Epenthesis

Only a single data point, but I was #13 at a (now) unicorn and was offered 45 bps for a new grad role. This was 7 years ago, though, so maybe the market's changed.

(I, in my infinite wisdom, traded it down to 25 bps for 15 k$/yr more in salary. Whoops)

This is a bit of a silly semantic game.

There's "smart" in the sense of "general mental ability" (ie, skill in cognitive tasks), which is usually what the word is used colloquially to mean, and then there's "smart" in the sense of "making the optimal choices for long term happiness and success", which, being correlated with the first definition is often conflated.

Now, sometimes these definitions come apart, ie, people who are "smart" in the first sense fail to be "smart" in the second sense. That doesn't mean the first definition is inherently meaningless. In fact, g factor ("IQ"), the psychometric concept that maps most closely to that first definition is extremely well studied, and well established as coherent and measurable.

Why these two attributes come apart in some people is an interesting question, because they're usually so correlated, and that's what the article is in a sense about.

Why would the voters listen to them if they did in fact approve of multiple candidates?

YMMV massively depending on what exactly you're working in.

I've found when I'm writing libraries that will be leveraged by other programmers, especially in a modern/high level language, insights I've derived from my understanding of category theory have been incredibly valuable.

If you're working very close to the metal (eg, embedded), very close to non-technical users (UI stuff, edge layer business logic), or in less featureful languages, then you'll get much less value.

This seems like a classic Simpson's paradox.

Suppose that people associate with people of roughly equal "success in life". And suppose both IQ and executive function correlate positively with success. Then, at a given level of success, IQ and executive function would be negatively correlated, and so it would appear to an individual surveying their "peer" group.

Basically, consider what would happen if those high IQ individuals you knew combined their intelligence with an even mental keel and extreme conscientiousness. Lucky people like that do exist, but in rarified heights (financial/professional/whatever they choose to optimize for) rarely encountered by us mortals, and so you likely wouldn't have had the chance to meet them

> rent will not drop, because the developer has to make payments on loans and maintain a profit

So, you're saying that if the developer has costs of X $/mo month, then in a oversupplied market, rather than take, say 0.8X $/mo in rent and have losses of -0.2X $/mo, they'll refuse to rent at all and take losses of -X $/mo?

Why?

Land is zero sum (which is why a Land Value Tax is such a good idea), but housing, which is what people actually consume is not. We have the technology to build more housing, just not the regulatory regime, which is what this article is about.

Wait, why would “sending a big chunk of that fat tech money to a landlord” make someone not interested in fixing the housing crisis?

Except ternary expressions have the huge advantage that they allow assigning to const. Eg:

    const var =
      val == 1 ? 1 :
      va1 == 2 ? 2 :
      null;

I've never seen a take home coding challenge that had even the possibility of being used as production code. For me it's always been a standardized, self-contained example problem. Maybe there're scummy companies that try to push job applicants' work to production, but I'd be shocked if that was anywhere close to the modal case.

So it's more like "What I need from you, Joe Electrician, is for you to go wire up this demo kitchen frame that I've set up. Once you're done I will inspect your work and let you know if I'm interested in hiring you to wire up the actual houses I'm building.".

Part of that is South India tends to be assertively anti-Hindi for various historical/cultural reasons. Given that, English is the only realistic option for communicating outside a given linguistic community.

> "toward the lake" means "north"

Fascinating! Lake Nicaragua (which is what I'd naively assume a person in Nicaragua would mean by "The Lake") is in the south of the country, so that's really unintuitive.

Edit: OH, I see this is in Managua, which lies on the southern border of a different lake. I guess it's like New Yorkers using "downtown" to mean "south" (or rather, southwest)

Right, but given that that's true today, what makes BTC a store of value?

Or should I be parsing the phrase to mean "It's not anything today, but in the long term, once the market cap is large enough, it'll be a store of value"?

(I'm not being snarky; I'm legitimately confused by what people mean by the phrase.)

I've been hearing this a lot, but what does it actually mean?

Isn't the most important thing you want from a store of value stability? Ie, that it'll store the value that you put into it? Bitcoin certainly doesn't have that property.

And if that's not the desired property implied by "store of value", what is?

Similar. It's the 401k employer contribution to UBI's defined benefit pension.

Are there companies that actually distinguish between these roles? For all the ones I've ever worked at, "software engineer" and "programmer" are synonyms.

(I'm aware that there's been some effort to extend the legal significance of the word "engineer" to the software industry, but I'm curious if that difference is actually in practice anywhere today)

But why would I as a person looking for a job want to commit a week or more of my free time to do something like this?

Especially since the current job market gives me plenty of much lower time investment options?

Do you pronounce those differently? Where'd you grow up? In all the English dialects I'm familiar with, those are pronounced the same.

Regardless, it's the "j sound" of "James" (as well as of both "edging" and "aging" for those of you who pronounce them the same) and not the "j sound" of "Jaques" (or the "z" sound of "azure").

(For those familiar with IPA, /be.'dʒiɲ/ not /be.'ʒiɲ/)

...yes?

Are you really unfamiliar with how medallion owners used to treat their drivers?

Speaking for myself: I'm a massive nerd. I need friendships with other nerdy people to be sane. There aren't that many nerdy people in my middle American home town of 300k people. There are many, many nerdy people in San Francisco.

> 7 k$ per month in my last remote gig.

I'm saving that much on an ongoing basis at my full-time job in SF.

I do have a roommate, but, to be honest, the weather alone makes it worth it.

So, living in places like that and paying that much is definitely not normal.

For 1900 $/mo, you can get a bedroom in a really nice 2 or 3BR place in the desirable neighborhoods or a studio/1BR in the undesirable neighborhoods (sunset/richmond). I don't understand why the people in that article are living like that (Poor credit? Desperation to find a place fast? Ignorance of the existence of Craigslist?), but they're very, very far from being representative of SF real estate.

To clarify what people are saying: 200 k$/yr+ in base salary is rare (but not unheard of) in SV/NYC for programmers. It usually implies some degree of specialization beyond "Java programmer" ("highly available systems expert" being an example that I know has garnered that base salary.)

200 k$/yr+ in total compensation (ie, salary + bonus + RSUs, at a public company where RSUs are liquid) is much more common. I personally received that as a SDE II at Google, with 4 years of experience, and from my understanding, I was not in any way an exceptional case.

I mean, this is the fundamental crux of these CoL discussions: How much does the quality of your residence matter to you?

People try and mechanically translate equivalent lifestyles from place to place, but that's probably not the best way of analyzing things. Yes, if you choose to have a midwestern lifestyle in SF, it will be ludicrously expensive. However, you don't have to. If instead, you're able to replace the utility you'd get for a nice place with the activities/amenities SF has and a small town doesn't, the cost differential is not nearly as stark.

Obviously, some people do value a nice home much more than anything they could get from living in SF, and that's fine. But that's not everyone, which is important to keep in mind when understanding why people move to the bay (or big cities in general).

That's a... heterodox interpretation of things.

The vast majority of the constitution makes no distinction between citizens and non-citizens subject to American jurisdiction (the exceptions, of course, being for voting and holding office).

At Google, assuming what I saw was representative, 220+ k$/yr in total comp (salary + bonus + RSUs) was the standard last year for one promotion up from new grad (SDE IIIs).

(Note that Google RSUs, unlike Uber's, are convertible to cash immediately upon vesting.)

(I realize this is rather tactless, but I ask in the interest of fairly weighing the risk/rewards of startups/consulting vs. big tech)

Is it fair to read this to mean that patio11's net worth is < 250 k$? (Based on the fact his liquid assets were negative prior to the sale of AR, and said sale netted less than the price of a house in Tokyo, median price: ~250 kUSD.).

I always thought a BIG benefit of SoMa is the fact that you can draw employees from East Bay and South Bay (as well as SF itself).

On the other hand, a, say, San Mateo -> Oakland commute is pretty much untenable.

I'm sad that they don't have executable bodies. That was a key feature of CoffeeScript classes for me, and not having it makes ES6 classes considerably less useful/interesting.

It probably helps that dialogs usually use "ok"/"cancel" rather than "yes"/"no". Chinese, for example, doesn't really have a word for "yes", but it does have a word/phrase meaning basically "ok" ("好的"), which is what's used on windows for those dialogs.