For any keyboard lover like me: this little guys are the most valuable things in my setup. Ortholinear keyboards from http://olkb.com I can't recommend them enough. They are fully programmable and comes in kits for you to finish mounting. The red one is a planck and the other is a preonic.

I'm using dsa keycaps from pimpmykeyboard and the switches are gateron blues.

They just opened a new massdrop for the planck, these are already assembled and ready for use. Check it out at https://massdrop.com/buy/...

P.S.: I have nothing to do with the project and I'm not getting paid to post this. Just love them and want to spread the word. Hope someone love them as much as I do.

This brings joy

https://reddit.com/r/technology/...

Bypass paywall:

A series of scandals and missteps has damaged Facebook's reputation so much that the company is being forced to pay ever larger compensation to hire and retain workers, according to industry recruiters, former employees, and data reviewed by Insider.

The company has always competed aggressively for talent, and the tech job market in general is on fire. But a deteriorating public image means the social-media giant now has to outbid other major tech companies, such as Google.

"One thing Facebook can still do is pay a lot more," said Jose Guardado, an experienced tech recruiter and the founder of Build Talent. "They can easily throw more compensation at people they currently have, and cover any brand tax and pay a little more to get people to come on."

Silicon Valley companies thrive or whither based on their ability to recruit the smartest employees. Without a steady influx of engineers and other technical experts, new products and important updates take longer to release, and rivals can quickly get ahead. Then there's the financial cost: In 2022, Facebook projected, expenses could jump as high as $97 billion from $70 billion this year, in large part because of "investments in technical and product talent." A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Other companies, and even whole industries, have had to increase compensation to overcome hiring and retention problems caused by scandal and shifting public perceptions, said Alan Johnson, a managing director at the compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates. "If you're an oil company, if you make cigarettes, if you're in cattle or Wells Fargo, sure," he said.

How well this is working for Facebook is debatable as the company has more than 4,300 open jobs and has seen decreasing rates of acceptance on job offers, according to internal documents reported by Protocol. It's also seen dozens of high-level executives leave this year, and recruiters say employees are now more open to considering jobs elsewhere. Facebook used to be a place that people rarely left, given its reach, pay, and perks.

A former Oculus engineer who left last year said Facebook could now be seen as a "black mark" on someone's career. A hardware engineer who exited in 2020 shared similar sentiments: They said they quit because of concerns about misinformation on the platform and the effect of that on children. Another employee said their department was dissolved in late 2019 by Facebook and, although the company offered another position that paid more, they left last year anyway for a different industry. The workers, and many other people who spoke with Insider for this story, asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic.

For those who stick around and people who take new jobs at Facebook, base pay and stock grants have gone up a "sizable" amount in the past year, said Zuhayeer Musa, cofounder of Levels.fyi, a platform that collects pay data based on verified offers and compensation disclosures.

During the second quarter of 2021, the median compensation for an upper-mid-level engineer, an E5, was $400,000, up from $380,000 a year earlier. For an E4, the median pay jumped to $276,000 from $256,000 in the same period. For both groups, the increases were double the gains between 2018 and 2019, Levels.fyi data showed.

Musa, who's firm also offers pay-negotiation coaching, said previously that the total compensation ceiling for an E5 engineer at Facebook was $450,000. "We recently had a client get up to $510,000 for E5," he added.

Equity awards at the company are getting more generous, too. At the group-director and VP levels, Facebook staff are getting $3 million to $6 million in restricted stock units each year, another tech recruiter said. Directors and managers are getting on average $1 million a year. In engineering, a high-level engineer is getting $600,000 in stock and a $75,000 bonus, while even an entry-level engineer is getting $50,000 to $100,000 in stock and a $20,000 to $50,000 bonus, Levels.fyi data indicated.

Even compared to Google, Facebook's stock awards are generous and increasing, Levels.fyi data shows. While base pay is about the same, Facebook offers more in stock grants, significantly increasing total compensation. At Google, entry-level equity awards range from $20,000 to $38,000, while Facebook grants are worth $40,000 to $60,000. Sign-on bonuses at Facebook are often about $50,000, while Google gives about $20,000, according to the data.

"It's not normal, but it's consistent with the craziness that's happening in the market right now," said Aalap Shah, a managing director focused on the tech industry at the consulting firm Pearl Meyer.

It’s now day 4 into handing in my notice. Here's a recap of day 1&2. Here's the recap of day 0: https://www.devrant.io/rants/871145

I handed in my notice on Wednesday with a leaving date of 10/27/17:
> format_date('27/10/17', 'short', 'muurcan');

Thursday, I had an appointment outside of the office... I was called by a marketing guy at [popular graph database company] to try and wiggle his way into my org. I forget his name, so we'll call him Derek:

Derek: 'Hi James, it’s marketer at [graph co] here; I know you downloaded our free book two months ago and we reserved the right to call you constantly since. I just wanted to...'

Me: 'Hol up Derek! I don’t want to waste your time, thank you guys for the book.
I’d have happily paid to avoid these phone calls.
I’ve resigned from [company] before getting a chance to introduce [most popular graph database platform on google, for real, go check now].
Again thanks, but I’m no longer a useful lead.'

Life lesson learned: free doesn’t mean free, free books aren’t worth shit. Marketing people are lovely... but have an job to do so they’re also basically all cunts.

If you want to learn graph DB best practices from oreilly, pay the £7 and be done with it.

Don’t download that book! Derek will take your number and use it like you’re a young naive college girl with a golden pička.

Aside: I’ve met a new girl! I’ve rapidly learned Slovenian swear words. She’s a beautiful Slovenian girl and has the mouth of a sailor. Peace out to any of my eastern euro buddies on here. Privyet, serbus, stay frigging awesome.

I'll be following up on the tag 'jct resigns' for anyone interested.

If you can be locked out of it remotely, you don't own it.

On May 3rd, 2019, the Microsoft-resembling extension signature system of Mozilla malfunctioned, which locked out all Firefox users out of their browsing extensions for that day, without an override option. Obviously, it is claimed to be "for our own protection". Pretext-o-meter over 9000!

BMW has locked heated seats, a physical interior feature of their vehicles, behind a subscription wall. This both means one has to routinely spend time and effort renewing it, and it can be terminated remotely. Even if BMW promises never to do it, it is a technical possibility. You are in effect a tenant in a car you paid for. Now imagine your BMW refused to drive unless you install a software update. You are one rage-quitting employee at BMW headquarters away from getting stuck on a side of a road. Then you're stuck in an expensive BMW while watching others in their decade-old VW Golf's driving past you. Or perhaps not, since other stuck BMWs would cause traffic jams.
Perhaps this horror scenario needs to happen once so people finally realize what it means if they can be locked out of their product whenever the vendor feels like it.

Some software becomes inaccessible and forces the user to update, even though they could work perfectly well. An example is the pre-installed Samsung QuickConnect app. It's a system app like the Wi-Fi (WLAN) and Bluetooth settings. There is a pop-up that reads "Update Quick connect", "A new version is available. Update now?"; when declining, the app closes. Updating requires having a Samsung account to access the Galaxy app store, and creating such requires providing personally identifiable details.

Imagine the Bluetooth and WiFi configuration locking out the user because an update is available, then ask for personal details. Ugh.

The WhatsApp messenger also routinely locks out users until they update. Perhaps messaging would cease to work due to API changes made by the service provider (Meta, inc.), however, that still does not excuse locking users out of their existing offline messages. Telegram does it the right way: it still lets the user access the messages.

"A retailer cannot decide that you were licensing your clothes and come knocking at your door to collect them. So, why is it that when a product is digital there is such a double standard? The money you spend on these products is no less real than the money you spend on clothes." – Android Authority ( https://androidauthority.com/digita... ).

A really bad scenario would be if your "smart" home refused to heat up in winter due to "a firmware update is available!" or "unable to verify your subscription". Then all you can do is hope that any "dumb" device like an oven heats up without asking itself whether it should or not. And if that is not available, one might have to fall back on a portable space heater, a hair dryer or a toaster. Sounds fun, huh? Not.

Cloud services (Google, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.) can, by design, lock out the user, since they run on the computers of the service provider. However, remotely taking away things one paid for or has installed on ones own computer/smartphone violates a sacred consumer right.

This is yet another benefit of open-source software: someone with programming and compiling experience can free the code from locks.

I don't care for which "good purpose" these kill switches exist. The fact that something you paid for or installed locally on your device can be remotely disabled is dystopian and inexcuseable.

https://devrant.com/rants/3140022/...

So I just realised it's been a while and I haven't updated this story.

So the job mentioned in the previous post did not work out. Things were tough for a while after that but then all of a sudden I had 4 interviews back to back. I guess everyone got the 2021 budgets and suddenly knew they could afford me.

So had an interview at a small company, only 6km from my house. A week later second interview, another week later, when I had the other 3 lined up as well, third interview as they wanted to physically meet me. The first two were digital.

They also only offered me 47% of my previous salary but they said there was a salary review after probation (3 months) and another at the 6 month mark.

Another interview was for more just a general "the printer's not working" type job. I went for that interview as at the time, I'd take anything that paid enough to cover the bills. They also made me an offer for 47% of my prev salary. I turned them down as I was about to sign for the other gig. I recommended my brother and he got the job.

The monday of that week I had an interview at a bigger company. They called on 11th Nov offering almost the same as my last salary and wanted me to start on the 1st of Dec. So I took that one as it was double the other two. I then got delayed by 2 days with starting because they were having trouble getting my equipment sorted. All's well now.

It's a support job, not dev but it's internal 2nd line so at least it's not customer facing. They want to grow me into an RPA role, which I'm down for. I figure I'll kill 6 months doing that and worm my way into microservices.

The forth company, I didn't even actually for the interview, it kept on getting delayed and by the time they came op with a date, I had already signed my current contract.

Overall, the job is not what I expected but it was a godsend as I was about to sign for half as much money. Finally, I can pay all my bills, catch up on debts and even save a bit!

Thanks for the support and encouragement from those of you who have been following this story