbase, Open Street Maps, and more. We’re rewriting our website to use Javascript on both client and server using Rendr.js, Node.js and Backbone.js. We use jQuery on the client, d3.js and Raphel.js for our charts and Git for source control. If there's something that's a good idea for the team, we'll do our best to implement it.
Why work at Trulia?
Engineering gets respect.
We use the phrase 'we're a tech company that does Real Estate' to emphasize how important engineering is to the company. Engineering is the department that drives our apps, tools, data, and interfaces forward. This attitude comes not only from the Engineers, but from our CEO and other top management. They believe in us.
We have awesome problems to solve.
The housing market provides a fantastic blend of problems. We need creative people to help us combine the data about every address in America with the soft side of helping people find a home that makes them feel safe, happy, and comfortable.
Stability is wonderful.
We're that rare company that holds the culture of its startup roots, while blending in the sanity of a regular work schedule with an emphasis on work/life/family balance.
Trulia is a successful rapidly growing Internet technology company, redefining the home search experience for consumers and changing the way real estate professionals build their businesses. Our marketplace, delivered through the web and mobile applications, gives consumers powerful tools to research homes and neighborhoods and enables real estate professionals to efficiently market their listings and attract new clients.
Trulia was founded in 2005, backed by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, and had a successful IPO in 2012. We are headquartered in downtown San Francisco with offices in Denver and New York and voted Best Place to Work in both San Francisco and Denver.
Full-Stack Software Engineers - Trulia, San Francisco
Positions are available on multiple teams at Trulia, including on the rentals team that where I work.
Why work at Trulia?
Engineering gets respect.
We use the phrase 'we're a tech company that does Real Estate' to emphasize how important engineering is to the company. Engineering is the department that drives our apps, tools, data, and interfaces forward. This attitude comes not only from the Engineers, but from our CEO and other top management. They believe in us.
We have awesome problems to solve.
The housing market provides a fantastic blend of problems. We need creative people to help us combine the data about every address in America with the soft side of helping people find a home that makes them feel safe, happy, and comfortable.
Stability is wonderful.
We're that rare company that holds the culture of its startup roots, while blending in the sanity of a regular work schedule with an emphasis on work/life/family balance.
You:
- You have experience working on high-traffic, scalable internet applications
- You love solving hard problems and working in small teams with smart people
- You're comfortable with everything from bash scripting to javascript
- You're a great person
- You love making fast websites
What you'll work with:
Our base web stack is LAMP, but that rides on top of Solr/Lucene, Hadoop, Memcache, Python, Couchbase, Open Street Maps, and more. We’re rewriting our website to use Javascript on both client and server using Rendr.js, Node.js and Backbone.js. We use jQuery on the client, d3.js and Raphel.js for our charts and Git for source control. We're learning OOCSS and are folding SASS into our workflow as well. If there's something that's a good idea for the team, we'll do our best to implement it.
How we work:
The engineering team is about a hundred people, and we break into small teams of 2-4 to focus on specific projects. The rentals team is a small, vertically-integrated team within the larger engineering team. We are responsible for the entire Trulia Rentals product, giving us the speed and flexibility of a startup with the resources of a public company.
We release weekly, but new features are always under development and often span releases. Our local QA team writes automation tests and does hand testing of your features, working with you to ensure that only high quality code gets to production. Organizationally, we're pretty flat, though you'll have a mentor with whom you'll have weekly 1-on-1 meetings, to review code, exchange ideas, and ensure we're doing everything we can for you to thrive in your role.
Behind the curtain:
- 'Innovation Week' every quarter
- People you're happy to see every day
- Stocked Kitchens and two kegerators
- Unbeatable SOMA location with penthouse roof deck
- All IDEs welcome
- Aeron chairs
- Great benefits (untracked time off, variety of health plans, 401k match)
Trulia is a successful rapidly growing Internet technology company, redefining the home search experience for consumers and changing the way real estate professionals build their businesses. Our marketplace, delivered through the web and mobile applications, gives consumers powerful tools to research homes and neighborhoods and enables real estate professionals to efficiently market their listings and attract new clients.
Trulia was founded in 2005, backed by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, and had a successful IPO in 2012. We are headquartered in downtown San Francisco with offices in Denver and New York and voted Best Place to Work in both San Francisco and Denver.
The weather might be something to take into account. Personally, I wouldn't want to live in far northern countries like Norway because of the limited sunlight hours in winter. I've found that more than the temperature, it's sunlight exposure that has a strong influence on the way I feel.
Living in a country that may get a few hours of weak sunlight in winter doesn't appeal to me, no matter how high the standard of living might be otherwise.
Great article. For me personally, the issue is not so much dying but aging. Seeing your hair thin, your eyesight deteriorate, your memory weaken and your energy decrease with time must be a profoundly depressing experience -- one of the major reasons why the old in general are more solemn than the young, I think.
These changes are still in the future for me (thankfully), but I imagine they will happen some day if I live long enough.
I think a world in which people would keep remain mentally and physically fit, but simply die (maybe from a lightning bolt type event) at some point, would be much better than one in which your body and mind slowly fade with time.
I'd be happy with medical advances that let you keep the mind and body of a 25 year old till you're 80 and then simply die one day. Unfortunately, some period of old age and infirmity seems to be present no matter how much lifespan extends.
This article might not be applicable to that many people. My guess is that many people are actually happiest working on things that are given to them. Working on your own projects requires that you think of an idea, and have the self-discipline to work on it in the absence of externally enforced constraints.
I think a better question for most people might be: how do I get a job where work on the job is itself interesting, rather than a job that allows me to do my own interesting stuff in my spare time.
I generally enjoy admitting ignorance and asking questions that seem dumb as a way of educating myself. You do have to be mindful of who you do this with. The person you're speaking with has to have a certain level of maturity themselves in order to not consider you stupid for your admission of ignorance.
In an ideal situation, you're speaking with someone who will allow you to probe them on the subject with a series of "stupid" (sounding) questions till you have a good basic understanding of the topic.
Unfortunately, many people are not like that. They will simply think that you're stupid and move on to the next topic. Sometimes these may be people you want to make a good impression on, for a variety of reasons, so some diplomacy is required.
Thanks for the reply. What about the additional latency of sending the rendered framebuffer to the local graphics card after it's received from the cloud? It seems like you're right on the edge of being able to do one-frame latency between input and render at 30 fps (33 ms per frame), but would have at least two-frame latency at 60 fps?
It's not clear to me from the announcement which parts are executed server-side and which client-side.
Companies like iSwifter have tried to do server-side-rendered, streamed Flash games for years with limited success. The local machine in that case simply transmits input and displays video.
I think the difference here is that there will be some client side computation as well, but I'm not sure how much. If the GPU is in the cloud, that seems to indicate that they are bypassing WebGL, which would provide access to the local GPU. So my guess is that the JS does the typical setup work of a CPU in a rendering pipeline (setting up the scene, constructing draw batches), transmits it to the cloud GPU, and then transfers the rendered frame to the local GPU for display.
For interactive applications, it seems like the CPU-cloud GPU latency could be a deal breaker, though John Carmack famously said that it was faster to ping Europe from the US than to draw a pixel to the screen.
> Look at what a dishonest shitfest the political system is in India, and the whole culture of corruption.
> It seems likely that without the British having brought "Anglo civilization", India today would be like most of Africa today.
India was keeping pace with the rest of world, and leading in many ways, quite nicely for thousands of years before the 1600s. It happened to be under continuous foreign occupation at just the time the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe, and British policies were explicitly designed to stifle the same changes happening in India. Most things that you see today are a consequence of that missed opportunity.
Without the British, it's more likely that India would have been like Japan today rather than Africa.
It's easy to be thankful for British influence when the US got rid of it so early in the industrialization game.
As nl mentioned below, I thought it was obvious that this was in response to the list of countries in the article -- NZ, Australia, South Africa and so on. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Yes, there are several. I mentioned two in my post above, so it's unfair of you to say that all I did was make accusations of isms. Here they are, repeated:
1. The fact that the (very large) number of Indian soldiers in WW2 was slipped in without comment into a statement about how NZ, Australia and other Anglosphere countries were joined in some kind of glorious kinship. India was not, and is not, a part of this cosy club and should not have been in that list.
2. Attributing the participation of Indian soldiers in WW2 to some kind of personal decision, and not the fact the British ruled India at the time as an imperialist foreign power.
Here are a couple more statements that are false:
1. "What do we mean by Western civilization?...Third, representative government. Laws should not be passed, nor taxes levied, except by elected legislators who are answerable to the rest of us."
This was patently false in the large parts of the world where Britain ruled illegally for two centuries. Taxes were routinely levied on citizens of the colonies without representative government. (I seem to remember this having something to do with the American Revolution, as a matter of fact.)
2. "Yet Peru—indeed, Latin America in general—never achieved the law-based civil society that North America takes for granted. Settled at around the same time, the two great landmasses of the New World serve almost as a controlled experiment. The north was settled by English-speakers, who took with them a belief in property rights, personal liberty, and representative government. The south was settled by Iberians who replicated vast estates and quasi-feudal society of their home provinces."
There were several other differences between North and South America, including the climate, the relative times at which they achieved independence, and (perhaps most importantly) the attitudes of the imperialists towards their subjects. In colonies where the ruled were racially different than the rulers (South America, Africa and Asia), their treatment and eventual outcomes were far worse than in places where the colonial power and the colonies were both racially the same (North America). The author is ignorant at best, and probably deliberately dishonest, in not mentioning this as part of his argument.
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The tone of the article is clear enough that point by point rebuttals like this are a waste of time, but since you asked...
The standard, disingenuous "we stand for civilization" line that apologists of colonialism like to make. Not a single mention of the fact that England with all its stated commitment to freedom ruled India and dozens of countries around the world against their will for two hundred years, systematically stripping them of their wealth for the benefit of the mother country.
Notice how casually the number of Indian soldiers in WW2 -- 2.4 million, more than the other countries combined -- is slipped in, well after NZ and Australia. And of course they all volunteered out of their love for the Queen -- unrelated to the fact that a coercive foreign power was ruling their country at the time.
Honestly, the world should be too evolved to be accepting thinly veiled racist garbage like this any more.
There are really two different types of H-1B employees: those who've studied at a US university but are foreign citizens, and workers brought in from outside the country directly to fill a position.
There is very little distinction made in the public discourse about the difference between these two categories of employees, but they are very different.
The overwhelming majority of H-1Bs directly employed at large American companies will be of the first type: they came to the US to study or at an early age, and were hired while they were already in the US. These employees are likely to be treated identically with American citizen employees and paid exactly the same in the same roles. They are not "cheap foreign labor" -- they are employees who just happen to be foreign citizens. They are very mobile because their skills are in high demand, and other employers are more than eager to transfer their visas over.
However (and this is where the rhetoric comes in), the majority of H-1B visas go to outsourcing/offshoring companies that bring in workers by the thousands to fill mostly lower-end positions in IT or back office departments at American companies. These workers fit all the H-1B stereotypes: low-paid, bound to a single company, living 10 to an apartment etc. There are significant violations and gray areas in the way these workers are brought in and paid.
The problem is that both sides of the H-1B debate do not define which group of workers they are talking about.
Google, Microsoft etc are correct when they say that they do not want more H-1Bs for cheaper labor. In the employee pool they are looking at (foreign citizens already in the US), this is true: they pay all employees identically irrespective of whether they are foreign or US citizens.
The opponents of more H-1Bs are also correct when they say that H-1Bs are being used for cheaper labor: the types of employees that offshoring companies bring in are indeed being chosen because they are willing to work for lower wages than workers already in the US.
The solution is clear: have separate visa categories for employees brought in directly from outside the US, and foreign citizens who are already in the country. Make it as easy as possible for the latter group to stay in the country, through a quicker green card process or other methods; at the same time, have higher scrutiny for the separate category of visas that apply to foreign workers brought in directly from outside.
It sometimes amazes me that even on a relatively knowledgeable forum like HN, this distinction isn't made often or at all.
This already exists as a practical matter. According to current rules (specifically, the AC21 act), H-1B workers can start working at a new employer as soon an H-1B transfer application is filed by their new company. There is no need to even wait for the application to be approved. Applications to transfer H-1B visa are not subject to the cap, so there isn't that issue either.
H-1B employees are currently quite mobile. I have many friends who've switched jobs repeatedly during their H-1B period because it's so easy to transfer the visa. I honestly don't know where this whole "indentured servitude" idea comes from.
The part of the system that's fubared is the green card process, which can stretch for up to 10 years if you're from India or China. During a part of that time (not the entire duration), you can't switch jobs unless you want the green card process to be restarted, which affects mobility. But that is not related to the H-1B, and the solution to that is to fix the green card process.