What is happening is people who are being forced into RTO are demanding a higher salary. Basic supply and demand dynamics are coming into play. Those CEOs are now learning this perhaps the (not surprising) hard way.
Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. I read articles stating that "the majority want hybrid", but what people truly want is freedom to work wherever it suits them best. I've been remote for 15 years, and I've seen people that want the connection an office provides, and others (like me) prefer to never set foot in an office again. Just look around at the other comments and you read differing preferences. And that's cool. Just leave me and others alone and let us work how we prefer.
As far as your quarterly meetings comment is concerned, even that is a variation of hybrid. I worked at a company once that had the quarterly meetups. It worked, but sometimes it was
a disruption to a normal routine, especially for some co-workers who flew cross-country. Another company (100% remote company) had the annual weekly retreat which I liked better. You got your face time/watercooler collaboration bullshit/whatever out of the way, then 358 days of peace til the next one.
True, but the quarterly thing doesn't have to be a requirement and the beauty of of is that 3 months is a decent amount of time to plan for who's going and who is no going. I'd leave it to people to decide if they want to attend every quarter, or every 6 months or every year.
I've been working in software consulting for over 10 years. I've worked for 5 different agencies, some small, and some household names. Every single one of these companies has hired out to independent consultants (or smaller agencies) willing to take on part time, hourly work. You have to remember most firms that are billing are constantly juggling the chicken and egg of having too much billable work in the pipeline or not enough.
My advice - figure out your core niche (i.e. GCP, Go, Rust) and reach out to 2-3 firms and propose your services and availability. Look in your LinkedIn network for any 1st or 2nd connections working at consulting firms.
That's funny, because I've always felt the opposite when evaluating candidates. If a candidate comes in saying certs are "trash" and "pointless" it usually looks less favorable. It signals an unwilling to learn and/or strive for continuous improvement. Certs are not the end all/be all but they help round our your knowledge and open your eyes to things you never knew.
As far as side-projects and open source contributions, this is a two way street. When I look at side projects, I look for how well you are utilizing best practices in your code. If it's a sloppy, poorly documented mess it doesn't look favorably for you. If you use your side projects as a marketing tool they should be well-polished.
> If a candidate comes in saying certs are "trash" and "pointless" it usually looks less favorable. It signals an unwilling to learn and/or strive for continuous improvement.
Or it signals that the candidate would rather learn hands-on than take useless multiple choice tests.
One of my peeves has always been the accepted answer is one of those "That's not possible" type answers, only to become possible later on with a newer release.
I once worked at a (open) office where sales people were constantly berating engineers, asking for a feature or pestering for a status update on a feature/bug in progress. It got so bad they installed a wall around that area.
I have several certifications from Microsoft and Google and, for the most part, mean jack to an interviewer. I am still forced to leetcode and answer mind-numbing questions.
On a side note, of all the choices I prefer a take-home, as long as it is timeboxed to no more than 1-2 hours.
It never is one or two hours though. It might be if you designed the thing and know exactly how to get there and handle all the corner cases. Oh and also we always underestimate.
I have yet to see a 1–2h take home test actually be doable in that amount of time. It’s more like 8–10h to get going, have something meaningful, and code that isn’t inscrutable.
It can be if they give you something to start with.
One company gave out sample code and asked me to optimize it so it ran under 5 seconds. The exercise was in parallelizing or caching/reusing what you could per the requirements.
The timebox has to be enforced on the company side, meaning that you have e.g. 2h to submit your answer once you've opened their link (which you should be free to open at any time, so that you're sure you have the time allotted).
I think the <textarea> problem can be solved if the interviewer gives enough information so that the interviewee can have their IDE working correctly by the time they get started.
The pressure problem can be solved by giving more time than what would be expected in a work setting. If you expect a task to be completed in 1h, just give 2h. Of course that implies that you don't give a task which would take an expected 6h to complete.
Of course these are things to consider from the company side, if they think they want to hire people who can program under high pressure, they should probably keep that as part of the interview, for both the company's and interviewee's sake.
If the care facility is housing at-risk patients, they should have strict protocols in place for visitors. Shaming a wedding here seems irresponsible by the media considering these people could have picked up Covid anywhere like Walmart.
It's not irresponsible. Holding these sorts of events without proper protocols increases the risk of secondary infection to society at large. The impact at the nursing home is collateral damage.
Walmart, on the other hand, requires customers to wear masks, and they have and will impose occupancy limits as needed to help minimize exposure.
While we cannot practically reduce the risk of infection to zero, we should also behave wisely. This applies both inside the nursing home and outside it.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240322-us-salaries-hi...