72f988bf

> Humans only care when the house is on fire

In corporate context it's because that's, in theory, an effective use of resources:

If 20 teams are constantly "there is a huge risk of fire", a lot of mental energy is wasted figuring out how to stack rank those 20 and how real of a fire risk there is. If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one.

In practice, you've probably noticed that the most politics-playing & winning teams are the teams which are really effective at :

1) faking fires

2) exaggerating minor fires

3) moving fast & breaking things on purpose (or at least as a nice side effect) to create more fires in their area of ownership* , and get rewarded with more visibility & headcount to fix those fires.

* As long as they have firm grip of that area... If they don't, they risk having it re-orged to another team.

Scanning, dumping, and diffing of active directory also helps seeing when people got promoted. ("Software Engineer" -> "Software Engineer II" -> "Senior Software Engineer" etc). Useful for figuring out stats on "promotion velocity" in one org vs other.

Wouldn't work at "a certain company" if such company now made all their levels secret by default of course.

Back in 2021, Seattle's courthouse introduced armed escorts for the same reason.

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/king-county-courtho...

Not sure if it's still going on today.

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

true.

> For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2

Also true most fall in the "figure it out" bucket... But here's where it gets funny: just meet in-person you say?

No, this is FAANG. You're in MTV, but the people you need to collaborate are in NYC, LAX, SEA, AUS, SFO...

So your in-person experience is you booking a room just for yourself so you can video conference all those people who also booked a room for themselves.

Because every other team is in same situation, finding a meeting room is a challenge in itself.

Take the call from your desk then?

No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.

Meanwhile in WA state, the house bill advertised by https://washington.repair.org/ has, in its most recent iterations (after 02-08-2023, in this list https://app.leg.wa.gov/bi/tld/documentsearchresults?biennium...), an exemption that magically appeared:

"Exempts manufacturers or distributors of certain medical devices, motor vehicles, any power generation or storage equipment, or equipment for fueling or charging motor vehicles."

Wondering what type of farmer equipment count as "motor vehicles" here, and if tractors are counted or not.

https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2023-24/Htm/Bill%20R... :

> (Other) Motor vehicles are not the focus of the bill, but could be impacted by the bill, especially for things like touch screens in vehicles and electric vehicle chargers. The industry would appreciate an exemption to exclude motor vehicles and related devices from the scope of the bill

https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2023-24/Htm/Bill%20R...

> (Other) There are concerns regarding the definition of digital electronic equipment. A clarifying amendment to exclude digital electronic equipment in vehicle charging stations would be appreciated. New York's right to repair law had similar language.

The list of entities testifying in the "(Other)" category (versus "(In support)") is thankfully visible in these docs you only need to Ctrl+F for "(Other)".

Also interested people can probably spend time watching the videos in https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1392&Year=2023... to learn more, such as the few minutes at 2:31:25 in https://tvw.org/video/house-appropriations-2023021401/?event...

> Seems like Americans are left with the choice to either risk killing someone/themselves driving home or just not going out.

If only there was a service where you can pay money to be driven somewhere... I heard Americans invented these smartphones with apps, Maybe they can even invent an app-based version of that paid ride service!

> Programs which have offered the homeless real homes, with privacy, the ability to safely store belongings and keep pets, and the ability to decorate, cook, and sleep in quiet, have not had any difficulty filling those homes, but these programs are few and far between (none exist in the US, that I know of).

This one is close to what you're describing:

https://www.lihihousing.org/tinyhouses

(Consider donating!)

These tiny house villages are real tiny homes, providing privacy & dignity.

And you're right about people preferring anything over a shelter:

"Some of the people we spoke with told us that if given a choice between staying in a nearby homeless shelter or spending their nights in a tent, they will choose the tent" (https://www.krem.com/article/money/economy/boomtown-inland-n...)

A tiny house in a small-by-design village is a better solution than a tent in a large encampment or shelter.

> They couldn't do a massive layoff in the past because it would get them bad rep

Forget about "bad rep", it was a bad economic decision: why let go a slight underperformer (a now-known 0.8x engineer) that you hired in 2015 at pay X, if in exchange you hire a "expected normal 1.0x engineer", but at a price of 1.8*X in 2021 due to crazy escalation of SWE salaries in that period.

(Assuming you have a perfected/more picky hiring process that knows the median hire will be a 1.0x engineer)

Now in 2023, the situation is different: you can hire a "expected normal 1.0x engineer" but at pay 0.8*X (adjusted for inflation - ratios all made up)

The original source seems to be posted at https://www.flexport.com/blog/flexport-co-ceos-note-to-emplo...

A bit disappointed that until pretty recently I'd still see "Flexport is hiring" advertisement posts on HN frontpage

This was probably very org/team dependant.

This announcement will at least make it more fair going forward to teams that sticked to the rules and did report the days off. The teams that didn't report still get an advantage in a larger payout though.

> I went back to Microsoft consulting as a both orange and a purple badge

Orange badge is for contractors, but purple badge are for dogs: https://twitter.com/juliehubs/status/892459513432858624

Was purple used for a different badge type back then?

It's either that, or you are an animagus like Sirius Black!

As an employer, stopping in Colorado is only cutting you off of 5.8 million talent pool.

Stopping in both NYC and WA state would cut you out of 16 million, so the equation becomes a bit different.

It's pretty straightforward, especially for the first 4 major levels:

- salary bands (+ stock awards & bonus. i.e "TC" bands)

- average seniority

- title change ( I (entry level) -> II -> Senior -> Principal -> ...)

- internal ladder descriptions (someone who worked at at least 2 FAANG companies can trivially figure out what maps to what, the titles & on-paper responsibilities are pretty standardized across most FAANG)

This extreme of "no zoning" doesn't work because of the negative externalities you can create, affecting your neighbors

Simply put: if you get to build your perfect house, with a nice mountain view, the neighbor west of you could build a building the size of the empire state building, and so does your neighbor east of you. Now you don't have any sunlight. The neighbor south of you could build a smelly & noisy factory, and the one north of you could build a nightclub.

3rd time I tried posting this url:

https://fortune.com/2021/10/07/playbook-funding-lower-taxes-...

HN keeps modifying it to "https://fortune.com/http:/playbook-peter-thiel-startup-taxat..." ... Very strange

> S3's margin is R2's opportunity

Indeed, it looks like "your margin is my opportunity" motto can work both ways for Amazon :)

Went down the rabbit hole from your link:

> > It is a parody/exaggeration of the Edsel, a similarly disastrous automobile designed by Ford Motor Company.

Points to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel:

It has a "Design controversies" section that's very relevant to today:

> Complaints also surfaced about the taillights on 1958-model Edsel station wagons. The lenses were boomerang-shaped and placed in a reverse fashion. At a distance, they appeared as arrows pointed in the opposite direction of the turn being made. When the left turn signal flashed, its arrow shape pointed right, and vice versa

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel#/media/File%3A1958_Eds...

Why is it relevant? Related thread from 3 days ago about blinkers with the exact same design flaws , but in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282

> Wyden’s annual billionaire tax, known in accounting circles as mark-to-market

Is that the tax in question? https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-bill-ens...

"Modernization of derivatives tax act of 2021".

This is the only one that appears to mention "mark-to-market". It seems to apply to derivatives only.

Sympathetic to your story, it's a really unfortunate situation, and glad you were able to salvage your trip.

> Also what would have happened if we weren't fortunate enough to be able to pay for this in the first place? Would we just be out on the streets?

You would go to your home's country embassy and explain the situation? Having your passport/luggage locked in the Airbnb isn't different from having it stolen on a train or something like that. This unfortunately could happen to travelers whether they're staying at a hotel or an Airbnb. At least you had your phone and means of payment available, and were able to recover the documents/luggage after some time.

I wonder what help Airbnb provides if the situation is flipped: let's say the owner has to change the locks for $750 because the renter never returned the key. Is the owner eating that cost?

In your situation, you're the party who lost the keys. Maybe Airbnb rental terms should have a clear cost for lost keys situation, $1k for this is steep!

Unfortunately... I found lobste.rs to be a good source of purely technical articles, but those made up only ~half of "the good stuff" on HN. The other half is startup/entrepreneur related posts.

For those, HN is still the best, but the signal-to-noise ratio is getting poorer with all those off-topic posts.

Exactly, "if you build it, they'll come" is the worst advice for startups.

Of course, if you don't build it, nobody will come.

But the real difficult part, and there's plenty of startup literature on the subject, is DISTRIBUTION. That's where the marketing & sales skills comes into play.

FizzBuzz is one of those puzzles where majority of experienced programmers won't find the solution easily as it involves the modulo operator in weird ways.

The modulo operator is rarely used in practice, unless you're writing your own hash table or some other internal where bucketizing by some ID is relevant.

Using the modulo within a for-loop though, virtually never happens.

So unless you're niche where using modulo every other day, or you're just out of school where you just learned about "+,-,*,/,%" , you have a good chance at failing fizzbuzz if you don't remember it's "that modulo 3 and modulo 5 silly puzzle"

There are better ways of testing for iterating, iterating through a real collection of elements is already much better than FizzBuzz.