> You have absolutely no way to negotiate your base salary above the band which was already known when we created the position
I don't actually want to negotiate the base salary, but I want to know before hand if all the time invested in interviews and the risk taken when switching jobs is worth it for me.
> You should care about your total compensation anyway and neither cash bonus, nor equity is covered in the disclosure, although especially for senior positions, those are very substantial part of your compensation.
No, because equity and all the other benefits besides the base salary are most of the time at the company's whim - I might or not receive them and I'll have only the freedom to choose between options offered by the company, not real freedom.
For a long time I had problems falling asleep, no matter how physically or mentally tired I was. And after some introspection I found out that I could not fall asleep because I kept thinking actively about the day that passed or making plans for the next day.
Now I can fall asleep in 10-15 minutes by focusing that mental energy into imagining a favorite place and once the image is established in my mind I let go of control. Then the image kind of comes alive on its own - I like to imagine a clearing in a forest so all kind of creatures appear randomly. I think all this random auto-generated sensory input overrides the real one allowing me to fall asleep.
Of course, it helps if there are no sudden changes in your real environment (loud sounds, sharp changes in lighting, etc.)
I think it will be nice to stay as it is for the most part, but for a comment of your own you should have the ability to enable notifications for direct answers. It would be really useful when I have follow up questions.
Maybe add a limit on how many 'followed threads' you could have active at the same time, so they discourage automating this behavior and make you really think if the thread is that important for you at the moment.
I was working recently on a similar project and I knocked my head in the GDPR walls; the most annoying being TechCrunch - you don't just get a modal that you could bypass, they send you to another site.
The core of my code is a line by line translation of the Firefox version. I know what it does, but not the exact motivation for everything, so it has many hidden tricks I never noticed. I'm not in Europe and I never tested this, but it's possible that it does remove some of the modals, as long as the actual content is on the page.
It won't do anything for the TechCrunch case you describe, because it only fetches the one webpage you point it to (and any redirections).
I took a very quick look at the source code, and seems you’re using the curl default options for things like the user agent. Please correct me if wrong!
Did you try pretending to be a search engine crawler, for an idea..?
On the other part of E.U., in Romania, no matter what kind of business you want to start you need to battle with the bureaucracy.
Out of high-tech domain, I was thinking that my grandma could sell the jam she makes - but she can't sell it legally if it's produced in her own house - no matter how low is the production. Maybe just at some kind of farmers market, but that is iffy.
If I want to invoice some custom development for software, I can not do it as an individual. I either need a BS in Compute Science or setup a SRL.
The romantic view of starting out in the garage is quite illegal in these parts.
You need to spend a lot just to test a business idea. And what yous spend is not actually investing in the business, but just wasting time and resources with the bureaucracy.
And once you have a business set up then the fun starts. For extra sadism, try winding down your business!
I wonder if Europeans know US companies of much bigger dimensions are capable of keeping their own accounting and the sky is not falling. But in Romania, every month the accountant must get the paperwork, do the magical incantations (that nobody! reads). The Annual report even costs extra since it's more stuffy and it gets uploaded to the Finance Ministry so they get a chance to do nothing with it.
Sorry for the rant, I'm also traumatised by living here and knowing it could be different.
Bold of you to assume there's a social safety net to speak of in Eastern Europe. It's only on paper.
You have to be a cripple or not worked for like a year or two in order to be eligible for some very minimal sum a month, and even that is taken away from you if you don't actively look for work and haven't found it in 6 to 18 months.
The whole thing is crafted in a way that unless you are living in shanty towns and rely on your relatives stealing food and clothes for you, then you will not want to descend that low on the social ladder just to get something like 200 EUR or so. And that implicit and indirect discouragement works really well; people just don't bother pursuing social help because it's meaningless and 99% of the time you won't get it anyway. Only the gypsies are persistent in it.
It's every man for himself here in EE. I am not complaining by the way; I've never known any other state of things so I don't actually care about social safety nets at all. But when we here in EE heard about the "Corona stimulus packages" (basically you get money because of the pandemic even if you didn't lose a job) then a lot of us couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of the idea that something like that would ever happen here.
There's only the social safety tax which you get clubbed if you don't pay. Other than that you are on your own and will pay out of pocket for whatever thing you imagine the safety net should have provided.
Social safety nets in post-Communist EU countries are purely theoretical. People throw money at bureaucratic structures which evaporate the money. Practicaly, think US-level of "social safety net", including healthcare. I'm not exagerating.
Unfortunately my experience is as an outsourced employee so not too relevant for pitching as a contractor.
But product managers are usually pretty happy to hear you out and usually benefit from referring people they've talked to. And they respond on LinkedIn.
It shouldn't be too hard, contractors were common, employee turnover was significant too. Platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud usually have an API that supports an older version of JavaScript so employees are a bit harder to retain and a lot depends on contractors. That's why I suggested that particular platform, plus it's easy to find their customers if you browse the SFCC customer stories.
I realize it sounds like a terrible job after the above but I truly enjoyed my years there even though the quality of the websites varies a lot.
The problem that I found with it, is that a recurring receiver (let's say a client) will eventually start trusting your minutes so much that they don't even bother to read them and just answer with 'Looks good' and basically you lose the power of minutes.
To counter this, recently I've been trying to insert one wrong bullet point from the beginning, making the receiver pay more attention down the line. I don't have yet enough data points to see if this approach works.
Do you have any recommendations of online resources or books that can get a web programmer (experience in PHP / C# ) up to speed with clojure ecosystem ?
Once you understand the spirit and rationale for Clojure it becomes apparent why other communities don't have this kind of tech yet
Once it gets down to practical things I recommend using clj-Kondo with type hints, Cursive for Intellji, make sure you learn how to hot code inject new code into your running program using your editor shortcuts, and TDD in Clojure is also excellent and immediate: https://cursive-ide.com/userguide/testing.html
Also look out for GraalVM and Babashka we're using it to compile fast native binaries out of Clojure
Its a pretty fun read, and does a good job of covering the language (plus its free, which is probably why most people start there).
You could also take a look at Programming Clojure (written by some of the people behind the language, Alex Miller and Stuart Halloway), which I think is a better resource, but it does cost money.
It can be tempting to want to start in the deep end and try to create something like a web app from scratch as your first attempt at using the language, but there isn't really a Django or Rails for Clojure and you can easily get lost in the weeds (as I did).
My approach to learning Clojure was to start with a simple setup (for me its VS Code with the Calva extension, and deps.edn for managing the project files) and forcing myself to use Clojure for any small utility scripts that I might have otherwise done in bash or JavaScript.
This allowed me to get a feel for the language and how to work with the REPL without having to also digest a lot of information on how a specific library or framework works.
I don't actually want to negotiate the base salary, but I want to know before hand if all the time invested in interviews and the risk taken when switching jobs is worth it for me.
> You should care about your total compensation anyway and neither cash bonus, nor equity is covered in the disclosure, although especially for senior positions, those are very substantial part of your compensation.
No, because equity and all the other benefits besides the base salary are most of the time at the company's whim - I might or not receive them and I'll have only the freedom to choose between options offered by the company, not real freedom.