human resource

Cyprus : startup visa proposal

CNA shares some interesting news:

A proposal promoting startups visa, aiming to attract entrepreneurs from non-EU countries will be submitted to the next meeting of the Council of Ministers for approval, Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades has said.

Addressing a graduation ceremony of IDEA, a starup programme co-founded by Bank of Cyprus and CIIM, the President also announced that a proposal from the legal framework for university spinoffs, liking academic research with entrepreneurship will be tabled within the next three months.

“We believe that the Cypriot startup visa will be one of the most competitive and will bring multiple benefits in the medium-term both as regards new jobs as well as promoting innovation and research and the boosting the competitiveness of our economy,” the President said.

Of course, knowing how long things take in this country (especially if the government is involved) and how twisted they get by the implementation time, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath. But there’s hope, if nothing else…

Engineers Salary Data

Amitj Aggarwal, former Staff Engineer at Google (2008-2012), has collected a whole bunch of data in regards to engineers salaries, in USA and worldwide. His points seem to be overly optimistic at times, but I don’t have any links handy to contradict his research.

Here are a few points to get you started:

Zoho, Salesforce pay 40% more than Oracle, Cisco, GE!!!

Top 7% or so engineers at Netflix, Amazon, Google, Facebook are paid more than $1.4M per year. Next 10% make $700K on average.

Facebook has lost relevance to Slack, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest and Quora. If you are working at Facebook ask for a 50% raise else move to a startup.

Oracle is loosing to cloud startups. If you are working at Oracle ask for a 60% raise else move to a startup.

ENGINEERS DO NOT WASTE MONEY ON AN MBA. You will make 2X more on average as an engineer.

Tableau, Splunk, Slack, Airbnb, Quora, Twitter, Facebook, Google pay more than $320K salary to their top hires. Definitely interview at these fine places. Uber top engineer salaries are $190-340K per year.

Starting salaries for fresh software engineering graduates is now $130K-160K. Ask shamelessly. For the best ones its ~$180K.

Apple pays 60% more than Samsung.

101 Most Common Interview Questions with Pass or Fail Answers

Following the recent post “10 Favorite Job Interview Questions for Linux System Administrators“, here is a more generic, but a much more comprehensive resource – “101 Most Common Interview Questions with Pass or Fail Answers“. It’s not as technical, but it provides a good summary of common interview questions, from the generic ones like “Why do you want to leave your current company”, through brainteasers like “How many gas stations are there in the United States?”, to stress and communication ones like “What did you do when you had a boss you didn’t get along with?”. The good thing is that you’ll find not only the questions, but also the suggestions on how to answer them.

Altogether, it’s a great resource to go through before your next interview. Most of these questions are very common, no matter which position you are applying to.

What is a Senior Developer?

I’ve been hiring, firing, and working with developers of all sorts for the last couple of decades. In those years, I realized that each developer is very unique – their strong and weak sides, knowledge gaps, working rhythm, social interaction, communication abilities, etc. But regardless of how unique each developer is, it is often useful to group them into expertise levels, like junior and senior. Companies do that for a variety of reasons – billing rates, expectations, training required, responsibility, etc.

And this is where things get tricky. One needs a good definition of what a senior developer is (other definitions can be derived from this one one too). There is no standard definition that everybody agrees upon, so each one has their own.

I mostly consider a senior developer to be self-sufficient and self-motivated. It’s somebody who has the expertise to solve, or find ways of solving any kind of technical problems. It’s also someone who can see the company’s business needs and issues, and can find work to do, even if nothing has been recently assigned to him. A senior developer would also provide guidance and mentorship to the junior teammates. I’ve also came to believe that people with the real expertise have no problem discussing complex technical issues in simple terms, but that’s just a side note.

Anyway, recently, I came across this very short blog post, which sent me a spree of pages, charts, and discussions:

Because of this “What is a senior developer?” conversation on Reddit, I am reminded of the Construx Professional Development Ladders, as mentioned to me long ago by Alejandro Garcia Fernandez. Here is a sample ladder for developers.

The original article for the Reddit discussion – “The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development” is absolutely brilliant. In the beginning it provides a chart of the conjoined triangles of senior-level development, which reflects my definition and understanding:

But it doesn’t stop there. It dives deeper into the problem, and, eventually features this Venn diagram:

.. and more. By now, I’ve read the article three times, but I keep coming back to it – it just makes me think and rethink over and over again. Once it settles in my head a bit, I’ll look deeper into the Professional Development Ladder and it’s example application to the senior developer.

Overall, this is a very thought provoking bunch of links.

10 Favorite Job Interview Questions for Linux System Administrators

As someone who interviews a lot of people (mostly for the web development positions though, not system administration), I’m always looking for more ideas on what to ask the candidates. Today I came across “10 Favorite Job Interview Questions for Linux System Administrators“, which has a few of bits that I liked.

First of all, this GitHub repository is super awesomeness. It also links to a few other resources with more questions and ideas. Not only for sysadmin interviews.

Then, this one is funny, yet somewhat challenging:

2. Name and describe a different Linux/Unix command for each letter of the alphabet. But also, describe how a common flush toilet works.

It also checks that you know the alphabet.

9. Print the content of a file backwards.

“I like broad questions where each person could give a different answer depending on their depth of knowledge. My personal answer is 8 characters not including the filename.” – Marc Merlin, Google.

This one caught me by surprise. My immediate thought was “tac some_file“, but that’s obviously not enough. tac only prints the lines in reverse order. Which is not the same as reversing the file. Perl to the rescue, but I wonder what’s the most elegant way to do it without the scripting language.

As always, interview questions are not only useful for the interviews. They are a good measure of your own knowledge gaps and habit pitfalls. This time was no exception.