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God, I remember when the Dream Act was first introduced. I wrote a story about it for my school newspaper, then started a GeoCities site, and then a newsletter. I thought it would be no time before it would get through. That was over 10 years ago! If it were passed 4 to 10 years from now, which is its apparent trajectory, it would be too late for me to benefit from it. I'm getting less and less optimistic with every year. Nothing changes, man. Nothing. I can hang on for the moment, but just barely. :(

Nothing makes sense.

Stop Using Mocks 15 years ago

Aren't controller level tests called functional tests? I'm still new at this, but I thought unit tests are to the model as functional tests are to the controller. And integration tests mimic user behavior.

The War For Talent 15 years ago

100-150 an hour? I have 6 years of experience and I can hardly get more than $70 an hour in NYC. Maybe I'm not a "great" developer.

This could be due to the strong emphasis Western culture places on "integrity." This term originally comes from the same Latin root as "integer," which itself means "whole, entire." Having integrity implies that your private self and public self are one and the same.

Multicultural roots of Western culture may have made integrity an important signifier of trustworthiness. Even going back to Shakespeare, you saw the theme of split identities everywhere in Western literature, and most of Shakespeare's villains are noted for their two-facedness.

The modern day implication of that cultural legacy is our cult of authenticity. For a rap singer to be taken seriously by his peers, he has to be "real." The realness is a hard earned credibility by showing a singular identity, and not being perceived as the real thing for someone immersed in that culture would be the equivalent of "losing face" in Eastern cultures. Something akin to social isolation and even death.

Another, perhaps more relatable example, is something I often hear Americans say. It's said that in America you can be who you say you are. That is at the heart of the open society for which Americans are praised, and Americans take your word at face value, until you say or do something contrary to their expectations of your self-proclaimed "role."

So thinking over what I wrote, I think the reason why role-playing works in Japan and doesn't in America is because Americans have a culture of self-invention, a culture built on appearances, they also have a wariness about being taken in by people who change their appearances often.

I'm a programmer in NYC who doesn't have a work visa. (But I've worked as a freelancer in the city for years, so I have lots of experience.) How should I bring that up to potential employers? During the application or during the interview or after I get hired? How much would it affect my compensation?

It's fairly early stage. The project was initiated 6 months ago, but it's not funded yet. They are still working on building a working product. The website will be 1/3 of the overall product strategy.

The titles are meaningless at this point because I am also doing marketing and strategy. What I am told is they want to work out an equity strategy based on milestones I deliver. The first milestone, they said, would be the entire website, fully integrated with the proprietary app they are building.

Is this reasonable? Especially considering that the site is an essential part of the product.

I heard elsewhere that an alternative is to use the "sweat equity" algorithm.

http://www.torquepowered.com/community/blogs/view/16191

But seeing as we are all working remotely, it'd be hard to ensure that everyone is working fulltime on this project.