That's exactly what I had in mind. Great article. Thanks!
5,848 karma · joined March 27, 2007
We don't have "planning cycles" except for quarterly prioritization to realign on which features matter the most (exceptional features occasionally get prioritized outside the process). When you finish one project, you pick another that's interesting to you that's near the top of the priority list, with support from our Product team and Engineering Operations.
I'm so glad that our company doesn't have them—I think it's a significant factor in me grinding it out for 9+ years. We have feature releases every 4 weeks. If your feature is merged before QA, it goes out in that release. Otherwise, it gets delayed till the next release, and we don't make a big deal about it—several other features will still be in the release.
I feel like it gives me a lot more agency and ownership of my work. I think it's the right amount of subtle deadline pressure, relying on my intrinsic motivation to get my feature shipped and move onto the next one. Or to have the freedom to determine that it's not ready yet and spend a little more time to avoid shoving out a pile of technical debt.
I'm curious to see what I'm missing, though. Anyone love sprints? Anyone working in a non-sprint model and hate it?
Point being that I think you're right that the media played an important role in contextualizing mass communication and controlling bias. Not only does social media disintermediate mass communications, the intermediaries themselves are now ignoring roles they historically performed.
By that point, you can go several ways. You may see an exit on the horizon and decide to stick it out. The startup could recognize the market for your skills and give you a salary that's in the ballpark of FAANG, or they can provide other compensating benefits more tailored to your personal desires. You could have experience and network connections to create your own startup. Or you could "exit yourself" to a high-level FAANG role for a huge pay raise, while still holding onto that early startup equity.
Again, I'm talking about joining a startup at early stages here, like first half dozen engineers, first couple dozen employees overall. Of course, there's a lot more risk in that approach, but there are also unique benefits. You'll have a huge hand in helping to shape the culture to be the sort of place you like to work.
That's the real selling point of startups; they'll never compete with FAANGs on a monetary basis, even in rather successful exits. A "generous" 0.5% equity slice of even $1B is $5MM, and it will likely take at least 10 years to get there. Add that to maybe another $2MM in salary and bonuses earned over that time, and you're looking at $7MM in total compensation for 10 years at a successful startup.
If you start at about $250K in total comp at FAANG and progress roughly linearly to $800K by year 10, you're looking at $5.25MM in total comp, without having to bet on a startup having a $1B exit. But then again, it's not guaranteed that you'll climb to those lofty $800K positions at FAANG.
My understanding is that a sufficient volume of equity sales can force new 409(a) valuations. These would require more payments to an external accounting firm, and 4x the work to do it quarterly, work that often consumes leadership cycles. Moreover, these valuations would likely have the effect of narrowing the gap between common and preferred share values, elevating the strike price and squeezing potential profits out of employee equity.
It’s probably different once a company is large enough that it’s granting RSUs. For companies at the ISO stage, I’m not sure the upsides outweigh the downsides.
Most employers that would accept that of parents would accept it of anyone. Most employers that wouldn't accept employees setting reasonable boundaries or making reasonable requests wouldn't accept them from parents, either. There are bound to be some that only accept boundary-setting from parents, but I assert that it's a very small percent of employers or managers. Maybe I'm wrong.
What I'm proposing here is that most people are too afraid to ask for what they want. Parents have the benefit of having some of those expectations carved out beforehand, but I think that many of them also develop a newfound ability to say, "No, sorry, can't do that."
For a concrete example of that, Deadspin in 2013 spelled out how ESPN created its own narrative to report on: https://deadspin.com/how-espn-manufactures-a-story-colin-kae...
> [Democrat representatives] want $3½ billion for the mail-in votes, universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion for the post office. They need that money in order to have the post office work so that it can take these millions and millions of ballots. Now those are just two items [in the bill]; if they don't get there, they can't have mail-in ballots. [A bunch of rambling about failures of mail-in ballots in VA, NJ, etc.]
He seemed to me to be saying that if the Democrats want mail-in ballots, they're going to have to find a way to get this bill passed that would give more funding to the post office. Trump emphasized repeatedly that they're asking for $3.5 billion dollars ("that's a lot of money") for the mail-in ballots.
> Trump said on 13 August that he opposes providing additional funding to the USPS to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in ballots.
That comment links to another article, where the first paragraph states:
> Donald Trump admitted on Thursday he opposed additional funding for the United States Postal Service (USPS) in order to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in ballots.
I searched Google and YouTube but can't find the original source, only commentary on it. Does anyone have a link?
Edit: Maybe it's referring to https://youtu.be/0ieLG29X_oE?t=840. I don't know much about the facts here, but Trump seems to be asserting that Congress is bundling $15–25B in USPS funding in a mega-bill that includes trillions of dollars of bailout money for states, and thus the bill has stalled. He also keeps harping on the failures of mail-in voting (but says absentee works well). I don't know what to make of it, but it's certainly frustrating that multiple news orgs are claiming that Trump is intentionally hamstringing the USPS to harm democracy, when I don't take away any such conclusion from that shitshow of an interview.
Would the other 396 look at the elite 4 in envy? Awe? Hate? Appreciation? Would they enjoy the 400 meals in a fairly equal way, or would they fight over allocations? Would the elite 4 encourage fair distribution of the 400 meals, or would they encourage in-fighting among the other 396, causing sufficient turmoil to distract the other 396 from organizing their own elite-and-profitable meals? There are a lot of scenarios that don't end in violence, even if a lot of people leave with a bad taste in their mouths.
I think it's a really interesting analogy, and it might even bolster the author's points about the importance of how elites behave and what systems they promote. It's too bad that the analogy was cut short with a reductionist assertion.
These numbers look more typical to me: https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation/sections/typi.... The article mentions that hire #1 typically gets 2–3%, and only more when it comes with a low salary.
If you want to do better than that, you'll likely have to be a cofounder, not an employee. I read PG's essays in the early 00s, prior to the creation of YC, and his whole shtick was that ambitious employees can't hope to capture the value of their work, that sharp and hard-working tech folks should fund startups to truly capitalize on their efforts.
Separately, I'm not clear on how "white cultural norm" is defined or what exactly it means. Is it meant to imply "majority norms in much of Europe, the British Commonwealth, and the US"? If so, why call it "white" instead of something more precise like "EBCU"? Otherwise, is it implying the existence of a shared white culture based around color of skin? When Latino and African and Asian individuals/families share similar ideals, are they contributing to the white cultural norms, or not?
I think the terminology here is important to get right, as I believe that the popular terminology is a source of a lot of the strife at present, whether intentional or not. For example, the tyranny of the majority is a well established problem in democracies. Society has debated for centuries how best to protect the rights of minorities while implementing the will of the majority. Strong individual rights is one method, as it provides a platform for all of us to actively participate to expand and protect the rights of every person. Recasting that debate as white vs. black seems to needlessly alienate potential allies and to reinvent a bunch of concepts without benefiting from the lessons and debates of the past.
For a concrete example of the terminology issue, I think that a big part of the controversy around the Black Lives Matter movement is disagreement about the meaning of the omitted, implied adverb. Does it mean "Black Lives Matter too", or does it mean "Black Lives Matter more", or perhaps something else? Radicals and dissidents on both sides of the spectrum seem to assume the "more" interpretation and react accordingly, whereas sympathizers interpret it along the lines of the "too" interpretation. To complicate things further, some sincerely respond that "All Lives Matter" in a well-meaning way, apparently attempting to clarify and agree with the "Black Lives Matter too" interpretation. Declaring "All Lives Matter" is currently a fireable offense, which brings us back to the theme of PG's essay.
To summarize, I think that terminology is incredibly important. Using "white" as a placeholder for a nebulous concept, especially when it routinely has a negative connotation, only seems to make unified progress more difficult.
> A study of 1880 family structures in Philadelphia, showed that three-quarters of Black families were nuclear families, composed of two parents and children. Data from U.S. Census reports reveal that between 1880 and 1960, married households consisting of two-parent homes were the most widespread form of African-American family structures.
> In the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related Black households had two parents. [By 1965,] out-of-wedlock birthrate had increased to 25% among the Black population. This figure continued to rise over time and in 1991, 68% of Black children were born outside of marriage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...
Similar arguments can be made against just about every point, but I'll address "Protestant Work Ethic". The NBA is majority African American, and players routinely share their workout regimen on social media: Jimmy Butler touted his 3:30a wake-up before his first Heat practice (https://www.miamiherald.com/sports/nba/miami-heat/article235...), Dennis Rodman—can anyone label him as a symbol of whiteness?—was admired for his grueling post-game workouts, Kobe and countless other players were known for hours-long shootarounds that would exhaust anyone. Are NBA players embodying white culture?
It's worrying to me that if you shared the "White Culture" traits with racists from the past, they would agree vociferously, especially when you consider the implied inverse of those traits. They would use it as an argument for white superiority. It seems that the modern left has somehow embraced the racist stereotyping of the past, with the only difference being that they are painting the same traits—many of which are correlated with individual success—as otherness and a source of oppression.
I don't understand how infographics like this could possibly make the world a better place. Are we meant to embrace them? As an individual of any group, should I somehow be factoring "information" like this into my beliefs and actions, and if so, how is it making my life and the lives of the people around me better?
There are bound to be some pretty cool places in AZ, NM, TX, and the southeast. I've been casually researching this topic for a while, and I've found it to be incredibly difficult to find a useful, non-biased index of walkable and interesting neighborhoods from all corners of the US.
Good luck!
- Chicago, IL: The L reaches a lot more neighborhoods, is a single integrated transit system. - Columbus, OH: Great bike lanes and dedicated paths, bus system that covers the entire city. - New York, NY: By far the most walkable city in the US. - Philadelphia, PA: Decent subway system, good connection to NJ and NY via NJ Transit. Very walkable core and neighborhoods. - Washington, DC: Far superior version of BART with a lot more coverage.
Unless I've just happened across a half dozen of the best cities in the US, SF isn't all that remarkable.