Sadiba

US Credit Card: Making Amazon/iTunes aware you have arrived...

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:08:35 -0700

Even though you are physically present in the US, Amazon and Apple may be suspicious when you try to switch to the US App Store or use Amazon MP3 with your existing account. If you have no or little history with Amazon or iTunes, starting a new account with a Amazon or iTunes gift card is easy enough, but you will encounter others services that want proof of your location.

You are going to run into the situation where you need to provide a credit card with a US billing address - possibly even a card number from a US bank. You will generally get a credit card with or soon after your bank account, but that might take a while. In the mean-time, you would like to enjoy the online services you have coveted for so long…

An easy way to do this is go to a Safeway or similar store and buy a prepaid debit card or gift card. Some cards allow you to reload them with additional funds, but you should watch out for charges on these. You will generally need to register these on a web site and update your details (name, address, and so forth).

Add this credit card to your Amazon or iTunes account. In Amazon’s case, you may need to make this the default credit card and/or default credit card for 1-Click purchases, and you may need to log out and back in again.

You probably do not want to use your prepaid or gift card for your actual purchases (either because of per-purchase charges, or because it will not have much money on it). Instead, you can buy Amazon gift cards online for yourself with your foreign credit card, or buy Amazon and iTunes gift vouchers in many stores.. This should tide you over until you get a US credit card.

(I do not recommend trying this if you are not staying in the US for some time — Apple and Amazon probably have systems to prevent abuse, and you could get your account suspended and yourself potentially into other trouble.)

Getting a Social Security Number

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 22:52:09 -0700

Background

Social Security Numbers (SSNs) are a hack to get around the lack of national identity numbers in the US. Originally, it was used by the government to track income and benefits, but gradually it has become the de facto means of identification as it is the only unique identifier available to employers, banks, medical insurance, and other companies. A credit record, for example, is tracked primarily through an SSN.

You can only get one if you can work legally in the United States, and you must get one if you are working there. (Some US non-alien residents challenge that last bit, but I don’t think you should try that as an alien.)

Your first days without an SSN

When you arrive in the US, you’ll probably be in temporary housing. As you start getting settled and looking for a more-permanent option, you will start to run into people asking for your Social Security Number.

You can generally do the following things without an SSN, but it will limit your options:

Open a bank account
Start working
Start a lease on your first flat

You will most likely run into resistance if you walk into a bank and try open a bank account without an SSN. You will want to bring proof of your temporary, non-resident, nature — if you have an L1 or H-1B visa and have just arrived, you won’t yet meet the “Substantial Presence” test, and thus would be considered non-resident at this point (but I’m not a lawyer, so please verify this yourself). So, your passport(s) with the entry stamp and with your visa and your offer letter or some other proof of employment (a letter) and of salary (letter or payslip), possibly with a pre-filled W-8BEN form. Opening a bank account before you arrive in the US may be much easier through an international programme.

You can accept a job and start working without an SSN. Your employer will be on your case for you to apply for one and to let them know what it is once they get it. This is so they can provide the right information to the IRS for your income.

You can get a lease on a flat, but you may need to shop around. Some people will just flatly refuse you without an SSN. Others will accept your situation, and request your passport details for verifying your identity in the mean-time. But getting a lease on a flat means paying a deposit, which means a cheque, which means a bank account. You can potentially use a Moneygram or other funded cheque if you get stuck here, but speak to your landlord about it before you try.

You probably won’t be able to:

Get any credit, including an unsecured credit card (or, possibly, any credit card at all)
Get enrolled into your employer’s health insurance and other benefits programmes

Getting one

Getting one is reasonably easy. Fill in the SS-5 form online, and bring it and your passport(s) with your entry stamp and your visa to your nearest Social Security Administration office. Depending on the day and time you arrive, it may take longer. It took a bit over an hour in my case.

In theory, you can submit your forms and documents through the mail. This is not a great option with your passport. You can send a copy of your passport, but only if it is certified by the issuing agency. I’m not sure that Home Affairs in South Africa would do that.

If you apply for an SSN within two weeks of arriving, you may need to wait for a two week verification period. (Or, at least, that is what I was told at the Social Security Administration.)

Disclaimer

I am not a lawyer or tax consultant, and am occasionally wrong, so don’t use this as any sort of advice. I do aim to be factual, though, so let me know if I’m wrong.

Bootcamp: rest of week 1

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:19:30 -0800

The second day of Bootcamp (Wednesday, for those keeping count) came with little instruction. Many of us did not even know where to go when we arrived, but through a combination of guesswork, internal Facebook tools, and following each other, we all managed to find our desks.

We had each been assigned at least two pretty different real-world tasks. As an example, my three tasks:

A reasonably trivial front-end change, ultimately a single line change
A complete rewrite of a few endpoints in a new Facebook framework
Adding SSL support to a client library

I suspect most people spent most of the day just getting used to the environment. For the first time in my life, there were more than two Emacs users around me — in fact, this particular bootcamp group is at least vocally dominated by Emacs users. There has been a lot of Emacs configuration sharing going on lately. I decided to start from scratch on a pathogen-based vim configuration — this is being built here.

Facebook takes its internal tools and processes seriously, and we have been taking a bit of time to get to know these tools in a real-world usage context. From source control, testing, code review, and being included in a release, there were new things to learn. From an early-on outside perspective of someone who loves building and tweaking such things, it is all very easy to use, easy to understand, and designed to keep things moving swiftly and safely. Still a bit apprehensive using them for the first time, though…

Thursday had a technical presentation — a look at how PHP code is written at Facebook today, the various libraries and frameworks available to a developer on the Facebook web site. I am no fan of PHP the language, but I am very impressed by the expressive power that some very intelligent engineers have made available to their fellow developers. The progression was amusing:

At Facebook Bootcamp on PHP programming libs. “Duh, of course” to “Did that before” to “Clever!” to “Woah!” to mind-blown in 1.5 hours.3 Mar via webNeil Blakey-Milner
nxsy

On Friday, we were introduced to release engineering. At this point, I was entirely unsurprised that I walked out impressed with the tools, processes, and people involved in it.

Friday closed off with the weekly update and Q&A session led by Zuck (by which he is universally referred). I’m not entirely sure what I expected going in, but I left more reassured about my decision to move half-way across the world to come work here. What he is like in person (especially, perhaps, if you’re the person who took the site down) is something I do not yet know, but in front of the collected employees he was quietly confident, frank, and down-to-earth. In particular, I liked how quick he was to say he didn’t know, and to call on those who could answer questions better than he could.

Bootcamp: day 1

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 09:54:45 -0800

Facebook is very proud and vocal about its Bootcamp, which is a programme that every engineer, whether a fresh graduate or a seasoned manager, goes through in their first six weeks. After Bootcamp, the engineers head off to teams throughout the company, usually to the team they most want to join.

The first day of Bootcamp included a half-day of fairly in-depth presentations and workshops covering how to get set up developing at Facebook, an overview of getting from an idea to something that can be pushed out, an overview of how Facebook is put together architecturally, and an overview of the code layout of the Facebook web application.

It was fast (you’ll hear me say that word a lot, I imagine) and very suited to my preference of understanding the breadth of a system, and where to find out more about each component. It’s fairly amazing watching a few simple commands quickly make it possible for me to start working — productivity and automation are given a lot of attention here. By the end of the day, I felt fairly comfortable that I would be able to achieve one of the real-world tasks that were assigned to me.

Even this early on I can see how this process will likely forge strong relationships between a group of engineers that will ultimately end up spread across the various teams within Facebook, refreshing inter-team communication. Mentors and Bootcamp presenters offer a connection to the existing group of engineers, as do the members of their future teams.

Orientation at Facebook

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:10:51 -0800

Orientation is a mature and well-honed operation at Facebook. It covers everything you would expect to be there, but not in the way you have had it covered before, and a lot you would not expect to be there. The pace is fast — just below breaking point — but there is plenty of opportunity to ask questions and get very detailed on any particular aspect of the company, the people in it, the culture, and its processes.

You are shown a lot of respect and responsibility. Firstly, by having some really important people in the organisation talk with you very openly. It is not a sterile presentation — you’ll hear the occasional swearword as you would find in any conversation. Perhaps the most commonly repeated phrase around how to behave now that you are Facebook employees is “be mindful”, with a common undercurrent of “we are all adults, we should behave like them”.

Of my newly-joined fellows, even the geeks most skeptical about HR that I spoke to seemed impressed when it came to the end.

I’m still trying to figure out what I can and can’t say, so I’m going to err on not saying anything more, but please let me know if you want to know anything in particular.

A bit of history - Dinner on Day 1

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 09:03:13 -0800

It seemed appropriate that Aidan and I had our first dinner here with Gary, a fellow South African working for Google in Zurich, since being here follows pretty linearly from his occasional queries about my interest in working at Google with him over the past several years.

Initially, there was little interest — if I have my timeline right, I was working full-time writing Open Source code, leading development on the KnowledgeTree document management system. Fulfilling work in South Africa — why would I want to leave?

After getting a little burned out two and a half years later and taking a less turbulent job at a more corporate environment though, I was bored. Looking around, the industry seemed dominated by boutique software development houses, agencies, and corporate environments, and I was interested in building infrastructure and product. I took him up on his offer to kick off the recruitment process.

This stalled after I was asked to come for on-site interviews, as I had been approached by Yola (then SynthaSite) with pretty much what I wanted to do, based in South Africa. Probably one of the most interesting startups kicked off from South Africa needed someone to build infrastructure for it to scale its operations and development effort. Again, why would I want to leave?

Fast forward two and a half years, and I returned to looking at the local job market, and again there was little going for infrastructure and product — at least not on something I wanted to work on.

A Facebook recruiter, Cathy, noticed me on the attendee list from the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Initially, I was skeptical — I thought that immigration for Aidan and I would have been much easier to Zurich than it would have been in the US — but she was adamant that Facebook would be able to guide us through the process. My previous phone interviews with Google made me confident I would get to the Facebook on-site interviews, which got me over the inertia of starting the process off.

I was still cautious, as I did not want to get my hopes up in case it did not pan out. I was encouraged by Gary and others (you know who you are) periodically through the process to take the chance that it might, and it did. That encouragement got me through the occasionally harrowing ordeal of getting a job in a new country.

It is possible I would never have had, or gone through with, this opportunity if it weren’t for the occasional pokes about considering working overseas for a few years, the encouragement to do the Google interviews and the confidence that brought when doing the Facebook ones, and the pick-me-ups during the whole process.

Waking up - Day 1, early morning

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:00:00 -0800

I have woken up and gone back to sleep at least five times since we went to bed at around 7:30pm last night. This time (around 7am), I realise I will not be going back to sleep. I have been listening to my boyfriend, Aidan, sleep for a while now. He deserves it. We both do.

The trip was unusually harrowing. I have flown Cape Town to San Francisco numerous times in the past three years, but this one certainly stands out. 45 minutes at check-in because of some dodgy data in our bookings, holding up the plane from Cape Town to Johannesburg. In Johannesburg, a sudden lightning storm developed after we had boarded our plane, delaying take-off by an hour. Finally, in San Francisco, I had to restart my passport/immigration control interview three times for unknown reasons.

The last few nights have not contained the best sleep. Co-ordinating travel with a 10 hour timezone difference can be troublesome at best, but I ended up on a Saturday morning hoping that my flight was booked for Thursday, but instead finding an email asking for dates of birth instead. The worry about whether we’d make it on time for my Monday 28th February start at work meant a weekend of poor sleep. Then, on Monday night, we were told we were flying on Wednesday! A whole 24 hours of last-minute apartment clearing gone from our schedule.

Before that, worry over my H-1B application being accepted, my visa interview, and Aidan’s visa interview periodically surged and were resolved over the course of four months. Before those, worries about how to fix my work situation, whether I would find a job I thought I would enjoy, whether I would get the job I thought I would enjoy were there for chronologically for the previous year and a half.

My mind is unusually clear now, though. The only immediate worry is that I need to fill in some forms and fax and mail them to get my bank account set up. “Far” in the future is finding a place to stay. But, mostly, I am thinking about writing this blog post (the first in about a year and a half after 6+ years of blogging) and feeling expectant about the time to come.