Iftheshoefits

A lot of those NIMBYs are the landlords, though, presumably because they like the high rents and the ever-increasing property values. The cost of ownership makes those high rents incredibly inefficient and the returns on "investment" questionable, in my opinion, but there you have it.

The rent I charge on my (nice, two-story, good neighborhood) property that is not located in the Bay Area is about 1% of the price I bought it at. In the part of the bay area I live, rents are about 0.3%-0.4% of the typical sale price for homes that are much smaller than my rental. I could buy 6 of my rental properties for the cost of one such home, have similar net appreciation in real estate value and be earning more rent.

What is "insultingly lowball?" Were I a YC company I'd definitely leverage its reputation in targeting a certain group of eager, young, and naive labor. I'd view it much like I'd view the labor market in the video game industry: there may be an overall shortage of tech talent, but in specific cases there is an abundance of labor that can be had (relatively) cheaply.

Most desktops are far overpowered for the (relatively) trivial computing tasks they are used for. As a result the relatively poorer performance of the webapps most people use desktops for is masked to a large degree, where it's even relevant.

That's not really accurate.

In mathematics and logic the "rules" are not only known but defined a priori by a human being. Not so with physics, and as a result the "proofs" of physics, what are known as scientific theories, have never been absolute. Quantum Mechanics merely elaborated on that theme.

I've an alternative hypothesis regarding the US and business/startup creation: it is the most resource-rich country on the planet that is also almost entirely unscathed by the ravages of decades or centuries of war.

It wasn't until after WW1, and in reality after WWII--which left basically the entire rest of developed civilization in a shambles--and lots of government intervention in the "free market" that the US became the economic power that it is.

Do engineers really have that big an impact on the success of the company? Their salaries and ownership share certainly don't reflect that, in my opinion.

That's why companies who have raised any serious funding in B-round or later or have revenues to justify it ought to raise early engineers' salaries to bring them (closer) to marker rate on a continuous basis. There is no good reason not to do that.

I'm hoping the parent is making a joke by riffing on the absurd technical requirements demanded by startups for working on what amounts to a glorified CRUD webapp. The math heavy analysis that a CS degree provides just isn't necessary for, oh, 95% of programming jobs. The people who design the systems for reliability or process "big data" at huge companies with real scaling issues (Google, Facebook) need to have such training.

On the other hand, these companies do need talent who never the less have skills that are rleatively rare. They shouldn't need to pay engineers the $200k+ salaries of big companies, but expecting to get median quality engineering without paying more than $110k/yr is as ridiculous as a non-degreed "webdev" expecting $180k/yr because he can slap some customizations on bootstrap and poke around a Ruby codebase.

Please provide evidence for your assertion.

I wouldn't call it a joke, at least in the insular world of SV VC webapp companies. I view "full stack" as a phrase the same way I view "we want someone whose passion is programming": they're both indicators the company is looking for people to exploit and pay poorly for the amount of labor expected.

It's not shocking to me. There are a lot of hiring practices in software development that are based on inertia, bandwagons/fad-following, empirically unsupportable perceptions, and HR nonsense.

It's small if one is geographically constrained or one has risen up to a certain point on the promotion ladder.

Beyond those factors I am skeptical that it's worth worrying about whether a past manager will have anything bad or good to say about a person.

Even if the chance were worth considering, I think one would do better to view it as a negative signal if a company makes the decision to not hire based on one bad or negative reference. It means the company was looking for any excuse to not hire the candidate, and it seems very likely in that case there wasn't really a good fit. This of course assumes that negative experiences are (relatively) rare. There are people who just can't help but torch the place everywhere they go, but no advice really applies in such extreme cases.

And if the former supervisor has an axe to grind his implicit negative reference doesn't mean much.

Add to that the fact that employees carefully cultivate positive references and you have just one more reason why references are a poor indicator of basically anything.

It's not necessarily more constraining, but from my perspective there are two reasons to choose Django over other python frameworks: the ORM and the out-of-the-box Admin (which depends on the ORM). If you take those away, there is no good reason, in my opinion, to choose Django over, say, Tornado.

I wouldn't choose Flask for anything; it's too slow, even by the relatively poor standards set by Tornado and Django.

No, it is not like that at all. It is like asking a Carpenter to build a cupboard and thinking he's unqualified for the job if he's only ever used Craftsman screwdrivers because that means he can't use Husky screwdrivers.

Its also like deciding to hire an HR guy based on what brands of keyboards or pens he's used.

Even when I'm in a discussion using the whiteboard at my current job its not like I'm up there verbalizing every thought that comes to mind as I write. And typically in these sessions I'll be completely silent for a majority of the time.

What you get isn't useful insight. It is the appearance of useful insight.

I'm biased, being a family-raising person myself, but I agree.

I'd go much further, but then this comment would be downvoted into oblivion, so I'll stop here.

I don't believe they're scrambling for talent. I think a lot of the supposed "demand" for labor out here is a combination of your typical resume collecting from the larger organizations and bandwagon-driven "we need PhDs from Stanford to scale our shitty RoR b2b sales app; there aren't enough 'qualified' people to write code" nonsense. Furthermore, there are just more people who are qualified to write code out here. So there may be more demand than elsewhere, but there is also more (much more?) supply of labor to meet it.

To emphasize pmcgrathm's point, the $60/hr "level" is for "Management/C-level" candidate interviews. If you're paying a consultant to ask "the right questions," then at that level you're paying another management/C-level person, or a very experienced "C-level" headhunter/recruiter, and they're unlikely to do it for $60/hr.

That said, the same is true across all these pricing tiers. I wouldn't consult on a Junior level interview for $60/hr, much less $30. I can earn twice that as a W-2 contractor doing boring, unchallenging enterprise architecture and software.

I suspect people without kids or other similar obligations tend to work more in any industry or location; it's not specific to the Bay Area.

The difference is that in the Bay Area it may be that the ratio of those with to those without obligations is lower. It's certainly socially acceptable to implicitly discriminate against "older" (mid-30s and up) workers in certain sectors of the tech industry out here.

That said, I briefly considered applying to Tesla. Then I did my homework and asked around: their pay is below what even a green "webdev" at some random startup might expect (well below in some cases), and the work/life balance seems to resemble something closer to the video game industry (lots of "crunchtime") than to anything respectable. (NOTE: Of course that is based on anecdotes from contacts and, e.g. sites like glassdoor.com; it's not a scientific survey of employment at Tesla.)

Eh, I think the approach we (as in, that's how I learned programming, too) learned with is the correct one, really. Computational physics is less about programming and more about the constant tension between the demands of efficiency and accuracy and the inherent imperfections of the methods (e.g. difference models) and underlying machine representation of numbers.

Physics isn't just about punching numbers into a computer or solving math problems, and I think a shift toward more programming centered learning of physics needs to be heavily tempered with that understanding.

I don't think a generation has been tricked into giving "free" (as in beer) software; I think the generation brought it on themselves, and continues to do so. We've always been free (as in speech) to charge money for our free (as in speech) software.

People are very eager to work for free on free (as in speech) software just for the pats-on-the-back from "the community", it seems to me, at least as often as people do it because they're truly passionate about their craft.

With the rise of "have a github profile/opensource contributions" in job posting descriptions, it's only going to get worse. "Open source" is very rapidly becoming the "unpaid internship" model of hiring and distributing work in the software industry, and it breeds a sort of contempt for the notion of receiving compensation for one's efforts. I'm not sure that's a good thing with all the very-much-for-profit activity around software development.

Are you talking about, e.g. "AirPair"?

I wouldn't be an "expert" for hire on those services, either, because the prices are all race-to-the-bottom programming/engineering-skill-is-a-commodity prices.

What you've described is a manager/supervisor->director->VP->SVP/C-Suite chain, but with different terms, (possibly) shorter tenure, and with a perhaps slightly more democratic allocation procedure.

It's a management structure, just billed as something else.

Giving managers titles that don't have the word "manager" in them doesn't mean that there aren't managers. Describing their responsibilities as being "mentor"-like rather than "managerial" doesn't mean they aren't, in fact, managing.

The headline is rather explicitly stating that Medium is building a company with "no managers," and then the article goes on to describe some rather transparently bad attempts at euphemistically calling "managers" something other than "manager." I think the commenters you're referring to can be forgiven because of that.

In America, there is plenty of money to be had by taxing the affluent, wealthy, and "obscenely" rich (a lot) more. There is nothing to guarantee any source of money beyond varying levels of confidence. Medicare and SS have lasted a long time, albeit after repeatedly being weakened. For similar reasons I have some confidence that said taxes used explicitly for guarantees of basic income and health care would be left in place for some considerable time.

People who choose not to vaccinate their children are by and large beyond the reach of reason, in much the same way the typical religious person is. I wouldn't advocate mockery and ridicule because it is as equally wasted as reason is on these people. Instead they should simply be ignored to the extent possible, and when not possible as in the case of the subject of this article they should be quarantined so the rest of us don't suffer from their ignorance.

Your experience seems pretty shallow and narrow if the only people you've met who are capable of "properly" breaking things down are programmers, mathematicians, or lawyers. I've known plenty of people outside of those disciplines as well as within them who are quite capable of thinking about a problem logically and from many different angles.

You're going to get a lot of "yes" responses to your questions that themselves are going to be embellishments (or outright lies), omit context, pretend that refactoring an existing set of code is the same as writing it from scratch under the same conditions, etc.

Our industry is filled with people who are "cowboy programmers" and think of themselves as Charlie when in reality they're more like Alan, and are attributing what is actually pure luck and circumstance to their own brilliance. There's an especially high concentration of this BS on HN. You only need review the HN threads about the HealthCare.gov website to see this in action.

That's not to say this sort of scenario doesn't exist, never occurs, etc. It's just that there is likely to be an extraordinarily high number of people who read HN who believe they have experienced it (on either side), even if an objective evaluation of the circumstances would reveal they haven't.

I find myself reacting more and more negatively to "language-specific-experience-required" statements in a job posting for a full-time employee. It's fine for a contractor or consultant needed to solve a specific problem or set of them on a time-limited basis. For a full-time employee however such language is, in my opinion, an indicator that at least one of the following apply:

a) the company is looking for junior level talent with specific language experience so they don't have to train them

b) the company is looking for senior level talent but thinks it can't afford them using any time to pick up the syntax or quirks of the language

c) the company is looking for senior level talent but doesn't think it's even possible a competent senior developer with mostly X experience and no Y experience can pick up Y in an "acceptable" amount of time

d) the company is so invested in their "stack" that (even considering) deviation from it will introduce a net negative (to the process, culture, whatever)

These all have a common theme: the labor that provides the bulk of the value they are able to trade and profit off of is seen as a commodity, as fungible as the brand of paper used in the printers. The company wants a developer who works "out-of-the-box" without any investment and can be discarded/upgraded at any time for any reason. They probably also want the human line-item to display a near-maniacal enthusiasm for the work and loyalty in return.

It's not that they want people who aren't discerning: they probably don't care, as long as the people they hire can fake it.

Also, being "ridiculously in love" with a language doesn't mean one doesn't know it well. For me, it's the opposite: I'm "ridiculously in love" with C++ because I know it as well as I do (which isn't to say I'm an expert). That doesn't mean I'm going to turn down non-C++ jobs or view them as being less interesting, etc.