Vancouver IT companies

 如果你决定留在温哥华, 那么求稳去知名上市公司的. 本地office有些工作经验的可以尝试, remote然而个人认为兼顾成长收入和稳定的选择应该是加入美国中后期startup公司在温哥华的office或者remote

上市公司就不多说了, Amazon主要是招的人多, Microsoft第二, Apple, Facebook, Google, Oracle招的人是真少, 其他的不错的有 Salesforce, Tableau, Square, Slack, Splunk, Segment(Twilio), Asana, Shopify, Workday, Mastercard, 基本错不了, Cisco和SAP福利不错Fortinet, GEdigital, Broadcom, Move(Realtorcom), Arista据说还可以

如果可以接受remote, 那选择是相当之多. 包括Twitter, coursera, Wish, Intuit, SurveyMonkey, MongoDB等. 

Startup

在温哥华开office有很多无法一一列举处于中后期的有Dialpad, Chime, Postmates

其他startup中比较有名的有Flipboard, Mozilla, Kickstarter, Zenefits已被收购单论工资还不错

除此之外温哥华本地也有很多Startup, 像Slack, 原本就是温哥华发家的. 

本地startup中做的比较好的有Hootsuite, Visier, Clio, Trulioo, Axiom, Zen(CryptoKitty/NFT), Tasktop, D-Wave(QuantumComputer), 饭团, POF等.

如果可以接受remote那么其实优秀的startup相当之多Esty, Stripe, Instacart, Brex, Okta, Coinbase, Zapier, Gusto, PagerDuty等

温哥华游戏公司也挺多, 不过总的来说性价比不高. 钱不多事不少, 大一些的有EA, Demonware(ActivisionBlizzard), Relic, Skybox, IUGO, Kabam, TheCoalition(GearsofWar)

小的就更多了, Archiact, A ThinkingApe, Klei, EastSideGames

数不过来其实Capcom, Nintendo, Bandai, Namco, KOEI.

在温哥华都有办公室但是招人非常少-baidu, 1point3acres

温哥华还有一些公司不完全符合上述条件但是机会也不错比如FinTech方面有RBC的lab, Borealis AI高频交易公司, DRW应该都是不差钱的. 

至于Shaw, Telus, Bell之类的就不太熟悉了.

总的来说温哥华的收入和美国相比要低不少. 

这是事实, 然而因为温哥华和硅谷处于同一时区, 所以这样的势能差逐渐被很多公司发现并利用. 

加上政府的优惠税收政策和宽松的移民政策使得这几年到温哥华来开office的公司越来越多. 

此外疫情也是一个相当重要的因素, 很多公司意识到了remote是完全可行的. 所以remote的机会也越来越多.

以上这些因素导致了温哥华码农这几年的待遇逐步提高并且长期趋势看好. 当然无论如何南边的机会肯定更多是没错的

Case study: My weakness in last 10 years working full time

January 28, 2020

Introduction

It is my short research. What is my weakness in last 10 years working full time? I learned that after I had onsite interview from Dialpad in December 2020.

Case study

As a software programmer, I like to push myself hard this year 2020 to learn more about technology. I like to start to read a restful webservice book, and then work on system design. I really like to learn how to advance myself in terms of book reading, technology, and large distributed system.

What I do is to work as an interviewer on interviewing.io, prepare for one system design interview called design twitter.

I like to start to work on one book, one system design to design twitter, and then continue to push myself hard.

Case study: January 2020 - My Restful web service learning month

January 26, 2020

Introduction

It is so important for me to learn some web technology as a software programmer. I was so busy but I never have a chance to learn web technologies, so many code to write and so many projects to work on. This January I spent whole month to learn Restful API web service.

Motivations 

I was busy to learn technology this year about restful web service. It is better for me to learn some technologies now, the tenth year at the same job.

I did not learn the importance about learning technology until I went to Vancouver Dialpad onsite in December 2019, and I had system design onsite interview. I like to learn Restful API every day until I can understand and also can rewrite the website, I like to design restful API and make it my first hobby to code in 2020.

Book to read

I was not so good how to learn technologies. One of ideas is to read a book. So I tried a few days but it seemed to me that I am not so good to read a book.

Videos

I tried to learn from videos. It is such a good idea and high quality videos are easy to find. But I do not take notes, and I may not learn very well.

Tutorials

Why Dialpad is the best company in the world in 2020?

January 4, 2020

Introduction

It is my short research. I like to write a short research why Dialpad is the best company in the world.

Why?


Follow up
Jan. 30, 2020

I do think that I learned a few things to work with Dialpad by going through code screen, phone screen and onsite. I started to learn Restful web service, take courses on Linkedin learning and then I understood that it is such great learning experience compared to Amazon and Facebook onsite. Those engineers working in Dialpad are also super talent and smart.

Here is the link related to my experience, go to http://juliachencoding.blogspot.com/search?q=dialpad

Suspension bridge park second visit

Dec. 16, 2019

Introduction

I thought about my weakness in personality. How come I do not have that personality to accumulate million dollars talent through 24 years in north America. I still work on learning how to enjoy life being frugal.

Second visit

I stepped out onsite interview from dialpad office building on melville street. There was a free shuttle bus to suspension bridge park in North Vancouver. I decided to take the bus and visited the park again using my annual pass. I needed to take some time to enjoy the outdoor.

Take selfie 

It is tough to be a person over 50 years old. I learn to work with myself better. One of ideas is to push myself to read more books, visit more places in local area.

I got my Google hat from Oct GHC event in the city of Seattle new lake union office. I just walked outside the building, finished 4th onsite interview in 2019, and then took bus and it only took less than 30 minutes to get the park.

It is so comfortable to stay outdoor and share this great picture with you at the end of 2019.

Second visit I also know the length of bridge, height from the valley bottom, how many weight it can hold.

What if I am the product manager, how much it costs to hang those lighting balls?

I like the rain of Vancouver. I know that there are snow on top of mountain. I should go up the mountain and go skiing.

My journey to the fourth onsite in 2019

Dec. 14, 2019

Introduction

It is my personal finance research. I could not explain what is going on. I just did something so quickly and then I will have an onsite interview on Dec. 16, 2019 in the city of Vancouver.

My journey

I got a message from the recruiter from dialpad on Linkedin.com on Nov. 15, 2019. The recruiter was so friendly, he sent me a message in April 8, 2019. After six months, he sent me another message.

So I just followed up,  and I had a chat with the recruiter on Nov. 21, I got a code screen on Nov. 21, and I worked on code screen on Dec. 1, 2019, and then I also got a phone screen on Dec. 10. So I will have an onsite on Dec. 16, 2019.

Count down days for last phone screen in 2019

Dec. 4, 2019

Introduction

It was so surprising that I took code screen from dialpad on Sunday, December 1, 2019. It was three hour test, but only one algorithm. I was so nervous since I still remembered that I could not pass December 2018 Indeed.com Japan code screen, there are five algorithms. I failed one Amazon code screen in march, passed Amazon code screen in May, and then I passed Microsoft code screen in May as well.

Code screen

I learned from the phone screen. My understanding of problem was not so good, I came cross the bug since I did not notice that there is a uniqueness requirement in the problem statement. I also spent 5 minutes to simplify my logic to write if statement. I spent 55 minutes to take the test.

I have to push myself work hard. Last week I spent time to watch videos from youtube.com related to personal finance research. I took risk and did not study at all until I spent time to work on code screen Sunday afternoon. I spent time to relax Sunday, played tennis, and then worked on code screen.

I did work on two mock interview on Leetcode for code screen, surprisingly two times I solved all algorithms. I wrote six posts to share my practice with my performance of mock interview. I just could not believe that what is happening, this is the real performance, am I memorizing those algorithms?

Here are those algorithms I practice. I will show the link here.

Phone screen

I will have to spend time to work on a few algorithms, so I can share with community how to solve Leetcode algorithms.

Follow up 

Jan. 30, 2020

I wrote an answer on quora.com, and I used one of two mock interviewes I did to prepare Dialpad code screen/ phone screen.  Here is the link.

How should I rush to learn basics of AI?

Nov. 24, 2019

Introduction

It is my personal finance research. I went to Facebook onsite interview this August, I met a few friends in California as well. One of them is a Linkedin manager and he gave me a gift for six month free premium account, and one is principle scientist of AI in Mercedes. Another friend also coached me how to find jobs before dinner, who works for Google. This December one of friends will come to Vancouver to attend a conference of AI.

Start to learn, learn early as possible

I learn the lesson that I wasted 20 years from 1999 to 2019 since I did not learn how to invest; I spent almost whole year to learn how to invest in 2019. The lesson is to start early. 

How to learn AI and start to build interest on this area?

Dialpad is the startup company I have strong interest to learn.

10 ideas to make US million dollar asset dream come true

Nov. 23, 2019

Introduction

It is time for me to work on ideas. How to generate ideas to make my US million dollar asset dream come true? It is the first year first time I have this thought. I like to push myself to work hard.

10 ideas

There are a few surprise this year 2019. I had Fortinet onsite, Amazon onsite, Facebook onsite, Docusign phone screen, last week Dialpad online code screen.

I just could not believe that I have chance to go out and meet more people, learn more business. Also I think that I have to catch up learning about business, investment, technology and all other interesting things.

1. Get Facebook job in 2020. This will make my dream come true early and possible. All I have to do is to push myself hold high standard. Practice more algorithm up to 700, and also learn more about system design.

2. Get a full time to work for dialpad, try to pass online code screen. I will get paid as Canadian dollars, so it should go to my Canadian million dollar dream.

3. I like to learn more about investment, finance, and also get myself more educated about capitalism. The idea is to work on my 401 K and IRA, and see if I can learn to invest better.

4. Reserve some TFSA account to purchase USA ETF. I like to look into software ETF, technology ETF.

5. One of ideas is to learn how to invest $4000 - $5000 US dollars every year on stock market.

6. It is tough project to work on. I only have less than $40,000 dollar on my retirement fund and cash, and a condo with market value $135,000 us dollars.

7. I do not have too much time to learn personal finance and investment. I have to push myself to learn investment first, marketing and sales first.

Actionable items

It is hard for me to manage a project like this called millionaire dream. But I understand that it is also important for me to continue to work on being frugal life style study. I think that it is important for me to stay frugal, and stay away from people hyperactive spending.

Work on my English and also frugal life style

Nov. 23, 2019

Introduction

It is a good idea to watch more video created by CNBC, and I spent over one hour to watch video. I also think that it is such great opportunity for me to learn English and work on my knowledge about technology and business.

Videos I like 

I like those videos about Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, Xiaomi. It is such a surprise for me to find those videos.

I said no to Paris trip in USA thanksgiving holiday since I like to get better opportunity for myself. I got one, which is from Dialpad.com.

How to prepare online code assessment?

Nov. 23, 2019

Introduction

I like to make plans to prepare for online code assessment. I like to prepare at least 10 hours before I take online code assessment.

How to prepare? 

I think that I should take some adventure, and work on a few mock interview sessions on Leetcode.com.

I also like to take some time to review the algorithms I solved. I have solved over 400 algorithms, and I like to take some time to review those algorithms as well.

I also like to take advantage of preparation, push me to solve more algorithms. My goal is to solve 700 algorithms on Leetcode.com. Now my mark is 460.

Hottest startup

It is my strategy. I do not know which company is hottest one. What kind of flow for talent to move to/ from. So what I do is to push myself hard, work on practice once I have time. 

Based on my analysis, dialpad is hottest startup in the city of Vancouver. I like to give it a try. 

Follow up
Nov. 26, 2019

Nov. 22, 2019
Mock interview on Leetcode.com. Here is the link.

Nov. 24, 2019
Mock interview on Leetcode.com. Here is the link.

Keys to Recruiting Success with Dialpad

Here is the article.

What are the key skills you look for in candidates?

Teachability is a big one. Testing a candidates’ coding ability at the front end of the recruiting process will help you test their problem-solving ability. But we’re not focused on whether they get the problem right, we’re more interested in how they’re attacking that problem and whether they’re open to feedback and being coached on their approach. HackerRank has been especially helpful for us during the coding assessment and video CodePair sessions, to really nail into this. So that we know this candidate we’re bringing on-site is definitely going to pass by a certain percentage the whiteboard sessions they have to complete.

Some facts:
2 engineers - work on HackerRank assessment -> onsite -> population was failing -> the reason is that the problems are not challenging enough.
3 assessments -> 7 assessments -> different levels of qualification/experience/background per candidate
upfront assessments, pass-through rates -> save time, save candidates time. Continue to calibrate and align on that proper background.

Another online code assessment

Nov. 21, 2019

Introduction

It is time for me to catch up so many projects in my life. I like to say no to things against my frugal life style. But I have to say yes to this one, one more online code assessment.

Project plan

I will come out the plan to work on algorithms in next seven days. I like to invest some time to study the company as well. Dialpad is taking approach to use hackerrank.com. Here is the article.

Dialpad | The Business Communications Platform | Founders Story

Here is the link.

webRtc protocol

Brian Peterson
John Rector
Vincent

Craig Walker Talks Dialpad Free on Cheddar

Here is the link.

Dialpad Learning Series

Here is the link.

Dialpad - weekend study

Nov. 17, 2019

Introduction

It is the weekend and then I took two hours walk outside my home. I was thinking about how to find a good opportunity for me to invest. And then I got my assignment to study the private company called dialpad.

Weekend time

I did not play Leetcode weekly contest last Saturday since the time moved back to 6:30 PM instead of 7:30 PM. I spent time to work on a few things on personal finance, chatted with my renters in Florida.

I am so excited to learn that I have chance to study dialpad.com this evening.

最近《华尔街日报》做了一期关于公司被收购后，创始人应该怎样做的报道，邀请了多位有出售公司经历的创业者谈自己的感受。其中一位创业者 Craig Walker 的故事吸引了我，他先后创立了两家公司，分别被雅虎和 Google 收购，但这两次公司被收购后的经历却完全不一同。

Craig 的第一家卖给雅虎的公司叫 Dialpad，是一家互联网电话公司。2005年雅虎收购了这家公司，据报道收购金额为2000万美元现金。

Here is the article in Chinese.

Dialpad由Craig Walker创立，这位互联网语音协议的先驱将这家公司卖给了雅虎和谷歌。Walker表示，如今Dialpad已经有7年历史，去年的增长率为100%，营收额为数千万美元。公司最著名的产品就是会议电话工具UberConference，另外它还会为企业提供数字电话套件以取代固定电话，最近还推出了一种呼叫中心解决方案。公司的客户包括WeWork和Uber，两者都在广泛地使用Dialpad。

Walker表示，收购TalkIQ后，公司的未来会出现不少关键优势，包括实时订阅、自动电话摘要和情感分析等。TalkIQ的技术还能帮助Dialpad根据呼叫的种类（包括求职、销售、客户支持等），提供不同的工具套件。

“当我们在宣传Dialpad的时候，总是谈论它是一个多么现代化的平台，对于终端用户而言就是如此。如今我们可以更快地在全世界扩张。”Walker说道。

Here is the another article. 

Uberconference正是瞄准了这些弊端而推出的：

*加入Uberconference不需要PIN，参加会议者的身份会被系统通过其电话号码自动识别。

*每一位与会者都能看到一块仪表盘，上面会显示出谁在讲话。*点击某人头像则可以基于公开的社交网络信息了解其背景信息。*对于头痛的杂音问题，Uberconference可以让组织者知道谁在制造噪音，然后将其设为静音。

Uberconference有免费版，目前开放注册，但注册后尚未能马上访问服务。现在的版本是Web版，仅在美国推出。此后将会推出iPhone和iPad版。高级版的服务包括本地接入、网外呼叫以及大型会议组。

Case study: system design - instagram

August 12, 2019

Introduction

It is very good learning experience for me to learn how to design instagram based on grokking system design content. I like to do a case study and then allow myself to learn how to work on design with very good structure, gathering requirement, high level design, and dive deep, and tradeoff and quantitative analysis.

Case study

Here are the highlights I should remember to be evaluated in system design.

1. Problem exploration
2. Design approach
3. Data management
4. Tradeoffs
5. Deep dive
6. Quantitative analysis

I have to push myself to learn and how to design a simpler version of instagram. 

Functional requirements

1. User should be able to upload/download/view photos
2. User can perform searches based on photo/video titles
3. User can follow other users
4. The system should be able to generate and display a user's News Feed consisting of top photos from all the people the user follows. 

Non-functional requirements

1. Our service needs to be highly available.
2. The acceptable latency of the system is 200ms for News Feed generation. 
3. Consistency can take a hit (in the interest of availability), if a user doesn't see a photo for a while; it should be find. 
4. The system should be highly reliable; any uploaded photo or video should never be lost. 

Not in scope: 
Adding tags to photos, searching photos on tags, commenting on photos, tagging users to photos, who to follow, etc. 

So, three things:

Functional requirements
Non-functional requirements
Not in scope 

Design approach

The system would be read-heavy, so we will focus on building a system that can retrieve photos quickly. 

1. Management of storage is important
2. Low latency is expected while viewing photos
3. Data should be 100% reliable. If a user uploads a photo, the system will guarantee that it will never be lost. 

- ideas related to management of storage: distributed file storage like HDFS or S3. 



4. Capacity estimation and constraints 

Let us assume we have 500M total users, with 1M daily active users. 
2M new photos every day, 23 new photos every second. 
Average photo file size => 200KB
total space required for 1 day of photos
   2M * 200KB => 400 GB 
total space required for 10 years:
  400GB * 365 ( days a year) * 10 (years) ~= 1425 TB

5. Database schema - Design database tables first 

It is a good idea to design the database schema. The database schema would help to understand the data flow among various components and later would guide towards data partitioning. 

It is important to write down tables with columns in the table, size and data type, primary key. 

Tables:
Photo 
User
UserFollow

We can consider using an RDBMS like MySQL, there is an issue to scale them. 
We can consider using a distributed key-value store instead of using NoSQL. 

I need to learn how to dive deep and do quantitative analysis. 

It is important for me to write down table, column name, data type, size, so I can calculate in detail how many bytes for each row. 

Let me skip the calculation. But I have to look into the size of table, 3.7 TB for all tables. 

Photo: 
284 bytes - each row in photo's table
one day, 2 million new photos get uploaded every day, 0.5 GB of storage for one day. 
For 10 years 1.88 TB of storage. 

I need to think carefully about Sharding. 

Assume that a web server can have a maximum of 500 connections at any time. 
Upload photos can be a bottleneck. 
The idea is to separate reads from writes into two different service. We will have dedicated servers for reads and different servers for writes to ensure that uploads don't affect the system. 

Data sharing 

I like to learn how to figure out different schemes for metadata sharing:

1. Partitioning based on UserID 

If one DB shard is 1TB, we will need four shards to store 3.7 TB of data. Let's assume that we keep 10 shards. 

To uniquely identify any photo in the system, it is a working idea to append shard number with each PhotoID. 

How can we generate PhotoIDs?

What are the different issues with this partitioning scheme? 

It is challenging for me to think about the issues with the partitioning scheme. 

1. How are hot users handled? 

2. Some users will have a lot of photos compared to others, non-uniform distribution of storage

3. One user's photos are on multiple shards, will it cause higher latencies?

4. One shard for a user's all photos, if the shard is down or high latency if it is serving high load. 

b. Partitioning based on PhotoID

1. wouldn't this key generating DB be a single point of failure? 

Yes. It would be. A workaround for that is to use two databases with one generating even number and the other odd numbered. 

Ranking and News Feed Generation

I am so surprised to read the content. I do not remember at all I read those content in 2018 when I prepare for Amazon onsite on June 6, 2018. I just could not believe that I did not write down any note on this topic at all. 

News feed creation with sharded data

Given the task to create the News Feed for any given user is to fetch the latest photos from all people the user follows. 

How to come out a mechanism to sort photos on their time of creation. One of ideas is to add photo creation time part of the PhotoID. As the primary index is available on PhotoID, it will be easy. 

Follow up 

Nov. 15, 2019

It is the first time I like to write down my review after six three months. It is true that I have no idea how good or bad I will be in terms of distributed system design. But I like to have some structure in terms of learning. Read Grokking system design, take notes, and then review notes once a while. 


It is better to spend 20 minutes to read and think about what to learn from this blog. 

Dec. 11, 2019
I spent time to review the blog, I have onsite from dialpad on Dec. 16, four days away. 

Dailpad Vancouver office

April 7, 2019

Introduction

It is so nice to learn that more statup company opened office in the city of Vancouver. I like to spend 30 minutes to do some research about dialpad.com.

Baidu search

Here is the article I like to read.