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The article is a fluff piece that's comically uncritical of Google. There's obvious hypocrisy for a company that's done all sorts of user-antagonistic things to internet users as Google has, from Google AMP stealing traffic, to PRISM actively violating the 4th amendment, to Dragonfly explicitly enabling censorship. Google's gotten away with the hypocrisy due to a relentless PR engine. Maybe if you don't like predictable Hacker News snark, downvote the PR "submarine" pieces from the front page, because there's nothing of value in this article and "predictable" critique is the best it deserves.

Google IARC is _not_ enlightened. The only way in which Google is enlightened is they have perfected the art of PR and selling employees that pro-employer policies are really pro-employee policies.

If you are in California, which is where the majority of Google employees live and where Google has their HQ, if you work on something outside of work hours and without work equipment or resources, then you own it, full stop. That's California law.

Google lawyercats will show up and say "well unless it's related to what Google does, and Google does everything', which is an incredibly flimsy argument with zero legal precedent that only a lawyer on Google payroll would accept. A company can't in good faith say "we work on literally everything therefore the law doesn't apply to us."

IARC is a trap. If you just didn't say a word to Google and worked on something off hours, you own it. With IARC, now you've created a paper trail and a chance for Google to say we discussed it and we clearly said the employee could not work on this, so now if it does go to court you've just massively complicated your life, all to accomplish something that the state law guaranteed you in the first place! There's literally zero upside to IARC.

I've unfortunately witnessed the head of OSS approvals at Google, mislead people on this issue and go as far as to vaguely threaten that employees who continue to debate the topic on internal company mailing lists will be terminated.

Google IARC is a scam and it should not be held up as a gold standard. CA Labor Code Section 2780 is the gold standard.

Index funds democratized investing. Robinhood “democratized” the worst part of investing and exposed unsophisticated investors to the instruments they are most likely to underperform on. Individual stock picking is probably worse than indexes but fine, however the incentive to day trade or trade complex derivatives is almost certainly going to hurt people far more often than a Vanguard account. It’s not a coincidence Robinhood has been directly linked to teen suicide and Vlad gave the proverbial lip service.

In any case, it really doesn’t matter. It’s awful at order execution, so you get worst prices on things. This was proven but SEC just gave slap on wrist.

Its an extremely immature platform and has outages at the worst times.

It’s app is simple but missing key info compared to competitors.

Finally, the GameStop fiasco was unforgivable and only a naive fool would accept the explanation given. Citadel is the MAJORITY of Robinhood revenue and was opposite that trade. The stock market has existed for over a century with online trading for decades, including many volatile stocks, and apologists can’t name a single other example of one way trade restrictions. It didn’t happen during the Volkswagen short squeeze.

Despite that, apologists act like the clearing house explanation is stone cold fact. Source? Not a single investigation other than the word of Robinhood CEO, who contradicted himself multiple times explaining it. It was the fraud of the century and only people with little understanding of finance bought the explanation.

I worked as a SWE for 6 years, then DevRel for 2, and it became a huge hassle to get back to plain SWE. This was true even though in DevRel I spent almost all my time coding on demo apps and client libraries. Recruiters just see something other than SWE and assume you forgot how to do real engineering in 6 months and push you towards roles like partner engineering. Ridiculous but true. I eventually got back to SWE but I just wanted to offer a counterpoint that it’s easy to go back because that can vary.

You are totally confused. Robinhood is free trading and you are not a paying customer. Robinhood’s incredibly sketchy business model is being paid by Citadel for order flow. So it’s very similar to Facebook in that the consumer is the product, not the customer.

Robinhood is an awful company that’s a net negative on the world. Their biggest innovation is creating a Candy Crush UI for complex derivatives trading and making it accessible to people who failed high school math. Their CEO has been consistently dishonest and fraudulent.

If you want a solid mobile trading app for stocks and options Thinkorswim is light years superior in every dimension but looking like a Vegas slot machine.

Your compensation is driven by several factors, the two biggest being how much value you generate and how easy you are to replace. It has nothing to do with your needs. Even Google's official compensation policy explicitly notes that cost of living is not a factor and only local competition density is.

The reason these adjustments are being made is because the whole world isn't remote yet. The engineer in Brooklyn could more easily go get a better offer at a Wall St job then the person in Kentucky.

People who believe that we're all going to be remote and keep our Bay Area/NYC compensation levels are laughably naive. It is possible that, your compensation relative to your cost of living might improve, but long term we will see equilibrium end up closer to average remote compensation than average BA/NY compensation.

It's true employees might more easily switch jobs, but hiring remote adds a LOT of candidates to a companies hiring pool as well (which is why they're doing it). Furthermore, a push for a stronger remote technical culture with more async communications, more documentation, etc is inevitably going to make the outsourcing efforts of the 2000s a lot more viable. There's still time zones and language barriers, sure, but remote work solves several other challenges.

Finally, even if your current employer keeps your compensation the same, you have to question how it will affect your next job search.

People seem to be thinking that they are going to take Bay Area compensation and go settle in the middle of the country and live like a king. Short term that may happen, but long term it's an absolute guarantee that tech compensation stagnates or goes down because the supply of the labor pool increases so much with remote candidates. That's a major rationale for companies going remote in the first place.

That's not what's happening in reality though. I gave you two notable examples but I know of a few more as well. This isn't hypothetical, many companies are actively seeking to destroy their in-person culture (outside of company offsite events). Of course, since every corporate move has to have a feel good PR element to it these days, the buzzword to justify this direction is equity/equality, and that since DEI candidates will be more likely to be remote, it's especially important to destroy Bay Area office culture to make sure remote employees are on equal footing. Again, I know many people at SV companies so this isn't speculation but what I've actually seen happen at several companies. And I'm really not trying to cast judgement on whether this is good or bad for the industry long term, just again noting that the idea that people who don't want to work remotely are largely unaffected by these decisions is totally false.

I'm mixed on remote work, even as an engineering IC, despite claims that only management want in-office.

To me, the downside of remote coworkers is we've already seen a dynamic at many companies that start with "we'll allow remote workers" straight to "if we allow any in-person collaboration, then remote workers will be second-class citizens, so to pre-empt that, we will actively discourage any in person collaboration."

For example, Coinbase didn't just allow remote but shut down the SF office for this reason. Twitter is re-opening their office but in a crippled state, where the food options are massively downsized, and employees are actively discouraged from eating with any teammates.

If you're the type of personality who gets energized by collaboration with teammates, if you like the real teammate relationships that more easily develop with facetime, then it's not a matter of allowing remote coworkers but whether those remote coworkers now get to advocate for actively destroying any office culture.

Again, I understand why there's many advantages of remote work, but let's not pretend the people who didn't want to go remote are unaffected.

I agree to the extent that it might not last and "make hay while the sun shines."

At the same time, I disagree it's that unprecedented. There's about as many lawyers as software developers and the compensation distribution is surprisingly similar (including some bimodal aspects). Yeah they put in 3 years and took some debt but it's not that significant big picture, many CS students get an MS.

There's a lot of doctors in my family. It used to be a gold mine field and now it's much less so, as hospitals have a lot more power over the doctors than they used to.

If you want a really good bang for your buck, look at salaries for nurses who get some specialization like CRNAs, who can make similar money to SWEs, with about 2 years extra school work.

I mostly agree we're in a golden age of software engineering compensation and as I mentioned in my first post, these companies have a right to be picky. Still, to some extent I think engineers of all stripes were relatively underpaid relatively to some other white collar professions historically and its just been catching up a bit.

Yes, a new grad "feeling lowballed by 200k" was hyperbole because I waste too much time on Blind. But FAANG new grad TC is pushing that number, which is a stark contrast to my new grad numbers ~2010. But it was probably confusing for me to phrase it that way.

It's basically both.

When I graduated with my CS degree, I was _thrilled_ to be offered 50k. Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC. So hard not to say that the market hasn't adjusted somewhat.

At the same time, part of the reason companies even have to pay so much is because they've made interviewing so damn hard. I personally know many people at great companies like Google and Twitter who are _desperate_ to change, but they are too afraid to interview. They feel they got lucky and got through the process once and are unlikely to be able to repeat it, and they might be right. The industry has taken "false negatives are better than a false positives" to an absurd extreme and then complain there's a shortage.

It's one or the other. If you're saying "a false negative is ok" you are implicitly saying "it's totally fine if we fail to hire good developers", and you can't say that then turn around and complain it's too hard to hire good developers. Which is _exactly_ what all my recent employers have done.

I've mentioned this on HN before, but I have 10+ years experience, a BS in CS from a top 10 school, worked as SWE at Google for over 3 years, I've done 100+ leetcode questions, studied grokking the systems interview/designing data intensive applications, I live in the Bay Area, and I've _still_ failed 90% of my onsites last few years at the top tech companies (Stripe, Lyft, AirBnB, Square, Dropbox, etc).

Reasons for failure vary, you don't get much feedback but when I've gotten it it's been distributed across coding/systems/behavioral.

I've also been rejected at resume round by companies like Instacart and Coinbase.

The interview bar has gotten insanely high it seems. And I left Google way back without anything lined up assuming in this job market I could waltz into a good job with some modest prep but that has not been the case.

I objectively have top credentials, and I find tech interviewing an absolute nightmare. The standards have gone through the roof and one slip up and you get dinged. And the system is way more arbitrary and subjective than anyone admits.

Now, this isn't a woe-is-me story becasue to your point, there's a lot of companies paying top dollar and I have a decently paid job. Furthermore, I'm not failing interviews at random startups but as senior engineer at top companies that would probably offer $400k if they made an offer. They have the right to be extremely picky and subjective, but let's at least admit that they _are_ extremely picky and subjective.

The "I'm a HM and can't hit dev targets", reeks of ignorance as to your own process. I wonder if you do things like tell your interviewers "a false negative is better than a false positive" ? Or let one interviewer use some arbitrary criteria to dock a candidate and then pass on them because of one bad score? Because you probably do lack perspective on how many good devs your company is rejecting if you're only sitting on the HM chair and not seeing what it feels like to go through these rounds as an IC SWE.

> The number of US adults with MDD increased by 12.9%, from 15.5 to 17.5 million, between 2010 and 2018, whereas the proportion of adults with MDD aged 18–34 years increased from 34.6 to 47.5

If about half of young adults suffer from a disorder, it makes me question if it’s a disorder at all. And the noted impact of economic factors and things like Covid highlight the “nurture” aspect of the disorder instead of “nurture” (e.g. the “chemical imbalance” internet myth).

I’ve been diagnosed with MDD, GAD, ADHD, and bipolar type 1 but after I suffered a manic episode while on psych meds , I really dug into the research of psychiatrists and now have the controversial opinion it’s very weak science riding on the coattails of the rest of Western medicine and is obviously influenced by the for profit pharmaceutical companies. The DSM 5 wasn’t even created in the open.

Both as societies and as individuals, we need to introspect on how we can be so relatively wealthy yet so often so fundamentally unhappy. And the idea that half of the population has a brain disorder rather than is in a bad environment and conditioned by circumstances to feel that way seems hard to believe.

I’m very interested in the anti psychiatry movement which includes a small minority of medical professionals, and I’m more open to sane ideas that I used to consider “new age.” But more than anything, I think many aspects of mental health are like losing weight - very simple but difficult especially in the wrong environment. Close family relationships, diet, exercise, time outdoors, a sense of community, less time on social media - we mostly know that this is the key to feeling better but we desperately want an easier answer in pill from someone in a white coat and our profit driven medical system is more than happy to oblige.

The obvious benefit to the company is to get the candidate to sign.

Companies generally have tech sourcers use software like Gem to spam thousands of candidates, link press releases about their funding rounds, then expect candidates to be excited about the company right away. Very rarely is much invested in selling the company, I think it’s actually gotten worse over the years due to platforms that automate candidate experience like Gem.

I got “bait-and-switched” on some key details of my current job, but it’s not so simple at all to just leave. Hiring managers don’t like job hoppers, they will wonder if you got fired, whatever.

The idea that candidates are swamped with multiple offers is also just a oft repeated false narrative . I’ve 10+ years experience, was SWE at Google, CS degree from good school, can do most Leetcode medium and hard with ease, but still have about a 20% on-site to offer ratio. Companies say they are desperate to hire but can still be very picky. And to extent I understand why I got so many rejections I think it ties into me struggling with the “topgrading” grillings about why I left previous jobs, which would only get worse if I stormed out of a new job over anything that wasn’t a massive issue.

There’s a few reasons why the narrative employees have so much power persists in tech - excuse to push for more government funded training and visas, awful hiring practices that emphasize “false negative > false positive”, companies that pay way below market surprised candidates dont accept, outlier stories from rare candidates who played the job search game and negotiation game extremely well. But on average employers still have way, way more power in hiring and this idea that an engineer can just quit a new job and waltz into another one is absurd and false.

A lot of this "pay everyone the same, be transparent" sounds pro-employee but in practice its exactly the opposite.

These companies that tend to write these blog posts on their fair and equitable compensation strategies always pay worse, usually significantly so, then market.

It's easy to say "we pay everyone the same, we don't make geo-market adjustments", until you find out that the Bay Area company that reduces pay for remote team members actually pays that remote employee more than these companies that pay everyone the same. Spotify is a good example.

Let's Whimsical post their compensation numbers and see how it compares to averages on levels.fyi . Guessing it's much lower. And they can talk about other things like WLB, that's fine, there's more to a job than. money. But it's annoying that companies feel the need to write blog posts about their forward-looking compensation strategies that at the end of the day is bluster that amounts to "we don't pay very well."

Levels and Blind are what added transparency to tech compensation - not self-congratulating startup CEO blog posts.

My friend lived in SF for 3 years, then left for a year. He called me to say, “dude what happened to SF? Apparently it’s all shit and needles now.” I had to explain to him that nothing has changed. He was just reading sensationalized media.

I live in SF, I would like the city cleaned up, more accountability for taxes, more focus on tax payers over homeless. But at the same time, SF represents liberalism in the US so is a target for conservative media and the problems are massively overblown. People act like the Tenderloin is the whole city, or tech people who never left soma. The city is incredibly beautiful overall.

The top comment at time of writing is complaining about taxes AND how terrible it is to see homeless and we are evil. It’s a hot take totally free of substance, short of kicking people out of the city there are no easy solutions that involve lower taxes and helping all the homeless. These people want to sound compassionate but mostly sound like they want suffering out of their eyesight.

Downtown SF has emptied out because we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t know if it will last but it’s so dumb to act like people left for any other reason than a pandemic making city living awful. There’s a good chance it will bounce back.

Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there. These are problems other cities are jealous of. The mayor of Miami literally bought a billboard right now begging people to go to his city. And that jealousy combined with hatred of democrats means people will massively exaggerate problems.

Again, I highly recommend visiting any other neighborhood besides soma or the tenderloin.

I’m certainly not denying there’s plenty of misinformation and far fetched theories floating around. I think there’s a big middle ground between “accept every half brained idea on Reddit” and “take a 300 word corporate blog post at face value.”

It is a fact that the relevant ticker symbols were hidden in Robinhood UI during the restrictions. This could simply be because the UI always hid symbols with restrictions, but that would be a strange decision in the first place (why not just always show the tickers info?) and in context is another oddity worth looking into.

My suggested middle ground is, call for investigation. Maybe there’s no smoking gun but if, for example, it was uncovered that a huge amount of institutional short covering took place during the restrictions that would be more hints that foul play occurred and justify more investigation.

In the future, if we don’t get answers , well connected players can manipulate markets by blaming opaque clearing house requirements unless more transparency is added.

My concern is that by being too dismissive of calls for investigation, we lose the political steam to at least try and get better answers that we deserve.

Conspiracies happen so frequently on Wall St that “conspiracy theories” should be closer to a priori assumption than irrational fringe ideas.

Were people skeptical of Moodys A+ ratings of subprime mortgages conspiracy theorists? And that’s far from the only example of financial fraud . There’s a lot of money at stake.

Citadel is most of Robinhoods revenue, they put money on the opposite side of the trade via Melvin, and Robinhoods decision to restrict trading benefited the short position of the trade . The stock markets been around for over a century and online trading around over 20 years, with many volatile stocks and bubbles, yet restricting trading in one direction has no precedent. The conflict of interest Robinhood had is crystal clear and at a minimum calls for a deep investigation. Accepting their PR, which has barely explained anything is about as far from rational as possible. They described the collateral requirements as “opaque” and “pretty technical” with no real clarity, and never explained other details such as why they restricted fully cleared non-margin cash accounts or why they removed tickets from their search bars.

I’m not saying with any confidence there was foul play, but there’s more than enough conflict of interest and unprecedented behavior to call for an investigation far more than what we’re getting. Especially with regards to who was buying when so many retail traders were unable to.

Financial markets should be open and transparent. They are not supposed to be casinos with arbitrary hedge funds playing the house. To resign yourself to that idea is far more irrational than calling for openness and investigation into the many unanswered questions around what happened.

Totally right, and furthermore, Robinhood is facing some serious solvency issues. Their PR releases claiming this was clearing house related was already highly dubious, and is self-contradicting because they are blaming it on a liquidity issue while saying it's not a liquidity issue.

But this is happening at the same time was mass account withdrawals/closures, and we're now learning this not only threatens their general solvency but ability to execute trades. This could easily cause a feedback loop that empties their accounts, at which point people are going to be unable to withdraw their cash which is goign to cause a bank run and drill the nails into their coffin even further. Healthy companies don't need to emergency borrow a billion dollars. If you have less than $250,000 on Robinhood, your account is FDIC insured so you'll eventually get your money back...but I think most people would prefer not to go through that process.

Robinhood is on a death spiral and prudent financial advice is to move any assets you have off of it as soon as possible.

If a physicists tells me something about how the solar system works, they don't have much reason to lie to me.

If RobinHood tells me how clearing houses work, they have a huge reason to lie to me.

Given what we say in cases like Enron, Bear Stearns, I am shocked and dismayed at the eagerness of Hacker News contributors to so readily accept whatever Robinhood tells them as 100% gospel.

Where were all these experts on clearing houses a week ago, warning of this exact risk? Because plenty of people had opinions on Gamestop, that maybe the SEC would halt trading altogether etc, but not a single person mentioned this clearing house liquidity issues until it happened. And I still really can't get a good explanation for why if I had 10k in my non-margin account that cleared over a year ago I can't use that to buy a stock(or withdraw for that matter, though hopefully that's temporary). OR, if people were allowed to sell stock, who were they selling to?? Clearly SOMEONE was allowed to buy! A lot of misdirection around things like margin accounts.

Robinhood didn't give any real explanation until many hours later. But they're apparently just "poor communicators." Amazing how a billion dollar company filled with conflicts of interest making a totally unprecedented restriction that actively helps their hedge fund investor simply can't possibly be committing any sort of fraud.

Because nobody's ever committed fraud before, a Robinhood press release must be treated as the "facts". This is insanity . Robinhood are not the "experts" in this case, their version of truth is probably the least reliable of all parties.

Your "facts" are basically corporate PR statements from corporations that have a huge entrenched reason to distort the truth and have changed stories multiple times. I'd say your eagerness to accept RH's version of the truth as 100% credible is far more actively dangerous than what you responded to.

The RH apologists are going on long winded explanations about clearing houses (and to some extent there’s elements of “it’s too complex for your little brain”). But even to the extent it’s true, if I put in 5k from my checkings into RH and buy stock, why does Rh need all this liquidity to get orders filled? I understand turning margin accounts off, but that’s it . Past that, at best robinhoods business model is highly flawed , at worst it’s fraudulent. Because ultimately, all the finance whiz bang talk doesn’t change common sense that only allowing trades in one direction is unfair, and is incredibly bad optics when that direct benefits a huge player filled with conflicts of interest. But honestly I think the “robinhood is committing fraud” is being underweighted amongst “serious “ discussion.

As someone who had the unfortunate experience of being locked in a psych ward, there’s nothing “conspiracy” related about the fear of being involuntary committed, where you get stripped of all basic rights with no trial.

Pretty ironic take given that the site you're writing the comment on was founded by pg writing a bunch of essays breaking the world down into "nerds" vs "jocks" with VCs being "high school girls". pg decided to write those down rather than share them over a third beer and it seems to have spawned a bunch of billion dollar companies.

The author refers to michael o church who had much clearer takes on the subject, not-withstanding a lot of other craziness that undermined some of his interesting opinions. He certainly was one of the first people to publicly call out that companies like Google and VC-backed startups spend a LOT of effort on PR that they are "social good" despite being as ruthlessly money-making oriented as any conventional companies they claimed not to be. He coined one of my favorite sayings that "Silicon Valley is just Wall St for people who can't wake up early." Those takes are a little less novel in 2021 now that everyone realizes how morally bankrupt companies like Google are but credit's due where it's due so I'd recommend checking out his old blog posts.

The confusing part is that salary and stock get mixed up, but in a public company the stocks effectively cash and can basically be considered salary, unlike illiquid equity.

I don’t know where you’re from, but in SF amongst my circles, senior engineer market rate is about 300-500k but most startups will only pay 150-225k salary so that’s a huge pay cut. However, the base salaries are same, but you can pay your rent, mortgage, or student loans with the public company RSUs.

That’s why it’s bullshit when employees get told they get common shares while investors get preferred because employees take salary and therefore less risk. If you’re walking away from 200k per year of public stock that you could instantly sell on the public market and buy real estate with, you are in fact taking a huge risk and a pay cut. Trying to pretend like you’re not and that the startup is paying a “competitive salary” is a sleight of hand used in 2020 to fool naive engineers.

Any companies that offer ISOs without at least a ten year exercise window is just spitting in your face and trying to leave an avenue to clawback your hard earned and well deserved compensation.

It’s not that early stage equity is worthless. It obviously isn’t, it can be worth a ton. It’s the instruments that VCs and founders use to offer early stage equity to employees that is worthless. That is a huge distinction that’s worth emphasizing because when people say “oh it’s probably worthless” it’s not just saying that the company is unlikely to succeed, but that if it does succeed you will be scammed out of its value via exercise windows, dilution, getting common instead of preferred shares, etc

Actually, App Engine is a LOT like Cloud Functions/Run. You have some code that you want to run in the Cloud and you don't want to worry about server ops.

Whether that's your "whole stack" or something "ad-hoc" is a totally arbitrary distinction. Your "whole stack" will almost certainly involve external concerns, and your "ad-hoc" concerns will almost certainly grow in complexity until they converge on the same spot.

AppEngine is also running containers via gvisor.

The distinction is being driven by PMs and marketers but not by the needs of customers. What end-users need is one well-supported tool, not 8 separate tools with uncertainty about which one will receive future support and matrices and flowcharts to decide between them.

AppEngine has had scale-to-zero for 15 years, but instead of having a coherent product strategy, why not just launch a different competing product every year which is missing features that already exist? AppEngine vs Cloud Functions vs Cloud Run, the reasons these all exist at the same time is not because it makes any sense for customers, but because Google PMs get promoted for launching new things rather than supporting existing products.

One thing that happens in SV is:

* Employer says "hey, we have all these convenient corporate app, wouldn't it be nice to be able to check work messages and work docs on your mobile? Just install our app to "corp-ify" your phone"

* Employer now views your mobile device as containing sensitive company IP and therefore they have the right to snoop on anything on your phone.

If you install corp on your phone, Google views it as a right to rootkit your phone, view all your private messages, etc. I learned this the hard way. Whether this is ethical, or legal, I don't know, but it's one of those things that seem obvious to some and not obvious to others.

If your employer expects you to use a mobile device at work, have them pay for your phone and only use it for work purposes, assume that HR can view EVERYTHING on your phone, because they can, especially at a company like Google that has both deep mobile expertise and insane paranoia around things like IP protection and stopping whistleblowers.

Scale AI is an embarrassment to YC in general, as the founders embody every negative trope we’ve come to associate with the worst of the scene. The Youtuber Joma Tech has an excellent takedown on the sheer arrogance of their founder.

https://youtu.be/HTXTVfBCeSY

The fetishization of a youthful founder, the ridiculous interview questions, and as I personally made the mistake of doing a phone screen with them before learning some of this, the recruiter admitted that their compensation was “startup compensation” aka we want the smartest people who are dumb enough to work for half the money.

And the cherry on top of course is that the world changing product they are building is, wait for it, labeling data. It’s basically YCs version of Poes Law where it sound like satire but it’s actually real.