are people using python 3 yet?

We don't, but I've noticed a few open source projects we use are now enforcing python 3 compatibility.

lol what a cluster****. Why aren't there transpilers for 2->3?

edit- I see there are & its more of a community problem than a technical problem. the whole thing still baffles me.

I was doing intern interviews all day today and noticed something kind of interesting. I have a question that I ask for interns that I don't usually ask for full time candidates. Last time I asked it to 6-8 candidates (about a year ago) and it worked really well. It was easy to explain and have people understand what I was asking and people did really well with it. Even the people that did poorly on the question seemed to struggle more with how to solve the problem / or implement the solution rather than not understanding the problem or solving the wrong thing.

This time I couldn't find the wording I used before so I re-wrote it from the general concept and everybody seemed to struggle with the problem and about half of them went the totally wrong way with the problem (in the same way).

It was a really interesting demonstration of how even the same conceptual interview question still depends a lot on exactly how its described/explained. I wish I could find my original wording to compare how exactly today's version differed.

Do you mind posting the question here?

I do.

I don't like posting any of our interview questions publicly. They have a short enough shelf life as it is, plus its something that would pretty easily tie my account to me if a coworker were ever browsing the forums (which isn't out of the realm of possibility).

It's basically a question where I describe the context of a real-life problem we're trying to solve, talk about the general approach we want to use to solve the problem and then give them a couple of simple interfaces they can use.

okay np

You should definitely be asking for more salary than a h1b farm would offer

that transpiler doesn't work very well. I have to use Python2 because even though the base I am using "works for Python3" it doesn't even after using 2to3.

I just think there is too much legacy code out there.

What's an h1b farm?

The percentage of tech companies (with say > 75 people) not using h1b employees has to be miniscule.

Are you guys looking at the actual job title list of salaries, or just the average? Because the h1b is used for all sorts of stuff so the average is generally lower than the specific tech jobs.

Also their "median" salary algorithm seems completely broken.

I'm not sure I agree with his stance that the companies listed here are all h1b farms, but an h1b farm imo is a company that uses the h1b as a tool to control people and dictate their working conditions, because at the end of the day, they control the person's visa and can essentially revoke it and kick them out of the country.

Thus, you get tons of contracting companies that get people signed up on h1bs and will shuffle them around various locations for moderate but not great pay, because they can essentially kick them out of the country. The h1b people are pretty powerless in these situations, so one of the ways that permeates itself in in lower pay and worse conditions (excessive travel, etc.)

Sticking to tech companies and programming jobs - is this a theoretical thing or a real problem?

Because in most of these jobs the employee will have little to no trouble finding a new job and sponsor. So at worse they can be abused during the period when the H1B quota for the year is maxed out (meaning they wouldn't be able to find a new sponsor).

I know there are tech contracting companies that treat their employees pretty crappily - but I don't think they distinguish very much based on visa category. They just suck to work for in general.

Edit: And I don't think his stance was that all of the employers listed there are H1B farms. Since thats obviously absurd given that anyone that's applied for an H1B employee is listed and the vast majority of companies have applied for at least one H1B employee.

It is an absolutely real problem.

Random contractors are often coming from h1b farms. They will bounce around 3-6 month contracts and when they are on the bench, their "farm" will quite literally force them to move across the country, away from family, for long stretches versus having them sit on the bench and not collect hourly revenue.

We had a contractor tell us he wanted our opportunity, only to show up and after 2 weeks of a 4 months contract leave unexpectedly because he was able to get Fidelity to sponsor him and give him enough stability to get his family moved up to where he was (they were in Houston, where his last project was, when his "farm" forced him to move to Boston, unbeknownst to me because he told us he really wanted our job.)

Saying they have little to no trouble finding a new job and sponsor is even worse than just saying that about a generic software developer, because the sponsorship aspect adds a layer of complexity that results in even less possibilities than an average software developer.

There are some incredibly sketchy h1b farms out there that make it feel like a form of modern indentured servitude. There are also very cool and reasonable ones, much like anything.

Please delete if this is spamming...

My company is looking to hire at least one data scientist. We are looking for people who at a minimum have internalized all material covered in Andrew Ng's coursera course. If you have this and have proficiency in at least one language such as Python, R, Matlab or Java and can work from Houston please PM me.

LL, I have similar stories from guys that started out at contracting companies before getting a full time gig. I guess it's a bit worse with a visa but the fact that these guys are working at a contracting company often means they've had a hard time getting a job and continuing to be employed is a pretty strong incentive for them to put up with ****.

In short consulting companies like this suck regardless of employee.

But anyway, I don't think this is that relevant to what I posted originally. The vast majority of tech companies are on that list and it's showing a good representation of the salaries they pay. And very few of these tech companies are 'h1b farms'.

Yea and I originally said I didn't think these firms were "h1b farms" but knowing that is another option for the people that can't get jobs at these first-rate employers probably makes some difference.

I was surprised that everyone said these jobs are being posted at their rate. Suzzer's 60% comment sounded more in line with what I was expecting.

I'm not interested for myself but I could get your message to a ton of potential data scientists in the Bay Area. PM me if interested.

From my rather basic understanding (please correct me if I'm wrong) the major weakness of node stuff is complex calculations (CPU heavy stuff). So if you're planning on writing a node based work scheduling or supply chain optimization tool or something it may be the wrong technology.
I don't know much about Go other than having watched a couple of videos, read some code and written hello world type stuff (+thinking the Gophers are pretty cute) but it's likely to be a lot better at that.

I'm enjoying my JS adventures so far and plan on using node/express for backend stuff but some of the things I'm interesting are "calculation heavy" so maybe I should rethink.

---

If anyone knows about good resources to read up on the blockchain (or cryptocurrency with a blockchain focus if need be) please let me know. Googling isn't exactly easy because bitcoin hypefest is taking up a lot of space.
My high level understanding is that it's essentially a distributed ledger which means there are probably some pretty interesting non-currency applications (DNS registry of namecoin sounded interesting, there's probably some identity management stuff).

Edit: I've already ordered "Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy" as a quick read on the train for a (hyped up) non-technical overview. Guess for technical stuff I'll just find relevant papers?

Personally I'd pick Erlang for those use cases. It seems like the best fault tolerant/concurrency FTW sprinkle in solution that I can think of right now.
I guess something purely functional would be great as well in theory but I know little about it.

Advantage of Go is that it has some backing and momentum but if it's just for sprinkling stuff I'm fine with more obscure (dunno if Erlang even qualifies) choices.

Technical stuff:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Popular Node Bitcoin library:
http://bitcoinjs.org

If you're doing calculation heavy stuff, why not create a pipe to c++ from node and do it with c++.
I'm just writing from top of my head what I would do, when I say pipe from node to c++.
A side project of mine is making a poker engine in c++ and I will pipe it to my node server eventually.

This is interesting, could you describe in more detail how you pipe the data.

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/30/8689481...pollo-software

On the lady who coined the term "software engineering," and whose code saved the Apollo mission

Holy crap.

Abstractions are a wonderful thing.