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freebish

29 karma · joined April 4, 2014

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freebish··on Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
Perhaps you're getting caught in the labels, like mission & loyalty. It's not about buzz words, or receiving favors.

In my experience, there is a substantial difference in the quality of work of a person who cares about what they're doing and someone who doesn't care. Perhaps you've worked with a contractor who was willing to do a half-assed job, only fixing things if they were cornered. I certainly have.

Money can motivate that caring only so much.

freebish··on Ask HN: What are scientifically valid ways maximize my life expectancy?
It depends on your definition of "excess", I guess.

If you work out in the cardio section of any gym, you will eventually see regulars who are hitting some machines very hard, with a visual appearance of anorexia. I'm sure some of those people were just skinny, but not all of them. It's not my role, as a fellow gym member, to recommend psychiatric help. But heavens knows I thought it, more than once.

In addition, gyms are built around luring in people while assuming that a large percentage of them will quickly stop attending. Some of the drop-off is just from laziness or dislike of exercise. But some of the drop-off is from going too hard, too fast, resulting in injury, especially for first-time weightlifters.

freebish··on This Pizzeria Is Not a Child-Trafficking Site
That reddit group was just banned, 23 November, 00:01 UTC
freebish··on Who Y Combinator Companies Want
I agree, but this is also a management failing, in not noticing the pattern.

I've been able to successfully hire good people by noting that some interviewers are never satisfied with any candidate. Once the pattern is clear, I either remove them from the hiring process, or politely disregard their opinion.

Hiring only with 100% consensus is a sucker's game. Some of my best hires have involved judging which "no" could be overridden safely.

freebish··on We apologize
No one has publicly said why she was fired. We only know it happened rapidly. It happened shortly after a Jesse Jackson AMA that went way off the rails, but that could be coincidence.
freebish··on [dead]
Man who hates Google concludes "Everyone hates Google," writes blog post predicting their demise.
freebish··on The trickiest bug I've encountered
In retrospect, I wonder if there was a better way to report that bug. Clearly the first person didn't get it, at all.
freebish··on Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
Card counting was hardly top secret until MIT revealed it. Edward Thorpe's "Beat The Dealer" was published in 1962. It did enter a wider phase of popularity in the 80s, especially as easier to follow tactics were worked out.
freebish··on Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis
My experience with agile/scrum is that it puts a more important bounding function on the product/biz side, where they place demands. The most effective scrum meetings I've seen have been where the biz side presents its desires, then the engineers give them actual level of effort, then the biz side decides _right then_ that they didn't care as much about this feature or that. That's an incredible improvement over documents whizzing this way and that, meetings, spreadsheets with LoE. Instead, just a quick meeting of minds.

"I want the blue button very, very badly." "no problem. it will take three of us the entire scrum" "my goodness, I didn't want it that much. Ok, punted."

freebish··on Ask HN: Wage fixing. Any updates from the trenches?
I don't work for Apple or Google, but I can assure you that there is strong upward pressures on salaries for developers in the bay area. Housing prices are a bit more complicated.

I've also had personal experience with people relocating from Denver and having a _very_ hard time dealing with local house prices. Please investigate carefully using Trulia, Zillow, or Craigslist.