How Github destroyed my life
Yes, I am a Syrian. And yes I live in Syria. I am not gonna hide that anymore. I am a junior software developer with only 1.5 years experience. I work hard like really really hard. I want to be a professional, and I am grinding day after day to make it, to get out Syria and get a visa and end all of this suffering. Recently I got a job, a remote Nodejs backend developer in a company based in Berlin. Very complex system, that includes Mongodb, ES, Redis and so many other internal projects. For a junior developer, that was scary af, but I worked hard day after day to understand the system. Only after 2 weeks, I was deploying to production, I understood the importants parts of the system so quickly. People asked me questions, mentioned me on Slack to give my opinion. I was there sitting on my laptop all day, and just enjoying my time and escaping all the shit around me in this country. Last Tuesday, I was working on an ugly bug, and it was 9 pm and still working, finally I got that sweet green light on Jenkins, so I went to Github to check if everything is correct and then suddenly I got restricted because my VPN just stopped without any reason, and Github noticed that I logged in from Syria so they restricted me for that. My company was afraid it may affect their repos, or causing them troubles so they fired me. It is just so unfair. Getting this job was everything I dreamed of and now I am on the edge like I lost everything. I can't get a proper job here, no one does code review, or standups or devops, and I don't care about the money, I just want that. I don't know what to do, all what I want is to leave Syria, and start a new life where everything is normal.
It must be very hard for you feeling this way 😔.
It is just some painful, I loved the people that I worked with. It is been the most happy time in my life, and now being in bed since two days, and the worst part I can't do shit about it
Why did GitHub block? What's wrong with logging in from syria
I somewhere read that even Coursera is not available there.
Due to U.S trade controls law restrictions
Apply for diversity visa in US?
US will never give a Syrian a visa. It is impossible right now
Am sure US has other avenues. Can't you reach out to non profit orgs or something? There are many who apply for asylum? You need to explore these options Good luck!
It though it was easy to spoof IP.
So sorry to hear that. PM me. Send me resume. I can refer you to Google and Amazon and other companies where I have contacts. Start leetcoding if that is not restricted.
Thank you so much for that. I will dm you my resume. But I guess I am not quilified for thos campanies
You won't know if you don't try. Besides, if you were able to wrestle with that other codebase and pump out stuff in two weeks then that probably says a thing or two about what you're capable of.
Anyone know if Google is able to hire people from Syria?
I'm sorry to hear of your troubles. I'd recommend that you apply for jobs outside of Syria and hope you get picked for an interview and visa. You should treat this job hunting process like a job itself - dedicate 8 hours a day to it. To keep your skills up, consider contributing to open source, maybe a humanitarian project (they'll need more skills in line with what you've been doing.)
Don't worry bro... Whatever is meant for you can't miss you... I know it feels really hard and awful but keep hopeful that things will get better. I am sure getting out of Syria will be a pain, if possible at all. Just hang in there
Thanks for your words
Wasn’t Github doing what it was told to do by the US government, or am I missing something? Don’t shoot the messenger.
It doesn't matter tbh, at the end of the day I lost my job based on where I live
You have your government and the US government to blame. GitHub didn’t have a choice.
How difficult is it to move out of Syria? Could you just move to Berlin?
I need a visa to move. It is near impossible to get on. And i was hired by a third party and the company didn't have a plan right now to hire a backend with a visa sponsership( they need to meet the min salary for the visa in that case)
German blue card visa is very easy with a degree