j_baker

It's not as much about how many hours you work so much as how much of your life revolves around your job. Ask yourself this: if things aren't going well in your job, what happens? If your life revolves around one thing and that thing goes badly, it affects your whole life. Having more things outside of work helps a great deal.

AA still has its place. A lot of people like its philosophy. Plus, some people just don't respond to anything else other than its "tough love" philosophy.

Is it just me, or does this seem horrendously insecure? How does this prevent arbitrary third parties from accessing your terminal?

The "show only ads from people who aren't assholes" is basically what AdblockPlus does.

Well yeah... it's completely delusional to think a 3 month developer should earn the median income for programmers.

$75k is not the median income for programmers. $75k is the median income for anyone in SF. Which is exactly my point. To expect engineers to live in SF, you have to be willing to pay exorbitant salaries just to break even. If you want to pay a good salary, you pretty much have to pay 6 figures. Don't like it? Move to Cleveland or Detroit. I'm pretty sure $75k would be considered a great salary there. Just don't complain that developers cost too much and then require them to live somewhere with such a high cost of living.

So what you're saying is that it's "crappy programmer entitlement" to:

* Expect to earn the median income

* Expect to have a decent lifestyle.

* Expect to be able to have a family

Sounds like crappy employer entitlement to me.

Yeah, but you know what? The cost of living has also skyrocketed dramatically in Silicon Valley. I mean, you make it sound like engineers here are on a gravy train where we spend 3 months learning a language and can suddenly move to San Francisco where we just let the money roll in. The truth is it costs a lot to live in the Bay Area these days, and that means that if companies want people to move here they need to pony up and pay a good salary.

That $130k starting salary you mention is enough for a person to afford a studio in the Tenderloin these days?

Honestly, I think these people are dicks: http://kalw.org/post/how-tiny-shipping-container-community-c...

Not only is this an issue of residential codes. The other problem is that they're doing manufacturing in a residential neighborhood that's not zoned for manufacturing. And it's disturbing the neighbors in the area with noise and even sewage spillover.

Well, there are still cases where object pooling might make sense. Some games on mobile devices still use object pooling. I suppose I could also see the need to use object pooling for a very busy server or a very large hadoop job.

At most private companies, stock options aren't worth the paper they're written on. Unless of course the company sells, in which case they're worth slightly more than the paper they're written on. And besides that, to exercise them you usually have to pay a pretty hefty sum. I generally don't consider equity as a part of my compensation package when I work for a private company.

Because there's no one they can sell their shares to. With a public company, you can sell your shares on the stock market.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it would seem like Ocean Acidification would be less prone to "Climate Commitment" than regular climate change. Meaning, if we just stopped emitting greenhouse gases, OA would stop increasing. The rest of Climate change would still keep continuing for a few decades.

You don't. It is not considered necessary for you to correct downvotes.

Blah. Yet another "new-fangled technologies have no place" post. Granted, there's a grain of truth to the core thought. As I've become more experienced, I've seen more frameworks and libraries that re-invent the wheel and solve problems that have already been solved long ago, albeit in a trendier manner.

But at the end of the day, software engineers are technologists. Our job is to create and consume technology. Being afraid of new technology is counter-productive.

You're not trying to say the two are comparable are you?

For better or worse, this is life for top executives. Example: the president of the US's popularity is correlated with the economy in spite of the fact that they have very little control over it. It's not uncommon for one executive to do something totally reasonable under hard circumstances only to get ousted anyway while the next person gets the credit for their actions.

"It happened on her watch."

They quote Shiller as saying that we're in a bubble, but then they conveniently leave out another quote:

But I'm not sure that the current situation is a classic bubble because I'm not certain that most people have extravagant expectations.

Not to mention that Shiller scarcely mentions the tech industry. When he's asked what asset class is the most overvalued, he points to bonds.

What he took was proprietary infrastructure-related code that didn't involve any of Goldman's trading algorithms. His claim is that it was so tangled up with the open source code he wanted that he had to take it out to get it.

How is this any different from when tobacco companies fund studies that say that smoking isn't bad for you?

I think this is a great point. I try to stick to a philosophy of "support the person, critique the idea".

I have to say: working in a civil work environment makes a huge difference in terms of job satisfaction and job performance. Civility works for the business, the worker, and the customer. Nobody really benefits from incivility except for the arrogant power-monger over the very short term.

Are you seriously suggesting that the uncivil boss is the real victim?

I'll say one thing: I think that there really are a number of business groups with vested interests in skewing the science one way or the other. On one hand, you have the Koch brothers who want you to believe global warming is a non-issue and that everything will be fine so keep burning all the fossil fuels you want. On the other hand, green energy companies such as Solar City who have a vested interest in convincing everyone that the world will end unless you install their solar panels on your roof.

I'm not certain I really agree with either end of the spectrum.

I wouldn't treat this as a complete reversal just yet. These kinds of "paradigm changing" studies get shown to be flawed all the time. It's just that the press rarely reports when that happens.

Based on previous studies, it was believed that individuals with social phobia had too little serotonin and that SSRIs increased the amount of available serotonin. In a new study published in the scientific journal JAMA Psychiatry, researchers from the Department of Psychology at Uppsala University show that individuals with social phobia make too much serotonin.

Hold on a sec. What exactly did this study do differently? If the previous studies showed one thing, why should we suddenly believe this study that says it's all false?

I don't see why living in a home and investing in it are mutually exclusive. The way I see it, my monthly housing payment is an investment in addition to a cost of living. Sure it costs more in maintenance, but you also get more customizability. You can paint the walls whatever color you like. You can tear the carpet up and replace it with hardwood or vice versa.

Hey, he worked on this app for a whole 30 hours. That's like 3/4 of a work week!

In all seriousness, when you figure it out, that's about $15/hr. I think a number of entrepreneurs would give their right arm to make that kind of money right at launch. And when you consider that he's probably going to be selling at least a few more copies of this, the money he'll make off of his time investment will grow.

In any event, I hope he didn't quit his day job to make a photo-blurring utility.

You know, it can be very difficult to tell the difference between Bipolar II and unipolar depression because the manic phases are so muted and short. Food for thought. :-)

With very confident people, flattery will get you everywhere. They have to see things your way because they're so smart.

Even better is to convince them that what you're trying to tell them is really their idea. If it comes from them, it can't be wrong, can it?

Though if you find yourself working with enough of this type of person for it to be a problem, I would question whether you're working in the right place.

I think a lot of tech workers are used to being the smartest person in class. When they come to SV and work with lots of other smartest people in class, it can cause egos to clash.