Kalvium | SDE2/Sr. Software Engineer (GenAI) | Bangalore, India (HYBRID)
If you have a CS degree from India, you know the problem: our education system is outdated. We've fixed it. Kalvium is the B.Tech CS degree you always wanted, leveraging GenAI to power a self-directed curriculum. We run in 22+ universities. We've built our company in a bootstrapped, "default alive" way.
Our engineering team is a core group of about 15. We're looking for someone to distill and implement insights from the finest pedagogy experts.
You'll thrive here if you are a high-ownership individual ready to grow at full speed, value learning above other factors, and want the fastest path to growth (We have a two-quarter promotion policy), you are fully committed to transforming higher education (missionary, not mercenary).
Work Mode: Hybrid - Bangalore. 9 AM to 6 PM, 6 days a week. Product/engineering is in the office Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Pay: SDE2: ₹14L (Base + bonus), SDE3: ₹19L (Base + bonus), ESOPs based on interview and experience.
Experience: SDE2: 1.5–3 years (launched and maintained 1 product end to end), SDE3: 3+ years (launched/maintained multiple products). Beyond these - reach out anyway, and we can see if any other role fits.
Tech Stack: Broadly GCP/Node.js/Next.js/React.
Contact: Send an email to my first name @kalvium.com if you'd like to take on this mission.
Boot camp level skills are dead now - deeper grounding in CS is a requirement. With the 2022 hiring boom over and AI taking on some of the work, the junior market has more competitive, and will remain so in the foreseeable future.
My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to find any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for these roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly reserved for senior-level engineers.
FOSS software is any other place to build skills and value until you land paying roles.
> My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to find any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for these roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly reserved for senior-level engineers.
This is just sound advice in general. A good professional analogue to recommending a junior college as a stepping stone to a university.
No one cares about FOSS experience. You’re lucky if they even visit your GitHub/Lab/Berg at all and even luckier if they look at anything past your heatmap.
Fact is, if FOSS experience counted for anything, then those charged with hiring would also possess the capacity to understand that C# and Java experience are nearly 1:1. Sadly, it doesn’t and they don’t.
As someone who is very experienced primarily as a C# dev, I wouldn’t say Java is “nearly 1:1”.
At a syntax level they’re practically the same and they both use GC, but in terms of ecosystem they’re very different.
It might not seem like it to people who are just starting out at programming, but syntax is probably the easiest part of it.
Sure, I would probably be productive in Java if I had to start using it fully tomorrow, but it would take me months or years to get that same nuanced knowledge of its ecosystem to be as effective with it as I am with C#.
Having been through interviews lately for mid-level CS internship positions, I'd say that having FOSS contributions on my resume that I was able to discuss extensively was indeed a factor in both attaining an interview and ultimately an internship.
That's actually good news in a way because boot camps were so surface level and we didn't get a lot of actually good developers out of those programs, just lots of arguments by people defending ideas that weren't well-founded.
F-droid has been stellar in steering the alternative app store environment over the past 15 years or so, and I'd heed their call on this.
A small call to any googler on the thread - put your support towards this internally. I understand the internal dynamics, and it may seem current option is best amongst imperfect choices, but in this case F-droid is right in that closing out anonymous (but good) software is a line crossed with peril for any open ecosystem. Today it's play store, tomorrow it will be the web, and that will have a significant negative impact on Google.
> A small call to any googler on the thread - put your support towards this internally.
Post author here. This.
Google toyed with a scheme like this a few years ago and reached out to F-Droid, and they were told the chaos it would cause. They backed off. This time, no one has deigned to contact us.
Anyone who wants to talk can reach out to us (board@f-droid.org) or me directly (Signal contact in my profile).
Do you think any single one remained who cares over their payment, stock options, office perks? They care about not getting laid off with the next wave.
The context is I've worked at Google, and internally was surrounded by many who do care. I also saw other sides of controversial calls - business and other considerations which are not apparent publicly. But one thing Google does well internally way more than others is listen to it's engineers' opinion.
They still exist, I know a few. Most of them are busy protesting Google taking over Microsoft's contract to provide surveillance and targeting information in Gaza, but I can ask about this issue.
What's wrong about the current situation? Why imperfect?
I have had Android phones starting from G1, and never had any problems with them, that I could install any APK that I wished on my own hardware. There's nothing imperfect for me, as a user. What's "imperfect" is that there are apps like ReVanced and PipePipe that deprive Google of the advertising revenue. But that's imperfect for Google, and perfect for the user. Just charge me 30 bucks for Android OS instead.
Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool—the original "killer app" for personal computers such as cellphones, and the best way that has been found so far to put computational power in the hands of end-users. Last I checked, there was no spreadsheet in F-Droid, largely because it's a relatively small ecosystem, and most Android users still aren't using F-Droid. Instead they are subjected to the outrageously abusive apps that fill the Play Store, as described for example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411897. And many Android phones ship with non-uninstallable malware and shovelware. Backing up an Android phone without a Google account—indeed, even activating an Android phone without a Goolge account—is challenging. From my point of view, these are imperfections.
It's nice to know that you use spreadsheets all the time.
I use them rarely, and often end up regretting that I didn't write a real program instead. And I'd definitely never see myself using one on a phone; it's too painful to type, and the screen is usually too small.
I'd guess that maybe one percent of mobile phone users have spreadsheets of any kind installed, or would want them. Maybe.
What I'm getting at here is that you seem to have a pretty skewed idea of "fundamentally important".
Admittedly an awful lot of mobile users do have a lot of game and eye candy apps that have no F-Droid counterparts. And some users have professional apps that also don't have F-Droid counterparts. But spreadsheets aren't the center of the Universe.
As I showed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413633, which I hadn't posted when you posted your comment, about 10–25% of mobile phone users have the Google Sheets app installed, because it has over a billion downloads. So it seems like your atypical personal experience is leading you into orders-of-magnitude errors.
I also use spreadsheets rarely, most recently three weeks ago, and often end up regretting it, but I do occasionally find them very valuable. I would find them even more valuable if I didn't know more powerful programming languages, which presumably is what you are alluding to with "write a real program".
I agree that cellphone screen input methods are clumsy. On the other hand, I've written probably ten thousand words of prose on this one, plus a fair bit of Python, Lua, and C, so a few spreadsheet formulas would hardly be an obstacle.
That's the download count from the Google Play Store. I don't think it counts preinstalls. If it's preinstalled on many phones, the number of Google Sheets users could be much larger than my number suggests.
> Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool—the original "killer app" for personal computers such as cellphones
I do not agree with your supposition. Like the parent using the G1 as I did (and still have it), never used a spreadsheet app on any of my many, many phones both personal and work. I am/was a systems engineer by trade.
> Last I checked, there was no spreadsheet in F-Droid
The most popular viewer is the LibreOffice one[1], which can handle ODS and XLS (amongst many others) formats. You may have meant editing/creating which I agree they're not around. See item (1) above though.
> largely because it's a relatively small ecosystem, and most Android users still aren't using F-Droid
Or possibly, a large number of users simply do not need or use generic spreadsheet apps on their mobile devices, which is why I disagree with your opening statement as I am a direct counterexample.
I think they just got carried away with the term "personal computers such as cellphones". I believe they were referencing the common recognition of VisiCalc as one of the first "killer apps" for personal computers.
I'm sorry my comment was so unclear. I'll try to explain in more detail.
1. Cellphones are a kind of personal computer.
2. Numerical computation is something that computers, personal or otherwise, are very good at. Conservatively, your cellphone is ten orders of magnitude faster (ten billion times faster) than you are at tasks like averaging a set of numbers.
3. The spreadsheet user interface is expressive enough for many numerical computations† that are impractical to carry out with more limited user interfaces such as pocket calculators, but it is simple enough to understand that large masses of people can take advantage of that expressivity. (The popularity of VisiCalc on early personal computers such as the Apple ][ is one piece of evidence for this.) It is the "low-code development platform" that inspired all the current no-code and low-code platforms.
4. Such numerical computations are so commonplace in many people's lives that they do them on their cellphones, despite the small display and lack of a keyboard; one reason is that many people have cellphones as their only programmable computers. When they do such complex numerical calculations on their cellphones, they often use spreadsheets to do them.
5. Therefore, we should regard the availability of spreadsheets as a central indicator for the viability of a computer software ecosystem, even on cellphones.
I think all of these claims are obviously correct, stipulating the ones before them, except for #4. As evidence for #4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCpJ441g-Y4 shows that the Google Sheets app for Android was at the time #7 in their "productivity" category with 793000 ratings and 4.8 stars. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... says that it has been downloaded more than a billion times and has 1.27 million ratings. The fact that people exist who do not use their cellphones for spreadsheets does not constitute evidence against this claim.
What I believe is happening, to elaborate a bit more, is that F-Droid users who need numerical computation that goes beyond what calculator apps can do are mostly just using the Google Sheets app. The radical fringe of F-Droid users like me who do not have Google accounts often make do with Termux programs such as Python, LuaJIT, PARI/GP, bc, Racket, or the C compiler, even though for many purposes a spreadsheet would be much more convenient.
______
† Spreadsheets are also used as simple databases, in fact more frequently than they are used for numerical calculations, but numerical calculations alone are a strong enough argument for my purposes here, and F-Droid does have a number of adequate simple database apps.
I think this just fundamentally does not track, because the vast, vast majority of phone users are not regularly using a spreadsheet app.
When we imagine phone applications, we think messaging, social media, web browsing, and email. That's 99% of stuff people do on their phone.
The statistic of "how many people have this app installed" is fundamentally flawed. Why? Most apps are worthless. Throwaways, single purpose.
Its entirely possible, and dare I say extremely likely, that people install (or it came installed!) Google sheets for one document that was shared one time, then forgot about it.
It seems improbable to me that photography, video recording, video games, phone calls, digital payments, video calls, tethering, and charging the battery would all be outside of that 99%. Possibly you don't know very much about how the vast, vast majority of phone users use their phones, for example because your friends and family aren't typical of Indonesians, Nigerians, Indians, and Chinese people.
Or because you aren't especially interested in whether what you're saying is true or false, since it is—to me at least—obviously wrong. And you're surely somewhat aware of how atypical your circle of friends is among, for example, either Malaysians or Texans, and probably both.
None of those are spreadsheets... And a lot of those are built into the phone. Like phone calls, digital payments, video, photography.
I just think using spreadsheets as a measure of an application repository for phones is obviously stupid.
Please bear in mind that things like the playstore aren't android phone stores. They're Android stores. Meaning, they also target tablets and chromebooks.
Now, I'm sure Google sheets on an android tablet is perfectly mediocre. But I can assure you, on a phone, it is downright painful.
Oh, you opened a can of worms... In terms of user experience Android is garbage. It forces on you features you cannot remove unless you break into the system (which is kinda illegal or, at a minimum, voids your warranty).
Stuff like "do not disturb" that turns on accidentally and makes me miss calls, and is impossible to remove. It's impossible to remove a bunch of trash from the lock screen, and with some workarounds sometimes only the picture is removed, but it stays interactive or affects other widgets, like the audio player, for instance. Lockscreen randomly trying to dial random numbers, especially if I don't answer an incoming call. Also, taking screenshots randomly, so after almost every run I have to spend some time deleting these screenshots.
Now, when it comes to the subject in OP, it's not really about Android, it's about Google's policies around developers and app store. The whole idea behind Android is very similar to MS Windows: oppress the user because the system provider "knows better". Make choices on user's behalf, prevent users doing from useful things jut to blanket "secure" them from some imaginary threat. Manipulate users into doing a thing that's harmful for them, but beneficial for the system provider.
So, the app store managed by Google is one example of such policies. Google doesn't have the best interest of the user in mind. They are maliciously complying with regulations that want them not to abuse their users. They check the applications submitted to the app store, but they check them for the wrong things. Just to say they did.
I ended up using an FTP server app from F-Droid and a file manager from F-Droid because the stuff that was available for the same functionality found in app store is some atrocious predatory trash. It doesn't matter if I can afford to buy an app. Whatever I tried was just garbage. Once you get used to freedom and the approach of free software after you've spent some time with eg. Linux, using Android will make your blood boil because of how hostile both the system and the programs written for it are.
I don’t think we should be framing their new rules like this. They are closing out F-Droid, which is not anonymous, due to a technicality of their implementation. At best, they are collateral damage. At worst, it is malicious compliance in response to a directive that was supposed to ensure their continued existence.
It's f-droid that's clearly calling this out. from the post:
>The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications
F-droid does not want to take responsibility for the app.
> F-droid does not want to take responsibility for the app.
That's not how I read it. They cannot "take over" exclusive control of application identifiers, that's all. For example, this would prevent a developer publishing the same app to both F-Droid and to the Google Play Store. I see nothing that says that they aren't willing to take responsibility for what they publish.
What is meant by responsibility? If something happens because of the app - you go to the responsible person. F-droid does not want to be the outreach person/org for any issue on an app.
But per Google policy - they will go to the f-droid if a govt request came in for that apk, as that's what the new policy would have on file. This is hence what f-droid is voicing concern on.
The only one who knows why they need this info is Google, and I doubt they'll explicitly and publicly call out the full rationale for attaching real-world identity to apps.
In my experience, it's better to infer on the side of potential abuse when it comes to privacy.
>Unless you speak for F-Droid, I think you're reading far too much into their statement that isn't there.
Bad faith commenter.
If you actually reach far into their statement you would have gotten to this part
>Regulatory and competition authorities should look carefully at Google’s proposed activities, and ensure that policies designed to improve security are not abused to consolidate monopoly control. We urge regulators to safeguard the ability of alternative app stores and open-source projects to operate freely, and to protect developers who cannot or will not comply with exclusionary registration schemes and demands for personal information.
>If you are a developer or user who values digital freedom, you can help. Write to your Member of Parliament, Congressperson or other representative, sign petitions in defense of sideloading and software freedom, and contact the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) team to express why preserving open distribution matters. By making your voice heard, you help defend not only F-Droid, but the principle that software should remain a commons, accessible and free from unnecessary corporate gatekeeping.
A plain reading of your quote still does not provide any evidence of GP's claimed "F-droid does not want to be the outreach person/org for any issue on an app".
Feel bad for the RubyGems community, sending my gratitude and empathy. Ruby was a leap in my career, and i have a soft spot for the language and community
I'll wait for RubyCentral's side on this, but on the face of what's written, these actions do not seem to be transparent or in good faith. Is there something posted from RubyCentral's side?
I wish the Ruby community strength, and a transition over to a community-owned org, one way or another.
(With NPM, WordPress, now this - seems like package repositories are becoming a flashpoint of corporate takeovers..)
IMO if you're a technical decision maker, you should ignore fair source/business source stuff with extreme prejudice. These are fundamentally incompatible with the goal of having autonomy for your systems.
Only pick these if they're non-critical, have a significantly higher RoI, or a high commodity item.
A ton of these new system languages can't seem to let go of exceptions (and/or null), which is increasingly being shown to be bad design. I would wager good money that a significant majority of those who disagree have not used exceptionless languages in anger.
Personally, I would learn any of them for a job - but not for joy. Exceptions subtract joy.
V is definitely worth looking at (but I have found the time yet).
A chicken and egg problem is highly unlikely. Here's a few probable situations:
1) A fdroid equivalent pops up, which them becomes a collection of fantastic open source apps, and soon develops a strong user base.
2) Google launches play store for iPhone, which will on day 1 get millions of users.
3) Meta launches metaStore, which so the only way to get Facebook, threads, Instagram and WhatsApp. This becomes the fastest growing store in a matter of a week.
One may personally not like this world - but imo it's a better world than the one we have - personally for (1) to exist.
> 3) Meta launches metaStore, which so the only way to get Facebook, threads, Instagram and WhatsApp. This becomes the fastest growing store in a matter of a week.
Why? They don't do this on Android.
At then end of the day the number of active users would fall if they do this. That's unavoidable. So what incentives do they have to not distribute on the App Store? It's not like (unlike in Epic's case) Apple is requiring Facebook to hand over 30% of its revenue.
fdroid is of course great. Extremely niche and not that significant, though.
> Google launches play store for iPhone, which will on day 1 get millions of users.
Amazon tried that on Android. Of course I would expect Google to do much better but that doesn't mean a lot.
On #3, Meta could have done it for Android and I don't think they did. Actually if Android is a god estimation of how it looks like with 3rd party stores, it won't be super disruptive.
Unless the iOS market is so lucrative it will garner far more interest.
This will rightly push Apple in the right direction - to bring the right OS controls at the operating system level / store API level, and not leave things up to apps. This is a better world, despite short term issues with metaStore.
> bring the right OS controls at the operating system level / store API level, and not leave things up to apps
This will almost certainly be litigated. We also haven’t broached national laws mandating a government-controlled App Store. (Would expect this to emerge in right-wing Europe or India first.)
Here's one line of thought - You can hand over 130K to your son, and let him decide.
Then he'll have to treat that as an investment, either into college (and hence he'd hopefully be Very Serious about it), or use it for something else - travelling, entrepreneurship, MF/stock investment, etc. The weight of the decision and the ensuing use of the monies are both the payoff, not a degree per-se.
