431 karma · joined January 15, 2022
I personally know a lot of people that just dumped their stimulus checks on memecoins or wasted it buying spurious goods. I'm sure the used car and electronics market also was greatly affected by stimulus as well.
The Fed also should have limited its stimulus to buying Treasuries rather than MBS. It makes no sense for the government to buy mortgage backed securities (basically a freebie to homeowners/homebuyers who are already wealthy).
It is good _nominally_. Real wages are basically flat. Meanwhile, for everyone who didn't get a raise or can't currently find a new job for whatever reason, they're losing purchasing power. On top of that, the housing market has been completely destroyed by the Fed printing money and shoving it into mortgage backed securities. In many nicer areas of Southern California you used to be able to get a starter home for $600k (manageable for someone in a working class profession like a nurse or mechanic), now nothing on the market is less than $1.2M.
Also you forget that a big reason the labor market is so tight is because a couple million Boomers retired early during the pandemic.
Why does it gentrify in the first place? Because the initial group of "gentrifiers" took the time and money to develop the area to make it more appealing, thus increasing demand.
Economics says you can't fix it no matter how much regulation you impose because at some point all the surrounding businesses, etc. will be gentrified too and force out poor people. Even if you freeze rent, ban new businesses from coming in, etc. the existing business owners will start to cater to their new clientele simply because the demand from those customers is much higher. The only thing you _can_ do is ban people from moving to the neighborhood, at which point you've turned into the worst parts of the Soviet Union.
That would never work in tech. And the higher paying firm you go to, the less it works. High performers in FAANG can have refresher and bonus multipliers of 2.5x the base performance rating. In HFT high performers total comp can be double or triple low performers' TC.
I would think it shouldn't work for teachers either. In the US there is a marked difference in teacher compensation between good districts and bad districts and you see the quality difference in the students that come out of those schools.
Other than that though, standardizing pay will balance the playing field towards smaller companies. Bigger companies will face pressure to standardize pay packages per level (see: Coinbase, Uber) which limits their ability to reward top performers. Smaller companies won't have that same pressure. The pay gap is largely a function of how much each gender negotiates on average and if you take away negotiating then people will just leave to places where they're paid what they're worth.
A large portion of society that doesn't want to work on hot, dusty, dirty worksites might become obsolete with nothing useful for them to do. But there are absolutely jobs that are accessible to no-skill workers with only 1-2 years investment in schooling.
Nobody wants to sit next to piss/weed/cig smelling people and get their shit robbed on public transit (see: BART) if they can afford a car instead. Plus, US light rail runs at much slower speeds than places like China due to NIMBYism, so it also takes longer than driving to get places.
> The very least you can do is pay their healthcare .
The very least they could do is come into the country legally. And by the way, a lot of the really crappy jobs are done by legal residents, like garbagemen, sewer maintenance, lineman, etc. Guess what? My local taxes pay for those workers to have good salaries and I'm happy to pay. The US also has a visa for farm workers to come to the US as well.
> national borders create an arbitrary and discriminatory barrier to free movement people and enforce QoL disparities across the world.
Spoken like someone who is privileged and wealthy enough to be unaffected by open borders. Globalization has destroyed the American factory job, along with its high wages, and you still claim open borders are the way forward? Pro tip, don't claim to be morally superior when you work as a software engineer making $$$ that has a huge demand supply imbalance. If you really believe what you're saying then go work in India in a bodyshop making $10k and working 80h weeks, but pay your US cost of living. That's what millions of blue collar workers are facing when you open borders.
Please exit your bubble and talk to some real working class people for once. People like you are like the engineers I meet who openly talk about how self driving cars are going to disrupt the industry as they get into an Uber. Zero self-awareness.
That leads to rampant abuses. For example in certain East Asian city states with "universal" healthcare people would use ambulances as taxis because they were free. You need copays to prevent this kind of abuse.
And you also forget that the US has a big illegal immigration problem. By and large illegal immigrants make minimum wage or lower, generally under the table (i.e. not paying taxes on it). By covering healthcare for them you are automatically subsidizing illegal immigrants at the cost of citizens and permanent residents. Is that fair?
If you think these aren't legitimate outcomes of allowing everyone to have free healthcare then you're naive.
One has to wonder whether modern agriculture is no longer as affected by these kinds of changes or whether the war in Ukraine is just a sign of things to come.
Also, not everything fits into cache.
We are not talking some CRUD app where it is trivial to make each component work or a Leetcode problem that you can spit out in 20 minutes.
And how do you prevent someone from cheating if there's no engineer there on the interview?
I've never seen this at any tech company in the SFBA. They cover 100% of the premium for yourself and it's only <$200/mo to cover a whole family of dependents. Their plans are always among the best. Copays are the lowest by far of anything I've ever seen, including ACA marketplace plans, my parents' plans, school offered plans, and non-"tech" company plans.
$200/mo is way, way less than I pay in taxes to CA state alone.
> since I prefer Kaiser
Obviously if you want Kaiser and they don't offer it you have to buy it yourself. Personally I don't feel like the difference is too huge that it justifies buying insurance myself. I used to have Kaiser and you get slightly smaller delays (3 days instead of say a week) to see specialists and that's it.
I think using comparative benchmarks instead of absolute benchmarks is where we differ. The absolute bar - being able to grok large codebases, work on complex systems, etc. with some help from a senior engineer - is not high. It's the equivalent of a proper undergrad education in CS. So when you set the bar at a, in my opinion, very achievable level, the benchmark is $70/hr for interns. We're not talking Jeff Dean or Linus levels of skill here. You can't just look at the percentiles and say it's unachievable. You have to look at it objectively. We're in a talent shortage precisely because there aren't enough people that meet the low bar.
The question should be, if I work my ass off and get good at what I do, how much could I potentially make as a random new grad / 2-3 yoe SWE? And the answer to that is if you meet the already very low bar, you can make a lot. I never compare myself to the average and you shouldn't either.
I know when my friends at startups look to hire they don't target percentiles, they target an absolute level of skill or intelligence.
> 0-1 years of experience there at Vercel pays about $70k-$100k
That would be getting underpaid if you had the skills I mentioned above.
> Now I have about 3 years of SWE experience
My whole point is that years of experience don't necessarily make you a better engineer. It correlates, but in general having more skill is a step function change compared to another year of experience. A senior engineer at mediocre level will be less productive than a new grad engineer at high skill that needs their hand held on design, because the high skill engineer is capable of doing things the mediocre one can't even complete with infinite time.
Speaking frankly as someone who has worked at bog standard F500 companies that pay "not so much" to HFT, experience is not nearly as important as raw skill. A 20+ year experience engineer who has mediocre skills will never be able to write a compiler, work on complex distributed systems, or bring new verticals to market (think AR, VR, ML applications) very quickly. A skilled new grad might be able to contribute meaningfully if their hand is held on architecture and design.
For example, it's a reasonable expectation for those skilled new grads to be able to grok and start doing easy tasks in a complex codebase (e.g. on PyTorch or Spark itself or business logic in a distributed system) within a week or less, and for them to require at most 1-2 hours of help from an existing engineer to get started. I posit that a 20+ year mediocre engineer is never going to get the skills to contribute to something like PyTorch if they haven't developed those skills in the 20 years they've worked.
For example I did a stint at a F500 company where 1) a data engineer did not know how to use multiprocessing to parallelize a multi-terabyte S3 upload 2) an internal tool that fired off hundreds of network requests did not use concurrency and hence had 30+ second latency 3) a certain other team was dumping hundreds of terabytes of logs that nobody even knew the schema of into S3 automatically, and none of it was ever touched. Also seen: "data scientists" who did not know Python and executives that spent more time talking about Scrum than any concrete execution.
If I was getting paid the snack amount in cash then I'd probably be ok but as is free breakfast+lunch+snacks saves me on the order of $500/mo. And as someone who is pretty mediocre at cooking the quality of food is better as well.
For example, I was learning Manacher's algorithm and I directly put the link to the corresponding Leetcode problem into Anki. Set your minimum interval to 1 day and just follow whatever Anki tells you to study. You don't need many cards to memorize the problem solving techniques, my entire probability deck has under 150 cards and half of that is concepts. It turns out the human brain is pretty good at generalizing from a few problems.
Make sure you don't put every problem you encounter because the review workload will get very heavy very fast if you do that. Only put the challenging ones or the ones you get wrong.