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#jobs-discuss
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2018-04-03
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Fahd El Mazouni08:04:11

there is another competitor in France BeatMe if you want to look into it

jgh12:04:10

are you sure the name is BeatMe? lol

jgh13:04:33

i mean i get it….it’s just….an unfortunate name choice.

Fahd El Mazouni13:04:47

@jgh I don't get the joke 😛

jgh13:04:46

sounds a little like it could be an S&M site or something

jgh13:04:58

i dont usually tell people to “beat me” when im challenging them lol

jgh13:04:32

skillz is a good name, even okletsplay is a good name

scriptor13:04:24

How doable is it to live off 90k in SF? Seems like you'd have to live pretty far out to afford rent

jgh13:04:08

not sure, ive only lived in LA when i was in california

scriptor13:04:12

I know people who live on far less than that in NYC, but they have to live fairly deep into queens or Brooklyn

jgh13:04:07

i guess you probably live in oakland or something if you cant afford the rent in SF

jgh13:04:16

i mean im sure you can live in SF on $90k…but the place you’re getting probably has roommates of either the human or insect variety.

scriptor13:04:33

Sounds about right, although I wonder if Oakland's rent has been going up

scriptor13:04:21

Yeah, roommates would be a must

Fahd El Mazouni13:04:50

I'm under the impression no one is hiring junior clojure developers

Drew Verlee15:04:31

@fahd.elmazouni My hypothesis is that the current software culture has a hard time evaluating talent and so the confusion causes a great deal of volatility. The result is that titles are meaningless and so there are no “junior devs” because it doesn’t pay to brand yourself as such.

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Drew Verlee15:04:05

Clojure probably suffers from being a niche language and so simply has a smaller pool, but i don’t think its unique in that dynamic.

Fahd El Mazouni15:04:48

@drewverlee thanks for your reply. I'm starting to learn clojure, and I'm worried I might not be able to use it professionally. There isn't that many companies using it in Paris 😕

Drew Verlee15:04:34

@fahd.elmazouni I understand your worry. I would keep learning clojure but not worry much if your day job wasn’t leveraging it. There are probably a number of other more important aspects then the PL when evaluating a job. Clojure seems like one of the best ways to grow your understanding of software development and build things on your own. The community here is vibrant and welcoming. And in time, i suspect something will work out for you.

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jgh15:04:42

I’m an artisanal software gardiner

jgh15:04:35

organic, free-range code

jgh15:04:55

the bugs are completely natural

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seancorfield15:04:56

@scriptor I used to rent an apartment in Oakland -- it was under rent control so it was cheaper (about $600/month back in 2000). When we moved out, the landlord renovated it and then charged $1,800/month for it.

seancorfield15:04:27

Looks like two properties on Athol Ave (where I used to live in Oakland) are priced at $1,800 and $2,000 per month, so maybe rental hasn't gone up as much as I expected.

seancorfield15:04:18

In order to buy a place, we had to go out to Castro Valley (East Bay), but buying here now would be impossible (house prices have more than doubled since 2001).

jrotenberg15:04:24

Similar here, I could never afford my house today.

jrotenberg15:04:34

In the East Bay as well

seancorfield15:04:50

We've refi'd several times and still pay nearly $3k/month in mortgage and property taxes. Rental homes nearby are often even higher than that. It's insane.

the2bears15:04:41

Yeah, Bay Area housing is quite insane. I keep wondering how much longer this can continue without a major correction. The people that work in most of the areas, cannot afford to live in those same areas.

seancorfield15:04:49

Our house went from $370k (in 2001) to $700k+ then back down to $420k so that was a big correction, but it's back up to $800k now. Bay Area real estate can be pretty volatile in the short term 😞 It's no wonder so many local folks are being displaced by tech workers who move in.

seancorfield19:04:49

And apropos of this discussion about the crazy Bay Area cost of living, Zillow sent me an update this morning that our house is now up to nearly $900K 👀 So life here is even more unaffordable than I thought 😞

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clojuregeek22:04:42

sell and move to Austin 🙂

seancorfield23:04:51

Not sure we'd like the weather in Austin... the Bay Area is pretty much "Baby Bear" weather: never too hot, never too cold. I'm also not sure we'd want to live in a Red state 😉 even tho' Austin is fairly Blue 🙂

clojuregeek17:04:14

yep its pretty blue here

clojuregeek17:04:19

i leave my red at at home 😜

justinlee15:04:14

well according to the baby boomers who bought their cheap bay-area houses and then voted to fix their property taxes at 1978 rates, there’s no problem and we can fix this problem by never building another house again. or building one somewhere else. but not here.

seancorfield15:04:39

When the dot-com bubble burst, a lot of people left (and traffic was sane for a while), but since then more people have moved back in. @lee.justin.m I hear ya... Every time there's a ballot measure to raise property taxes (or other local taxes) to fund education or public transit, I vote in favor! We def. need a lot more affordable housing built here.

justinlee15:04:37

this way OT, but I’ll just say this one thing: if people were required to say “income-qualified subsidized housing” instead of “affordable housing” (which is what that term means), it’d do a lot of clarify why the current approach ain’t working

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seancorfield15:04:25

Good point. I've fallen into Americanisms there -- back in England, we talked about subsidized housing instead.

fellshard16:04:31

It'll happen organically, one way or another. You push out too many people who provide basic services, and even all the delivery systems SV can create will sustain it enough. People will move out, equilibrium will swing the other way.

jeaye17:04:11

Certainly doable to live off that salary; for the past year, building OkLetsPlay, my wife and I have been living off only hers, which is higher, but there are two of us. Someone interested in the early startup experience (and/or 3% equity, with some coin allotment as well) won't have an issue with it.

jeaye17:04:04

@fahd.elmazouni That's very good info, regarding BeatMe (awful name, in both an abuse and sexual way). Looks like they don't integrate with the games at all and instead rely on screenshots of the in-game results to determine the victor. We considered that as well, but it opens up a lot of avenues for cheating (e.g. if both players' results claim to have won, who actually won?).

jeaye17:04:58

The light integration we have with the game's back-end (and server-authoritative games are a must) gives us results directly from the source.

Fahd El Mazouni17:04:42

I have no affiliation to them @jeaye 😛 my friend was one of the early tech guys

jgh18:04:06

@jeaye an alternative might be to do some screen-scraping via replaykit/screen capture on android. I guess you’d have to do some manual fingerprinting work for various games but it would work better than screenshots and be automated.

jgh18:04:43

and then you dont have to convince devs to integrate 😛

jgh18:04:36

(i’ll need a royalty for that one if you guys use it ;))

jeaye18:04:15

@jgh Thanks for the suggestion. That was the first approach we considered, a couple years ago, but the support for dispute management and verification alone would be a daunting task. Given that games are already integrating with Skillz, with a much more intrusive relationship, we figure we can take the same path but make it much easier for everyone.

jeaye18:04:36

As a rule, we don't trust the client. We don't trust the game clients and we don't trust our own client.

seancorfield19:04:49

And apropos of this discussion about the crazy Bay Area cost of living, Zillow sent me an update this morning that our house is now up to nearly $900K 👀 So life here is even more unaffordable than I thought 😞

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