residentfoam

This! Right to the point.

I think Texas got this right. Higher property taxes are assessed every year on the current property value. This has the positive effect to keep the real estate market within reason. Home owners have no incentive to see their taxes explode, unless they plan to sell and move.

CA is a mess! And don't get me started on the fact that property taxes pay for public schools, so if I buy a property today say at $1M whereas my neighbor bought 10y ago and payed $100k guess who is paying the most to finance schools ? It is utterly unfair!

Hence, after almost a decade in SF, I and my finally finally moved on, I kept my job and bought a nice, modern, luxury house in Austin! I and my family are super happy now.

I voted democrats my entire life, I have now realized how wrong I was! SF and CA turned me into a republican! And that's what I vote now.

Yeah I looked into home prices rent/buy. True that you can find something _cheaper_ but not cheap/good enough to justify the lower salary and less tech opportunities. I came to the conclusion that Boston is just as expensive as SF but with less opportunities.

Still, I am sure Zurich wouldn't even come close to the number of opportunities one get in SV.

My LinkedIn account is always flooded by recruiters. That gives engineers leverage to seek new and better opportunities all the time.

Plus networking is also a big one.

Unless you get a job at Google/Oracle and planning on retiring there, SV wins hands down.

The language barrier is also a no go along with cost of living.

If I could, I'd leave tomorrow, but, besides tech, there is another unique aspect of Bay Area: the Biotech scene.

My wife works in Biotech and the only other alternative for us would be the Boston area. But, after running some numbers pro/cons, the Bay Area wins.

So we are stuck here ... for now.

The weather is also overrated. SF weather in particular is boring and sucks!

The weather in SF is boring. Seasons are much better. I like cold winter, fall, warm spring and hot summers.

Had terrible experience with AirBnB support. I had to reach out to them on Twitter and eventually someone got back to me!

You would expect their site to have a clear link to support. Good luck with that.

Clearly a project built for the sole purpose of getting a promotion and then move on. I wonder why would they ever even consider building this thing oO.

fake it until you make it

if you have years or decades of experience you should have a large network of colleagues

yes, but more often than not, those colleagues best interest is not YOU but their employee referral :) .

At least in my experience, they often try to oversell the company they work at, as the best place to work, trying to get you to join, even if they know it is crap.

I do my own research and always take "ex-colleagues" advises with a grain of salt, basically I mainly trust my judgement, balance sheets for public companies and buzz around like glassdoor, blind, etc .. :)

Let's put aside Chernobyl, Fukushima and all the safety/economic/environment implications those incidents have had.

What about the nuclear waste ? How/where are we gonna store it ? And for how long is gonna be safe, before containers start leaking radioactive st into the environment ? Nobody wants to live anywhere near that st. That's a big problem.

It is also Google.

Looking forward to a Google Container

If I were the US authorities, I'd start asking/demanding Google to stop SSO across Search/GMail/Browser.

Just because I am a GMail user does not automatically mean that you can trace all my web search.

In addition, I'd demand removing Captcha-alike when using VPN services, to avoid them from tracking my IP.

I mean, even if you are not logged-in, they can still correlate IPs across products.

Where was the antitrust in all these years ?

I think it is a little too late now. Companies like Google have grown to the size where it is now impossible to stop them from being a monopoly.

I don't think there is anything, anyone in the world can do to really allow a fair competition in the space.

As for the fines that e.g EU has inflicted to Google in recent years, they are simply ridiculous, considering Google's revenues.

I stand with Apple!

I deleted my FB account years ago, never used Instagram. Unfortunately I am forced to use WhatsUp because of my family :( .

I think it is time to put a stop at this selling user data business. Selling user data and ads is not an Apple business, so I trust Apple vs Google, where the majority of their revenue comes from ads.

I have also recently switched to DuckDuckGo and so far I am happy with it.

In a professional context (and not only), one would think that this should be the normal expected good practice. But unfortunately, that is not the case.

It is so surprising (well not really) to see how, in most cases, developers put so little to close to zero effort in writing proper commit messages and more in general to have a clean commit history. They simply don't care and you keep seeing garbage commits with non-sense to close to empty message and description. Sadly enough this is seen as normal and just accepted.

Every single team I have been working with from small to large organizations I always had to pick up on the "write proper commit history" fight. And even after extensive explanations on why you should do that, people simply don't care and they keep pushing stuff like: "fix", "updated class z" and stuff like that.

Commit history does not seem to be part of the review process.

Sometimes it is just so depressing to see how so unprofessional software engineers are.

I used ORMs JPA/Hibernate in several projects/teams and the outcome is always the same: things always get messy and overcomplicated, few reasons :

- they push developers to design super-normalized db schemas that look beautiful on paper but are horrible in practice

- the average developer has a very superficial knowledge of how ORMs work and this often leads to bad code/performance

- soon or later you will find yourself fighting the "framework" because what you are trying to do does not fit their model (e.g: upsert)

In my experience, this whole idea of abstracting from the DB is faulty at its root. You want your code to be close to the DB so that you can use all the greatest and latest functionalities without waiting for the framework X to support it.

I have found that JOOQ or simply Spring JdbcTemplate in most cases are more than enough.

I have mixed feelings about this.

As society, we seem to be ok with millennials fresh out of college making hundreds of thousands of $$$ a year for a bunch Javascript that allows people to share pictures of their butt with their friends BUT we are not ok with doctors who literally - save lives - getting paid according to their responsibilities?

Same goes with football/basketball/etc.. players whose sole purpose in life and responsibilities are to throw a ball somewhere and for that, they are covered in gold!

I think doctors should be paid a lot of money and on the other hand, many other professionals should be paid way less compared to what they make now!

That said, this proves, yet another time, how unfair and inefficient this whole health insurance system is.

Health care should be a universal right and should be provided as a public service at a minimum cost for single contributors. People have the right to getting sick and receive the best possible care without going bankrupt or having to sell their houses for it.

It is that simple.

On this, the EU model wins hands down compared to the US one. And it's time for Americans to open their eyes and realize how unfairly they have been treated in this regard for their entire lives.

I find myself browsing Netflix but not finding anything interesting. Old movies and low-quality content. I am deleting the subscription.

is a truck load of cash

it is relative, for normal people it is indeed a ton of cash, but you have to compare that to the size of FB. In that respect, $5B is not that much.

$5B is peanuts for FB, just Mark personal wealth is ~$74B, he could pay the fine himself.

The should have fined FB on some % of their total revenue, like GRDP. I'd say 15/20% at least.

So you are saying that children "have a massive impact on climate change" ?

I don't have any statistics that can either confirm or dispute that assertion. But I will gladly ban SUV and Cruise s in favor of whatever climate impact children can have.

The way I see it is that you don't bring child into the world to "increase" your own personal happiness. They are (at least in my personal case) the result of my own happiness. And yes they require a lot of work, but all the hard work is totally worth it every time your children look at smile at you.

I have been lucky enough to be able to work and live in several countries around the world. One thing in common I noticed in all these places is that guys and girls don't have time and don't want to commit to a stable long relation. They invest pretty much themselves and their time in their career, traveling , parties, dogs, cats and bitcoins :) !

The mantra is to get rich and retire at 40 years old! Travel the world and have fun.

By the time they are somewhat satisfied with theirs status they have reached ~35 years old. At that point is more difficult to find a person and accept to share your life and habits with them.

They are so used to live their own lives that they have extremely hard time compromising any part of it.

I think the society has (wrongly) evolved towards an individualist model at the expenses of families.

I have noticed that people have been more and more intolerant to family flying with kids. It is hard to find kids friendly restaurants, hotels and resorts. People invite you to parties and kids are always not welcome. Not to mention also the additional cost associated with having a family.

But you know what ? I am so happy every day when I come home and my kids run towards me and we play and have fun. I and my wife coudln't be happier!

A piece of advice, stop running, take time off and think about your life beyond work and money. Traveling is fun but is way more fun and interesting when you can share it with some one you care about, like your family!

I look only at the negative reviews. You can trust them to highlight the weak points of a product. So I know at least what would be the "worst" case scenario and if that works for me I buy it.

OKRs could drive some value BUT in my experience they are hard to maintain and update. Most companies keep their OKRs in huge spreadsheets, some even have dedicated people to maintain that insanity.

Teams then work with different tools, e.g: Marketing use Trello, Eng use Jira, you name it and now you have to trace back tasks from different tools to some OKRs defined somewhere in the cloud ... good luck with that.

It's nearly impossible to measure and reconcile progress made on team/sprint basis with OKRs therefore you just shovel random numbers in the spreadsheet and management is happy.

When an OKRs is updated good luck cascading the changes bottom <=> up .

I have yet to find a company that has implemented OKRs in an effective way.

Most of the time managers themselves tell you : "just write something .. it does not really matter" hahahah and there you go ... At the end of the day people have to do OKRs but they keep asking themselves ... why ?

after many years of MacBook Pro I recently switched to Lenovo x1 6th + Ubuntu and never looked back .

people smoked in public EVERYWHERE

There are people smoking in Italy as there are everywhere. They were probably smoking down the street and that's fine. But I have never seen anyone smoking in hospitals, restaurants, cafe, buses, etc .. it is illegal and people wouldn't tolerate that.

That being said, of course, there are always people that do not respect the laws as everywhere else in the world.