HN user

sinstein

465 karma

https://www.sinstein.xyz/

Posts14
Comments47
View on HN

Counter take: After having worked for startups a lot, my CV did not really look very impressive. A couple of short-medium stints would not really instil a vast confidence to someone screening.

Algorithm and "Trick" Coding Questions allow me to prepare for companies I would normally never qualify for just based on my past experience. If Google only hired people who have touched Google scale systems, they might not have a lot of people to choose from.

Thanks to the current interview structure, I can spend some time and prepare for any large company regardless of the kind of work I have been exposed to so far.

Its definitely not a great process, and requires a lot of time investment to prepare but allows people from not so impressive backgrounds to get a fair(ish) shot.

  Location: Bengaluru, India
  Remote:   Yes
  Willing to relocate: Open to Europe
  Technologies: Rails, Go, Kotlin, React
  Résumé/CV: https://www.sinstein.xyz/cv.html
  Email: kothari@hey.com
Hi, I am Saurav Kothari and my goal is to solve problems and technology is one of the tools I utilize to solve them. I consider myself to be a "domain driven engineer" and take great interest in the nitty-gritty of the business behind the product I am working on.

I have worked as a full-stack engineer for startups in India ranging across domains from SaaS to B2B e-commerce. I am interested in medium to large companies which will allow me a chance to grow with the business.

This rings true for me. I was in a very hectic workplace when the pandemic began and was able to function pretty much as effectively as I would in office.

Then I made a switch to a different company towards the end of last year and I do not yet feel a part of the team as I would normally. This is despite having a friend in the team. New relationships have been very hard to build with completely remote onboarding.

It appears that everyone mentions commute as a massive energy/time sink that erases many potential benefits of working in office. Every other claimed benefit of WFH is all very subjective and you will either enjoy it or not enjoy it.

But so many of us actually stay very close to our work places. Commute is either 15 mins one way or sometimes even lesser.

Can someone guide me to a shorter synopsis so that I can justify purchasing Gunpla to my family?

I bought a very tiny one (SD) with a friend when we were in Taiwan based off of his knowledge and I love how they look. I want to convince myself (and my wife) that I should be getting a bigger MG piece.

Location: Bengaluru/India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (preferably SEA/EU)

Technologies: Rails, Kotlin, React, Typescript, K8s

Résumé/CV: https://www.sinstein.xyz/cv.html

Email: kothari@hey.com

Website: https://www.sinstein.xyz

----------------------------------

Hi, I am Saurav Kothari, a full stack engineer with 5 years of experience working with some of the fastest growing startups. I consider myself to be an engineer first, developer second; i.e, my goal is to solve problems and technology is one of the tools I utilize to solve them.

Over the past years I have had the opportunity to work across a wide range of business domains from SaaS to e-commerce. I have worked across the stack over components that have been internal facing as well as user facing and I believe I can emphatize with the end consumer of my product. My experience as a Product Engineer has expanded my horizon to understand business goals and how to tie them to tech goals to create a win-win scenario for everyone involved.

I have been fortunate to have worked with various languages and frameworks and feel comfortable learning new ones as needed and switching between them on the go.

Some of the other comments address this. The problem is that we see and hear about these extreme viewpoints from people who are very loud and vocal. But we are not seeing or hearing anything from the vast majority of people which causes 2 problems 1. More and more of these platforms are driven by the extremists 2. There is less and less chance of actual debate and discussion with people of opposing views as anyone who you could have a discussion with is not engaging.

I upgraded from my 6s to X a year ago. Broke my X in the last few weeks and have been using the 6s again and it is such a delight to use such a handy phone.

I am planning now to get rid of the X and switch to the next small phone from Apple

One of the reason to not consider Kotlin would be lack of resources. We run Kotlin services on Production at work and whole writing and reading Kotlin is so much better than Java, finding ways to do things still means having to fall back on Java examples.

There are still resources available for Kotlin + Android development but non Android resources are very few.

The plus side is because of the First Class Support in Intellij Idea for Kotlin, I can always take Java snippets and have the IDE convert them to Kotlin.

My current use case for AirBnB is when I travel in a group (4+ people) and we would like to stay together. Getting a 2 bedroom AirBnB with a working kitchen and maybe even a private pool is a great place to spend time with closed ones.

Is there a list of developers who are approved to accept sponsors on Github?

For certain projects, I already follow the people running them and became a sponsor when I got to know about them being on-boarded to the program (eg: cUrl).

It would help if I could see a list of all users accepting donations and figure out if I use any of their creations in my day to day work.

I think there is a difference between how we interact with some of these services and Grammarly. Uploading a picture on Facebook is different from having Grammarly check if what you are posting to Facebook is correct.

In one I am uploading content to a platform, in the other I am utilizing grammarly to validate what I write, but I am not posting to any forum/service owned by Grammarly (atleast not deliberately)

I think Taiwanese engineering is a great bunch of seemingly underpaid developers. I visited Taiwan for 2 weeks from India and had a few observations:

1. Food and transport are quite cheap. So cheap that almost everyone eats out for all their meals.

2. Everyone stays far from the office. They said the area around the offices is expensive but the rent I heard did not sound so high. Most of my friends in Mumbai, India already pay rent close to that figure and they get by just fine.

3. Consumerism is quite high. Almost everyone in the office had fancy clothes and gadgets which are usually considered signs of good wealth in India.

My conclusion was that people are not paid a lot, and they spend a lot of what they make on clothes and gadgets but that is just the picture I could paint.

Would appreciate some input from people who have more knowledge about Taiwanese culture.

I basically see two schools of thought in the discussion:

1. People that believe ads are strictly a source of revenue. If you don't like them but want to use the service, pay for the service

2. People who believe that ads are more than a banner on the page, its permission for ad networks and services to run potentially malicious content on their computer