Application For Welcome Home Bonus: Fill & Download for Free

Anybody have Rails and .NET that wants a full-time job in Northern Virginia? If so, read about my project and contact me!What We’re DoingWe’re working on creating a better system to streamline the Visa process and get ready rid all the shops that are charging people a lot of money to process Visa applications internationally. We’re developing an international VISA application that is being launched in over 48 countries which is written in Ruby on Rails in support of the Department of State and US Embassies. Our project location is in Chantilly, VA.We're adding another layer to our already existing Visa application Rails app that receives 1.9 million views per day. We are looking to develop a software application to retain biometrics information (i.e., retina scanning, facial recognition, fingerprints) where we create a client server app in .NET have a SOAP web service communicate between our .NET app and Rails app, and all information will be stored in our MySQL database. After this project, you will then support our other Rails applications and mobile apps (Android and iOS) which are new development, enhancements, etc.Responsibilities· Develop new code and make modifications to existing code, whether it be Ruby on Rails, .NET· Polish the website, frontend or backend, to constantly provide a better customer experience· Resolve emergency code issues at any stack levelQualifications· 3 years of software development (personal projects welcome)· 1 year of Ruby on Rails or .NET· Product-minded engineer who is able to empathize with end-users. You’ve built with the mass audience in mind.· Testing experience (e.g. Rails unit testing)· 3rd party API usage and integration experience· RDBMS usage (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL)· People who value building a Minimum Viable Product with quality· Strong design skills for MVC separation and general modularity of code· Aversion to and tendency against spaghetti code· Persistence. Design it, build it, if it breaks, fix it, but make it work, and make it shineBonus· Free and/or Open Source project work· Database Design· Frontend coding (HTML5/Javascript/CSS)· Built a mobile app that has hit scale· Experience in SaaS business environmentBenefits and Perks· Open vacation policy. We don't count days· If you're sick, just stay home and get better· Buy or build your ideal work environment.· Flexible work hours.· Competitive salary· Health, dental and vision benefits.· Happy hour with Sake and Sushi

Short answer, no. Not at all.Once upon a time, following WW2, the UK Labour government (socialist) which was voted for in an overwhelming conclusion at the election, brought in such terribly socialist things as The National Health Service, which implemented universal basic health care to all, free at source to all users. This is now being broken up and handed bit by bit to private companies which costs us all more in every which way. The service costs more, for less. Waiting times increase. Cost per appointment rises. Mistakes soar. Controversies rage. Just this last week there has been the unwholesome unearthing of a drastically horrendous case of putting profits before everything else. Here’s a link to that one.NHS supplier that accumulated body parts faces criminal investigationhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/04/human-body-parts-stockpiled-hundreds-tonnes-nhs-contracted-waste/I’ve used two newspaper sites as some might accuse me of bias in choosing a left-leaning paper or a right-leaning one.Housing, in post-WW2 was also one of the ‘evil’ socialist things which was introduced and expanded in Britain. “Homes fit for heroes” was one way it was stated. I live in one of those very houses (actually a flat, though it looks like a house). In my back garden is an old, well built, shed, but which was once a railwayman’s hut. It was brought here in the 1950s for an ex-Royal Navy man to sleep in after he returned home from a Japanese POW camp, and then from a British hospital in the Far East, after his ship was sunk in the Pacific/South China Sea. He was in the water for 24 hours and developed TB. The Japanese took him and all survivors out of the water and cared for them as best they could, and he survived until the 1970s. When I took on the tenancy to my home 12 years ago, it was after the death of his widow who passed away at 102 years old, one of the oldest twins in Europe at the time. Her sister died very shortly before.The houses were often built of pre-fabricated concrete, as mine is, but had decent gardens, indoor toilets and bathrooms, open fires, and were brand spanking new.Other ‘council houses’, as they became known because they were all owned by the local council/government, were solid, basic, sound, ample housing for a cheaper price than any landlord could offer. They were/are unfurnished and were/are able to be internally decorated in whatever reasonable manner the tenant wished. The main structure and exteriors were/are maintained by the council.At some point, many more houses were built all over Britain and Northern Ireland by councils using central government funding. They loaned the money at extremely low interest rates (being as any government can borrow money from banks at far more competitive rates than any private or public company can dream of doing. They employed local people to build them. They trained young people to learn the trades. They sourced local resources. The communities soared from the investments. When the private housing sector rose with the economy, into the 1960s for example, council housing was less needed so the tradesmen who built them moved over to build new private houses to replace the Victorian slums which were being torn down. When the ecomony took a nose dive and the private housing sector slumped there was an increase in need for council housing again and so the building workers moved back to construct those. The wages may have been marginally less working on council housing, but not greatly so, and there were benefits too. Also, it was at least a wage income instead of being thrown on the heap, as had been the case prior to WW2.In 1979 Britain voted in a Conservative government on a radical programme of change. In the early 1980s this same government introduced into law The Housing Act, which meant that anyone who had lived in a council house could now buy it. The story was that the money raised from the sale of the ‘dated housing stock’ would fund new houses. It didn’t happen.Some years later, entire housing lots were sold off en masse to Housing Associations, which are private companies with, nowadays, ‘Charitable Status’, and which were always meant to be ‘not-for-profit’. Things changed radically then, but even the vote was odd. Anyone who didn’t vote for the local Council Housing stocks to be sold off was considered a ‘yes’ vote for this to happen. The votes cast were overwhelmingly against the sale, but the sale went ahead due to this odd, and downright shady, arrangement.Anyone in Britain at any time can apply for benefits. They may be a £Millionaire, or be in work or whatever, but they are entitled to apply. Not all get the benefits. Anyone who is not entitled to them, for dozens of reasons, will be filtered out.Anyone who is living in a Housing Association dwelling, as I am, does not get it free. There is a strict rent agreement. There are stricter rules applying than apply to anyone in private housing, noise for example can see a tenant evicted. There are also some welcome freedoms, for example to decorate the interiors as you wish to, which private tenants rarely have.If one falls on hard times, and under the government of austerity, which have had since 2010, so many people on the lower quartile of income are struggling more and more. Recently there was a report in a relatively right wing newspaper that 14 million people, including 4 million children, in the UK are living below the official poverty line. [N.B. the UK government official poverty line is well below what many NGOs consider the poverty lines.]There are now 14,000,000 people living in poverty in the UKSo, if you fall into hard times and your company has laid you off, or closed, or you have a zero hour contract, as SO many do now in the UK *(which effectively means you are entitled to zero hours work and if you turn up for a full shift of 8 hours, perhaps paying £6 for your travel to your job, and you only get 3 hours, then told there’s no work now till next month, there’s nothing you can do but change your job. So, you have no work, and you have not enough money to pay your rent, even at 85% of local standard mean of rents payable in any area, then you can claim Housing Benefit.Once upon a time this was all paid for 3 months, then you got any ‘spare’ bedroom space taken off the benefit as a percentage of the rent. So, you had to either downsize (and in some areas there are simply too few smaller dwellings suitable or available to do this), or find the extra. It was once also done that all of the council tax (a banded charge per dwelling which is paid to the local government/council which replaced the old and now obsolete ‘rates’ we once had to pay for local services and such). Now, for the last 7 years or so, this is no longer applicable. One must pay for 20% of this charge straight from the subsistence payment one gets to live on and pay for food, laundry, cleaning, clothing, etc.Here’s some figures from the government website to explain some of these amounts.Note: There have been at least two occasions when politicians have opted, as a gimmick more than anything else, to ‘play’ at being unemployed and try to survive on the basic pay of this. They ignored the extras they would pay for housing needs and for council tax and yet none managed to make it even one week on their income. Most people could actually survive for one week on pure water, based on a reasonable health and a reasonable diet before they started the week. Months and years? Another matter entirely.There is no free housing in the UK. There is ever increasing homelessness.Just to redress the answer Paul Murphy gave below.. Yes, there are a very few professional scroungers in the UK who learn the system, fake some illness symptoms and gain huge amounts of money per week in benefits. These are rare and ill-liked people. Meanwhile, the real benefit scroungers are the CEOs and CFOs of vast companies who pay so low wages to their workers that the workers need to apply for supplementary benefits (the names of these benefits change so I won’t name them for the current system, but they were variously called “Working Families Tax Credit”, and so on.While this is happening the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) were paying bonuses to their employees for finding any excuse to refuse benefits to claimants on the slightest pretext or excuse. The death toll is pretty high on this account, as Paul mentions below.Apart from this, I nod to his knowledge of the amounts of money and the ‘generosity’ of the UK benefits system in general.

I'm not sure if I can speak for other INTPs as some people before me were kind enough to note the limitations of MBTI while exploring potential career fits. I understand neobehaviorist models are considered scientific as they're based less in one man's theory and more in empiricism, but the MBTI does give us a solid theory of human cognition which, when you think about it, underpins all decision-making processes and fundamentally determines how we approach the world. So I wish to leave you with a mixed bag of what I would consider fulfilling career choices for the INTP.I'd first like to challenge this notion that INTPs have a natural inclination towards the sciences or engineering. This often comes from individuals who either aren't INTP or those who haven't experienced the industry. We must remind ourselves that the industry doesn't always represent the best nature of the discipline it claims to represent. INTPs may be good at engineering, but they may be absolutely useless in a corporation that only cares enough to extract clerical tasks from them. Making it in the industry/ being able to make a career out of something is a lot different than just being naturally good at it. With this knowledge, you work inside a small intersection of many sets which include industry, discipline, culture, etc. to find a fulfilling career that will also keep you fed. The Japanese concept of Ikigai could perhaps help you discover this intersectionality of life.Speaking from a cognitive standpoint, INTPs or just about any Myers-Briggs type for that matter will need to exercise their functions in order of their preference to feel energised - to achieve a state of flow. In this state, work becomes effortless. It comes naturally without conscious effort. To achieve this state, one must reconcile with their preferences for cognition. As an INTP, I found myself in a state of flow most recently when I was putting together this headphone amp that I'd just designed. It wasn't the physical labour of assembly that proved gratifying but these short flashes of what I can only call brilliance - of things fitting into its place, metaphorically of course, into the grander scheme of what I'd envisioned for it to be. Just knowing what questions to ask and where my inquiry should take me next is, in itself, immensely satisfying. I leaned back for a moment and just realized how I'd lost all track of time and the residual existential angst that usually lingers around was just making itself known after an unusually long break. You may have taken note that in all these examples, my Introverted Thinking (Ti) function was put to good use. My Ne was also satisfied in knowing what else could be done with the insights I'd gained that day in future designs.Ti doms are also logical solipsists. Unlike their Fi cousins, the INFP, who are emotionally solipsistic - the INTP relies endlessly on their subjectively-contrived logical framework by which they measure, test and validate the outside world. What does this mean for careers? Well, solipsists cannot be tasked with objective tasks. Tasks that have their ends in the outside world and end up relying too much on factual data. Number crunching and parsing huge swathes of data just for the sake of it isn’t something an INTP would do. They’d happily write a computer script to do the task for them while they entertain themselves with a philosophical debate between Sam Harris and Deepak Chopra.Circling back to giving away practical advice - let it be known that we need cerebral tasks to feel energized at the end of the day. Yeah, we could perhaps squeeze in some physical labor as long as it has its ends in some cerebral goal. Tasks which test our ability to deal with concrete, trivial and seemingly arbitrary information in the most efficient way isn’t going to make the cut. If someone told me the ISS had an orbital period of ~90 minutes, I wouldn't care too much for it. But if we discussed Kepler's laws equipping ourselves with the ability to describe planetary motion of any kind - I would probably have never forgotten that.Sadly, much of engineering school and early experience in the field doesn't grant one with the privileges to work with original ideas and execute them in your own designs. More often that not, you'd be helping maintain an existing product, service or process instead of proving instrumental in its development - only helping execute the vision of one person occupying the upper ranks within the machine. And we all know how INTPs suck at climbing the ladder to ever get to this level where they may exercise their autonomy. This can be a deal-breaker for the “architect” personality.INTPs don’t live in social reality but instead choose to live in material reality. They see past socially constructed ideas like wealth, fame and status. They aren’t keen on accumulating status or wealth as other types do. They don’t see any incentive in doing an internship “for the sake of it” because a certain employer needs you to. They don’t see the incentive in having to do something so arbitrary and meaningless within the grander scheme of things because it would make appease some authority figure. They don’t care about doing things simply for its sake - to rise in ranks among their peers. This is very problematic, you see, in an industry governed by status - and where status dictates how much autonomy you have over your creative expression.I know this might run contradictory to the popular opinion how INTPs rule in STEM but engineering, at least from my experience, is overwhelmingly populated by Te, Se and Si. The Se thrives in the mechanical side of things - making and breaking is all they love to do. They’re quick and useful. The Si loves sticking to rules, protocol and working with red tape - getting things certified, documented and approved as they should be. They also excel at rote tasks, drawing on previous knowledge, precisely what you need to ace an exam. Te is looking around the rules to see what works and how it can be made to work. Te cares only about how it works not why it works the way it does. The Ti is a theorist where Te is not. Ti cares about the validity of concept, Te about the proof of concept. Ti is more holistic where Te is black-and-white. As much as I love physics, my college classes were mostly designed around physical activities and group work which I loathed. They never tested my deep, conceptual understanding of the subject but rather how well I could meet the teacher's black-and-white expectations of how a problem should be solved. My physics prof was likely an ISTJ. He never cared to help us understand problems but merely wanted to see us working frantically on them. Cut-and-dry problem solving never came by nature to me. It was second nature for him. A lot of assignments you will receive in college is busy work after all. They aren’t meant to be worked through efficiently but instead in a long monotonic, procedural manner. This is especially true considering that they measure your odds at academic success by the amount of time spent in the act of “studying”. It's never about efficiency. The “studies” you undertake here isn't supposed to be understood but learned at face value because only mindless repetition can accomplish that.The rules were arbitrary - and INTPs hate arbitrary rules that have no rationale supporting them. When I would define a coordinate system to my convenience to get certain terms to cancel out, they penalized me because it wasn't the coordinate system everyone was expected to choose. When my answer was rounded to the wrong place, they took away points. Everything had to be fit in and presented in the right portions of a piece of paper. I never cared about the trivial details of problem solving, but only entertained myself with the concepts behind them. They didn’t. To them, the details mattered more than your grasp of the concept. This only demonstrated how these professors lacked a profound understanding of what they were attempting to teach - choosing the convenient route of sticking to just one way. This made their job easier by not having to tailor the learning experience on an individual basis. These methods were so arbitrary in fact that they would vary between classes taught by other professors! It was hard for me to demonstrate my capabilities in a place where people were tested for their ability to subjugate to the partial understanding of one man. Because being equally stupid makes you look smart in an environment where conformism rules.Engineering and math at the high-school and college level were extremely process-oriented. They placed great importance on abiding ruthlessly to a method - and one method only. There were no abstract definitions, only details that had to be learned and recalled from time-to-time. This naturally meant reason took a back seat as we never consciously reasoned anything - simply followed protocol to get the grades we wanted as nobody in my class saw more to education than as a means of entering higher education or the industry. This mindset coupled with un-reasoned but learned behaviours is very toxic to the Ti dom and perhaps other Ne doms like the ENTPs who see the world as a colourful labyrinth of possibilities. Math education still panders mostly to Si/Te tendencies - caring only about ‘how’ to solve a well-defined problem. We never learned math conceptually, because a high-level grasp of the concepts was deemed unnecessary to the ends of solving problems. When I would arrive at a problem, most people would just rush me saying I had to take the second derivative in order to solve it. And I’m like okay, I get that, but why the second derivative? Why do we care about the rate of change of another variable’s rate of change? Most students would just scan for specific keywords and immediately jump to solving problems. It’s like you wanted to win at a game of chess. You don’t go about asking why the horses or bishops moved a certain way but instead use these non-negotiable dogmas to solve problems. In the applied sciences, you simply don’t attempt at a deeper understanding of the subject. I felt intellectually stifled.INTPs thrive on the inherent ambiguity of things. We need a high-level grasp of these concepts because it’s precisely what aids our creativity, where we can effortlessly apply these ideas outside its typical context. To most people math is for solving problems, music is for entertainment and sports is for fitness. They never attempt to tie in concepts from these disciplines together on a more abstract plane. As for us, we get a healthy shot of dopamine from making these connections i.e in the process of discovery. This is what drives us to uncover new truths. The system doesn’t. They want everything neatly laid out, explicitly stated, trivialised so they don’t have to expend large amounts of mental energy making sense of things. You know you’re an INTP when the first thing you do on a test is turn over to the bonus problems at the end only to see how much of a challenge they posed. I would then work through the boring portions of the test, you know, the problems that everyone was instructed on how to work through in a very exacting manner beforehand, knowing well that I had saved the best for last.In fact, I think most xNxPs tend to be very non-linear in their approach - which is exactly what makes them creative, cross-contextual thinkers but equally what deems them unsuitable for many process-oriented fields like STEM. STEM is very methodological, and quite rigorous at the foundational levels. Everything assumes a chronological order. There are time constraints. At the end of the day, STEM, especially engineering is going to have its ends in practical application. It’s not just about idea generation or improvising, but more about sticking to one idea for long enough to make it happen. It’s also about working with people. I remember watching an interview with Joe Sutter, the father of the Boeing 747 program, on YouTube where he commented how one of his teammates had to convince the board of directors of their primary customer, Pan Am, on the size of the airplane. They wouldn’t believe it so he had to use a practical analogy to win the contract. The INTP, with its remarkable disconnect from reality will clearly suck on all these fronts. They can’t convince people, persuade them or manipulate them to get their visions executed. Worse yet, they see no incentive in controlling people or resources being the intrinsically-motivated types they are. INTPs just want to live and let live in a competitive economy ruled by material and social greed.Ironically, the problem with competition is that it puts quite the opposite kind of people you want to see in positions of power. The truly competent don’t care about the title or trophy as much as the craft. Often the ones who win this game are those who are more enticed by the prospect of winning rather that being the best at what they do. Most winners are often intellectual losers as in order to win, you must always play it safe, specialising and sticking to what you already know - where you can dominate above the rest of the pack - making sure not to leave your territory as that’d make you vulnerable. Winners are forced to live in the present, delivering quick, dirty and tangible results that people can then reward you for. You have to limit your scope of ambition to match what formal institutions and society can recognise you for. No man worth his while was called a trailblazer in his time, simply because these novel ideas had little demand to be of commercial utility.If you wanted to be called a good musician in your time, you must follow mainstream techniques and adhere rather exceptionally to established form. In simpler terms, you need to do what average minds can comprehend. An INTP Gustav Mahler was called a crazy conductor who wrote obscure symphonies in the side. Nobody took him to be a serious musician. On the other hand, the criminally overrated and more pedantic Schubert (paraphrasing an anonymous reviewer on TopTenLists), Beethoven is lauded as the greatest composer of all time. Ask any layman to name one household name of a composer and they’ll either say Mozart or Beethoven. Unlike the eccentric geniuses of Mahler or Chopin (probably INFP), Beethoven and Mozart very much stuck to traditional form. While their musical ideas (motifs/melodies) were fairly cheesy and simple, nowhere as emotive and poetic as Chopin or Rachmaninoff, Beethoven did a better job at presentation i.e. he went through the grunt work to make his work presentable and practical to the average masses. In fact, his symphonies were engineered within such impeccable tolerances that his works have come to be the industry standard. Unlike a misanthropic Chopin, who never embellished his melodies using a full orchestra or ensemble or worked with performers and wrote highly intricate melodies on a piano. He had substance but lacked presentation. Our world cares about presentation in-case you didn’t catch my drift. Who knows how many modern-day Chopin's are forced out of their creative habit simply because they refuse to do things in a very traditional, formulaic way. I mean, what good is good counterpoint if you can’t reduce your listeners to tears. It wasn’t until more liberal attitudes spawned across Europe during the Romantic era that the work of creative geniuses like Chopin got to see the light of day.We live in a world of players, and INTPs blatantly refuse to play the game. They are sometimes oblivious to its existence, not sure if there was a game to be played - choosing to go about everything in just about the most honest and straightforward way possible.Serotonin's status seeking tendencies are less commonplace among INTPs, especially among more turbulent (neurotic) ones. Serotonin-driven types are more conscious of social constructs like honour and rank. Likewise, they act on this knowledge, shifting gears to maintain conduct appropriate to the prevailing social context.In today's world, I'm not entirely sure if engineering or science would be a gratifying study at the university level for us INTPs including work with corporate culture and all. The field is getting increasingly polluted since everyone wants to be there. A lot of low quality individuals who hardly care about the discipline but the money it brings down the line are found here. There seems to be an honor culture that lives in STEM, unlike the arts and humanities, where you aren’t valued by the quality of your character and intellect but rather by outwardly achievements - which may or may not have been driven by luck and/or cunning strategy. This guy's got so many patents or that guy's got a PhD - you see, I couldn't care less about this fetishism for titles that plagues STEM. Going back and watching Joe Rogan’s latest interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, STEM seems more like the field for the highly disagreeable. It’s quite competitive in its own right. The arts and humanities used to be one of the saner fields until they too were institutionalised. Gender studies degree anyone?During my time in college, I only did well in philosophy (straight As), one chemistry class and in music. So much for being able to think critically, pfft.Freelancing is a good starting point if your finances aren't tight. You can make and sell your own product here. Consider writing, (independent) journalism, design & prototyping, content creation of any kind. I design amplifiers and wish to market them to a niche audiophile crowd. You can demonstrate your thinking spirit where there are no arbitrary and meaningless expectations placed upon you whose sole purpose is to make one person look good. Creative expression is where it’s at. After all, a good percentage of INTPs report self-employment or more sadly, no employment at all.The arts are extremely gratifying for xNxPs where their unmatched creativity can shine. After everything they had to put up with in this uninspired, shrewd, and business-minded SJ society, INTPs might find themselves less lonely engaging with wholesome art that speaks to them. Interior design or architecture are great choices as long as your clients and the local market where you operate have a liberal predisposition. Humanities such as philosophy may allow you to flex your Ti muscles while occupying a teaching position. Engineering is great as long as you're proactively involved in design efforts behind a product and moreover if your company has a liberal, egalitarian culture. I say this particularly because I've determined from experience that businesses in engineering tend to feature a very heirarchical internal structure. There's a large wager placed on age and experience i.e. seniority as well. Unless you're partaking in the preliminary or perhaps even detailed design efforts behind a project, engineering tends to get very boring and mundane. The field work, production, management and legal side of things is definitely suited for the more industrious personality.We thrive in environments where we’re allowed to be fiercely experimental - to stay true to the essence of who we are - ever pushing the envelope of what’s possible - and doing things organically sans external incentives or pressures. The moment money, fame or competition comes into the picture, all hope is lost for the INTP.I found my calling in the digital arts namely of electronic music production after much deliberation and I hope you'll find yours too. Here I am able to fuse my nuanced understanding of signal processing and analog electronics with my love for music. And of course, where would INTPs feel most at home if it weren’t for sitting in front of their computer screens in their bedroom. In my spare time, I write on two blogs (on matters pertaining to philosophy and psychology - both Ti heavy disciplines btw), design analog circuits, program embedded computers and share quality memes.Tl;drGet into an emerging field. This is my only piece of wisdom for xNTPs. A field that’s only poorly understood by the masses. A field that hasn’t had enough time to mature oppressive hierarchies and structures that can stifle creativity. Because everything settles into a routine once they go mainstream. Innovation is allowed only to meet this end. A shortcut method might involve looking at fields that have little prestige attached to it.Where’s your culture. Traditionally masculine fields like business and technology are focused with material outcomes i.e. tangible and immediate results. The INTP’s intrinsically-motivated work ethic instead takes a process-first approach. On this front, disciplines (or countries) with that tend to be more feminine are better fits. Think of countries from the Nordic regions or the Netherlands.Choose your competition wisely. Don’t go about competing at a game you aren’t meant to play. And most importantly, don’t go about selling yourself short. Don’t expect people to comprehend the intricate nature of your craft. Go where your proclivities are welcome and appreciated. Don’t expect to have a high-level intellectual discourse in a Si/Te environment like college or high-school. People will look at you like you’re crazy when you step outside their familiar and narrow understanding of reality. And they will always beat you with their collective stupidity. In other words, you will always remain a loser competing in the wrong hierarchy.Probably just another INTP (Laurie Spiegel) in its natural habitat, surrounded by a liberating concoction of computers, books, cats and coffee. Mmm..Further reading:NTPs and Science Careers: What It’s Like to be an NTP in a sea of NTJs: a very helpful action plan for divergent thinkers who insist on staying in STEM.