I've seen there are plenty of comments that disagree with that statement. I agree, though.
I love working remotely. I've been working remotely for a bit less than a year now. I had some few months break at the beginning of this year where I was working on my own product, but I was still at home.
Why do I love it? Well, my wife is staying at home with me and we get to spend so much more time together. I think over that period of time we've got closer together. We can chat during the day, eat meals together and stuff like that, it's super cool.
More reasons? If I can work asynchronously (not being dependent on the rest of my team) I can schedule my day according to my needs. Need a one hour walk outside? Well, why not:) Even though it's not my company I'm working for I kind feel like I am the boss. I don't have people staring at my screen, I don't have people talking next to me, I can go to a shop and prepare a nice breakfast if I want to. It's really good.
I do agree that it gets a bit boring without a chitchat with colleagues. But I try to compensate for it by meeting with my friends and family regularly.
Based on my experience this is very true. It's very annoying when you want to find a job, but you don't want to be a sucker, so you end up looking for a job for a long time. I don't get it. You want to hire someone talented or smart, obviously, you are gonna have to pay them good money. What's the problem with that? I'm sure they will bring much more value than a usual sucker.
Personal story ahead. I've been looking for a job for around two months already. I'm Ruby/JS dev, so there are a few offers I can choose from. The problem is, half of that offers pay very little. Based on my experience, related to working with other people and to my previous salaries, I'd be a sucker to apply to those cheap offers. What I'm even more afraid is the people I'd work with. I'm pretty young and ambitious and I learn fast and I want to learn a lot, but if you don't have a good mentor you are not gonna learn that much.
Unfortunately, the offers, that interest me, require much more experience than I have. I doubt that I'd have a real problem with adapting and doing the job unwell. But I don't even get invited to any interview from that offers, because my CV has one year or two years of experience less than they expect :( How can I show that I could be a good fit then?
I know it's not that much related to the topic, but I've been a bit frustrated.
The advice is fairly obvious (or at least is the default course you're likely to take anyway): just keep at it. If someone really cares about the difference between 24 and 36 months of experience, you probably don't want to work there anyway...
Dude, get those jobs and leave in 6 months. They don’t pay you enough? Then do 8-5 and still look for jobs. Not paying you your market rate means you are already a flight risk.
Yeah. I moved to the Bay Area for an interesting gig, and now I get 3-5 recruiter pitches a day, many of which are from interesting companies. Same Ruby/Js background. It’s so much recruiting it’s gone from amazing to annoying actually, but it’s a good problem to have. If you can find a way to get here I think you’ll have an easy time finding a nice job.
I don't know why people make such a big deal of types. They don't add that much time to typing the code.
I also have noticed that if you write daily using some code style (for example using types) it takes time to switch to another style, for example without types. So you are better of using types, because you are used to it and you will code faster that way anyway.
Recently I've been tinkering with Elixir a lot. That's why I decided to share some small tips for learning Elixir. Hopefully someone will find it useful :)
Never been a CTO, but, don't be afraid to give some of your responsibilities to other people. Not sure how else to describe it, what I mean is just don't expect yourself to do everything, you have dev team for coding, etc.
Make sure your developers have everything they need to do their job: like tools, specs, docs, designs, etc.
And don't be afraid to ask questions to your developers, there is no way you will know the product 100%.
I don't know much how to help. I'm sorry. I have one idea though. Maybe find a temporary work in some other industry? Something new could spark a new passion? Even a job like a waiter/ress, taxi driver could bring a new look at life.
I think that interacting with other people could help. IT is very specific workplace, especially, startups, in my opinion.
I thought same in 2018 when I didn't use Phoenix. But after trying out Elixir and Phoenix, damn... Elixir and Phoenix give you so much, nice websockets, concurrency, fucking easy to read code with great docs.
I was a bit sceptical about the praise Elixir was getting, but after working with it for a while... I started noticing a lot of stuff that is lacking or abused in Ruby and Rails.
Elixir looks great until you look at modulecounts.com where Erlang/Elixir libs total a mere 7900. Compared with Ruby's 150900 gems that's a lot more code you're going to have to write surely?
That's a very valid concern.
My personal opinion:
Yes, the package system is pretty small. That's why it depends what kind of project you are gonna write and how much time you have. Ruby has a lot of gems, but many of them are buggy and deprecated... Proof: https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia
I think that Elixir is gonna catch up. If you write a project where you need to use a lot of external libraries probably Ruby is better. If you don't need to rely on the external dependencies too much and you want to/have to write your own code(libs), imo, Elixir is a better option. It also depends on a project, lots of external api calls, webhooks, real time chatrooms, etc. I think Elixir is gonna be a better option.
One thing more, because Elixir's code is much easier to deal with, it's easier to fork and fix deprecated lib than in Ruby(Rails).
In addition, Elixir libraries tend to be very high quality in my experience. This is not the case with gems; I'm always very hesitant to add a new dependency in my Ruby applications.
Of course, the quality disparity exists in part because there is a much wider pool of developers with varying levels of experience in Ruby, similar to Node.js. But I believe Elixir encourages and even enforces a certain level of code quality, without introducing fragile mutable state, security issues, and package incompatibilities. Thus I expect the quality of Elixir libraries will remain high even as the pool of Elixir developers grows.
Another concern with Elixir is that, like Node, it is optimised for IO, not computation. Take chatbots, for which Elixir is supposed to be ideal - what if my chatbot connects to a computation-intensive AI/NLP model. I'm going to need something else for that, surely? Elixir and Node are good for the orchestration layer but lack the all-round capabilities of, say, the JVM platform.
Elixir definitely comes up short on raw computation. However we've been very satisfied with it for implementing a database. Use data oriented design (you want that anyway) and move any CPU intensive part into a native function. It's pretty straightforward to bind a C/C++/Rust library.
Considering the massive growth in AI that makes Elixir only half a solution then unless you're good with low-level languages such as C/C++/Rust. Scala and Clojure, on the other hand, are good for both computation and IO so I don't really see the advantage of Elixir.
I finished high school not that long time ago...
I'm gonna say... Think Lean (startup lean) go to the high school and ask the kids what they want to know and what could make the presentation better for them and their friends.
As a kid, I really disliked listening to presentations from some random folks, because they were just talking and talking and talking about their job, lol. Make them interested in the field, show them why it's so cool. A million words are not gonna convince them, but if you show them something cool and show them the path to do it at home, some will get interested :)
Hi, I'm looking for a position that involves Ruby/Elixir. I can additionally do Javascript, so I can be your fullstack developr :) At the moment, I'm building my own products, so I'm learning a lot about the business side, which is cool and useful, imo.
I also recommend using Oj [1] which is a very fast JSON parser/generator for Ruby.
JSON generating through DB seems like a good idea, but imo it's a bit too complicated solution.
[0] https://github.com/procore/blueprinter [1] https://github.com/ohler55/oj