employee123

I recently interviewed at a well-known silicon valley company that is public for a front-end role. I have been doing front-end for more than 3years now and I don't mean to brag but I can say with confidence that I am an advanced Javascript developer because for the past two years I have put in so much effort into understanding the deeper workings of the language from ES5 - ES6. At my current employer, I'm well known as a Javascript expert. So I was shocked when the feedback from the interview was that I was not well versed in Javascript, this surprised me. Note that I'm of African descent & I think this may/may not have influenced the interview. I'm not sure what to make of this.

The interview went fairly well & I demonstrated my knowledge of es6 which they even acknowledged.

I'm a front-end engineer with about 4 years experience currently working for a big Co in Europe but looking to relocate to an English speaking country.

How easy/possible is it to find front-end engineering positions in Canada/UK with companies willing to sponsor Visa. I know Canada recently has a Tech visa program.

Self-taught programmers without CS degree working at one of the big 5 Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon. Kindly share your experience, how you did it & how happy you feel.

I am currently interviewing for a position at Booking.com, researching online, I found out that they have so much bad reputation about the way they treat their developers. I'm really skeptical about continuing with the interview. Are these just disgruntled employees or is their claim credible?

I wanted to know if anyone has been hired by the big 4 from outside the US. How did it happen? what was your experience with the interview and most importantly what role? I want to know if this is possible or I should just forget the idea.

A little about me:

I am a front-end dev, with strong front-end skills currently taking courses in Data structures and Algorithms and bought the book Cracking The Coding Interview, been doing one question every day since. I have worked for a number of European startups as a remote front-end dev, but I've always dreamt of going to the valley. I live in Africa.

I just joined a startup which has been running for more almost 2 years now as a remote dev and have been with them for about 5 months now. Currently, we do not have any strong revenue coming in and have about 2-3 customers, it's a SASS/b2b product so I can understand if we don't have that many customers. Last month, the salaries of employees was slashed by more than 50% & I was told by the CTO that because they didn't really have any revenue, investors advised that they reduced spending. A senior developer already left. I do not have any equity in the startup (because I'm halfway across the world, but was promised when I relocated and started working onsite). Are these signs of a failing startup? Should I jump ship? I'm the only dev on the team and it doesn't seem like they are hiring a replacement for the senior dev that left which we need badly.