I think the best, most reliable way to get a software engineering job is to get a software engineering degree.
If you want a shortcut, I would look for ways to complete your degree faster. Do more courses at a time, and make sure to finish them in the shortest time possible. It should be possible to complete a bachelors degree in 3 years.
I don't think there is anything you can do in a few weekends that will make your Github profile appealing. I also don't think you need an impressive Github profile to get a job as a developer. Most devs I know have boring Github repos.
Well this is reassuring then. I definitely feel good in the sense that I know way more than I did at the beginning of the year. If. I continue this trend I should be a pretty solid candidate sometime in 2022 plus I will continue pursuing my degree.
> much of my job satisfaction came from the sense of comradery of working on a team
I think this is a seriously undervalued factor and something I was completely unaware of.
I used to always judge job opportunities either by how well they pay, or how interesting the work is. But in reality, the social factor is just as important.
So some time ago, I was trying to hire my first employee. I paid a lot of money for job ads, and got very little applications. I offered the same salary as the other tech companies in my city, and I really tried my best to attract people.
I couldn't understand why people instead only applied to work for boring consultancies or even for an online gambling company -- why would people prefer such mind numbing or even morally questionable jobs?
I realized that the social situation at work is really important. When I met people who worked at the online gambling website, they weren't talking about the actual work; they just told me about their awesome boss, and how they had fun with their team mates, etc. It didn't matter how interesting my project was, nobody wanted to sit all day in an office just alone with me.
Consultancy might have a boring image, but the work can be extremely varied. I was at one of the big names and got to go behind the scenes at a major theme park, spend a night with police officers on blue light calls, watch open heart surgery in person, meet a lunar astronaut and eat lunch in a tv studio watching a live broadcast.
I think you make your own luck for things like this. I was a technology architect which had the advantage of being quite broad in scope. I came to the company with a deeper technical background than some which helped, but I also built a specialism after I joined that was rare in the company. That meant if there was a need for that skill, I had a high chance of being asked to assist. And of course, when it came to change projects, choosing ones that held an interest helped. But for example, anyone who joined the project with the police force had an opportunity to join a shift, anyone who worked on the TV project could have lunch where I did, so it isn't all about the role.
I'll chime in since I also worked in consulting for a long time (still do). It depends a lot on what vertical you get pulled into, but I'd say it's 50% luck and 50% you putting in the effort to develop and prove you have skills (including social ones) to get staffed on interesting projects. Many consultants never see more than conference rooms and the home office, but the parent commenter's experience also happens quite a bit. It's worth noting that in my experience the more advanced you get in your career the more likely you are to work only in a specific industry.
Years ago, I remember someone talking about working in film. Ideally, you work on three movies a year; one for the pay, one for the script, and one for the people you work with. I've tried to keep this in mind when looking for full-time work and I think it lines up with what you're saying.
I think the OPs point was that the past employer effectively leveraged the social aspect to underpay. Now that there is a hobby outside of work, the latter is suddenly not a center of life anymore. The pay raise is the ironic reality of employers catching up with the real cost of labour.
That assumes that these social aspects are valued at zero. Money isn't everything in a job. Your compensation consists of the money, yes, but also everything else in the job. Good social aspect at work takes effort to build and maintain, so maybe, actually, those employers weren't underpaying at all. Again, money isn't everything.
It assumes exactly the opposite of that. The underlying economic principle at work is that the social aspects of a job do have an equivalent monetary value, and now that they're gone, employers have to make up the shortfall by paying more in plain money.
Counterpoint: with basic human decency and almost every company following the same blueprint when catering to that social aspect, odds are in practice it really doesn't matter. Either you're an outlier socially and lucky to hit it without turning your CV into Swiss cheese, or you're more average and almost every company will cater to you the same way, so odds are high you'll fit in similarly regardless.
Good social aspect is still in the eyes of the beholder, and for people like me, this blueprint absolutely isn't beneficial. Nor is the risk of looking for an outlier culture worth the potential benefits, when that same outlier culture can be much more easily found outside work.
This isn't new; it's called a protection racket and it works especially well if you actually do have a mechanism to protect against the thing (though of course that's not a requirement if you're generating most of the problem yourself).
I've met (and worked with) people who built something, and were looking for someone to sell it.
The unfortunate truth is that this usually doesn't work because of two reasons:
1) If you can't convince anybody to buy your product, you also won't be able to convince anybody to sell your product. You need to be able to at least sell your idea to the cofounder.
2) If you've never tried selling your product, and have never interacted with your customers, chances are that what you built doesn't solve anybodys problem. I've never seen a successful product that was a hit right away without any user testing and iteration based on user feedback, but some people are convinced their product is different.
> I’m surprised so few people care about where there cofounder lives.
If I wanted to find someone in my city, a global website would be the last place I'd look. Maybe the people who use a global matching platform are more interested in finding someone with specific skills / interests rather than someone who lives nearby.
>Maybe the people who use a global matching platform are more interested in finding someone with specific skills / interests rather than someone who lives nearby.
Maybe there's a misunderstanding because there are no obvious screen shots but it says you can filter on location. Thus, a "global" matching platform becomes a local one. It's not is if one is endlessly scrolling 15000 profiles hoping for a local person to appear.
It's still a relative numbers game. Finding a nearby potential co-founder in a subset on a popular website such as YC is more likely than a local website such as lasvegas.craigslist.org
Well even if I want to find someone local, doesn’t mean I can just walk outside and find them, especially since the pandemic shut down most events in the Bay Area. Dating apps seem pretty popular and I think vast majority of people on those platforms are looking for someone local.
It took many years before dating platforms became viable. I remember trying some dating websites early on, and there just weren't any people in my area at all. It was fun looking at the profiles, but it wasn't actually useful for meeting people yet.
I would assume that a cofounder matching platform with 16000 profiles has a similar problem, it's just too few people to bother looking for local matches.
I've never worked with bamboo plywood, but the product on the website looks like it should be compared with 20mm 3 ply wood panels made from cut hard wood instead of the cheap ply wood made from peeled wood.
So a better comparison would be something like [1], which is a lot more expensive than standard birch plywood.
I'm not saying it's bad, I've used birch plywood myself and I like it.
But you can't compare the 13 layer plywood made from peeled wood with the stuff made from 3 layers of sawed wood. They are completely different types of product, and the cost is also very different.
Apart from mechanical properties, the 3 layer stuff is also much nicer optically usually (eg. they use camera sorted boards to achieve nice and even patterns). That's why it is more expensive.
Birch plywood and baltic birch plywood are completely different animals.
Regular birch plywood is indeed often the cheap stuff.
Baltic birch will be void-free and of a very consistent quality and made from thinner veneers. It's much more stable and high quality product, although you're correct that it probably won't be as pretty on the surfaces.
Too be honest I've never heard of "baltic birch" before so I can't comment on how different it is from the normal birch plywood we get here in EU.
I just googled it and saw that it looks exactly like the birch plywood I have been using, so I assumed that it has similar properties.
I consider birch to be "good" plywood, it's very easy to work with, strong, and seems somewhat resilient to warping. However, because the layers are so thin you often end up breaking bits off when working on it with a router, and the surface somehow doesn't get as smooth when sanding.
The 3-layer boards (not sure what they are called in English) seem to be easier to sand smooth, easier to finish with oil, and are not as finicky when routing.
Just from looking at pictures, I'd assume the bamboo boards are closer to the 3 layer stuff rather than the 13 layer stuff.
I assume they just mean that they get too heavy for practical use. They stated that they offer boards with a thickness of 30-40mm, they just don't offer panels of that thickness.
At a density of 1200kg/m2 it's almost twice as dense as some other hard woods like walnut (~650kg/m2) or particle board (~700kg/m2).
I guess for a kitchen countertop it wouldn't matter (stone countertops are popular and even heavier), but for most furniture it would probably be just way too heavy to be practical. Someone needs to be able to carry your furniture :)
Germany has a lot of high end car manufacturers and other industry, which means that there are a lot of experienced engineers in the country that they can hire. Most people also speak English well enough, which makes it easier to collaborate with US engineers (compared to eg. Spain, where many people really struggle with English).
All of the established domestic car manufacturers have significantly expanded their operations in Berlin in the last 5 years (though mainly R&D, especially software). Germany has relatively high immigration, and it's a lot easier to draw highly qualified immigrants to Berlin than to the Southern German countryside due to the youthful appeal and lower CoL of the city. The US, OTOH, has become more hostile to immigration over time. From a "competition for global talent" PoV, Berlin is a decent stake in the ground in many ways. Tesla also has plans to build an R&D site on the land of the recently shuttered Tegel inner city airport.
It would also require the whole thing be designed differently.
The hinge would need to be sturdy enough to not wobble when the user is dragging or tapping with a finger. The body would need to be heavier than the screen by a big enough margin to not topple the whole thing over when tapping.
Touchscreens are the big missing feature on macOS.
It's not useful as a primary input method, but after using a Windows Surface computer for some time I'm surprised how often the touch display is useful.
Lots of websites are optimized for touch / mobile first. Wether you are filling a form or watching Netflix or Disney plus, touching the screen is just much more convenient. Keyboard navigation is increasingly an afterthought on many websites.
Macs now support running iOS apps. Using them without a touch screen is going to be a very poor experience.
And finally, some things like annotating PDFs are things that are really cumbersome without a touch display -- when I need to do that on a Mac, I just print out the page because using the track pad or mouse for annotations is just not an option for me.
If you want a shortcut, I would look for ways to complete your degree faster. Do more courses at a time, and make sure to finish them in the shortest time possible. It should be possible to complete a bachelors degree in 3 years.
I don't think there is anything you can do in a few weekends that will make your Github profile appealing. I also don't think you need an impressive Github profile to get a job as a developer. Most devs I know have boring Github repos.