So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

Warning: This is going to be a long one!

Day 1: Fresh outta grad school. Joined a start-up in silicon valley (50% lower pay than avg salary) . Moved to the bay area and rented a car to travel to work. First day, all excited, drive 35 miles to work.

It's a small company with just 5 people. Greeted by the CEO himself. Asks me to wait outside while he goes speaks with the project manager. In the meantime the office manager asks if I have a copy of my resume.

10 minutes later, the CEO walks out and tell me: "I'm sorry but I don't have a job for you at this time. Please come back after a month". Palms are sweaty, Knees weak, arms are heavy. I feel my heart skipping several beats. As an F1 student I immediately start thinking about my visa status.

I drive back home and try to think what I should do next. Then suddenly the CEO calls me back saying pls come back and we can work something out. I drive back and I'm offered a small spot on a round table with my colleagues. Everyone looks stressed out and sad.

Day 2: Work starts early since we need to collaborate with a team in India. I reach work at 6:00 am hoping my second day is better than the first. Couple minutes into the early morning meeting, the CEO flips out and screams: "I'm going to fucking fire everyone. This fucking thing is taking too long. Just get the fuck out already".

Day 547: I finally quit and joined another start-up :)

Just got back to the Bay Area. Already feeling extra poor.

I taught myself to programm (properly) when I was 27. I got a job in 2016 as a junior developer but had to quit in early 2017 because I relocated with my partner to the Bay Area.
I'm finding it very hard to find work, no one looks at my CV seriously 😭
I turn 30 this year and I feel like I left things too late...
It's hard being a junior dev at 29 haha.

hey guys have you heard of sTate aCtoRs?!?! tHeRe iS a BaCkDoOr BeCaUsE I aM a BaD coDe mAiNtAnEr aNd ApProVe aLL coMmiTs

i'm one of 10,000 ultra-rich fuckwads who lives in the sAnFraNsiScO bAy aReA

its crazy that people earn less than 300K per month!

but i spit around the word "state actor" because i once wrote a for loop that retrieves customer emails from a CSV!

hacker news dumb fucks, all of them

they need to go eat more salad at the meta headquarters

no wonder their jobs are at risk 😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡😂🤡

Need some advice here.

So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.

I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.

I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.

Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.

In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.

I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.

what do you call an Asian doing Math and Statistics in the Bay Area?
A Bayesian!

Been studying web dev for about 10 months everyday and night and wanted to know when people usually look for they’re first job? I live in Asia right now and would be willing to move back to California or anywhere in the world to get started. What would you guys do freelance, search for jobs overseas, go to Silicon Valley “I’m from the Bay Area” but have been overseas for the past 6 years. Let me know thanks devs

A fresh React Native template install doesn't even come with a src/ folder

wild

this might be controversial, but what exactly use to be / are benefits of moving out to live in "tech hub cities"?

i would like to hear the points which applies to both pre pandemic and post pandemic (aka remote work boom) era.

going to a bigger city if you are living in villeges / unreachable areas seems a valid move as there will be opportunities in the city. but going out of home citiy (aka a place with decent opportunities, even if less paying), to a completely new "tech hub" city just because there is a bunch of companies have offices seems a bit much.

what's the plan? you going to bay area for 5 years, and then coming back with vested stocks to your poultry farm home at springfield ? or is the plan to get settled in the city too? in my country, the difference i expense s in my city to my country's tech hub is 10x , even tho my city itself is the capital and has plenty of tech companies .

they offer lesser salaries tho, but leaving away my nest of friends, family , relatives and other known people to start my own dynasty at a completely new hustling city with no connections, just to earn a few extra bucks seems very less compelling

Okay, not a rant, but hope it stays anyways. I am currently on a study trip in Silicon Valley until april 11th. I am wondering what it is like to be a dev here. So if there are any devs from the Bay Area who would like to meet for a talk please contact me

Anyone in the Tampa Bay area? I would love to meet some of you guys. I'm currently attending HCC.

Those who are Software Engineers in the Bay Area or other places with high cost of living (COL), do you think living in that area is worth it? Or would you rather work remote somewhere that's cheaper even if that means taking a slight pay cut?

I was born and raised in the Bay Area and want to own a home. The Peninsula is just so fucking expensive. No way I want to shell out 500k for a condo with a $500 a month HOA fee. What gives? I'm not looking to make money on a home I'm looking to have a place I can call my own.