Felipe Silva, aka Feio

• 2012-07-19

  In Tech, East chases West

  I stole this title from a great article written a couple of months ago at the Times. It explains well how amazing it is being part of the Tech industry here in NYC. You will feel like being the last piece of the famous toasted riccota gnocchi  from the restaurant Jane.

  Besides being a Tech paradise, NYC is also charming, entertaining and a cultural melting pot. People from all over the world live here, and sometimes you forget that you are in the US. It’s easy to get addicted to it.

  QA!

  How do I apply for a company there?

  Most of the companies you can apply online, but it is better to be available to interview in person. Sometimes being the George Clooney in the Github world is not enough; they want to see if you are real and can breath.

  
  

  How much do they pay?

  The average for a Senior Software Engineer is between $80k and $120k annually. If you want to know the income monthly and after taxes, approximately, divide the value by 20. E.g.: If your salary is $80k per year, you will receive ~ $4k per month.

  
  

  What if you hold a visa?

  If a company wants to hire you bad enough, they will take care of it. Many tech companies, including startups, know how to deal with working visas; and in most cases, the company has a lawyer to facilitate the process.

  
  

  Do I need to be a university graduate?

  The company and lawyer will need to prove why they should hire you. Therefore, a college or university degree can be helpful. In case you are not, they might ask you to prove 3 years of working experience for each year that you didn’t study. In other words, you might have 12 years of working experience. As long as I know, it’s applies for the H1B visa, but I don’t know about the others.

  
  

  Is it expensive to live in NYC?

  Finding an apartment is a pain and you should be prepared to pay a reasonable amount, unless you want to live in New Jersey/Queens/Bronx/Long Island, but remember, those options come with a long distance commute :(. Groceries are also expensive, and generally the more healthy the food, the more expensive.

  
  

  Is it really entertaining? Are you having fun?

  Jesus. Yes.

  
  

  If you want to make sure that you are the last piece of the “incredible gnocchi”, try changing the location on your LinkedIn profile to the New York City Area. You will probably be bombarded by a ton of recruiters/head hunters in a couple of days.

  love,

  Feio.

  @felipe_silva
  felipef.silva at gmail dot com

• 2012-07-14

  Hey Feio, how is work at The Times?

  It’s great! :)
  
  The New York Times building is situated in Manhattan Midtown, pretty close to Time Square. What means that even being a few feet away from the closest subway station, you can be easily bumped by millions of tourists before getting there. It’s also really noisy and dirty. Anyway, once you get into The Times Building it’s another story, a brand new skyscraper that catches the eye. The temperature and clarity inside is awesome, and automatically controlled by the building. Great restaurant with an amazing cafeteria.

  

  

  We are Agile, we are waterfall. We buy software, we built them. We do test, we do not test… We use all sort of languages. It always depends which project you are working on.  Seems that the direction is being agile for good across the whole company, implementing/improving the sweetness part that comes with it like: Test Driven Development, Pair Programming and etc. 

  I’m part of the Video Team. We are agile. We do care about tests. The team is small. We are becoming friends :). Process is not an impediment so far. QA is another team :(. We don’t sit together (it might change soon) :(. People listen what you have to say. The stack is great and challenging, but I can’t talk about it right now :). It’s a great opportunity to learn more about DRM, Encoding, Scalability and etc. Also, super excited to build applications for different devices and think out of the box.

  

  The company host meetups, create hack days and stimulate the developers to be creative and open-source. I’m proud to be surrounded by smart people, learning with them every day.

  You should follow: Andre Behnens @mrandre; Jeremy Askenas @jashkenas; Jeremy Zilar @jeremyzilar and David Nolen @swannodette

  APIs and Tools: http://developer.nytimes.com/ 

  Experiments: http://beta620.nytimes.com/

  We are hiring: http://www.nytco.com/careers/index.html

  love,

• 2012-07-13

  Almost 30

  It might be the reason that I came up with this weird/terrible idea, that is create and maintain a blog. I am about to be an year and half away from home, friends and ex-colleagues. I believe that I can use this space to share my experience with all of you.

  I would love to be writing in portuguese, but I don’t want to exclude my “gringo” friends and colleagues. I will try my best to avoid grammatical mistakes. Oh wait? I did already? Shit.