4,033 karma · joined August 29, 2012
If you hate Elon , that’s your opinion , clearly many Twitter employees don’t want him. But if you think that if these videos are leaked people will agree that it was embarrassing, you will be disappointed. It was an extreme dry and boring interview and if there was any aspect that stood out it was how low energy the whole thing was.
People often downvote thoughtful discussions they disagree with. It’s tiresome to see your text fade with downvotes so often people don’t bother.
If you hang out on Hacker News you might also think every engineer thinks crypto is a scam and no engineers want to return to the office. Neither situation is the case but if you disagree with the majority on those topics you will get downvoted to oblivion, your comments won’t be visible after a point, so why bother?
I personally don’t care about the endless leetcode debate but it’s a bummer there’s so much exciting technological advances in crypto that can’t be discussed on this site without an army of “crypto=scam” bros emerging from the woodworks.
Brian Chesky directly ripped off a popular free product called CouchSurfing then said “ok same thing but I get to be a billionaire, local housing markets lose long term rentals in exchange for teenage keg parties, and I get to buy virtue signaling billboards all over SF cause I get to be rich AND morally superior.”
Then after we lionize those guys we can make fun of the Musk fan club.
When it comes to being “default alive” there is _zero_ consideration for the human impact. I could not agree more strongly that there’s all sorts of social mores around employee behaving well but virtually zero around executive behavior (you put an exclamation after CEO as if it should be surprising, when the opposite should be).
I’ve read these CEOs brag about “generous severance” that turns out to be 3 weeks.
WSJ reported less than a week ago Coinbase execs netted BILLIONS in PERSONAL profits to execs in the last year. Think any of that money could have been used as a rainy day fund to not fuck over people who resigned from their last job expecting to start at Coinbase?
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/coinbase-leaders-net-1-2-bi...
The amount of apologism for tech execs who act so selfishly over and over again, while the cogs are held to these insanely high standards of behavior, is infuriating.
Call a spade a spade. Brian Armstrong is a selfish piece of trash who dumped hundreds of millions of his company stock for his own profit while reneging on people who took his company’s word for what it was and put their financial health in his hands.
Startups have the ability to compete in ways like better equity deals but by and large they still highly prioritize their investor concerns over hiring concerns as reflected in things like liquidation preferences in ISO and stingy equity grants. Most of the founders would rather ride their startup to the grave then re-evaluate the “standard” terms of their equity compensation approaches which each year have become more favorable for VCs and less favorable for employees.
Even though big tech has many problems and things I disagree with, at the end of the day they respect engineers by paying them their value while startup founders prefer to make engineers second class citizens then bemoan their hiring difficulties.
The idea that no name engineers at Google work on more interesting problems is laughable to me as someone who worked there for 3 years and saw the vast majority of them work on garbage Angular apps or borgcfg . Not exactly designing a zero knowledge roll up chain in complexity.
The “cryptocurrency=bad” bros on hacker news are getting so tiresome. Many people think things like adtech are scams yet if every single time someone brought up Google we derailed into that conversation it would rightfully get moderated but with crypto, dang is asleep at the wheel.
Actual cryptography experts like Dan Boneh and Silvio Macali are full time on cryptocurrency, but since your L4 Google buddy thinks it’s a scam, that settles it so we bring it up every damn time.
For example, one outage related to Google Ads API changing their parameters. This led to ads not being run which directly cost revenue since those ads were profitable. The outage went on for much longer than it needed to since people with expertise on the marketing pipelines were gone.
Id say the “bad engineering” here is mostly Google ads who should version their API changes. But if Google can’t do good engineering, I’m not counting on too many other companies to do so. This idea that infra is a “set and forget” operation because autoscaling exists is a fantasy for conference talks, not reality.
One thing it obviously does not address is the human element of who you cut and whether they will be “default alive” unemployed in a recession. A huge amount of YC advice in general positions founders as protagonists and employees as NPCs then are shocked people pick Google over their startup offer.
Funny thing is I’ve seen this exact advice destroy a company. In March 2020 they did deep layoffs and cited the need to be “default alive.” Then their main market surprisingly quickly grew in the rest of 2020 , they wanted to capitalize on that, but they had laid off too many engineers who knew their infra and had enough outages and slow product development that they lost to their competitors and are now way underwater on their valuation.
They decided to be serious and prudent and go “default alive” which ironically killed them. Of course if 2020 had gotten worse maybe they would look smart but the takeaway is there’s no easy answers.
I would just like to see the human impact of layoffs at least lightly considered in these conversations which it rarely is. And it’s bad for business to as Im sure many people are hesitant to join companies that will have a gut reaction of doing 70% layoffs. If you even think about doing 70% layoffs you clearly over hired and are not making good leadership decisions leading up to the layoff.
People constantly assume good faith in these things when they shouldn’t.
Obviously number of outstanding shares is a bare minimum, but things like cash reserves and cash flow should also be shared but they don’t want to share that information, often times because it’s not good, they just wasn’t people who believe in the “mission” or that it’s a rocketship or whatever.
The secondary reason is that there are still too many naive engineers who assume good faith, drink the startup koolaid, and take these offers . Sometimes even declining public RSU grants to do so. One company out of ten thousand have ISOs that are worth anything but those are the only company in the headlines so the mystique continues.
The only solution is education. ISO (Incentive Stock Options) are one of the biggest scams of all time and you’re financially illiterate if you value them more than zero. They are carefully designed by venture capitalists to screw employees. NFTs of monkey pictures are infinitely stronger financial assets than startup ISO - I mean, as least the monkey jpegs have liquidity and volume, and no liquidation preference coded in to screw you over.
Project veritas exposed a lot of this by having a journalist match Twitter engineers on tinder, get invited to their holiday party, and secretly record them admitting to targeting conservative accounts.
Besides now being the biggest shareholder, Elon also has a lot of Twitter followers. He threatened to make a new platform, but did this instead.
The new CEO is a former SWE and a more typical SV guy. I don’t think he’s especially woke but he’s also down to bow to peer pressure. Elon doing this is now massive peer pressure in the opposite direction.
Given how often Bay Area engineeers forget their own bubbles and biases and accuse dissenting views of being “intolerant”, this is likely great news for proponents of free speech and Twitter shareholders.
Even outside Google, the halo effect is insane. Look at how much hate companies like Facebook and Uber get on HN. But if you break down the scandals side by side, you'll realize Google has by far the worst ethics in the industry.
For example, Uber is accused of being sexist because a woman wrote an open letter that she was excluded in various ways as an employee there, such as not receiving swag in her size as the only woman on the team. That sounds like a shitty culture. Meanwhile, Vic Gundotra was credibly accused of inviting 22 year old junior SWEs to exec offsites to sexually harass them. Andy Rubin was found to have sexually assaulted a subordinate, according to Google's own investigation, and recieved a 90M payout.
What's a worse workplace for women? Not getting swag in your size, or being raped?
Yet when I worked at Google when all these scandals took place, ordering an Uber was a huge faux paus. You had to order a Lyft because "Uber=sexist."
Even now on a recent thread I mentioned how all these tech companies are more evil than your typical crypto startup, people said "only Uber and Facebook" look bad on a resume. I would argue that's purely a function of PR because I challenge anyone to debate me that Facebook or Uber had worse ethics scandals than Google.
Google has one of the strongest PR machines of all time and its effect on sentiment inside and outside the company is indisputable.
Finally, the whole thing got settled (slap on the wrist but something at least), so Google employees could finally get an answer in the weekly all-hands (TGIF).
Laszlo Bock was their head of people at the time, and claimed that Google still did nothing wrong, and that they only settled because they were caught up in the whole thing with other companies like Adobe who did do something wrong. He said they did nothing wrong because they only stopped outbound recruiting towards employees at those companies, which had no effect, and still accepted inbound applications.
This raises the obvious question - if outbound recruiting had no effect, why was Google so eager to put at end to it? And how could Google act like they were caught up it the crossfire when it was specifically emails by Sergey Brin that provided the strongest evidence of illegal collusions?
It blew my mind how Google insists they hire "the world's smartest people" but then can have executives on stage spin narratives with ridiculous holes in it and expect those smart people to believe it rather than have their intelligence insulted.
But sadly, most Google employees did seem to buy it. There's a strong cult of indoctrination, starting with calling yourself a Googler and wearing the stupid hat, that Google execs just had a halo effect. I think between 2010 and now that halo effect has massively worn off, especially with all the dirty details about misbehavior from Sergey Brin, Vic Gundtora, and Andy Rubin.
Nonetheless, it served as strong evidence as to how even really smart people can get caught up in cult-like communities. The "founder worship", the indoctrination into company culture, all of that is super common in Silicon Valley tech companies and for an obvious reason - it works.
In reality, practically nobody cares and most employers are more than happy to hire experienced engineers who happened to work at some employers who did sketchy things.
But, if we're going to drill down into the ethics of crypto startups, I think they come out looking pretty good in comparison.
It's worth noting that the author of this post works at Hubspot which literally had an entire book written about how its workplace culture was highly discriminatory, particularly against older workers.("Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble ")
Engineers in glass houses....
Ironically I’d count crypto towards TC more than what you actually see more often which is counting ISO or private RSU as TC. Mostly since I think there is much more risk they will never be liquid. And even if they go liquid they are tough to evaluate exact dollar value unlike something being actively traded. For example many private companies got valuations before bear market that would be worth a lot less if actively traded but doubt the recruiters at those companies admit that.
The less popular narrative that’s just as true, at least in California if you pay attention to the politics, is that PHIMBYs who are mostly renters and insist on 100% affordable or nothing, play just as big a role.
If you look at who blocked SB50 or who pitched the “Mission moratorium , it was PHIMBY renters.
It’s easy to rally people up against greedy rich people. But the elephant in the room is that so much resistance comes from poor people who think “luxury housing” (aka anything market rate) will lead to more gentrification.
You can agree or disagree with the PHIMBY position but most people find it complex enough they just pretend that faction doesn’t exist despite the huge role it plays.
If you’re willing to work in the Bay there are at least ten companies that will consistently beat them. Check levels.fyi
For remote, I’m not sure, maybe Meta is best but unclear exactly what their remote situation is. I’ve read you’re second class citizen to MPK.
Meta obviously pays super well but that’s reflective of SV paying well, they don’t stand out. They are just a better known brand. In fact despite their “toxic” brand I think they still have quite a strong overall engineering brand and many engineers interview there precisely because it “looks good on the resume.” This is especially true for the international crowd. Often times people only interview at famous companies and don’t realize the better options.
Somehow FAANG has gotten reputation for being the king of compensation when none of those companies stand out, strong consumer brands and huge market caps putting them on finance radars is why they get talked about. FAANG as a term was coined by a stock analyst.
Of course any individual case can vary a ton and Meta has deep pockets if they desperately want you, I’m just talking about standard IC senior E5 and staff E6 engineers.
I’m not saying anyone has to move to the Bay or optimize their life for money, I’m just noting that if you do want the “cheddar” but don’t like Meta, you’re in luck. Many other companies will outpay them, I speak from experience as an IC engineer in the Bay whose spoken with many others who get offers.
Dantley has an enormous ego, and that ego led to a bunch of fluff PR pieces commissioned where he bashed other employees which started a civil war. The guy who did the Google comic for years went to Twitter and made a comic about the civil war and HR accused him of racism (the comic was not racist) and made him take it down.
Montara made like 20 million a year but did absolutely nothing but send an email about the important of diversity every few months.
Only reason these guys weren’t fired a long time ago is that the previous Twitter CEO was totally checked out and obsessed with bitcoin. New CEO knows what’s going and and is cleaning house.
I don’t work at Twitter but I’m close to many who do so this is grapevine gossip.
I thought /r/gendercritical and /r/nonewnormal both fit into the bucket of “I can see why this is controversial, but it’s more dissent from mainstream opinion than clearly ban worthy.” Again I’m not espousing views in those subreddits I just didn’t view them as ban worthy.
All sorts of “misinformation” is totally fine as long as it goes with the group think such as the Rolling Stone story on Oklahoma covid units being overrun that turned out to be false.
Reddit has unpaid moderators who wield way too much power and blackmail the company into getting their way. Now Reddit has raised money so we can expect even more purges to become as advertiser friendly as possible.
Some sort of app that would connect federated backends would be ideal, Lemmy was on the right path but yet another dead on arrival project due to ideology.
I know we seem to be on a path for increasing centralization but I predict the pendulum swings the opposite way as the user experience on centralized sites keep deteriorating due to pressure to monetize and people get fed up of a few power mods on these sites dictating permissible opinions.
Your failure to keep two paragraphs of texts consistent and coherent badly undermines your overall point. It’s pretty clear tech as a whole is a lot less elitist than law/medicine.
People are “elitist” because there is non stop pressure to drive down wages of engineers and it’s often disguised as progressivism. It can also undermine the professional and political power of engineers if the field is constantly portrayed as easy for anyone to enter. The AMA knows this better than anyone as they’ve tightly restricted the number of new doctors for decades, so it’s highly ironic you’d even link to them at all.
Go look at levels.fyi. Facebook pays close to market for senior engineers (~450k), more or less in line with companies like Uber, Robinhood, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. In fact, Facebook doesn't even crack the top 5 on levels for senior SWE comp so this idea that they have to overpay to recruit is clearly false. If anything, if you hang out on Blind, people will pick FB over other companies precisely because it's perceived as having a stronger engineering brand than those other companies.
I think Facebook executive team is full of liars but there are also these weird PR games in play. Uber had a woman complain about not getting a jacket in her size, Google gave Andy Rubin 10 figure bonuses after he credibly raped a report, had scandals with Vic Gundrota/Kelly Ellis, etc. yet Google is still a relatively well perceived company but Uber/TK are mysognistic/sexist companies.
Google got caught literally forwarding private user data to the government without warrants, nobody cares (except Glenn Greenwald I guess).
Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs got caught explicitly and literally illegally colluding to suppress wages but nobody cares.
Google execs were caught lying multiple times w.r.t them building weaponized AI for drones for the DoD in the Maven scandal and that largely washed over.
Eric Schmidt sends out email after email to Google employees to contribute to his SuperPAC and nobody cares. Google builds Dragonfly to censor Chinese political opponents and nobody really cares.
Facebook is an unethical company but companies like Google have objectively far worse scandalds but don't become the media targets. There are weird groupthink/PR plays at work here and it plays out even on Hacker News where accuracy takes a backseat to narrative building.
Besides meeting my wife this way, there was one girl who rather coldly rejected me that I later ran into via another social circle. I apologized if I had made her uncomfortable and she told me that even though she wasn’t interested she was also somewhat flattered and that the incident made her day.
I think with sexual harassment in the world and all these apps everyone overthinks things and think just walking up to a stranger is for boomers or pick up artists. Really it’s just the normal human interaction that worked for a couple million years and still works today. And at least for typical heterosexual dynamics, the ability to make eye contact and say “Hi, my name is” will always be more impactful than a Bluetooth signal.
The NYTimes fired an editor for publishing an opinion piece by a sitting US Congress person because that opinion upset people. And this is supposed to be the crown jewel of journalism and has turned into Huffington Post. Your downvotes and others defending modern “journalists” are delusional.
People nowadays complain that gay pride parades have gotten too corporate, but especially by companies that are willing to exploit people in other ways. But this is simply the playbook Google pioneered, to take good will around certain social issues and use it as a decoy while you pick people’s pockets and put your boot on their face. I don’t think we can understate the extent to which good causes have been infiltrated by bad corporate actors and how much that had undermined our trust in our communities.
FAANG is also a horrible acronym for the top paying companies since two of those companies don’t even pay that well. Companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Lyft, LinkedIn and many others will outpay FAANG companies and their equity is fully liquid.
Walkouts are pointless. True Employee organization and collective bargaining is the only answer to holding execs accountable , whether it’s at Google, Activision, or anywhere else.