Bahamut

I sort of discovered this myself when looking for flight prices about 4 months back around this week (flying from the US). I happen to have the whole week of Thanksgiving off from work due to it shutting down that week every year (supposedly not guaranteed but has been given every year since instituted), so I was looking to take advantage of it to travel - I settled on the UK, but picking good days/times to fly was a challenge. I knew that generally early morning/late night flights were cheaper if I could get them in general, but one thing I noticed was flights were expensive the Saturday before to fly out, and expensive the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving to fly back.

I settled on flying out the Friday before Thanksgiving, and flying back on Black Friday for a savings of about $200-300. My flight to the UK though was completely full, in part owing that SFO is a major United hub whose employees take advantage of flying standby whenever they can. I’ll be a little surprised if it is full going back though.

That sounds more like a quality problem of the particular dev shop than an indictment on Angular.

I can’t remember prior years, but browsing this site on mobile has been the most painful web browsing experience for me in years (iOS Safari).

Consider the design of the site in the future and mobile browser behavior - for example, tapping the bottom right button to navigate to the next view brings up the toolbar on Safari instead of navigating to the next page.

I know Apple has some engineers that work in other offices - there’s a good component in Cork (Ireland) in Software Engineering, and other offices where engineers work out of.

Similarly, I know of a fair number of engineers at Facebook working or who have worked out of their London office.

The big tech companies definitely prefer to centralize engineering though, simply because video conferencing software is not there yet, and in-person communication is still far superior to the remote communication tools we have today.

I say this as someone who works at one of the companies mentioned above.

This does not match with how I have seen friends using Snapchat - friends spending time focused on recording videos for Snapchat while with other friends instead of valuing the time with the friends they're with. I've experienced it first hand and it soured me pretty quickly on the platform.

This is not authentic communication to me, and I want no part of it.

There's more to it here - the wealthy generally are able to better play long games to further save more, better able to handle unexpected life events that could devastate the less prepared, and have better alignment with the government fighting/optimizing for their use cases.

There are a lot more reasons as to the exponential advantages the wealthy generally enjoy suggest that the wealthy should indeed get taxed more, but it's probably better suited for discussion elsewhere than HN.

FWIW, I don’t think FAANG necessarily care about what degree you have vs. what can you do. Mine certainly doesn’t, and I know a number of people at these companies who are college dropouts.

Full package vesting over 4 years - you typically get annual refresh grants, which are new 4 year grants that stack on top of your existing grant.

Google offers are some of the best for putting pressure on other companies.

I am currently at another FAANG though, and may not leave my company ever, even if it would likely up my compensation.

This is not true of most of the numbers on levels.fyi that I can tell. I know for my own FAANG employer, the numbers seem right on the dot with numbers I have seen elsewhere and my own compensation (RSUs being at time given, not current value).

This is false - employers do give less. My own FAANG stock for my initial compensation when I joined my company was at $105k in RSUs, and they jumped up about 35% (was even higher, but the market is a little volatile currently). My refresh grant after a little over a year was $125k in RSUs, which turned out to be less stock by a not insignificant percentage compared to my first grant!

My read of the numbers floating around the internet suggests my refresh grant was for outperforming and my TC is high for my band. Whether my new TC is less than my first year, who knows. I'm happy with my work, and while the comp could be better (I should be at the next band but promotions are slower to come by in FAANG), I don't know if I'll ever even leave my company given that my total comp for a mid-level software engineer (at my employer) is already over $300k.

The California tax rate is off - you get taxed certain percentages up to a certain amount (progressive tax). The effective tax rate for $500k in California should be about 9.44% pre-deductions (should be effectively lower than this).

Should be roughly 42% pre-deductions/writeoffs.

...But in truth, if you're making around the $500k ballpark, you're doing pretty well financially.

I have interviewed with Google 7-8 times over the past 3-4 years (Google has mostly rejected me, but last time I cancelled the process with an onsite scheduled due to personal reasons) - every single time, Google has let me interview with JavaScript.

These numbers are out there - a cursory look at https://www.levels.fyi for example should open your eyes to some of the numbers big companies pay, that I can confirm with my own comp info for my company (a FAANG).

Also it should be noted that the author has some fame in the frontend web world, and is a fairly well known name.

I don't think gamers necessarily expect an L3/R3 button. The Switch does not have anything like that, and Nintendo has always been top tier for gaming controllers.

Something that doesn’t get publicized but is as onerous is that Amazon is recruiting engineers to work on facial recognition tech that was implied to be used for their warehouse workers[0].

[0] Amazon recruiter emails that coworkers and I have gotten from Amazon. These emails had a very heavy implication that that particular group was using the facial recognition tech for this purpose.

At least in the Valley, this is very much not true. Very few companies are willing to match the compensation from the tech giants. I work for a non-Amazon FAANG and I'll be surprised if a company was willing to match almost $300k of unvested stock (after 1 review cycle & 1 year of vesting), a healthy salary on top of my existing one, and comparable annual refresh grants - only companies I see really doing so would be another FAANG and VC firms.

Yes really based on my own experience in a FAANG - if you hit the top of the pay band, your salary will go up at a minuscule percentage, even with significant outperforms ratings.

But a newly promoted staff engineer has more ability to move up in pay in annual reviews.

The companies are all of varying sizes and distribution of types of workers. Google has a heavy engineering component to it - Apple and maybe to a lesser degree Amazon does as well, but one thing about Apple is that it has a culture of generally not talking about work as much outside of work, in part due to the whole wanting to keep things secret. Netflix as a company is also just small at around 5000 employees last I heard. Facebook is somewhere around 20k I believe at HQ, although that number seems to go up every time I hear more recent numbers, Google is at ~60kish I remember reading, and Amazon is around 100k I believe? Apple is at a little over 120k employees, but Apple and Amazon both have a lot of non-engineer workers as well (retail and warehouse employees, respectively).

It shouldn't be in the transit planning - it should be addressed at its root cause, instead of trying to paper over the issue by focusing so much on the incidental nature of public transit bringing a shift in location.

Unfortunately, oftentimes people have a very NIMBY attitude about these sort of issues in the US in general, and end up perpetuating the problem through intentional ignorance.

I think that is a particular ability - I can do so as well, but I also recognize that it may be more the exception than the norm.

That said, I very much like private offices more.

Even UI developers often get exposed to Invision, especially if mobile is involved - it’s a very useful tool.

My response to that would be that if someone remembers differently, they should treat their coworkers with respect and give them the benefit of the doubt if there is no reason why anyone should be skeptical. That is not a good work dynamic if your coworkers are not doing that, and is cause enough for me to start job searching.

If there is reason to believe that there are disagreements in actions to be taken, then messaging everyone to get on the same page is ok. If someone is actively throwing someone under the bus unceremoniously & quickly, then one should prepare an exit strategy & a strategy for working around the problematic coworker as a cautionary step because the spinner could potentially stop at oneself. If it is more than one problematic coworker, then the exit strategy approach becomes increasingly pertinent.

I think it is self-defeating to do other than this approach in general, and far from naive.

I have never had to do this nor seen anything like this behavior in my 6 years of work in the industry. This sounds incredibly in bad faith, and I would probably take it as a signal to go job search for a better work environment if I witnessed this in my day to day.

This is something I generally recommend to juniors, which goes against a lot of advice I’m seeing here - spend more time learning if your work is all good for the day. Early on, it is important to ramp up to get to senior as quickly as possible. If you don’t, you risk having trouble if you get laid off for whatever reason and need to ramp at a new job with a new codebase. I generally recommend doing around just under your max focus abilities - enough to push you hard, but not to the point where your mental health suffers.

Once you get to senior, your job prospects will reflect how quickly you got there - the quicker, the better opportunities you get, which has a cascading effect on your entire career.

I have seen junior devs fall into the trap of taking the job for granted, and run into trouble searching for new jobs - you don’t want to be that person.

I’d argue even 10 years ago the quality of Time was questionable. One of my friends was interviewed on chiptunes by Time at around that time due to a success of a Kickstarter for a Miles Davis chiptune album he did, and the editor twisted his statements of love for creating songs with that production quality into something he disliked - he contacted Time about the mischaracterization and they refused to change it until he started a Digg posting blasting the atrocious journalism, upon which they agreed to change the article...which still contained the writer’s clear bias against it, but not as insidious as was originally written.

Ever since that incident, I’ve been very skeptical of Time articles, and if I do read them, I read them very carefully with my friend’s experience in mind.

Just hiding how many jerks a company has until after the interview process is complete is not effectively any better - it could even be worse for people, as they could have had signal to avoid the jerk. The absence of evidence of some behavior or signal is not equivalent to it not being present at all.

In my experience, most companies have jerks - I’m not convinced it’s even avoidable reliably, as people come from many walks of life, and sometimes the walks form people to be jerks.

I work at Apple, where I’d say that jerks are a very low number of people I’ve interacted with (maybe a couple hundred employees so far) - I’ve seldom seen a company beforehand with less jerks percentage-wise, much less have processes that help with descalating arguments & deal with them quickly.

Not sure what you’re reading, but it said nothing about requiring a license - what the person said was very different than the definition cited. In fact, the obsession over the license part clearly misses the mark.

This is what the summary mentions as the only supporting evidence of any sort of credentialing:

“The foundational qualifications of an engineer typically include a 4-year bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline, or in some jurisdictions, a master's degree in an engineering discipline plus 4–6 years of peer-reviewed professional practice (culminating in a project report or thesis) and passage of engineering board examinations.”

Note that the word used is “typically” - this is very different than being a requirement. The definition of a professional engineer cited mentions no such credentialing required, speaking in broad terms of the characteristics & responsibilities of one, but no narrow hallmark of how one reaches the title.

The part he quoted is far from verifying his/her claim - just the opposite, it is evidence that he/she is misusing the term professional engineer and is not distinguishing from a licensed professional engineer from a professional engineer.

Did you even check the link? The Wikipedia article has a definition of a professional engineer right in there, and what you said did not agree with it at all.