The author of this article has a reputation for an incredible sense of self-entitlement, he's the person who tried to do a hostile takeover of Redis after making a few minor contributions[0]. In light of that it's not too surprising that he's finding it difficult to find a job that meets his expectations.
> I can count people that provided an important contribution to the Redis code base in the fingers of my hand, and spare fingers remain. One of those contributors is Matt Stancliff, so I can't (and I don't want) ignore him when he disagrees about how the project is developed.[1]
This quote by antirez suggests they did made core contributions. Also the events you’re bringing to light seem to be rather old and not relevant to the theme. Being self-entitled is a bit cringey, though.
I agree, it was a long article and at first I was with him but after the first few hundred words the author seems to start complaining that his obviously sufficient work is not sufficient to get him a job which is nothing more than a logical fallacy and having a slightly big head, it says nothing about the wider job market as a whole.
Indeed it was very entertaining, relatable even, and at times a complete wish-fullfillment slasher flick!
But it kinda (definitely :D) misses the point that it itself set up at the beginning with the fancy FRED graphs ... almost in the same way as the author misses the point of (and thus the required choreography for successful) interviews.
(As others comments here mentioned that he seems to lack the self-awareness to correctly position himself on the bell curve meme, which gives him a lot of consternation.)
Strong opinions are great when you know when to deploy them :)))
At least he now seems to be self-aware, though it seems likely he wasn't so self-aware at the time of the odd proposal at a conference. Check out the GitHub sponsors link at the top of the article. I'm sure someone's going to take him up on the $12,000/mo one.
Agree, it reminds me a bit of the guy who was really obsessed by the mh370 mystery and happens to have found more pieces of the plane than anyone else. It’s certainly possible, but I remain skeptical
I mean, several of those parts has matching serial numbers with the corresponding parts installed on MH-370. I'm not sure how one could fake that without a lot of nonpublic information.
And didn't the dude in question walk along the entire coastline of Madagascar looking for washed up debris? That's certainly a plausible reason to find them.
People can be pretty weird. I once received death threats over a technical blog post I’d written nearly a decade earlier, because the reader was upset that I hadn’t updated it. (The date was clearly labelled at the top of the post)
It is really weird. I have had dozens of hateful messages or emails in the decades of online communication, but in terms of death threat both was somehow related to Intel.
First one was in 2013/2014 when I said by the current trajectory TSMC is going to overtake Intel by 2020. Second was Intel losing the Smartphone Modem and Foundry battle about a year later, due to failure to forecast capacity.
For a lot of these reasons I simply left most of the online hardware communities and forum.
It is strange a lot of people think of brands in Tech as if they are religion. And internet in the 10s is really different to the 00s.
Consider substituting 'criminal' (or 'felonious', etc) for "weird" in future tellings of this story. Death threats are generally regarded as a crime by police and judicial systems, and 'weird' tacitly excuses the crime committed upon you. A death threat is not in the same category as weird, and does not deserve a framing-pardon from us.
Yeah, personally I take this as a known fact of life on the internet. I'm surprised the maintainer let it get to them so much.
Like many popular creators today are learning, we all must "stop reading the comments", lest we never put anything out there ever again, for fear of critical feedback.
To those people you are the weirdo refusing to use the convenient platform that everyone else is on. This stuff just does not enter their brains because it has become utterly normalised. To them it's not bizarre to insist on using social media, it's bizarre to insist on not using it.
Unless it's half-assed, clumsy and short-sighted, and we are stuck with it forever, because standard. Until one's implementation becomes a standard thanks to the fact it wins as a library (as jQuery did), it should not be slyly forced into the language.
Github has network effects that will always be difficult for challengers to overcome. Even Gitlab is nowhere near taking over. GH is effectively a professional resume for many people, and if they're contributing to something they want that recorded on their profile. When was the last time a recruiter asked to see your Gitlab or Sourcehut profile? As far as they're concerned those contributions might as well not exist, and like it or not that really matters to people. In short, it's the people, not the code that counts.
I'm really surprised to hear that. My GH profile has got me plenty of jobs over the years and also allowed me to skip things like programming tests that are usually part of the interview process.
I've seen jobs claiming they let you skip their tests but none have yet to do so. I have multiple conpleted side projects. They are small non-commercial but not trivial and solve a problem for me.
You are fortunate, which is great for you, but your advice will not work for most people.
half finished projects that you developed on your own don't hold that much value. They may pad those green stats, but those can be faked quite easily. It's contributions to projects with other contributors that really matter.
Why work on half-finished personal projects when you can contribute to a high(ish)-profile public projects, especially such that your prospective employers might be using?
Seems like you lucked out, because this never really happened for me. I wish this was the case! I have a ton of half-finished projects I could show instead of doing tests.
Doesn’t seem like luck if he actually finished his projects. Every undergrad has a github full of half finished projects. Seeing professional contributions to a widely used project is a completely different story.
Even half-finished projects can be a valuable reference if they showcase passion, good development practices, or some specialty skill. Contributions to popular projects are valuable as well, but they should also showcase some of these attributes.
Something people often miss is that it's not enough to just link someone to your GH profile. If it's full of half-finished projects, they will likely look at your pinned ones (if you have those set), and not bother with the rest. The crucial thing is linking them directly to specific files of a project, specific PRs and contributions, that showcase the value you can bring. This makes the job much easier for the other side, while highlighting your strengths.
I have to agree a stubborn portion of companies refuse to look at it. It's their loss. If a company does not respect open source contributions I think it's a good filter.
I have so far found it to be a very good filter, helping eliminate BS or candidates grossly exaggerating their abilities. I've yet to experience the opposite but I have hope.
I'd definitely look at their code contributions on any code platform they'd provide on their CV. In addtion to this, sr.ht would hint me "you're actually interested in your craft way beyond what's in your school curriculum".
gitlab would hint me "you absolutely don't care about an UI which is slow as mollasses but you maybe have stronger moral principles."
I tend to agree. My company (and many other companies) don't let you use a personal github account for company code, so we have separate accounts for the businesses private repo. Obviously these contributions can't appear on my personal github account.
The other issue is that commit activity is just a very poor signal for engineer quality. I've met truly terrible engineers with the brightest green activity boards you'll ever see. And I've met absolutely brilliant wizards whose activity board is very sparse.
Seniority is another issue -- as you grow in an org, you won't always grow in a way that leads to more contributions. I personally am spending a lot of time pairing, a lot of time leading, and a lot less time busting out individual tickets with constant commits.
I've also found that instead of taking 30 commits over 2 weeks to finish a project, the more experienced I get, I can do the same work in 5 commits over 3 days. It's just the nature of experience. But which one looks better on the github activity graph?
As an interviewer it is the opposite to me. If there is a link showing your open source work, I want to review it to see if it indicates anything good or bad, and could be a topic for discussion. Too few people have good content there, so it can be a useful filter.
Me too. In particular, I look at how they handle pull requests. If it's full of derogatory comments or other asshole-isms, probably not going to be a fun person to have on the team. If they handle the occasional annoyance with a modicum of professionalism, it's usually a good sign.
I just find GitHub's interface very intuitive and easy to use. Even GitLab isn't close despite being very similar; and it was miles ahead of sourceforge, Google Code etc.
(This is from someone who is not a dev by profession and had no idea about version control at the time.)
One will never hear me defend GitLab's UI as "good" or "helpful" and for damn sure nowhere near fast, but in their defense the number of things they need to provide an interface for is much, much larger than GitHub's. I could very easily see them making better use of "and the rest of it" to put the 80/20 front and center versus the "cheesecake factory menu" approach they have going now
You mean that if you sent links to your Gitlab or Sourcehut profiles (or even your personal site) when asked for your Github profile, those recruiters would refuse to look at it?
If you replace "refuse" by "not bother to", the sentence suddenly becomes very believable. When you have dozens of resumes to sift through, and one applicant is difficult for no apparent reason, it's very easy not to bother. It's going to require a bit of effort to switch to the gitlab context and figure out the interface if the recruiter isn't used to it, which is annoying. Unless you already stand out for some positive reason, you don't really want to stand out for being annoying.
Well if clicking a link to your Gitlab profile is more difficult than clicking a link to your Github profile... yes, that could happen.
I have no idea how it could happen in practice. It's quite believable that there is some recruiter out there that has this kind of problem. But I do think it's quite safe to assume most of the tiny minority that will click on the link will get the same information from either one.
Well I personally am sick of seeing github profiles that are just a bunch of trash commits. List specific projects, what you contributed, and a link to who cares which service on your resume. Way easier to read
yeah i think they're much less likely to look at it, unless they're already significantly interested in you as a candidate for some other reason. We're in a competitive marketplace and having a profile that stands out is definitely an edge
remember that a recruiter is probably spending about 30 seconds assessing your job application, and that you're one candidate out of dozens. In that environment they're going to go with the easy route and showing them a bunch of pinned, interesting repos with a healthy number of stars in a format they're used to is going to help them to quickly put you in the "maybe" pile rather than the "nope" pile.
It’s not impossible for someone to have 30 apartments by the time they’re 40. It’s a matter of convincing mortgage companies to loan you money, which is what they want to do given it’s their job. I know several people who’ve done this 100% legitimately, the real question is how much equity they have
It’s impossible to buy 30 apartments in Munich for normal people with normal salary.
You need at least 40 million euros, more if you are not only buying in unattractive areas.
Ah so I show up at the bank and tell them “Please give me 40 million so I can buy apartments and rent them out - oh and I also have no money or safety of my own so just hope that I will be able to pay it back”
no bank would let you do that in the UK either. The way this typically works is that a bank will lend you ~75% of the purchase price on a Buy-to-Let mortgage, so you buy a £200k property with £50k down payment. This is achievable for normal people with good salaries, let's say they're earning £100k.
The mortgage is likely interest only so the landlord can make approximately £10k/year from rent from that one property. The next year they buy another, their earnings are now £120k. It now only takes them a few months to save another £50k to buy their next property, and the more properties they own the faster it is to acquire the next one. After a few years of this let's say they have 10 properties in total. They are now earning £200k, which makes the bank's decision to lend them more money an easier one, even though they have £1.5m in mortgage debt already.
If they already have 10 properties then it's not that much of a relative leap to get to 20, then 30. With 30 properties they're earning £400k a year and can finance a new property every 2 months. They do have £4.5m in mortgage debt that is not being paid off though, but they're making a bet on the value of those properties exceeding the purchase price by the time the balance of the mortgages becomes due 20 years from now. In the past that was a pretty safe bet.
The risk of doing all of this is that the property market can slow down, rates can go up, values can fall, property maintenance can become a significant cost, bad tenants can ruin a property and wipe out several years earnings and the government can change tax rules that makes all of this far less profitable (as happened in the UK quite recently). But it's absolutely not impossible.
About a decade ago I worked with a perfectly normal guy in his mid 50s who worked as an accountant in a small software company, he had 200 BTL mortgages! He just kept reinvesting the profits and buying more each month.
That's a nice theory, but it doesn't work like that in most EU countries where banks are reluctant to give you a loan even for the 2nd property, let alone for tens of it unless you have collaterals to cover the cost.
I don't know how it works in the UK, but in the US the types of people hustling properties in real estate are not using the same banks/financing an average person looking for a mortgage would. It seems from talking to small time real estate folks that you use these lenders (likely lie or stretch some truth to do so in many cases) to get your first 1 or 2 loans, then move on to specialized lenders.
There are specialized firms w/ private capital that are happy to fund these midsize deal flow guys and finance them. Once you get a working relationship with a few such vendors it seems rather easy to get marginal deals done others would find impossible.
I don't know if this simply doesn't exist in the UK at all - but I'd bet money that it does in some form. Since bankers and finance make their money off the points on deployed capital, especially the loan officer making commission on the deal flow, the incentives are aligned to make more loans vs. less.
I think the hardest part of getting something like this going is the first 2 to 3 properties. After that and a few years of proven ability to manage cashflow here in the US your lending options open up exponentially both in number of lenders and the creative/exotic means of financing now available.
Yes it can take several months but it's also a well oiled process that's quite straightforward as long as you have the relevant paperwork ready to go and assuming the properties you want to buy are easily mortgageable (and you have a large enough deposit and a good credit rating)
I am sure they do/did but this still doesn't match resulting reality. By financial swings he does, he has 1-2 mil euros of disposable cash, on top of that vast amount of flats. Judging by his age and career path, he had to amass most of it (80-90%) within less than a decade.
No German bank is going to give you 100% mortgage (in fact 110-120% for taxes/fees/additional reconstruction) when you already have 10 properties mortgaged in exactly same way. You also don't build any cash reserve like that, owning properties is always more costly than financial projections make it so.
At the end it doesn't matter, good for him (apart from everything that makes a man the man) but his vague background story as told simply ain't true, and folks were eating all that till I came along and thought about numbers for few seconds.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9176800