The most useful posts in this topic, by likes from the community.
Few people asked after my air raid deploy post how a normal day looks. So here is one. Not the worst day, not the best. Tuesday. I work remote for a Danish company, Go and Postgres, team of 6. Kyiv is one hour ahead of Copenhagen, which is the only easy part. 06:40 Wake up, before coffee I check the outage schedule in the energy company app and in our district Telegram channel. Kyiv is split in groups, my building…
Last week a recruiter from a startup in Austin wrote me on LinkedIn. Very nice, very excited. "Senior Frontend Engineer, React, TypeScript, Next.js, full overlap with Central time". I have 6 years working with React so I said ok, let's talk. Two calls and one take-home later (4 hours, unpaid, I know, I know), the offer: 1,800 USD per month, contractor, no PTO, "but great equity". For context: in Guadalajara some…
Not a thread this time. Just a reflection, because several of you asked in DMs whether you should move from engineering into developer relations. What I miss Owning a system. For six years I could point at a payments service and say: that is mine, it moved money for a lot of people today, and it did not fall over. Devrel work is spread across talks, docs, samples and conversations. It matters, but you can rarely…
1/ A European company posts a "fully remote, work from anywhere" role. A senior engineer in Lagos and one in Lisbon get the same title, the same tickets, the same on-call rota. One salary is 40% of the other. Let's talk about why, and whether it holds up. 2/ The company's argument is cost of living: "we pay for the local market". It sounds reasonable. It is also convenient, because it is always the company that…
I have worked with US teams from Manila for three years. The first year I said "I'm flexible, I'll be available whenever" and nearly burned out by month eight. Here's what I do now. The time maths Manila is UTC+8 all year. No daylight saving. US East in summer is UTC-4, so 12 hours apart. 9am in New York is 9pm in Manila. US West in summer is UTC-7, so 15 hours apart. 9am in San Francisco is midnight in Manila. When…
Gano 5,500 USD al mes. Soy frontend senior, contratista, para una empresa de San Francisco, desde Guadalajara. Lo digo con números porque cuando yo buscaba nadie decía cuánto, y por eso la primera vez me ofrecieron 2,000 y casi acepto. Si este post sirve para que una sola persona no acepte 2,000, ya valió la pena. Esto es lo que hice, en orden. No es la única forma, es la mía. 1. Inglés: no necesitas acento gringo…
I write Django for a startup in Berlin, from Guwahati. The Brahmaputra view from my window is lovely. The broadband is not. After three years, here is my setup and what it has survived. Medium length, because my UPS only gives me so much time. The connections Primary: local fibre, 100 Mbps on paper, 60 to 80 in reality, very stable when it works. Backup: a 5G fixed wireless box from a different operator (Jio…
1/ If you work remotely from Africa, your job is attached to a handful of cables lying on the sea floor. In 2024 we all learned exactly how few. 2/ February 2024: several cables in the Red Sea were damaged, including Seacom, AAE-1 and EIG. The damage was widely reported to have come from the dragging anchor of a cargo ship that had been attacked and abandoned. East African traffic to Europe and Asia had to be…
नमस्ते everyone. I've been a full stack dev for an Australian agency for two years, fully remote from Kathmandu. People keep asking me how it works, so here is the honest version haha. The timezone that confuses everyone Nepal is UTC+5:45. Yes, 45. Every new client thinks it's a typo. Sydney is UTC+10 right now, so we're 4 hours 15 minutes apart. I start at 6:45 am, which is 11 am for them, and finish around 3 pm.…
2017. Cebu. Dalawang buwan akong nag-a-apply sa OnlineJobs.ph at Upwork. 83 applications. Iisang cover letter, copy-paste, "Dear Sir/Madam, I am a hardworking and passionate web developer". Zero replies. As in zero. Ano ang nagbago Tinigil ko yung generic na cover letter. Bawat application, 4 na linya lang, pero specific sa job. Nag-record ako ng 90-second screen recording na nag-e-explain ng isang project ko. Noon,…
Actually I wanted to write this for two years. I will not write about politics in this post. Only about what a shutdown costs a small outsourcing company, and what we changed. We are 34 people in Dhaka. Most clients are in Norway and Denmark. In July 2024 mobile internet went off first, then broadband. For about five days we had nothing. No Slack, no email, no GitHub, no way to tell clients why we disappeared. The…
hi kifak, ça va? People ask how I work for French and German clients from here. Short answer: around the generator. Long answer below 🙃 Electricity. State power comes some hours a day, when it comes. The rest is the neighbourhood generator, the "ishtirak", a subscription you pay to a guy with a very big diesel engine and a very big network of cables over the street. It switches over a few times a day and every…
Every few weeks there is a remote vs office fight in this topic. I want to give a different answer. I go to the office three days a week. Not because of the office. Because of the bike. Context. I live in Utrecht, the office is in an industrial area at the edge of the city, 14 km. I go with the bike. 35 to 40 minutes depending on wind, most of it on a separate fietspad next to a canal. It is boring. That is the…
My product team is spread across Manila, Bengaluru, Lisbon and Toronto. On paper it's "follow the sun". In practice, in August, it was "follow the confusion". What broke Our Toronto engineer asked a question about an API change at 5pm her time. That's 5am in Manila, 2:30am in Bengaluru. The Bengaluru dev had the answer, but by the time he woke up the question was buried under 40 messages in a busy channel. The…
Dün akşam bir veda yemeği daha vardı. Bu yıl beşinci. Ekipten Can, Amsterdam'a gidiyor. Kadıköy'de her zamanki meyhanede oturduk, rakı, meze, ve herkes aynı soruyu sordu: "Sen ne zaman gidiyorsun Elif?" (For the English readers: last night was another goodbye dinner. The fifth this year. Can from my team is moving to Amsterdam. We sat in our usual meyhane in Kadıköy, rakı, meze, and everyone asked the same question:…
Qué onda, carnales. Les cuento porque ayer un compa de la oficina de San Diego me preguntó si "extrañaba ir" jajaja. De 2018 a 2024 mi rutina era: levantarme a las 4:30, salir a las 5:00, fila en San Ysidro. Con SENTRI, 30 a 45 minutos en un día bueno. Antes de tener SENTRI, dos horas, a veces más. Llegaba a la oficina en Sorrento Valley a las 8 ya cansado, con el café frío y escuchando la misma estación de radio…
Mga kapatid, madalas akong tanungin "Kuya, totoo ba na may nahi-hire kahit walang CS degree / kahit taga-probinsya / kahit matanda na?" Kaya nag-ask ako sa ilang students ko kung pwede kong i-share yung stories nila. Pumayag sila, pinalitan ko lang yung names. Joy, 27, call center agent for 6 years Nag-aaral siya ng HTML at CSS ng 4am pagkatapos ng shift niya. Walong buwan. First job: WordPress developer sa isang…
Parce, les cuento. Vivo en Laureles hace 5 años. Pagaba 1.800.000 de arriendo por un apartamento de dos alcobas, nada lujoso. El mes pasado la dueña me dijo que o le pagaba 2.500.000 o lo desocupaba, porque "en Airbnb por mes le dan el doble a los extranjeros". Y lo peor es que tiene razón. En mi cuadra hay tres edificios que ya son casi todos apartamentos amoblados "por mes", anunciados en dólares y en inglés. El…
cobrar en dólares y que el peso se ponga fuerte es la única tragedia que nadie te deja contar. 'ay pobrecita, gana en dólares'. sí, y mi renta sube en pesos igual jaja 🙃
