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jchendy

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Why Use F#? 8 years ago

// no curly braces, semicolons or parentheses

Is this a good thing? It feels like saying "It's English without the periods or line breaks or capital letters."

you could be at Google collecting a 1/2M paycheck

That's director-level compensation. Would somebody whose only experience is 4-5 years of running a startup be hired straight into a director role?

I very much dislike the idea that you, as an employer, are deciding what proportion of their income your employees should be spending on rent.

With rent as a multiplier, it's like they're suggesting 100% of your income goes to rent. It seems like a more reasonable way to take housing into account would be something like:

Salary = Base + Avg Rent

Using that formula, salary might be about $20k more for somebody in NYC than for somebody in Tucson. Using the actual calculator, it's $72k more ($117k vs $45k for senior level and average experience).

Thanks for the detailed response!

I'm a little torn on #1. I definitely don't think anybody should be allowed to be paid less than minimum wage. But on the other hand, if these people are choosing to come to the United States to work these jobs because it's better than what they could get in their home country, it's hard for me to say they shouldn't be able to do it.

Isn't #2 the whole point of sanctuary cities? In theory, the undocumented immigrants in these cities should have no fear of going to police and other authorities. Whereas in other cities the police might actually be obligated to inform immigration officials.

#3 is interesting. Definitely undocumented immigrants make use of government resources, but they also help the economy by providing cheap labor. As far as I know, there isn't a strong consensus on whether the overall impact is positive or negative. For example, here's a brief article that explores both sides a bit: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-thorny-economics-of-illegal-...

In the US, you take the Engineer In Training (EIT) exam when you graduate university, then require 4 years of industry experience before you can sit the PE (Professional Engineer) exam. If you pass that, you can call yourself an Engineer.

I believe you that this is the requirement for some fields of engineering. However, there are thousands of people reading HN with the job title 'software engineer' who did not take those exams.

has anyone you tried to recruit walk away because you mentioned the 40hr/week expectation?

Why would they? Are you imagining somebody who only wants to be part of a team that's overworked?

American females have a very similar experience as American males

How can you say that after reading the first question in the article? Do you think the editor was just cherry picking the most extreme anecdotes they could find?

Well, my own experience is that the $1.49 million would more likely be reinvested in the company as a whole: hire more developers, more salespeople, expand the office, etc

A lot of it also goes to essential business expenses: HR, legal, the AWS bill, the new feature that's currently losing money but will pay off in the long term.

And the person who made the $1.5mm code fix didn't do it on their own. They wouldn't have been able to improve the code if somebody else hadn't already written the first version. And neither of them would have been able to get their code into production if somebody hadn't set up the build and release process for the company. And they never would have been in the position to make the $1.5mm fix if their manager hadn't identified the need for an additional engineer on the team and recruited them. And the company wouldn't exist if the founder hadn't had the idea in the first place. And the company would have blown up last year if the lawyers hadn't made sure the company was protected from a frivolous lawsuit. Et cetera, et cetera.

They are piloting it on internal HR software which I think says a lot.

There's a tendency for people to think that HR software and other internal tools are less important than public products, but if the company is allocating employees properly, that doesn't really make sense.

The engineers working on this HR software all passed the same technical interviews that everybody else did. Amazon could have easily allocated them to some flashy consumer product, but management decided that it's important to have a team working on HR software. So either somebody made a horrible miscalculation when they decided to build the HR software, or this work is equally valuable to all the other work happening.

I think we could give them the benefit of doubt

I've found that this is a much less stressful and more productive way to approach most things in life.

Some of the 60 hr/week employees are gunning for promotions and probably don't care about work life balance. Why should everyone have to compete with that?

That seems totally reasonable. It's similar to the way tech companies have a concept of a "terminal level" where it's considered fine to spend your whole career with no pressure or expectations to earn further promotions.

On the other hand, I'm a software engineer who is able to keep a clear separation between work and personal life, and I would very much appreciate the ability to spend fewer hours on work.

Though as others have suggested, a 3 month vacation every year might be an even better approach to a 75% work schedule.

I've been told by people that work for Amazon that they can barely keep their teams properly staffed

I think that's true of every tech successful company. There's always more +EV work to be done than people to do it, and recruiting quality people is never easy.

It seems short-sighted to suggest that the existence of this problem necessitates working long hours. There are lots of factors to consider:

* It's possible that somebody working 30 hours is actually more productive than somebody working 40 hours, so productivity goes up under the new policy without hiring anybody new.

* It's possible that many more people could enter the workforce if a 30 hour week with a flexible schedule was possible. This working style could be appealing to students, retired people, stay-at-home parents, artists, etc.

* Maybe it's actually okay for productivity to go down. If the company is able to remain stable while getting slightly less done and having much happier employees, perhaps that's a net gain to society.

Why do you want them locked up?

The things I'd like to happen are: 1) Reduce the liklihood that these people will commit further crimes 2) Discourage other people from robbing homes 3) Help you replace the things you lost

I'm not really familiar with the literature on this, but I'd guess there are more effective options than prison for all three of those.