Hi hacker news, I am co-founder of Abhyasu here, happy to answer any questions or suggestions the community has. While I spent a couple of decades working in the areas of Distributed Systems and Machine Learning, teaching computing to kids is my passion, and recently I started doing that full-time. Any suggestions welcome!
My suggestion is to double down on what you know already (iOS, swift, etc) and do homework on about 10 companies that pay well and have a need for that skillset. Then, a couple months before your bond gets over, approach these companies and start interviewing. If you are good, you will get at least a couple offers and will be in a good position to negotiate.
Note - the key is to approach these candidate companies more or less in parallel, and not serially. If you have multiple offers, you have a much better chance to make much more than what you are making today, compared to learning a new skill at this point.
Remote management works in some scenarios, but needs commitment from both the team and the manager to make it work. Additionally, the goals should be clearly defined and communicated, so that there are no surprises.
It is hard to make it work, but is very beneficial and can be a competitive advantage when you get it right. Hey, you can now hire top talent regardless of geographical boundaries!
I would really stress the importance of having an open one-on-one conversation with her and resolve these issues. Seems like you already tried that and it turned into a heated discussion, here is some advice on how to approach it.
1. Have the conversation in a public place where professionals meet. For example, coffee shops. If you in the bay area, it would be best to have it in coffee shops known for startup discussions, such as Coupa Coffee in Palo Alto. Just choosing the right place for the conversation will make sure that the discussion does not go out of hand.
2. Come to the discussion with an open frame of mind. There may be some issues that she is feeling - you should be willing to listen.
3. Alert her in advance about the general topic you want to talk about. So that she is not surprised and is mentally prepared.
4. During the discussion, make sure to lay out specific behaviors/situations/examples that you find objectionable, and listen to what she has to say. Again, be open - perhaps there is another piece of the puzzle here that you have thought about fully, and she explains it to you.
Example: "I put in 60-70 hours per week" is a very general statement. A specific statement would be "Last week, we launched feature F. I did X, Y, Z tasks over night to make the launch successful. However, you contribution over that week was only implementing a simple bug fix B. I would like to listen to you to know how can I help you contribute more to the project."
5. You may have some counterpoints to the arguments she makes. Be specific and encourage her to be specific. Hopefully after some time you'll sort it out amicably and you both have a good understanding of how each other works.
6. Contrary to what others have said, I would not bring a third-party to the discussion. You need to own resolving this problem. Getting third-party involved too quickly can be detrimental - they don't know the situation as much as both of you do. Most problems like these can be solved by honest and open communication.
What is missing in the UI is that there is no context for why a result is relevant. There are multiple Yahoo, Facebook, CNN logos on the result page - how do I know which one I would be more interested in, without clicking on it?
Given you want to make search visually appealing, consider displaying thumbnail of a prominent image or video from the target page in the results page. However, although this will improve the UI, you will take a hit on performance unless you are crawling top news sources and caching image thumbnails yourself.
It seems like what you need an external validation of your talents which can be put on your resume. Some examples of such validation include:
- Start contributing to open source. Start with small bug fixes but quickly move to some real, solid work. You'll lean a ton along the way and will get the validation you need.
- If you are a frontend engineer, put out some demos publicly accessible on the Internet. Let people know what you can build. To add on the top, put the code on github and help others who want to reuse it.
In parallel, start cultivating relationships with Google employees in the area of your interest. Attend meetups where they may be present. Tell them things that you are working on and get their advice on how you can improve.
Somewhere along the way in this path, you will be a better and well-networked programmer that great tech companies won't afford to ignore.
