Parents would have to be equipped to be able to answer these questions in the way you suggest though. That seems a bit of a stretch if they haven't been educated similarly themselves
on .ca they seem to be newer accounts, often "FIRSTNAME LASTNAME" "located" in the US somewhere.
Totally forgot the _every_ book thing - they also sometimes have items that aren't actually released yet, but are available for immediate shipping, which I guess gets them bumped up a bit.
a similar scam has been going on for a while, with at least video games, board games, and bike gear, from what I've seen on Amazon Canada.
Third party sellers with a "real" looking name will list an item at a ridiculous discount off retail. If you buy it, you get a Chinese international tracking number. This takes forever to "arrive" and it turns out Amazon only really cares that the tracking number shows to Canada. I'm not sure what is actually in the package, since it's not possible to figure out more than just the city it went to.
Eventually, Amazon will refund you, but it's a bit annoying. It's pretty easy to spot once you get bit the first time, but you'll usually see the third party seller spike to several hundred bad reviews before the entire situation gets resolved.
This seems like Amazon CSR just failed to read the writer's complaints correctly. It should eventually get fixed, because it often does get fixed, even for hundreds of customers at a time.
It was mostly persistence and luck in finding a position that matched my existing skills and interests. You'll often have a code screen as an early step (because remote jobs get hundreds of applicants in days), so getting good at those sort of problems can be helpful as well.
It's even more fun, in BC "high technology companies/professionals" are exempt from a bunch of the usual labour laws around overtime, hours of work, stat holidays, etc.
PolicyStat | Carmel, Indiana or remote | full-time (remote)
A hospital’s best tool for standardizing and implementing life-saving improvements are their written policies and procedures. PolicyStat’s mission is to improve healthcare delivery by making those policies and procedures easier to find, access, and enhance. Our clients (across 46/50 states) use our SaaS application to ensure that this critical information is correct, their staff can find it, and that it supports regulatory compliance.
In this role as our 5th engineer, an experienced software engineering generalist, you will be a critical part of our engineering team. You will spend time on all aspects related to delivering a great web application to our users. We're a small team, so you'll sometimes be asked to wear hats ranging from API design to algorithms and libraries to front-end engineering. We’ve recently been freed from the tyranny of supporting Old IE, and we’re excited for the opportunity to improve interaction for the hundreds of thousands of people that rely on PolicyStat.
We are a remote-friendly team, currently with members in Indianapolis, Vancouver, Brasov, Barcelona, and elsewhere.
Our interview process is mainly work sample based: one short screening work sample, human interviews, then a 3-4 hour work sample using our tech stack. No whiteboarding involved.
This is a great post. I think the "paid to write code" is often a byproduct of environment - whether it's poor engineering leadership, bad productivity measurement, etc.
A follow up to this, how do benefits work for team members who are not in the USA? I imagine things like health insurance would be different, for example
Man those were the days. I was just barely old enough to be able to get into them before they died. Anyone remember the door games?
I remember it being pretty crazy that I could play BRE or LORD with people, even across BBSes in some cases.
And each BBS had a different setup for LORD. There were some that seemingly just tried to install every possible in game module, and it was the most broken thing ever...
The rental market has begun heating up lately (stories of rental auctions, renovictions, evictions for airBnB, etc) so although they may be comparatively reasonable, they may not stay absolutely reasonable for long.
Vancouver is currently a mess of low interest rates, FOMO, foreign buyers, and supply issues. Due to both the city & BC government having a large number of developer donors, it's also a very partisan issue.
For the longest time, the ruling provincial party was of the opinion that this was not a problem and high property prices was due to the strong economy (circular logic, as real estate & construction are the drivers of that.) They were getting pretty hammered in polls. On top of that, they cited a ~5% ish foreign purchaser number based on 19 days of data, only to then bump it to 10% conveniently on the release of new data a day or two after introducing this 15% tax...so yea. It's a disaster.
Residency tracking is hard. Actually, the city of Vancouver got permission from the provincial government to implement a vacant homes tax, but it's based on the home being unoccupied for a whole year. It probably won't work.
There are no shortcuts to solving brain drain. Find a compelling way to solve it (paying more, giving more opportunities to grow is a good start) and let's talk from there.
As someone living here, one big problem is that there is far too much noise - too many studies and bad articles (like the original one here.) There's obviously problems but everyone is running around chasing the hot topic of the day ("shadow flipping," for example) as the various governments either pretend it's not a problem, or sponsor yet another flawed study on it.
I've seen fallback CSS and JavaScript polyfills used.