accountatwork

replies, I have hardly ever seen them used before they were removed. in any case, the new implementation is much better

How are so you sure that a feature you never used is better than it was before it changed? Even if I'd never used tumblr, I would find this response to be incredible, in the original sense of the word.

Replies are so bad that I don't use tumblr anymore. They used to just load in a normal HTML page, but now you get a page with lots of suggested posts, and some sort of pop-over with replies that's too slow to really be usable even on my brand new iPhone. It's usable on desktop if you want to wait a few seconds for enough CSS and javascript to load that the pop-over shows up, and then scroll through and read a long list of replies.

Yahoo uses Bing because Microsoft was willing to cut Yahoo a better deal than Google, which happened because Microsoft was more desperate than Google. That's not exactly a good thing and it's not really a meaningful number.

It would be different if Yahoo users used Yahoo because Yahoo uses Bing, but that's not the case. For example, Bing gets used in some searches because they cut Yahoo a good deal, and Yahoo pays Firefox to be the default search provider. That has nothing to do with Bing's search quality.

I don't know if this was changed for the external release, but when Windows 10 was rolled out internally to employees at Microsoft, a significant fraction (but not all) employees weren't notified and had their machines reboot without warning. This happened in the middle of the workday and caused a lot of employees to lose half a day, and that's in the happy case where nothing went wrong with the install.

I flagged this article on purpose because I don't consider a random Reddit thread to be a legitimate source.

Maybe you also won't consider a random HN thread to be a legitimate source, but if you ask MS employees you're sure to find some who were either hit by this or know someone who was hit by this.

IBM is particularly dysfunctional in this regard. I keep in touch with a lot of friends at IBM and a common story is that they'll cut headcount by one on a local team and hire two or three people overseas. The overseas people will require so much handholding to produce correct work that it consumes in entire person's time locally, negating any potential cost advantage and causing massive delays, as simple work items require corrections taking multiple round trips between people in different time zones.

I don't have anything against overseas labor and I've worked at companies where the overseas dev teams are first class citizens and produce work that's comparable to the work produced here, but IBM is not one of those companies.

we put our kids in school five days a week, eight hours a day

Do kids spend 8 hours a day at school now? Back when I was in school, it was 9-3, including an hour for lunch, plus 5 minutes between classes. On top of that, we got a lot more vacation than I've gotten at any job. If I do the math on it, we spent a total of less than 1000 hours a year in school, less than half the time I spend at work in a year.

A software engineer at Google earns, on average, $127k per year [1]. We multiply that by 1.4 [2] to obtain a cost per employee of $177k.

That ignores RSUs, signing bonus, and other bonuses, which make up the majority of the compensation package for senior engineers.

Even at entry level, total comp (ignoring insurance, cost of office space, free food, and other things that aren't directly paid to the employee) is over $127k/yr. A baseline new grad offer last fall included $180k of stock, or $45k/yr, on top of a six figure salary plus a $50k signing bonus. This probably goes without saying, but new grad offers can go significantly higher if the new grad has strong competing offers, and senior offers start out even higher and have a much larger range.

[Tom] Chavez thinks industry titans like Larry Page, the chief executive of the Alphabet holding company that includes Google, are intentionally driving up salaries. “If I was Larry, I’d do the same thing: throw a few more million at people and cut off everyone else’s oxygen.”

Cut off everyone else's oxygen? There are maybe 10 companies that hire in volume and are willing to match top tier offers. The companies that aren't willing to match top tier offers could do so by hiring fewer people and paying them better, but they choose not to. Those companies are cutting off their own oxygen.

Some companies are willing to pay more than others, often by 2x or more, and those companies have a lot more options when it comes to hiring. That's how the market works now that the wage suppressing no-poach agreement has been canceled. And frankly, that's how it should work. Companies should be able to go out and pay market rate to get the people they want. And people should be able to take advantage of that.

I'm past the edit window here, but it's also not to the point. The point is that, by incentivizing reviews, you skew the sample of reviewers. Even if we didn't have decades of research showing that giving people toys changes their behavior, it would still change the sample of reviewers and make the rating both meaningless and misleading.

with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other.

That's intuitive but factually incorrect. There's a large body of empirical research that shows that giving away trivial tokens has a significant impact. This is true for everything from charitable donations to sign-ups for services to survey responses. Not to mention ratings for college courses, which are, in the aggregate, more expensive than Hack Reactor.

That's shady. Normally, there's a bias such that people who are disgruntled are more likely to post a review than people who had a good experience. If you take that bias into account, a 4 star rating is pretty good, 5 stars is excellent, and so on.

But if you flip that bias on its head, 5 stars becomes a mediocre rating. That's ok if you've disclosed what you've done, but out of 165 reviews only one mentions that people are incentivzed to write reviews with free swag.

I have learn that during the interview process unless it is written down and signed then it is probably a lie.

This happened to me when I took a job at Microsoft and it sucked. The worst thing was that when I asked around I found that Microsoft does this kind of bait and switch all the time and that a lot of other people were in a similar situation and thought that it was normal.

It's not normal. People should not lie to you about what a job is going to be, and there are many companies that will try to give you good information about what the job will be like.

15k barely covers the engineers employed by Google alone at the time. The class action lawsuit covers 64k employees, and that's a subset of the employees affected. If your argument is that Eric Schmidt's entering in the agreement only affected employees at Google, that's clearly false. A single company no-poach agreement would clearly be worthless, so it must be the case that Eric Schmidt's actions affected employees at other companies. If you believe some of the latest news, the agreement spread to enough companies that 1M employees were directly affected: https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage.... Schmidt and Jobs were central in creating the agreement and its spread.

As for the second order effects, do you know a hiring manager? Ask them about how competitive offers have changed since the no-poach agreement was canceled. The effect is much larger than just having to keep up with the across the board raise Google gave to their employees when the agreement expired, which was itself non-trivial.

which likely affected 15,000 software developers at most

Where does this number come from? When the wage fixing agreement was canceled, Google immediately issued an across the board raise, and compensation has increase very quickly since then. That's 15k software devs right there, not even considering the second-order effects, which are surely non-zero.

Cool site, but it's really too bad Google isn't willing to open up offices outside of California (like, say, Portland? :) )

Google has teams in Portland and the office has grown enough that they just got a new building: http://www.google.com/about/careers/locations/portland/

I believe you're overestimating what it takes to get a job at Google (or Facebook or whatever other company you might be thinking of).

As someone who's approaching middle-age and has done a wide variety of interviews, it's my experience that large companies like Google have less age discrimination than trendy startups. If you don't want to work at Google because you don't think it's a good fit, I think that's a totally valid reason. But if you don't think you can get a job there because you're too mediocre at actual programming, I think you're simply wrong. For all I know, you actually are a mediocre programmer. That doesn't matter.

It's not possible to be too mediocre a developer to get a job at Google because the interview process doesn't measure how good a developer you are. It is possible to be too mediocre at whiteboarding algorithms and answering the brand of design questions they ask, but those are learnable skills.

I don't have enemies, but I've made enemies. In both cases, I said something that accidentally publicly embarrassed them, and it seems to have enraged them for life.

They both appear to be angry, unhappy, people much of the time, and I see no reason to return the favor and become unhappy in that particular way myself.

When I've seen this happen, it's been pure mismanagement. An order goes out to do layoffs, so people get laid off. Within days, people realize that they've laid off critical employees who can't be replaced and they get hired back as contractors. The employees who got laid off aren't happy about it, so the ones that do come back demand huge raises and some don't come back.

Mozilla devs appear to be completely out of touch with what their core goal should be . . . Instead the Process is holy and cannot be altered

They made a mistake. They then fixed it and admitted exactly what the mistake was. Because they did so, they're called completely out of touch.

I often advocate for my employer to be more open in our postmortems, but responses like this make it impossible for my side to win the argument against folks who claim, quite reasonably, that admitting any kind of mistake will result in people using it against us later.

So you're saying that you don't know anyone who buys in the quantities that we do, but definitely know what we pay?

I think you're responding to something that's not what I'm saying here. I never claimed that our pricing is relevant to you. Just that your pricing isn't relevant to us and that you're making generalizations that aren't valid outside of your niche.

Sure, you won't get much of a discount from anyone for quantities of a few hundred. You might be looking at a 2x price difference, which is pocket change for a few hundred machines. In quantities of hundreds of thousands or millions, the price difference is well over an order of magnitude because Solarflare won't play ball the same way other vendors will.

That adds up to a significant number, even if it's "only" 10%-20% per server, and you're probably overestimating the cost of the rest of the server since large companies are able to get steep discounts on almost everything in the quantities they buy in.

Mellanox etc. tested similar but had less helpful sales engineers

We've found Mellanox engineers to be more helpful than Solarflare folks. I don't think that's because one company has inherently more helpful engineers. We're just not in a market that Solarflare cares about and you're not in a market that Mellanox cares about.

if you actually care about latency, you do not use windows nor use the public cloud

You might be surprised by how many HPC shops have moved from fancy in-house infiniband networks and custom fabric to cloud hosted HPC clusters. HFT isn't moving to the public cloud anytime soon, but a number of large customers who care about sub-microsecond network latency have found real value in moving to the public cloud.

Solarflare isn't the only option for OS bypass. In fact, no major cloud vendor uses Solarflare NICs even for applications where OS bypass is critical because Solarflare is way too expensive for what you get (the retail price is substantially higher than Mellanox, Annapurna back when you could buy those publicly, etc., without discounts, and the volume discount you get with other vendors is more than an order of magnitude larger than the discount Solarflare will give you).

The advantage of Solarflare is that it's easy to use, but at the scale large cloud vendors operate at (millions of machines), it's much cheaper to just have a networking staff that can properly operate another vendor's NICs.

In case it wasn't clear in the original comment, the big name is usually someone who was only tangentially involved in the project, if at all. Sometimes it's the head of the org the project took place in. They may have approved the budget for the project, but it's rare that the big name did any of the work.

This is like when Tim Bray mentioned that Amazon is great because he hasn't experienced the same problems that have gotten a lot of press lately. Of course he's treated well! He's Tim Bray!

Matt Welsh is exactly the kind of big name that isn't going to lose credit on something. Of course he gets credit! He's Matt Welsh!

Something I've seen at every large tech company I've worked at (which includes the author's company), is that some people do the work for something cool. The next step for them will be to prepare a slide deck so that some big name can give a talk at a conference. That doesn't always happen, but it's common.

Depending on the managers and team leads involved, that kind of thing can also happen when promotions come around. At every place I've worked, a common complaint is that the TL for the project got promoted despite not doing much because they were TL. Of course that's not supposed to happen, but it happens all the time.

The post seems to compare the worst case in academia vs. the best case in industry. You could just as easily flip things around and make industry sound bad.

This is an odd post to voice that complaint on, since the site supports HTTPS.

I interviewed at one of the two companies you mentioned and their total comp package was about equivalent to my signing bonus at a company in Seattle. I like Portland, but not enough to take a 3x-4x hit in compensation to move there.

I know of one company that opened an office in Portland because compensation is so low there. That's great for them if they can hire people at local rates, but it's not really appealing for people who have the flexibility to relocate anywhere.