thatsenough

If my company announces WFH for the rest of the year, I'll be moving out of San Francisco in a heart beat. The office has been the only thing keeping me here for a long time now.

I imagine SF natives might say, "Good riddance, don't let the door hit you on the way out," and I completely agree. I don't have issues with the city itself, but the value you get for your money here is completely abysmal if you're a renter or potential home buyer.

Or, don’t get lured in by a company offering you huge compensation that you can’t actually touch (without realizing it’s a gamble).

To be fair, even the cash compensation at Airbnb was supposedly pretty high. But I’m not sure whether that’s much consolation now, after they’ve been dangling a golden carrot in front of employees for years.

IMO, this is a matter of public health and should be treated as such (as much as some politicians want to cast this as a partisan issue for political gain).

Not really. You're choosing a definition those words that involves a value judgement.

Because people with the worst symptoms go to the hospital.

How do you differentiate this from laziness/apathy?

Love this, but on the phone the podcast art takes up a lot of real estate and leaves little room for the podcast title.

I’d rather see an even more stripped down UI that leaves more room for the informational content.

Then again, I guess not all podcast episodes have informative and encompassing titles, like articles often do.

Because that doesn't feed into the outrage machine and drive clicks.

So your accusation is that Epstein blackmailed Seth Lloyd or converted him into an Israeli spy/consultant on quantum computing?

Many engineering professors consult with private companies for a fee. So it seems odd that a country would need to take a roundabout and scandalous approach like this to pick a professor's brain, when they could just work though a legitimate-seeming company as an intermediary.

You need to meet some more "average people."

What would Epstein get from Lloyd?

If Epstein was in fact blackmailing the rich and famous, or running a sex trafficking operation for profit, how does he benefit from supplying donations (and whatever else he allegedly supplied) to a quantum computing professor?

I know I would be able to do it.

Freudian slip?

This brought back memories of doing data entry for an insurance company as a teenager. I spent eight hours a day transcribing people's names, addresses, SSNs, and medical ailments, including all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases.

It's weird, now that I think about it. I was just some kid they hired as a temp. We've never really known who's looking at our private data.

After decades of disparaging their Southern California brethren, the Bay Area has become home to America's most superficial people.

Yes, labor market competition is the primary factor. But is there a place in Australia where engineers can work for higher salaries and the same or a lower cost of living?

In the US, the discrepancy between Bay Area and non-Bay Area salaries is not as great as they seem at first glance, once the real cost of living is factored in.

House prices are a function of wages (or, more accurately, have a floor set by wages if land is constrained) not the other way around.

I guess if you state it as a fact, that makes it true?

But if that’s the case, why would the company pay an engineer more when she moves from the Austin office to the NYC office? She has become more valuable to the company overnight? And the most valuable engineers just happen to live in the most expensive cities?

Sorry, but salaries are impacted by cost of living. Because if they’re paying top talent too low relative to cost of living, those engineers will just move elsewhere, as you suggest.

Yes, this puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the housing market, affecting everyone in the Bay Area. I’m not claiming this is good.

Vancouver is a different situation entirely.

Why do you think you're entitled to a $1.5m house at all let alone 3 years out of college?

This is not at all what I said. And most people I know here cannot afford a house 10+ years out of college, unless they’ve worked at a top-paying company all those years.

Who is claiming they’re entitled to it? I’m saying companies are offering it to retain employees, because it’s in the companies’ best interest.

it completely ignores people with real problems, like, oh I don't know, the people who drive the shiny white buses who need to live 2+ hours away.

And there are plenty of people less fortunate than the bus drivers. By your logic, if they don’t like it, they can just move somewhere cheaper. Maybe it’s just too late in the evening, but I’m not really seeing your point here.

There was a peak in the mid-80s, and another around 2005.

CS enrollments reached a max around 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble. But when the bubble burst in 2000-2001, enrollments plummeted in 2002, 2003 and 2004, leading to the local minimum in graduates in 2009.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/images/BS...

Telecommunications engineers produce the worst naming schemes and acronyms of anyone, anywhere.

Any cellular document is a mishmash of alphabet soup: UTRAN, UMTS, PS-CN, SGSN, RNC, RNS, eNodeB, EPC, MME, S-GW, X2-AP, S1, GTP-U, HSDPA, HSUPA, RRC, PDCP, RLC, OFDM, MU-MIMO, and on and on ad infinitum.

You'd think the marketing people would at least get the public-facing stuff right, but they've likely been tainted by association with the engineers.

this whole article can be summed up as "providing a better experience for customers can increase sales"

That, plus "be part of a community you can rely on for capital and labor." Despite the many struggles that immigrants face, they do seem to often benefit from being part of a close-knit community.

As an ordinary, middle-class, non-religious white American from a small family, I'm not sure where I'd turn to find such a network. Open to suggestions, though!

The top firms have gotten themselves into an insane bidding war.

That may be true, but there's more to it than that. The first wave of successful IPOs (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, etc.) caused a spike in housing prices as employees purchased houses. On top of that, companies have added tens of thousands of new jobs, without proportional growth in the housing supply. So housing prices are now absurd, and these companies need to pay more so their employees can buy smallish houses on the peninsula at $1.5-$2.5M a piece and have a middle-class quality of life.

I think these numbers are accurate.

Some of the numbers are skewed by the unicorn startups: since employees at Airbnb and Stripe (and Lyft and Pinterest, at the time these numbers were reported) can't sell their equity, and since the equity may drop considerably after IPO, these companies compensate by offering more of it.

LinkedIn is widely known for paying extremely well (to the chagrin of people at parent company Microsoft). Same with Netflix.

If it's any consolation, most engineers here are not senior/staff engineers and they make less. Rent here is very steep (~$3500/month is the median price for an old 1-bedroom in San Francisco), but the home prices are really insane.

Also, there are many companies and start-ups up here that pay much less. Lots of people scrape by, and lots of people move away.

I personally really like LA (which is not something I can openly admit up here) and hope to transfer there or to San Diego.

I started working at FANG recently, after spending 15 years in a different field. The very first thing I noticed was how young the average employee is. It was a little startling. I've heard different theories:

* Today's big tech companies are still relatively young, so the workforce is young.

* The companies have grown exponentially in recent years, and they've hired many new grads to meet hiring targets. This would also shift the average employee age lower.

* The people who joined these companies 15-20 years ago would likely be very well-off financially by now, so they don't need to keep working. They've retired early, created start ups, left the Bay Area, etc.

I think there's likely some truth to these claims. But Silicon Valley also has a reputation for ageism, so who knows.

I think it's by design, but I believe the main intent was just to make it a desirable place to work.

For most people, that meant not being worked at 100% until they burn out. It also meant giving people latitude to transfer teams, take on side projects, and find work that resonated with them. That works for a lot of people, but others work better with more pressure or more structure.

head hunter compensation report

You should ask for a refund. Senior engineers at FANG in the Bay Area will typically make over $100k/year in stock. Total compensation of $300k-$400k is pretty normal, and includes salary, stock, and bonus. Netflix is an exception; compensation is mostly or all in cash.

The flip side is that, even with $350k/year income, you probably still can't comfortably afford a nice 3-bedroom house in a good neighborhood to raise a family (unless you've already been working in the Bay for a while and saved up a big nest egg, or your spouse makes a similar amount and continues to work full time while you raise a family).

Since I moved to the Bay Area, I've realized the high salaries aren't worth it to me. If I were still in my twenties, I could make it work, but as it is, I'd end up paying a truly absurd amount of money for a small, over-priced house, and my entire paycheck would go towards paying the mortgage for the foreseeable future. So I'm looking to transfer to a non-Bay Area office ASAP, even if it means a pay cut.

"Almost 50" means you're in your 40s. And you probably started interviewing in your mid-40s, at the latest, if you've already interviewed 4 times.

The gist of your comment might be correct, but I think we shouldn't perpetuate the mindset that mid-40s or even 50s is "so old."

In almost all knowledge-worker professions, age and experience is acknowledged as an asset. I think software companies are just starting to realize that, as the "move fast and break things" companies are now weighed down under technical debt and imposing hiring freezes on recent grads and junior engineers.

I feel like I'm in my prime in terms of experience and productivity, and though I may not want to work 70+ hour weeks or chug beers at the office anymore, I'm a considerably better engineer than I was 20 years ago. I think many of us intuitively know that, and we shouldn't let ourselves become victim to self-defeating SV groupthink.

The Fabulous Article.

First posted in 2017, continually edited since then.

A bit dated

It does seem dated, but the author has continued to edit it since it was originally written. He's got stuff from 2018 and 2019 in there.

massive loss-leaders like YouTube

Citation needed.

In the dribbble screenshot highlighted in the article, everything looks interactive. The UI looks like it's composed entirely of buttons, sliders, and spin wheels.

If a design goal is to make interactive elements seem interactive, and make non-interactive elements seem non-interactive, this has failed. It's bizarro Material Design.