HN user
Do you also advocate for an embargo of China, which pollutes at over twice the rate of the US?
How about embargo of the EU, which currently pollutes at roughly the same rate?
Did you know that energy production in the US is overall more environmentally friendly than in Germany, for example?
lots of of very smart, talented instructors take on these jobs to make ends meet while they look for something else that allows them to pursue their passions with their extensive educations.
My point is that you can't attract and retain top talent by offering low pay and no job security.
You are confirming said point by showing any person of talent taking this job is only for a short, temporary period while looking for something else.
Of course, they are compensated horribly
Non-tenure track academic teaching positions that pay "horribly"... I can already imagine the kind of talent they attract.
From what I know, it's not that "people lie to themselves" about those terrible jobs, but more like the article describes: concerted effort by the employer to flood their reviews pool with inaccurate positive reviews, and muzzle accurate negative ones.
Some of the worst companies I ever encountered also had the best Glassdoor reviews and scores.
Sounds ironic, but makes perfect sense when you consider:
1. When a system is so easy to game simply by acting dishonestly, score will correlate with unscrupulous willingness to lie to your future workforce.
2. For these kinds of unscrupulous terrible employers, Glassdoor is seen as nothing more than an easy way to market themselves. Certainly cheaper than investing in your workforce, trying to make your employees happy, or fixing any of your real issues.
The only time I've done a real take-home in less than 10 hours, it was rejected for not being polished enough.
Because you were competing with folks who were unemployed and probably invested 30+ hours in it.
Not sure what you're arguing.
I'm fine going through tough technical interviews.
I'm not fine spending 3-5+ hours on some trivial coding task that can be gamed and was issued to me by folks who may not have even thoroughly checked my resume.
Given the current supply/demand curve, and the fact that top employers like FAANGs do not require this sort of time and effort (and for a good reason), I don't have to jump through that hoop.
How do you get senior candidates to spend any time and effort on submitting "work samples"?
I'm a senior engineer. Last time I interviewed, I received multiple offers from brand-name employers. None of them required any work samples, just hard technical interviews.
A few times I saw a small unknown company that piqued my interest. I talked to them. Occasionally one would require me to do some sort of a task.
Why would I do it?
I don't need to do any of that for the top employers in the market. Why would I spend hours of my time, and precious coding time, especially on some small company I never heard of before?
I haven't done that in years, and doubt I'll ever do it again. The only way you could get me to do it is if I was desperate for a job.
By requiring this sort of time and effort from candidates, you are screening out the best ones, those who can get multiple offers from great employers without jumping hoops for you.
They also bought Strongloop[0] a while back, so the developers from aqui-hires have to go somewhere.
That would be somewhere else.
Strongloop is in SV, there's no shortage of opportunity for the devs who worked there.
Unless they got some serious golden handcuffs, in which case I'm sure some will stay for the 3-5 years these last.
I only skimmed this rant, but if one interview is terrible, then the interviewing party might be an asshole.
If every interview you ever took is terrible, then you are probably the asshole.
You don't have to use a very large vocabulary to be a solid lyricist.
Yeah, and how well is that going to work out for them? They should have known better than to invest in this company in the first place; companies like that are cults of personality.
So you are saying the investors (who are the current shareholders) stupidly bought into Neumann personality cult.
So now they are paying for their idiocy.
This isn't some failure of capitalism: it's the failure of large, wealthy, sophisticated investors to properly assess their own investment.
Just something to remember the next time a startup CEO tells you that "we" have to "work hard and give up some of our compensation" to "make a positive change in the world".
But I think it's very important to remember that companies can have moral standards and follow them. Many companies don't sell-out in crucial ways, and throwing one's hands up and condemning them all is punishing the ones that stay true.
I agree, which is why I criticize shallow analysis of a company's motivation based on its skin-deep marketing veneer.
In this case it's not even moral standards - the implication is that WeWork's CEO is neglecting his fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value by lining his pocket instead.
That's in fact a corruption of capitalism, it's illegal, and he can be sued for that by shareholders.
I think moral outrage is a very important and effective market force.
I completely agree, which is why it's important to look beyond the marketing.
If a company can breach standards of morality and decency, but get away thanks to some 30 seconds commercial featuring smiling kids, then we will not be effective as a public in enforcing those very real consequences that companies should face for their actions.
Either way, the truth value can be deduced by taking a hard, penetrating, objective look at the commercial entity, its policies, actions, and impacts.
It is not ascertained by buying into the shallowest outer layer of its marketing veneer.
Why would a WeWork object to paying Neumann's rent? WeWork is bascially Neumann anyway! Why would Tesla object to buying Musk's other companies? Tesla is basically Musk anyway!
The shareholders do mind, because these actions may violate the CEO's fiduciary duty to act in their best interest. They can sue him for violating said duty.
Less relevant in WeWork's case, but very relevant in Tesla's case, since it's a public company, and in fact Tesla and Musk have been sued for neglecting their duties before:
https://www.reuters.com/article/tesla-musk-lawsuit/tesla-ceo...
The entire image and “vibe” of this guy / his team is supposed to be an egalitarian re-invention of the status quo. The kibbutz story. The “community adjusted EBITDA.” The rebranding to “We.”
This is all just marketing. It's like believing all the actors in a commercial really are elated and blissful just because they chose the right brand of soda.
I apologize if I came across as overly harsh. I did look up your resume, and it does confirm my assertions. In fact, you are not directly contradicting any of them.
I made three assertions:
1. You will not be able to negotiate away non-compete clauses with large, powerful employers.
2. You may be able to negotiate them as a senior candidate for smaller companies.
3. Junior candidates will find it hard to negotiate their offers, including waiver of non-competes.
You agreed with my 1st assertion.
Your resume shows you to be a perfect example of the 2nd assertion. You are a senior engineer, an expert in his field, who worked in very senior technical roles in a series of small and very small companies. As such, you were in the best possible position to negotiate.
You seemed to dispute my 3rd assertion with your claim that you were able to negotiate non-competes away "early in your career", but your resume shows you took a Lead Programmer position in your very first year of full-time work. So you were never really a junior - you were a senior engineer working for small operations since the earliest stage of your career.
This is great for you, congratulations. It doesn't change the fact that your situation is unique, and doesn't generally apply. Not to most engineers, and certainly not to fast-food and similar unskilled workers mentioned in the article. These are people who don't have much money, really need the job, and often have limited choices in their area. They don't have the money to relocate, nor do they have leverage to negotiate.
So while I applaud you for being in the favorable position to negotiate away clauses since your first year of employment, I still caution against concluding that this is how it works for everyone else as well.
Respectfully, your comment makes no sense.
Yes, you have to be good at your job and hard to replace before you make demands.
You are required to sign a non-compete before accepting the job. You cannot be "hard to replace" because you haven't started that job yet.
They won't even "replace" you - they just won't hire you!
At any rate, I've had plenty of success striking all non-compete agreements
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is possible if you are a very strong senior candidate negotiating with relatively small employers who are desperate to hire you and don't have many alternative candidates.
At larger corporations, I've been told straight up that the non-competes are policy and won't be waived for anyone.
If you check the history of non-compete lawsuits, you'll find some very senior employees being sued, so this statements seem true.
What does "open source contributions" and "community work" have to do with non-compete clauses?
Non-competes prevent you from working for your employer's commercial competitors. I.E. if you leave Uber, you can't go work for Lyft.
Also, it's naive to assume you can just "sell" an employer on a contractual change that goes against their goals.
Saying "I'm a software engineer, and I plan to continue being a software engineer after we part ways, instead of waiting tables" also sounds like a strong "sell", but it does not work based on my experience.
It's not about convincing anyone, it's about power and who has it.
Of course. It also encourages competition, especially from new startups.
Imagine Facebook had to wait for a couple of years to be able to hire any senior engineers with the knowledge and skills to scale their services.
They would lose momentum, and quite possibly fail as their service would be constrained by severe scaling and reliability issues.
The reason Facebook and other unicorns were able to thrive in SV is because they were able to poach dozens of experienced engineers from other companies, that are all arguably its competitors.
If you like startups, non-competes are some of your worst enemies.
I'm a senior engineer, and as I said, I was never able to bargain away a single non-compete clause.
Even with a smaller employer, you will need some bargaining power.
There's research that credits the fact that SV is in California and not, for example, near Cambridge MA, to the fact that non-competes aren't enforceable in California.
My bad, it was Skype, not LinkedIn: https://www.businessinsider.com/skype-scandal-silver-lake-20...
A nation that does not have either strong (and not hindered by law) unions or a minimum wage to support the most vulnerable (your mention of which in the context of your comment comes across as libertarian concern trolling) does not deserve to "grow".
Increasing minimum wage is liable to cause a host of well-known unintended and paradoxical adverse consequences:
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/14/the-real-problems-with-raisi...
To you it seems like a simple way to benefit the poor, but in reality it raises unemployment - a far graver problem - among these very poor you are ostensibly trying to protect.
You can flame that as "concern trolling", but these are not just very real concerns - they are real consequences that have been observed numerous times across history, including in this very case in Korea, where unemployment has risen substantially as a result of the recent minimum wage raises.
My solution to this is simple - abolish the wage.
Truly an excellent practical suggestion for the modern growth economy.
Your comment offers zero practical solutions, or anything but empty moral posturing and inciting inflammatory language.
don't listen to them
GP has replied elsewhere that all his employers were startups that paid him in "worthless options".
Indeed, you won't ever see $400k or even $300k working for startups that "pay" you in illiquid 0.001% stakes in what will surely become a multi-billion dollar runaway success (in which unlikely case your share will be diluted to nothing anyway).
You can certainly stick your fingers in your ears and sing LALALA while the rest of us make real money,. Your life, your choice.
It was always worthless Options that could never be sold. One company's options I worked for 6 years, was worth about 4K after taxes, fully vested.
There's your problem.
Getting paid in options is the exact mistake I've warned about repeatedly in comments throughout this thread.
Yours is a fairly common case in SV: worked in a series of startups that "paid" you in illiquid options that ended up being totally worthless.
I'm willing to bet these very same startups encouraged you to value these options very highly: high 6 and even 7 figures, right?
These places don't pay well, because why should they? Talent is apparently willing to work their ass off for these "worthless options" that are sold to them as vouchers for surefire multi-million-dollar jackpots.
Exactly. The key factor in growth is the production of goods an services.
To easily demonstrate: imagine everyone stopped producing goods and services tomorrow in the US.
Everyone would still have the exact same amount of money, but you will not be able to use it to buy a fresh loaf of bread (since none are being baked) or have your car serviced.
The value of money will drop to zero. It won't matter at all if it changes hands; indeed, it won't, since there won't be anything to buy.
Thinking "money changing hands" powers the economy is thus mistaking effect for a cause.
You take a person that could be producing goods and services in the private sector, and pay him to work in the public sector, where he produces no such goods or services, and often is tasked with creating and enforcing regulations that limit economic freedom.
Clearly you're going to end up with lower economic growth.
The fact he would spend his salary on purchases is small comfort, especially when he'd likely earn a larger salary to spend in the private sector.