The Maverick Debugger

(Est. Reading Time: 5 min)     Do you value yourself? What about your time? Have you any value in your friends? Family? Pets? What about the company you work for? Not everyone has the luxury of valuing their employer, but do you? And do they value you? Oh, and what about money? Is that valuable to you? I hope you answer yes to these questions, because there isn't an upside to answering no. Think about that. When you don't value any one of those things, what does that mean? Well, that thought process is exactly what led me to define strict guidelines for interviewing. When I am talking with a hiring team, I am not just being interviewed, I am also interviewing them. Fit goes both ways. And fit, to me, doesn't compromise my values. So here are my rules: 1) I must be compensated fairly. This one is about them valuing me and my time. Fair is not even a specific amount. It's based on my experience and skill set (which is always growing), versus the job that I will be doing, ...

(Est. Reading Time: 3 min)      I've been working remotely since COVID. That was 5 years ago. Most of us/I have been vaccinated for 4 years. Why haven't I returned to the office? As a Software Engineer, working remotely is extremely more productive for ME. I'm not going to get into the semantics of it, we all have heard the reasons both sides align to, but everyone has a preference, and that is just fine. But it's not even about being more productive, or having more time for a work-life balance. Being a Software Engineer today means being in a "blue collar desk job" type career that is loaded with far more risk and constant highly unpredictable situations. If I had relocated to the cities of any of my previous employers that I was remote for, and they didn't work out like they did, that would have been so much more financial and emotional stress for not just me, but my whole family. Even my last major employer would have had me in California, coming from T...