Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".

We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.

It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]

It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.

It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.

And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.

What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.

Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.

1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.

Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.

A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:

A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.

The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".

In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.

In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.

On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.

On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.

[Seeking Advice / Legal / Opinion]

Hello world, (TLDR at the bottom)
I'm the co-founder of a small startup and looking for advice from people of legal background or similar situations. (Any help making the reddit post more active will also help a lot: https://reddit.com/r/legaladvice/...)

Just as a backstory for better understanding:
a couple of years ago, me (early twenties, male) and another guy (late thirties, male) started an entrepreneurial journey, got in an accelerator program and some investment, and things always looked well.
We opened the company and started working / selling our services. Step by step we started recruiting, and getting some clients, and business is going well... ("well" as in, small revenues but not spending more than we earn).

The thing is that me and my co-founder's relationship has been degrading over time and I think it would be better for us and the company to split up and go our own way. He has the majority of the shares and I don't mind leaving it all behind for the sake of the company and mental health.

This is in US, if it helps, and we both have At-Will employment contracts.

My main question is, *if I do sign a termination contract*, from what I read, I'm obliged to remain reachable for a period of 12 months (plus all those IP related stuff, not sharing confidential info, etc).
[1] Is there anything I should be careful about and get some kind of protection or get some more information before resigning?

I'm afraid that if I leave the company it affects the business negatively, as we both work 16 / 20 hour shifts many times and my work would not be easily replaced by anyone in the current team. We are hiring more people right now, and some seniors, and I was thinking on staying one month dedicated only to training them... [2] Could this be specified in some contract that I am resigning from "today", but stay 30 days focusing on training new people, or anything similar?

I don't mind staying in touch and help whenever they could need, but I will not be available 24/7 and I will obviously need a job to pay living expenses, so I don't want to affect negatively my time in other jobs or personal life and be kind of protected against anything that he could do to make me stay continuously connected or compromised.

I'm interested in knowing any opinions and advice you guys may have, and feel free to ask some questions if you need extra details.
I just want the best for the startup but cannot hold much time in the current environment.

TLDR: Relationship between me and co-founder is getting worse, thinking on resignating but want to keep some sort of protection against anything that could make me keep compromised to the company.

!rant !dev

So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162

I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.

"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.

Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."

So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.

Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.

I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.

That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.

And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.

Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.

Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.

So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.

After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.

In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.

So my fist task was.

task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.

Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.

Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.

Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.

GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.

Capture, Process and Review.

Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.

Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.

And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.

You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.

I starting developing my skills to a pro level from 1 year and half from now. My skillset is focused on Backend Development + Data Science(Specially Deep Learning), some sort of Machine Learning Engineer. I fill my github with personal projects the last 5 months, and im currently working on a very exciting project that involves all of my skills, its about Developing and deploy a Deep Learning Model for Image Deblurring.

I started to look for work two months to now. I applied to dozens of jobs at startups, no response. I changed my strategy a bit, focusing on early stage startups that dont have infinite money for pay all that senior devs, nothing, not even that startups wish to have me in their teams. I even applied to 2 or 3 and claim to do the job for little payment, arguing im not going for money but experience, nothing. I never got a reply back, not an interview, the few that reach back(like 3, from 3 or 4 dozen of startups), was just for say their are not interested on me.

This is frustrating, what i do on my days is just push forward my personal projects without rest. I will be broke in a few months from now if i dont get a job, im still young, i have 21 years, but i dont have economic support from parents anymore(they are already broke). Truly dont know what to do. Currently my brother is helping me with the money, but he will broke in few months as i say.

The worst of all this case is that i feel capable of get things done, i have skills and i trust in myself. This is not about me having doubts about my skills, but about startups that dont care, they are not interested in me, and the other worst thing is that my profile is in high demand, at least on startups, they always seek for backend devs with Machine Learning knowledge. Im nothing for them, i only want to land that first job, but seems to be impossible.

For add to this situation, im from south america, Venezuela, and im only able to get a remote job, because in my country basically has no Tech Industry, just Agencies everywhere underpaying devs, that as extent, dont care about my profile too!!! this is ridiculous, not even that almost dead Agencies that contract devs for very little payment in my country are interested in me! As extra, my economic situation dont allows me to reallocate, i simple cant afford that. planning to do it, but after land some job for a few months. Anyways coronavirus seems to finally set remote work as the default, maybe this is not a huge factor right now.

I try to find job as freelancer, i check the freelancer sites(Freelancer, Guru and so on) every week more or less, but at least from what i see, there is no Backend-Only gigs for Python Devs, They always ask for Fullstack developers, and Machine Learning gigs i dont even mention them.

Maybe im missing something obvious, but feel incredible that someone that has skills is not capable of land even a freelancer job. Maybe im blind, or maybe im asking too much(I feel the latter is not the case). Or maybe im overestimating my self? i think around that time to time, but is not possible, i have knowledge of Rest/GraphQL APIs Development using frameworks like Flask or DJango(But i like Flask more than DJango, i feel awesome with its microframework approach). Familiarized with containerization and Docker. I can mention knowledge about SQL and DBs(PostgreSQL), ORMs(SQLAlchemy), Open Auth, CI/CD, Unit Testing, Git, Soft DevOps Skills, Design Patterns like MVC or MTV, Serverless Environments, Deep Learning Solutions, end to end: Data Gathering, Preprocessing, Data Analysis, Model Architecture Design, Training and Finetunning. Im familiarized with SotA techniques widely used now days, GANs, Transformers, Residual Networks, U-Nets, Sequence Data, Image Data or high Dimensional Data, Data Augmentation, Regularization, Dropout, All kind of loss functions and Non Linear functions. My toolset is based around Python, with Tensorflow as the main framework, supported by other libraries like pandas, numpy and other Data Science oriented utils.

I know lot of stuff, is not that enough for get a Junior Level underpaid job? truly dont get it, what is required for get a job? not even enough for get an interview?

I have some dev friends and everyone seems to be able to land jobs, why im not landing even an interview?

I will keep pushing my Dev career, is that or starve to death. But i will love to read your suggestions! how i can approach this?

i will leave here my relevant social presence:

https://linkedin.com/in/...
https://github.com/ElPapi42

Thanks in advance!