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Infinitesimus

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Human who loves solving problems. Sometimes with code.

Feel free to email me if you ever want to hang out in the Boston area or talk futurism, philosophy and technology.

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That isn't surprising for most people. It is also hard to say without knowing which year and model Porsche she was driving. Someone with a Cayenne Turbo GT will have a different experience from someone with a 1st gen base Macan.

A juniper Model Y is very fast, no engine noise, can drive itself better than a lot of cars on the highway for a similar price, doesn't need gas - convenient if you have a fast charger at home/work, fewer moving parts to think about in your day to day and control.

I like knobs and AA and will never make that trade... but it makes perfect sense for many people who don't mind the interface.

I'm glad Genesis still has knobs and Lexus is getting back to that now. The German luxury cars can't rely on fantastic engines alone forever.

Damn, what a turn of opportunities from just saying yes and showing up (and obviously a ton of hardwork and sacrifices). Thanks for sharing!

I can't resist ...

There were other dramatic events that evening in Cambridge that I think sharpened all our minds and made us appreciate there’s no time like the present, but I’ll leave that story for another day.

... appreciate there’s no time like the present ...

The present is now! Some of us are dying to hear the story.

1. Life isn't fair. The earlier you accept that, the better off you'll be. This unfairness is why you're here posting on hackernews and someone through no fault of theirs is starving trying to cross the Sahara into greener pastures. It cuts both ways.

2. Hard work rarely ever implies financial success.

3. "...second tier job from the perspective of software professionals". Tiers are a made up concept. An Nvidia programmer working on critical HPC work is in a difference league than someone who is very good at making infinite scroll smooth.

Software is a broad field with different specializations. I don't know what you do but you made a bet and it's probably turned out quite well for you. Other people's bets did worse, others did better.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Remember to be grateful for where you are and how far you've come.

It mostly masquerades as performance curves.

You're not being told to pick someone, you're being told that your org cannot really have 80% of people meeting/exceeding expectations and that because reasons (budget), you should review the cusp cases and adjust them down.

No they don't. They _say_ they do (really mainly Amazon) and the rumor develops legs and gets repeated.

To actually do this, you need an objective measure that is repeatable over many different kinds of products, domains and people and they is a very hard problem no one has cracked. Career ladders and some calibrations help to do this but it'd never perfect and people slip through the cracks.

If you're at a big company, you've seen people get a rating that seemed misaligned to their work because an arbitrary curve is enforced or a project has high visibility by sheet luck because an exec was adamant that the project be on the roadmap.

Part of it is how many of these companies handle performance. If you're more likely to get a good rating by building a complex system, you might as well do it and take the money.

These depend heavily on car. What kind of car is this?

The decision to have an annoying beep instead of a soft ding or pop up is stupid but many cars do this. Mine handles seatbelts well and never has a false positive there so it's not a general modern car problem (2021 sonata).

A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders.

There is theory and there is reality. If someone is paying your bills by an outsized amount and they say jump, you will say how high.

The influence is rarely that explicit though. The board knowing that X investor provides 60% of their funding, for instance, means the board is incentivized to do things that keep X investor happy without X having to ask for it.

9 times out of 10, money drives decisions in a captilist environment

$700k is clearly a salary someone got during the bubble.

Research a bit about Netflix's comp philosophy and this will make more sense.

It's not bubble compensation. They aim to beat what someone else will pay for your skills, as long as they want you working there.

Until recently, they also only hired at a single IC level so the range was probably narrower.

It's unlikely that would have worked. 2 big ecosystems seems to be what the market will bear and choosing an Android base for the fire tablets makes a lot of sense.

Very few people are going to bother writing apps for another ecosystem. Also, more apps means less control by Amazon which won't fly