Townsquared is a private network for businesses in the same community to meet one another, share advice, and form partnerships. We are Series A funded by Floodgate Capital and August Capital.
We are ramping up quickly and hiring for engineering and product roles. Please get in touch directly (abhi@townsquared.com) if interested.
Why work with us:
- We are passionate, talented, and curious
- We believe in risk taking and action
- We collaborate closely with our users
- We love local
- Help shape our product and company culture
- Ample opportunity to grow as we grow
- Form deep connections with local businesses
- Create meaningful change on a large scale by empowering individuals and communities
=====
We're hiring:
* Senior Backend Engineers: Experience building cross-platform APIs; Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, microservices
* Frontend Engineers: Experience building delightful single page applications; AngularJS, CSS
* iOS Engineers: Experience building shipped iOS applications; Objective-C
* Product Managers: Experience driving projects through the ideation-to-ship lifecycle; analytical, A/B testing experience
Cringely doesn't understand the difference between immigrant and non-immigrant visas if he recommends the EB-2 as an alternative to the H-1B. The EB-2 is a green card application for a foreign worker who wants to live in the US permanently; the H-1B is for people who just want to work in the US for some period of time. All countries have similar distinctions between workers and long-term residents, and confusing them is a strong indicator that the writer doesn't know what he is talking about.
Cringely is also wrong in at least one important respect about the EB-2 visa: its numbers do indeed fill up every year, just like for the H-1B, for Indian and Chinese applicants. So if you file an EB-2 based visa application this year, it will take you about 10 years to receive your EB-2 based green card if you are Indian, and 5 years if you are Chinese. The US Government was, as of February 2015, processing EB-2 applications received in September 2005 for Indian applicants, for example [1].
Is Cringely then suggesting that companies wait 5-10 years for new foreign employees to join them?
I've posted about this before on Hacker News, but it's a common misconception here that H-1B workers are somehow "indentured", or that they cannot switch employers. Under the AC-21 act of 2000 [2], H-1B employees can switch employers with a single H-1B transfer filing, and even start working at their new employer while their H-1B transfer application to their new employer is in process. Further, the H-1B transfer application is not subject to the yearly cap (which has been regularly reached in recent years), so there is almost no chance of it being denied. In practice, this means that H-1B workers have as much job mobility as native American workers.
The bad actors in the H-1B program are indeed the Indian outsourcing companies, which need to be investigated and punished for violations of the program, including paying below market wages. But there are many more good actors who use the H-1B program extensively -- Google, Facebook, and similar reputable American tech companies -- and they don't use it because they underpay their employees, but because they can't find enough qualified employees even given their high wages. There was a recent post on HN about the very high salaries paid by these companies to their H-1B employees, as disclosed in their H-1B visa applications.
Summary: For someone who claims to have written a long running series on the H-1B program, Cringely is disappointingly misinformed. The H-1B program has violations, which need to be properly investigated, but the EB-2 is not even close to a viable replacement for it. H-1B employees are not indentured labor and have high job mobility, except in the case of a few large outsourcing companies which do indeed deserve to be punished.
Cringely singles out the H-1B abusers to whom I and you refer, and that pay substandard wages, not Google, et al..
Also, switching employers is encumbered if there is any risk of deportation without continuous employment which "vosper" (see peer comment to yours) notes IS a growing risk as the H-1B ages. This is the "indenture" effect in question.
Lastly, H-1B workers working for the aforementioned abusing employers accept their lower wages and often poor conditions because of the hope that once in the USA they will find a Green Card sponsor. This makes the H-1B equivalent to the EB-2 when speaking of the abusing employers to which Cringely refers.
Indeed - this is a pretty basic mistake. Also, note that the government recently lifted the blanket ban on spouses of H1-B's holding employment in the USA (which was for me and many others a factor in choosing an L1 intracompany transfer visa rather than a more portable H1-B when I moved here). The H1-B can also lead to a green card too (given time), so workers on it are by no means locked in.
Great story. Very impressed by your persistence and creativity, and congratulations on your success.
I think the concept of employers applying for a green card for employees is fundamentally broken. It pits the interests of the employer directly against the employee, since it's in the employer's interest to drag out the process for as long as possible, and reduces job mobility (which brings down wages for everyone) because the green card process needs to be restarted if employees switch jobs midway, before the I-485 step.
A system where any legally employed foreign worker can file for a green card for themselves seems much more sane.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that wages for H-1B visa holders are only lower when the employer files for a visa for an employee who is outside of the country. In my experience as a student who went the F-1 -> H-1B route, salaries are the same whether or not you have an H-1B. The much wider set of employers that you can interview with when you are already in the country probably makes it infeasible for employers to pay their H-1B employees who were already in the US under a different visa less than employees who don't need a visa.
I think you got lucky. Most people that I knew who were on H-1b were getting much less than green card holders of US citizens. I don't have a substantial amount of data on this of course.
The author's definition of "full stack" is rather strange, as others have noted. But as the client side of web applications becomes more complex, it's true that it's harder for the same programmer to develop both the client side code (which may involve developing a sophisticated client side architecture in Backbone or Angular) in addition to the server side code and API layer. I see more programmers now who call themselves "front end developers" and aren't just UX designers with HTML/CSS knowledge, but can program a complex client side MVC application, working with a separate backend developer who focuses on the API.
I think this trend will accelerate as web applications are increasingly broken into loosely coupled services, with a rich client tying them together in the browser.
> I see more programmers now who call themselves "front end developers" and aren't just UX designers with HTML/CSS knowledge, but can program a complex client side MVC application
It's almost misleading these days for a designer with HTML and CSS knowledge to say they can do front-end development. If you can't navigate your way around a client side MVC framework, I don't think there's much you can contribute.
I find this conflating of the US as a country and the US Government annoying. Megan Smith is the CTO of the US Federal Government, which is an entity separate from the US as a country.
It doesn't make sense for a country to have a "CTO". Do all technology decisions made anywhere in the US have to have her approval?
Logically, if she were the CTO of the US, she would have as direct reports all the CTOs of all the companies in the US.
The President is "of the United States" not "of the US Government", it doesn't mean everyone in the country reports to him - I think you might be over-thinking the terminology a little bit.
Full-Stack Software Engineers - Trulia, San Francisco - INTERN, VISA welcome; REMOTE possible
Contact me at abhi@trulia.com for more info, or send me your resume.
Positions are available on multiple teams at Trulia, including on the rentals team that where I work. We're growing very quickly and aim to hire the highest quality people while doing so.
How we work:
The engineering team is about a hundred people, and we break into small teams of 2-4 to focus on specific projects. The rentals team is a small, vertically-integrated team within the larger engineering team. We are responsible for the entire Trulia Rentals product, giving us the speed and flexibility of a startup with the resources of a public company.
We release weekly, but new features are always under development and often span releases. Our local QA team writes automation tests and does hand testing of your features, working with you to ensure that only high quality code gets to production. Organizationally, we're pretty flat, though you'll have a mentor with whom you'll have weekly 1-on-1 meetings, to review code, exchange ideas, and ensure we're doing everything we can for you to thrive in your role.
Behind the curtain:
- 'Innovation Week' every quarter - work on any project you like for one week each quarter, recruit others to work on your project with you, present your work to other engineers (if you feel like it)
- People you're happy to see every day
- Stocked Kitchens and two kegerators
- Unbeatable SOMA location with penthouse roof deck
- All IDEs welcome
- Aeron chairs
- Great benefits (untracked time off, variety of health plans, 401k match)
You:
- You have experience working on high-traffic, scalable internet applications
- You love solving hard problems and working in small teams with smart people
- You're comfortable with everything from bash scripting to javascript
- You're a great person
- You love making fast websites
What you'll work with:
Our base web stack is LAMP, but that rides on top of Solr/Lucene, Hadoop, Memcache, Python, Couchbase, Open Street Maps, and more. We’re rewriting our website to use Javascript on both client and server using Rendr.js, Node.js and Backbone.js. We use jQuery on the client, d3.js and Raphel.js for our charts and Git for source control. If there's something that's a good idea for the team, we'll do our best to implement it.
Why work at Trulia?
Engineering gets respect.
We use the phrase 'we're a tech company that does Real Estate' to emphasize how important engineering is to the company. Engineering is the department that drives our apps, tools, data, and interfaces forward. This attitude comes not only from the Engineers, but from our CEO and other top management. They believe in us.
We have awesome problems to solve.
The housing market provides a fantastic blend of problems. We need creative people to help us combine the data about every address in America with the soft side of helping people find a home that makes them feel safe, happy, and comfortable.
Stability is wonderful.
We're that rare company that holds the culture of its startup roots, while blending in the sanity of a regular work schedule with an emphasis on work/life/family balance.
Trulia is a successful rapidly growing Internet technology company, redefining the home search experience for consumers and changing the way real estate professionals build their businesses. Our marketplace, delivered through the web and mobile applications, gives consumers powerful tools to research homes and neighborhoods and enables real estate professionals to efficiently market their listings and attract new clients.
Trulia was founded in 2005, backed by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, and had a successful IPO in 2012. We are headquartered in downtown San Francisco with offices in Denver and New York and voted Best Place to Work in both San Francisco and Denver.
Full-Stack Software Engineers - Trulia, San Francisco
Positions are available on multiple teams at Trulia, including on the rentals team that where I work.
Why work at Trulia?
Engineering gets respect.
We use the phrase 'we're a tech company that does Real Estate' to emphasize how important engineering is to the company. Engineering is the department that drives our apps, tools, data, and interfaces forward. This attitude comes not only from the Engineers, but from our CEO and other top management. They believe in us.
We have awesome problems to solve.
The housing market provides a fantastic blend of problems. We need creative people to help us combine the data about every address in America with the soft side of helping people find a home that makes them feel safe, happy, and comfortable.
Stability is wonderful.
We're that rare company that holds the culture of its startup roots, while blending in the sanity of a regular work schedule with an emphasis on work/life/family balance.
You:
- You have experience working on high-traffic, scalable internet applications
- You love solving hard problems and working in small teams with smart people
- You're comfortable with everything from bash scripting to javascript
- You're a great person
- You love making fast websites
What you'll work with:
Our base web stack is LAMP, but that rides on top of Solr/Lucene, Hadoop, Memcache, Python, Couchbase, Open Street Maps, and more. We’re rewriting our website to use Javascript on both client and server using Rendr.js, Node.js and Backbone.js. We use jQuery on the client, d3.js and Raphel.js for our charts and Git for source control. We're learning OOCSS and are folding SASS into our workflow as well. If there's something that's a good idea for the team, we'll do our best to implement it.
How we work:
The engineering team is about a hundred people, and we break into small teams of 2-4 to focus on specific projects. The rentals team is a small, vertically-integrated team within the larger engineering team. We are responsible for the entire Trulia Rentals product, giving us the speed and flexibility of a startup with the resources of a public company.
We release weekly, but new features are always under development and often span releases. Our local QA team writes automation tests and does hand testing of your features, working with you to ensure that only high quality code gets to production. Organizationally, we're pretty flat, though you'll have a mentor with whom you'll have weekly 1-on-1 meetings, to review code, exchange ideas, and ensure we're doing everything we can for you to thrive in your role.
Behind the curtain:
- 'Innovation Week' every quarter
- People you're happy to see every day
- Stocked Kitchens and two kegerators
- Unbeatable SOMA location with penthouse roof deck
- All IDEs welcome
- Aeron chairs
- Great benefits (untracked time off, variety of health plans, 401k match)
Trulia is a successful rapidly growing Internet technology company, redefining the home search experience for consumers and changing the way real estate professionals build their businesses. Our marketplace, delivered through the web and mobile applications, gives consumers powerful tools to research homes and neighborhoods and enables real estate professionals to efficiently market their listings and attract new clients.
Trulia was founded in 2005, backed by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, and had a successful IPO in 2012. We are headquartered in downtown San Francisco with offices in Denver and New York and voted Best Place to Work in both San Francisco and Denver.
The weather might be something to take into account. Personally, I wouldn't want to live in far northern countries like Norway because of the limited sunlight hours in winter. I've found that more than the temperature, it's sunlight exposure that has a strong influence on the way I feel.
Living in a country that may get a few hours of weak sunlight in winter doesn't appeal to me, no matter how high the standard of living might be otherwise.
When I worked in Stockholm, I had a few colleagues who preferred to take a large portion of their generous (32 day) annual holiday in february or so and go someplace warm. Working through the summer is not unpleasant: the pace is slower, the office is quiet, the evenings are long, and you could still have a week or two off.
Great article. For me personally, the issue is not so much dying but aging. Seeing your hair thin, your eyesight deteriorate, your memory weaken and your energy decrease with time must be a profoundly depressing experience -- one of the major reasons why the old in general are more solemn than the young, I think.
These changes are still in the future for me (thankfully), but I imagine they will happen some day if I live long enough.
I think a world in which people would keep remain mentally and physically fit, but simply die (maybe from a lightning bolt type event) at some point, would be much better than one in which your body and mind slowly fade with time.
I'd be happy with medical advances that let you keep the mind and body of a 25 year old till you're 80 and then simply die one day. Unfortunately, some period of old age and infirmity seems to be present no matter how much lifespan extends.
