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#jobs-discuss
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2018-05-10
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slipset09:05:08

Wether your salary should be based on your locations cost of living or not is really a discussion about who should reap the profits from this. Both employers and employees want to pocket the diff if it’s positive, and shove it on to the other party if it’s not.

lmergen09:05:45

remote work levels the playing field, so if you're in a high cost-of-living place you have a competitive disadvantage

lmergen09:05:46

for example, a situation that would be difficult to justify is for a european company to hire a remote developer from mountain view (i actually had to make this decision recently and decided against it, it would be a waste of money)

slipset09:05:21

Yes. I’m an experienced programmer from Norway, a high cost country with great benefits. No way I can compete on price with younger devs from say Eastern Europe or Asia.

lmergen09:05:22

now i am all for paying for value, rather than cost of living

lmergen09:05:45

but people in expensive places will understand that their position isn't that great

Ivan09:05:01

well, maybe, this is an incentive to bring back balance on SF and other places, where people living there had to move out because of the steep increase in the cost of living, ..as not everyone living there was an engineer..

Ivan09:05:44

(I haven't thought this through, ofcourse .. just crossed my mind as I was going through this discussion)

slipset09:05:01

A side note to this is that as a Norwegian, I have very good benefits which are required by law (5 weeks of vacation, paid sick leave, pension ++++) This means that for a Norwegian employer, the cost of employment is somewhere around two times the salary.

kwladyka12:05:18

What is your feeling about recruitment task for remote workers to do in free time for free? It is so common and always gives me bad impression to not respect people time in company while I can show github code challange and my own project on screen share. I can discuss about code, tests, exceptions, monitoring, etc. It gives much more proves of my skills than fake tasks. The only one company which didn’t do this in that way was the one where I was happier. But I would like to hear another people opinion. Why do you want people to do this recruitment job in they free time when they can give really good proves of they skills based on what they already did.

vemv12:05:36

I'm with you. But personally while I feel great about my CV/skills, I don't feel confident enough to just reply with e.g. "sorry I don't do challenges, kindly refer to <some FOSS contributions or whatever>" Would love to get to that point but meanwhile, I'll complete challenges for interesting-enough opportunities. Others, I keep them in the queue for weeks... perhaps that'll give them a hint 🙂

kwladyka12:05:46

well than i hear answer like “everybody doing this, so you have to do it for consistency”. Or third party recruiters explain “it shows you are serious about work with them” etc. The worst HR guys probably have right. Companies interpret it like “I did this task, so i really want to work with them” what is really not relevant.

kwladyka12:05:51

Just I would really like to hear opinion of somebody who see value in that 🙂

vemv12:05:38

Worth adding, some companies put challenges in good faith. Of course, if you feel like you are not being handled like proper talent, walk away. Sometimes I've completed challenges, got a 'no' but turned it into a 'yes'. Important to ask for feedback, and then reply with your views on why you coded X in Y way. A bad sign is when only HR has interviewed you and proceeds to ask you for the challenge. Worst-case scenario, their engineering team could spend 10 minutes in you (CV + challenge assessment), while you spent 4h in them.

vemv12:05:10

Best teams spend CEO/CTO/eng time in you, needless to say. I've come to sort of demand it.

kwladyka12:05:09

Heh, but 80% of companies demand this tasks and there is only a few remote Clojure jobs 😉 So I can’t really walk away from all of them. Interesting. I have impression I have never heard honest feedback. Maybe once after this code challange https://github.com/kwladyka/chess-challenge . They told my code is very good etc. but they decided to not hire Clojure team troll So you see my point 🙂

Drew Verlee19:05:51

Would you mind me reviewing your CC? I suspect ill learn from it.

kwladyka10:05:27

hi @U0DJ4T5U1, do you mean my CV? Or technical tasks? Sure, you can do both 🙂

kwladyka10:05:52

https://github.com/kwladyka/chess-challenge https://github.com/kwladyka/fy-stock - this one is probably far away from perfect, but i had limited time resources. Assumption of this task was to do it in 2 hours anyway 🙂 In next days I will push one more

Drew Verlee17:05:04

I just got around to looking at these. 🙂. the fy-stock is hard for an outsider to judge. The chess example seems like a variant on a problem you would encounter in discrete mathematics.

kwladyka12:05:53

How do you ask them about feedback to get any valuable information?

vemv13:05:22

I simply ask them, perhaps emphasizing that I'd like to improve myself or that I spent some effort Would be rare not to get some empathy (unless there's some serious HR wall between you and eng)

kwladyka13:05:53

So you have better luck than me 🙂

kwladyka13:05:31

But I am talking about remote jobs only

vemv13:05:29

I tend to get the same email-based process for both kind of positions

kwladyka13:05:16

> Tip: One thing that I did do to stand out from the crowd for almost all my homework assignments was to record a screencast talking through my work and illustrating what I thought were the best points. I had several interviewers tell me that “thank you; I’ve never seen that before”. This gets the interviewer past any issues with getting code installed / setup, etc. ha interesting

👍 4
3Jane13:05:59

it’s “on-demand screensharing”: the interviewer can listen to the developer explaining their thought process as they work, but doesn’t have to schedule a time that works for both participants, and does not have to react on the fly - can pause and rewind

3Jane13:05:31

greater psychological comfort for the interviewer I guess, and you can “schedule interviews” during the workday (whereas devs record after work)

kwladyka13:05:13

I have to find a way how to record it and attach to the code in comfortable way

sveri19:05:26

OBS is the go to open source tool for that.

Drew Verlee19:05:56

I feel like this, like everything else, can be misleading. I do a lot of my designing on walks and aways from the computer.

Drew Verlee19:05:03

I suppose, i personally would feel very inadequate to learn that someone opened up a “create X” programming challenge and just coded it front to back and did so in such a way that they didn’t feel the need to even take a break or think about any aspect of it.