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Step 1 would be to pardon Snowden. He was whistleblowing on an illegal and dangerous program that directly threatened our democracy and took steps to totalitarianism. But instead of honoring that, Obama and his DoJ instead go to SXSW and give insulting, condescending talks about how we should stop working on "cat apps" and come be a drone for Uncle Sam. Why? So you can demand all our expertise but trust none of our judgement? So you can underpay us, give us no voice at the table, but then insult our intelligence by acting like serving these crooks is some noble cause? Lawyers run the country, Congress is all lawyers and no engineers. But then they run into problems related to technology and they say "bring in the nerds". Well, the word you're looking for is experts, and they're in the West Coast making way more money and building real technology instead of bureaucratic bullshit and illegal authoritarian tools of oppression. And maybe smoking recreational marijuana without having to bullshit their way through some bogus polygraph (not that those even work). I can't imagine anyone but the most naive would work for the NSA, FBI, or CIA if they had any other options.

> even Python

Off topic, but it shouldn't be better than "even Python", because Python has a really, really broken dependency system. Far more so than Java, which has Maven/Gradle which are both infinitely better than the pip/virtualenv disaster.

People complain about things like shading in Maven being complicated. What they might not realize is that pip doesn't even try to address conflicting dependencies, it will just silently give you the wrong version! You ask for A==0.2 and it will give you A==0.1 if another dependency asked for A==0.1 first. And it won't even warn you even though it's straight up broken behavior. Virtualenv makes packaging annoying since it's almost vendoring but not quite. To totally understand the packaging system forces you into the world of eggs, wheels, disutils, conflicting versions, condas, etc.

Sorry for tangent, just thought it was funny you would hold Python up as a standard of dependency excellence when it's probably the worst overall ecosystem of major languages.

But poor grades indicate a lack of grit.

There was a recent thread in r/Bitcoin about someone missing a 200k deposit on Coinbase. With the quote "say what you will about the banks, at least you can get on the phone with them." These super anti banking activists want banks when shit really hits the fan, surprise surprise.

BTC will never be a currency for anything legal. Anyone telling you otherwise is pumping so they can eventually dump. Regulations, inflation, etc these are all features, , not bugs. None of the Bitcoin true believers want to spend theirs which is exactly the problem with deflation.

Maybe it can be a store of value. Maybe. It's primarily a Ponzi scheme and a way to buy drugs.

O.1% of common shares with complicated tax options. Investors get preferred shares cause they invest money. But engineers get common shares even though they're asked to take paycuts.

Startups insist this is "standard". Well I hope it's standard for them to fail until they actually value engineers. I don't see why engineers need to be a monastic underclass to subsidize founders and VCs.

After initial skepticism, I like Snapchat for reasons in the article (lower pressure). And I think they "get" the younger generation and have good product strategy, a lot like Facebook succeeded in a crowded space for similar reasons with a similar amount of skeptics.

Problem to me is they seem more like Twitter than Facebook in that their only real monetization path is ads, but their ads don't seem that valuable.

If I'm selling watches, I want to pay Google to advertise to people who just searched for watches. If I'm selling retirement planning, I want to pay Facebook to advertise to middle aged people who like personal finance topics. But who wants to buy Snapchat ads? Some people who want to do brand awareness marketing on a trendy platform but not much else. So I think just because they can get lots of users does not guarantee success.

I've always been baffled that asking these questions are not incredibly obvious to anyone. I could not agree more that not knowing the outstanding shares, the liquidiation preference, etc with the "it's like getting paid without knowing the currency." What's interesting, at my first startup job I had the CEO push back when I asked how many outstanding shares there were, amazingly, even though otherwise it makes the stock compensation literally a meaningless number. The second place I work that gave me options gave me a bit more info, but there was still so much uncertainty compared to a company that just paid public RSUs or cash, especially because I had no insight into the financials like burn rate. Both of these places ended up having worthless options, and in both cases I couldn't even "wait and see" because by leaving I was forced to choose to exercise.

Not only are options often worth less then you think, you get all the tax complications, all the exercise window complications - how do people not discount their value even more?

I think a company like Uber should just offer cash. They are not a rocket ship, they are already in space but haven't IPOed for weird reasons. They raised enough money to just pay cash. If the financiers want to play financial games, they should play them amongst themselves, not with employees livelihood. All of this advice pops up, "Get an (expensive) lawyer to review it", "Take this online seminar" etc. It's like writing a job offer in a foreign language and suggesting someone take a few Duolingo classes so they can read it and make sure it doesn't screw them. And if you need a lawyer to review it, reimbursing an independent one should be part of the job offer, full stop.

Nowadays people are saying don't join startups for money.

But it seems that the founders and VCs are very interested in money. It seems they think _you_ are the only one who shouldn't be worried about money. Work yourself to the bone because "we're a startup", don't expect to get paid because you're "changing the world", but excuse me while I drive off in my ferrari I bought.

Yes, the startup will "change the world", almost always in the sense that every company changes the world by offering goods and services. But if you want to work for charity, work for a non-profit, why do people think it makes sense to sacrifice their own income so some rich VC can get richer?

The tune has changed recently as well. Because pg used to say startups were the way to get rich, by compressing your work years. Zach Holman used to say the same thing. Nowadays you do the compressing your working years in terms of work output, just not in terms of compensation. And Zach Holman is now writing every other blog post on how startups don't pay out and they "move fast and break people."

With the crappy salaries startups offer, it's almost impossible to buy a house in the Bay Area, yet somehow you get looped into the anti-tech villinization. If I'm going to be the big bad evil rich bogeyman, might as well actually try to get paid like one.

Startups were romanticized. These billion dollar companies that are clearly not startups tried to retain the startup "brand". And even the early-stage startups are really just product areas of the VC firm. You are still working for a big company. The VCs call the shot, your "CEO" is the PM. But it's great for the VCs since they can screw you over, screw the customer over, screw the public over, and it doesn't matter because each one of these dinky startups is their own brand you can shut down tomorrow.

They rode the waves of a lot of romanticism from pg essays, the Social Network, Airbnb/Uber/Snapchat, but now bigger companies are paying more, too many engineers have gotten screwed by equity grants, and I think we're seeing a general trend away from startups. Maybe it will eventually restart, but VC companies will not be appealing until VCs fix these issues.

>I don't get this at all. I've been at this over 20 years and the only times I get "angry" (or more realistically, frustrated), is when the powers that be are adamant that the team spend months building a feature that no one wants or has no justification or is the feature we removed two years ago or there is no vision for what we are collectively trying to do.

Constantly amazed at how often this has happened to me. The worst is the fake "agile" terminology when you're doing the opposite. MVPs that are neither minimal nor viable nor a product. Two week sprints that stick to the Gantt chart we made 6 months ago no matter what the customers/target audience tell us. Spending more time talking about the work we've done and plan to do than actually doing any.

The empire-building as well drives me nuts. We need more people! Don't know what projects they will specifically do, communication and collaboration overhead is already slowing the pace down to a crawl, but we need more people. That way I can say I "led" a large team of engineers on LinkedIn. Wish these people obsessed with "leading" people could all be replaced by people obsessed with leading products.

Always amazed me that I could make $8 an hour serving pizza in high school,, but clearly delivering economic value to people, then find so many people in the world who can raise so much money money or headcount and pay me ten times as much so I can deliver absolutely no value to anyone.

I know we were talking about how most stuff doesn't make us angry though :)

I think I was always above-average intelligence (top 20%) but I don't think I'm close to a genius. Sure, people pay me money to do things and of course many of them could do it themselves if they learned how, that much is obvious to me. I pay a lawyer money but I'm pretty sure I could have become a lawyer, it's not an insult to their intelligence, we all specialized, that's how economics works.

I think a lot of programmers get angry because they're young and poorly socialized, my past included. Getting motivated to improve that which can be improved is good. Looking out for yourself and not being a doormat to the sociopaths that VC and management tends to attract is good. Doing the above without getting angry about what is usually trivial in the big picture is best.

Very unsurprising for me. You are measuring your ability to solve algorithm puzzles. Most engineers don't actually do many algorithm puzzles in day-to-day work, especially the types of algorithms that interviews tend to focus on like sorting and dynamic programming. So "years of experience" is not measuring experience in what you're actually being tested on. On the other hand, you do exactly those types of things in many CS classes, and in Coursera classes, algorithms are exactly what you practice. So it makes sense it correlates.

Top company is a predictor for the obvious reason - it's selection bias for people who already passed those interviews at the company. You're not good at the interview because you worked at the company, you work for the company because you're good at the interview.

Master's degrees seem like largely for international students needing visas, career switchers, etc so not surprised they are not a strong predictor. And if anything the course material moves past the intro data structures stuff the whiteboard interviews tend to test.

The only huge surprise for me here is that Coursera is a stronger predictor than top company and top school. I would have predicted top company > top school > Coursera.

The post that I would be much more interested in is correlating performance reviews to interview performance. That gets suggested as a possible future post.

Amazon lost money for a long time and both private and public investors were fairly forgiving. More importantly, GCP is not "eating up" Amazon's revenue. Both are growing very fast because the entire market is growing very fast.

Yes. We need to politicaly organize to make legal protection for tech workers scalable.

I'm very interested in this because it's a great first step towards politically organizing. PM my username on Reddit if youre interested in collaborating.

Yep, and don't call it a union. Barrier of entry is not a problem, we dont need an organization to limit entry into the field, we just need political representation. Now "tech" in politics means executives/VCs. We just need an association that funds employee friendly lobbying.

Fired a friend right before vesting cliff.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222622

Relentless PR pushes, rebrands, etc.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I could not agree more. The thing is I actually like drinking and socializing, but having it mixed up at the workplace led me to drink more than I should, which I didn't like. And a few times I had conversations I felt weird about the next day. When I wanted to drink less it was annoying walking past beer all the time and people drinking it, because again, in the right context I do enjoy it. And I definitely know people who didn't drink, which was fine, but they felt socially alienated because of how many people were drinking. And several people got fired for sexual harassment, which is never cool, but it only ever seemed to happened at late night events with alcohol.

I actually decided I was drinking too much at that job so when I quit I took a break from drinking. One of the jobs I interviewed with had their happy hour as part of the interview! It's an insane "culture fit" test because of the many valid reasons you mentioned people might not be comfortable with it.

Like you said, people can go drink with their bros. Good not to tie your social life to work anyway so you can leave without losing all your friends.

I think putting beer out for an hour or two at an event and having a culture of 1-2 drinks sporadically is fine. But I'm avoiding any employers with a keg in their office, beer in the fridge every day, a happy hour culture etc.

Said the fox to the hen.

Depends on the rake system, in timed games this is the case but more common they take it from the pot so only the winner pays. But typically you win some pots even in a losing session so it's a pedantic point.

We noticed men consistently knew their market worth and women undervalued themselves, so we decided to use the hot button topic of diversity to make it seem like lowball offers are actually coming from a moral high ground.

Especially true for nurses. Very tough job, but there's more money in it than many realize. My friend who already does well for himself is now going to do 1 more year of school to get a CRNA and says he'll likely make 160k in Miami or 220k in SF. Yet a co-worker asked "how can nurses survive here?" SF nurse salaries are public and you can see they can out earn most engineers esp via overtime (which lots of engineers work uncompensated). Still, nursing is a very tough job and can have a low status stigma.

Gusto (people being interviewed) formerly known as ZenPayroll, fired an acquaintance about a week before their options vested.

Now they are trying to educate people on equity? You would need a full-semester class to explain the many ways in which VCs and their "startup" cronies can screw you out of compensation (e.g, dilution, selling at a low price and then using staying bonuses to kick in liquidation preference, 30 day exercise windows making it financially prohibitive to exercise, etc). Do companies even IPO anymore? If Uber still hasn't gone public, when do you think Gusto is?

If these companies actually wanted us to value their equity, they would reimburse independent corporate lawyers to review the contract.

Higher profile people like Zach Holman are already speaking up. It's going to take a while, but I already see programmers realizing that the smart move is either being a founder or going to work for GoogMicroAppleSoft. It's still to be determined whether the VCs will finally realize their inability to hire is their own damn fault and fix equity.

Only the naive and the financially illiterate accept these equity offers as worth anything.

Most of the positive things I read about company cultures, the "best places to work" lists, the glowing pieces on the founders, the TechCrunch articles, the phony Glassdoor reviews, are infinitely more self-aggrandizing fluff PR pieces than anything Lyons has written. No doubt about it, he's promoting his book and his show, but I'm glad some other sides of the story are being told.

I've worked at several tech startups with sudden firing. The "norm" from my perspective tends to be a one month Performance Improvement Plan, usually just serving as a paper trail with very little hope of getting off of it, though I've seen people just suddenly walked out as well.

I appreciate Dan Lyons cutting through the bullshit on tech startups and I recognize a lot of what he's talking about from my own experience. The thing that bothers me the most is the disingenuity of it all, the "we're a family" and "we're changing the world" when it really is all standard capitalism business practice, not so different from Wall St or Walmart.

It's funny Netflix and Reed Fisher got brought up, because I at least respect Reed's honesty about the whole arrangement. The "we're a family" companies frighten me a lot more.

These companies are also masters of PR and marketing. Many of these companies that are Kafkaesque places to work for are frequently cited on #1 best place to work etc, and you seem crazy to complain when you work at one. People don't realize that the ping-pong table doesn't make up for the uncompesated 24/7 PagerDuty rotations, how little job-security you have long term, how anxiety inducing a lot of the performance-driven culture and open-office plans can be, etc. So it's refreshing to see a different take.

We venerate leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt because they inspired millions of individuals to act directly against their self-interest and in favor of the organizations that those leaders own and manage. "We will fight on the beaches" sure sounds inspiring, but if it was my intestines bleeding out onto the sands of Normandy, at that exact moment, it wouldn't have quite the same ring. Yet these inspiring words still convince millions to follow them, and so we have warehouse workers dropping from heat stroke and programmers sacrificing their personal life to fix that bug into the late hours, all so people like Bezos can live the high life, rake in millions, and write some pithy emails. Works for them I suppose, and it seems to be human nature for such type of organizations to arise and dominate. Amazon is a great company that makes a lot of money, no doubt about its success. Me? I'll try to keep my intestines _inside_ my stomach.

Tech workers have it better than many, worse than some. But hardly the most spoiled ever.

If you're the type of person who values kegerators and nerf wars more than salary, benefits, and professional status, then I can see how you would have your perspective. I can only guess you're much younger than some of us. Personally, I'd rather finish my work and leave the office to go home and buy my own beer with a bigger paycheck than act like I'm in a frat-house.

As for comparing someone writing a dating app to a teacher, I in no way implied that programmers create more value than teachers, or that somehow salary directly reflects the value people contribute to the world. But I think both contribute some value, and neither deserves to get demonized for just doing their job or even advocating for their own interests.

By what metrics are engineers the most babied in the world?

Certainly by metrics of the Silicon Valley PR machine that pays them, would greatly prefer to pay them less, to blame them for the housing crisis, and to use as a debate piece for advocating for infinite H1Bs (but certainly not green cards - those employees have rights).

But not by any real metric. Go walk around an open-office plan filled to the brim with programmers, then walk into a VC office with their mahogany desks and high ceilings and private offices. Check out a law office where you'll see similar things. Look at actual salary data. Lawyers make significantly more than engineers, despite the "shortage" of engineers and "surplus" of lawyers (since this always gets brought up - yes, elite Stanford programmers who work at Google make more than some podunk law grad, but that Stanford law grad still does better, and the average programmer is paid less than the average lawyer). Doctors are 9 out of the 10 highest paid positions in the country. Police, firefighters, and teachers get paid actual overtime with pensions that pay out almost their whole salary after they retire, and have infinitely more job security. On the other hand, tech workers seem to think uncompensated 24/7 on-call is a badge of honor, just like spending all your free time doing even more programming to keep up with the endless tech skill treadmill. So why exactly are tech workers on the top of the list to see fail, other than us taking the blame and devilization for the failure of SF residents to properly plan housing and economic growth for years and trying to preserve the "character of the city" over making practical decisions?

Tech is a great career and compared to many people in this country who have been totally fucked over, we have it great. But this trope that tech workers are so spoiled because they give us a ping-pong table and catered lunch while paying us less than many other white-collar professionals is overdone, so drop it.

And what come-uppance do we deserve? Because we have jobs building products people use and value, that we show up to every day, that makes us deserve some retribution? Because we reasonably point out that six figures in the Bay Area is nowhere near an extravagant lifestyle, which anyone who knows anything about the cost of living would agree with?

The biggest problem I see is too many engineers jump on this self-flaggelation train without thinking critically about it or how it hurts them.

The real reason people keep calling "bubble" is because they're unimaginative. It happened before, so it's easy to just say the same thing will happen without really thinking about it. And yes, they say "this time it's different" in every bubble, except in this "bubble" there is no real indication that there is a bubble, and all these market corrections and beatings tech companies take that are pointed to as the existence of a bubble actually prove the direct opposite, because in real bubbles it goes up really fast based on speculation and comes down really fast in a spectacular crash. Tech has been slowly but consistently growing for years and occasionally takes some corrections and downturns, which is like any other market and nothing like a real bubble.

If hypothetically, the entire industry collapsed, sure, the people who called it a bubble were right. But an "industry collapse" means something like Google or Facebook shutting down with no competitor to replace it, almost every unicorn going broke, and most importantly the market cap of the entire sector hitting pre-2011 levels proving the growth was fake all along. That would be a really big collapse - to the extent that pointing to a bad Yelp earnings as evidence is a joke. In real bubbles, big, established players like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers disappear and thousands of smaller shops get crushed. A collapse is not a few unicorns losing some value. Even if Uber got wiped out I wouldn't call it an industry collapse, and that scenario is already hard to imagine.

More likely, at some point we'll see a bad year or two, some hiring freezes and layoffs here and there, and people point to that as a bubble collapse that they "knew all along", even though they "knew" it during times when the sector grew more than it eventually receded.

In real bubbles, you see a insane amount of growth based on pure speculation, followed by a massive collapse. The justification for a "bubble" so far has been based on incredibly silly things like the engineers making 80% of what lawyers make or private valuations being high (which only affects a small number of people and is often inflated by things like liquidation preference incentivizing it to sound artificially high despite a significantly lower risk).

Companies like Zynga, Groupon, Living Social, Homejoy, Twitter and Yahoo struggling during a so-called "bubble" is not insane growth, it's proof the market has maintained skepticism over the years. And a few more unicorns falling over won't be a massive collapse either.

Every market has downturns. Not every downturn is a bubble. And an actual "bubble" existence hasn't been proven true despite repeated insistences for 5 years, and I highly doubt it will start now, unless we uncover massive, massive fraud.

Correction: people haven't been calling a bubble for the last year, it's been for the last 5 years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231352

So the majority of people called a tech bubble, unlike your claim that most people are "permabulls", and then there was a period of great growth and prosperity. There have been plenty of people predicting gloom and doom to happen before now and none of them are admitting they were wrong. So basically it's gone down exactly the opposite as you've described.

Eventually, the naysayers will, to an extent, be right. But it's ridiculous to act like financial market movements are obvious and we should all predict it perfectly. It's even ridiculous to act like a few resignations is indicative of a bubble popping. The strongest evidence that a bubble does not exist is all these weaker companies struggling, because in an actual bubble they would be propped up by the relentless speculation. Yet people point to failed companies as proof there's a bubble, even while many tech companies are doing great.

Either way, financial markets are very difficult to predict, unless you count predicting the same direction for years and waiting for it to be right. So stop acting like it's easy and obvious. If you really feel so strongly, put your net worth into shorting tech stocks and make a ton of money.

Digital Ocean is really great for hobbyists and side project. I especially admire their community tutorials, which hosts tons of great content and I'm sure has been very valuable marketing for their products. With that said, I think trying to build a real startup on DO would be a big mistake. They simply don't offer the suite of products that the bigger cloud offerings do, and as clouds become more sophisticated, companies using them will have huge competitive advantages. From my perspective, tools like PaaS, Lambda, managed databases, big data/analytic tools etc are getting increasingly sophisticated. Using them now is a bit like a late 90s company using Python to code circles around companies sticking familiar, stable C++, where in this analogy C+ +is the equivalent to DO's basic VPS offerings that you use to cobble together what you need (stable and familiar, but ultimately less powerful and requires much more developer time to use effectively).

The most insulting things companies do is offer 'vanity' perks while slashing real perks. My last gig had fancy parties, free dinner (no lunch interestingly), got itself ranked as a "best place to work" etc. It could market its employees as entitled, spoiled developers for sure.

However, there was no 401k matching. No tuition reimbursement. There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year, many for stressful legacy applications the company refused to invest resources to actually maintain for real. Basically, if you couldn't market the perk to 20-somethings, they slashed it.

Meanwhile I'm told that my very existence screws over the poor working class police officers and firefighters, who make 80% of what I make but have job security and lifetime pensions awaiting for them. And they get paid for overtime.

While I absolutely feel like I'm privileged in many ways to work in tech, the industry has many incentives to make tech workers look more 'spoiled' than they are, and so they work their PR engines to do exactly that.

I am also sick of hearing these 'rumors of one engineer at Google' making millions being cited as if it was a BLS salary report or something.

Sure, the primary objective is a huge IPO. It's the playbook in the sense of it was plan B to break even by cutting employees out. Investors might have not made out, but they broke even, and scratched the back of execs who can repay the favor in other contexts.