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Hey, it’s Sarthak from Bitfumes! Welcome to the 13th Newsletter 🚀
A huge thanks for being here with us ✨
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Hi there 👋
The need for inter-networked devices over long distances led to the creation of the first "internet" in 1983 - and it has only made monumental leaps in form, ability, and function since then.
Today, we have billions of systems in sync, forever connected with hundreds of petabytes of data streaming constantly between the "clouds" of computers.
This evolution of working with systems also ushered in a new era of labourship - the internet savvy remote tech worker. But are we fully utilising remote work's freedoms? Have we actually tapped into its full potential? Let's see how you can get a remote job as a software developer in 2024 🚀
Before we dive in, let us take a stroll through some small bits of history to truly understand how our tech world has evolved 🙂
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Before 2000
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Since around the 1970s and throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 00s, the software industry saw enormous number of inventions and changes. It was deemed the golden era of tech, laying the foundation to everything we experience today.
The onset of the year 2000 saw burst of the "dot com bubble" and the tech world experienced its first taste of a setback in the industry. The result was that many sweeping changes came in, including the rise in outsourced work across countries and continents, and also a rise in many new sub-sectors of the tech industry, mainly with the advent of BPOs in India.
India was poised to be a crucial player in the BPO and KPO sector and it proved its mettle for nearly a decade and half. This led to the embracing of the 9-5 culture as well as the "factory shift" work timings since work was now globalised.
Service sector MNCs like Infosys and TCS had already begun major landmarks in their respective offerings by 1990s and 2000s, and they saw exponential growth with their immensely organised and meticulous work planning for software companies all over the world. "Shifts" existed here too but the culture was hugely different and better compared to the industrial age labour, and tech workers revelled in the new change that the IT sector had brought in.
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The 2008 Global Recession
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The US housing market collapsed in late 2007 and this started a chain of events across the globe, leading to the first major "recession" in the history of the modern world. Many industries were affected, unemployment was at a major high, and tech companies saw a shift in perspective.
This market regained balance around 2010 and for the next 10 years, the global software industry experienced new groundbreaking innovations. The roots of AI were sown in different names and formats, more product centred companies and startups began cropping up, and the VC investor era of startups began taking major shape.
Employment was now higher than ever, demand for software engineers and developers was at an all-time high, and the first seeds of modern remote work were already seen in many but not-so-well-known companies. Of course, companies like Google and Microsoft had their free-food and benefits policies with hybrid work model very commonly implemented.
Many good smaller startups in this time period replicated this model and saw huge success and profits with their products, and increased happiness and work-life balance among its employees. This encouraged some of the startups to even go fully remote long before it was even normalised.
Tech workers were happy.
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2020 and the COVID-19 Pandemic
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And now.. well, this is not history anymore. It's our present reality. 2020 brought in something completely unexpected and new to 99% of the businesses worldwide.
Fully remote companies like GitLab had to simply change their positions on the business front and work forwards from there, since they already had a globally distributed team of employees. But thousands and thousands of startups, MNCs, and companies the world over were in for a rude shock.
They had to make a complete tectonic shift in their businesses. Work-from-home (WFH) policies, asynchronous communication, remote worker benefits, insurance policies for the respective country where employees resided in, etc all had to be factored in.
Playbooks of earlier remote companies were now in demand. Many startups even went above and beyond to improve upon these playbooks and policies to truly accommodate remote employment.
Late 2020 and 2021 saw an immense increase in remote employment. While few companies had no option but to facilitate WFH, many other companies saw the benefits.
Increased employee retention, reduced attrition, more work-life balance, nearly zero infrastructure costs, and high productivity. boosted the economy as it existed, and gave rise to many new products and ideas.
We saw AI make its grand global entrance and now it has its own wing of opportunities and suite of specialised AI engineer roles.
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The Present
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Admittedly, things have changed again. There is a bit of a recession going on. The developer market is a bit in the shadows again. Many of the companies have forced employees back to the office.
Granted, these are the highlights. But as history above has taught us, things will always be back in greater flow once the wave settles.
We are now going through a "change" is all. Not a permanent dip. This is just the groundwork for something better to come. The software industry is now pretty much cemented and ingrained into other IT sectors so much that it is impossible to not grow in future 😁
So how can you as a skilled developer make the best out of the current and the future market?
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Going Remote in 2024 & Beyond
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Before we dive into learning how to find remote roles, there is a point to understand - remote work is also not the answer to everything. It depends on the type of companies and the products being developed, and majorly, on the leadership of the company.
Most remote companies have quarterly retreats that last for a week or two. They are mainly for catching up in-person but also to brainstorm on major decisions and products and kick off the development processes so that the actual software/product development can happen remotely without the need for such in-person meetups again.
This is a very significant balancing point. It ensures remote employees get to work remotely, but are also expected to show up, contribute, and help in the company's offline growth.
The first step in finding remote jobs is to make sure you are ready for a remote job. In our next edition, we will discuss about how you can do this preparation.
So where to find these companies? Here's a list of job portals to look at -
- WeWorkRemotely: As its tagline says, it has been the number one destination for remote workers, and long before 2020 as well. There are all kinds of roles from many different fields, and you can find full-time, contract, and part-time gigs on here.
- FlexJobs: Similar to WeWorkRemotely, FlexJobs also has remote job listings, updated many times per day. The great thing about this site is that giant companies like CNN, WSJ, etc., actively use this site to post jobs globally.
- Hired: This is also one of the older sites in existence, evolving over time to always match the current market scenarios. Both job seekers and employers can use it. They are a focused recruiting pipeline platform, enabling and smoothing the hiring processes for companies. Create a profile and craft it properly to get relevant matches.
- Working Nomads: Tailored specifically for digital nomads, this site has a simple, elegant UI to filter your exact needs and shows matches relevant to your skills and locations.
- Devremote: A sassy new platform with a rich interface with many innovative startups in its list. From frontend, backend, SRE, Cloud, to Blockchain roles, Devremote has it all and new opportunities are updated very frequently.
- RemoteOk: The most popular remote job portal ever, RemoteOk was built by Peiter Levels @levelsio. And guess what - it uses PHP 😎 Yep! This robust, sleek, and highly scaled platform uses the time-tested PHP stack behind the scenes, and has been in the arena for many years now. Pieter built to set off a new age of remote employee culture and since 2020, RemoteOk has become the most visited remote job portal in the world.
- Jobspresso: Find jobs while sipping a shot of espresso ☕️. Jobspresso is a relatively new kid on the block, but one look at the portal can give you hundreds of job listings in many different fields. From social media marketing, writing, tech marketing, to software development, you can find the gig of your needs.
- Wellfound: Last but not the least, Wellfound, which was previously AngelList, has been a solid platform for finding both remote and on-site (in-office) opportunities for a long time. Backed by well-known investors and founded by Naval Ravikant - one of the best known angel investors in the tech industry.
That was a great reading marathon 😅 Now it's time for you to start building skills and work on your portfolio. Soon, we will talk about positioning yourself to become a skilled, globally employable developer.
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What's cooking at YouTube
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🇮🇳 Code Jugaad 🇮🇳
::: I am guilty of something.
I am working endlessly on my latest Hindi channel, but there is something I am guilty of - I am thoroughly ENJOYING the entire process 🤭😁
Waking up at 6 AM to record videos is giving me more energy throughout the day. Why?
Because in just a week, we have crossed from 177 subscribers to almost 300 🤩 This kind of motivation is the only one that keeps energising my goal of making this channel a one-stop platform for all my Hindi speaking developers 💪
Lots of gems dropped recently, check them out -
🎥 Property Exists in JavaScript
And our CSS playlist is bigger now with 19 videos and counting 😎 Go binge on it now - Complete CSS in Hindi
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💎 Bitfumes 💎
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🦀 My Rust journey 🦀 is continuing with me exploring Vectors and Hashmaps in my latest videos. Check them out -
Ever wondered how and why Tailwind is now overtaking almost all popular CSS libraries? Bootstrap is still great after more than 10 years but for production grade, minified CSS, Tailwind is being adopted increasingly. Watch me dissect an important reason why Tailwind is better than Bootstrap in this quick short -
🎥 Bootstrap vs Tailwind - Which Is Better?
:::hljs-center Further Reading :::
📚 Building a robust state management for enterprise level apps is a golden skill to have. And building it with Redux and useReducer is now the industry standard. Learn how to do it with this insightful guide here -
Mastering State Management in React: Harnessing Redux with useReducer
📚 If you haven't been under a rock, you know that Vercel is now a defacto choice to deploy production-ready apps. And it is not just for NextJS! You can even deploy your standalone NodeJS apps to Vercel too.
How to Deploy Your Node.js Backend Project to Vercel: A Step-by-Step Guide
📚 Developer jobs are becoming broader nowadays. More skills are demanded within the industry which means there are no dedicated teams or roles for everything. With a big pay comes big responsibilities and it is a developer's need to be ready on all fronts. But where does one start? How to get proper real-world thinking and experience before actually getting the chance to work on it? The answer - System Design.
10 Reasons to Learn System Design in 2024
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