I’ve been using LinkedIn basically since I started working as an intern back in 2012. My usage is mostly limited to posting my blog posts, except the couple of times I used the platform to search for a new job. So most of the time, LinkedIn has been pretty slow-paced, with maybe half a dozen random recruiters reaching out per year.

However, since the Covid-19 pandemic started, and particularly in 2021, things seem to have gone a little crazy, with a lot more recruiter activity. I was curious to see just how much things had changed, so I looked at LinkedIn’s data export.

We're all remote -- for now.

Communicating well with your co-workers and managers is supremely important to a software developer, and even more so for the remote one. With a lot more remote workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this topic became a lot more relevant.

I’ve seen people hint at this more than a few times over the years, but I didn’t really “get it” until I started working as a fully remote engineer. I also find it important to understand not only what we should be doing to achieve efficient communication, but also why we should be doing those things in those ways.

To me, the single most important thing to keep in mind is that people’s mental resources: time, attention span, etc, like yours, are limited.

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to write for a while: all the times (the ones I can remember, anyway) I bombed a software engineer job interview. There are so many “how I aced interviewing at X”/”how to pass X interview” floating around that I thought the opposite story would make for an amusing read.

My first developer job was as an intern at a big tech company in 2012. I think that was one of the worst interviews I’ve had, by the way – I could barely understand the interviewer over the cellphone, and those were the days of “how many piano players are there in New York”-kind of questions. I thought it went terrible, but I got the job somehow. On the other hand I’ve had many interviews I thought I did great but bombed anyway.

A couple of years ago I interviewed at one of the largest Ruby shops out there. Screening went well, and some days later I was invited for an onsite.

These were the good old pre-covid days, so an onsite really meant onsite. You had to travel to the office, wherever that was.

The thing is, an onsite is actually radically different depending on where you live. It follows that onsites introduce further bias into our industry’s already problematic hiring process. I’d like to argue that although onsites have some advantages, they’re mostly a waste of time (and money).

OpenAI is so much fun!

I’d like to preface this by stating that Amazon is obviously a huge company, and my opinions are just that, one person’s opinions. There will probably be some people that share my frustrations while others have had a completely different experience.

I interviewed at AWS in early 2020, pre-pandemic. The interview process is grueling and I spent considerable effort preparing for the 5-hours-long pantomime of absurd algorithms trivia and “tell me a time when you said no” behavioral questions. COVID-induced visa processing delays pushed my start date forward in time many times. The high-stress interview process and years-spanning wait built up tremendous anticipation. In hindsight I can say I probably had somewhat unrealistic expectations when finally joining the company in late 2021.

Regardless, I was quite frankly shocked after my first couple of weeks, and my first impression was that this kind of work was not for me. As a software engineer, I expected to eventually do some software engineering. I’m not sure how to describe the work that first team I joined was doing, but I can’t in good conscious call it software engineering.

Immigration sucks. In addition to the personal toll it takes on anyone, it is also mind-numbingly tedious and baroquely complex. Why aren’t things better by now?

This reminded me of the so-called “digital nomad visas”. Searching for that term will get you a thousand clickbaitey Wordpress sites with the “20 best countries with nomad visas” or whatever. But how real are they really?