freyir

Still, they’re likely to readjust your comp back up to baseline.

You face the opportunity cost of not working for a company whose stock will rise fast, making it worth much more in years 2-3+ than it was initially priced at.

None of us have a crystal ball though, so it’s all speculation.

When so much of your compensation is tied directly to the stock price, you also need to make a guess where the stock price will be in 2-4 years compared to your other options.

FB is not cool, TikTok is eating Instagram’s lunch causing IG to pivot more to video, so it comes down to the Metaverse.

To save some people the trouble, here are some top-paying companies: https://www.levels.fyi/2020/

This was compiled in 2020 and Meta might move up the list in 2021.

It’s worth noting that Netflix does not have RSUs, and Stripe keeps appreciation of RSU value for itself. So if you expect Meta stock price to go up over the next few years (a big if), compensation at Meta could be higher in the long run.

Almost everywhere [1].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/

I wonder if this is a misattribution of Zuckerberg’s quote:

“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical … Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know… Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."

Of course, he said this in his twenties and he may have changed his tune. As far as I know, he hasn’t handed the reigns of Meta over to a twenty-something just yet.

I worry about this myself. I sought out my first “software engineer” job at 36. At some startups where I interviewed, I was already a decade older than anyone else in the room.

I ended up taking a job with a FANG company that skews slightly older than most startups, but even here I’m on the wrong side of the Bell curve. I can run circles around most of my younger coworkers so I never feel like my job is in jeopardy. But I’m often the oldest individual contributor on any given project and I have to wonder, where have all the older software engineers in Silicon Valley gone? Did they retire early, and was it their own choice? Will I be served up as Soylent Green in the cafeteria next year?

I moved into software engineering from a different engineering discipline where most of my coworkers were in their forties and fifties, and some were older than that. I doubled my pay, but now I work on the SF peninsula where I can’t afford a house, and I probably cut my remaining working years in half. All in all, it seems like it may have been a questionable choice in the long run.

Engineers working in programming-adjacent industries (rather than Silicon Valley web tech) such as telecommunications, defense, aerospace/satellites, medical technology, etc., tend to earn less but have much longer careers in my experience (and often work on more interesting problems IMO). You may be able to leverage your medical degree, after your residency, to work in an area with more specialization and less churn.

Japan produced a lot of comic books and films, and nerds like comic books and films?

Interest ebbs and flows. Korea is perhaps eclipsing Japan in general interest these days. But their cultural export is pop music and boy bands, and their main Western demographic seems to be teenage girls.

It doesn’t seem strange to me. Why would a Japanese artist searching for the soul of France not find it? A lot of art is made by outsiders, who see the distinctive elements that insides take for granted.

Yes. “For more than two thousand years fountains have provided drinking water and decorated the piazzas of Rome. During the Roman Empire, in 98 AD, according to Sextus Julius Frontinus, the Roman consul who was named curator aquarum or guardian of the water of the city, Rome had nine aqueducts which fed 39 monumental fountains and 591 public basins, not counting the water supplied to the Imperial household, baths and owners of private villas. Each of the major fountains was connected to two different aqueducts, in case one was shut down for service.” -Wikipedia.

They haven’t actually been decriminalized. Some crimes have been classified as lesser crimes (through Prop 47, for example) and many crimes the DA has simply refused to prosecute. And the police know that making arrests is often pointless if DA won’t uphold the law on his end.

It’s extremely important if you’re a white or Asian applicant whose parent didn’t attend or donate a large sum of money to Harvard.

As a transplant from Boston to California, every instance of “Miami” could be replaced with “California” in your comment and I’d be fine with it.

Where would that be?

New developers write simple but shortsighted code. It gets the job done, but it will be painful to work with in the future.

Intermediate developers, bitten by their past mistakes, decide to future proof their work. But they don’t just look one or two steps ahead, rather they try to look five steps ahead and identity problems that do not and may never exist. Consequently, they over-engineer, over-abstract, and over-complicate everything. Carmack’s recent “But here we are” speech resonated with me.

Advanced developers identify the right balance for each task between simple and complex, concrete and abstract, and pragmatic and idealistic. In my experience, they favor simple and pragmatic solutions, use abstraction effectively, and can satisfy near-term goals quickly without painting themselves into a corner. “As simple as possible, but not simpler.”

I try to avoid working for tech leads stuck in the second phase, which is not uncommon. If you suggest taking the “ifs and for loops” approach of solving a simple problem with a simple solution, they’ll assume you’re on the wrong side of the bell curve.

Between this and their employee-hostile changes to equity vesting, Stripe went from the company I was most interested in and one that I wouldn’t bother interviewing with.

> Advertising is disgusting honestly

Again, they give you the options: subscription model or ad-based model.

This covers the cost of infrastructure, paying creators, and paying developers.

It doesn’t make sense that they or any other company will host and send you video for free at a financial loss to themselves because you’re watching it on “your computer.”

Then again, we live in a world where drugstore makeup needs to be kept behind lock and key, so this shouldn’t be surprising.

> assuming you have an ad-blocker, which you obviously should

Stating the the obvious, but these features were developed by real people and revenue pays these developers, pays for the infrastructure, and pays the content creators. As an alternative for those who have the means, you can also sign up for a subscription to remove ads. I’ve gotten more value out of my youtube subscription than most other streaming services I pay for.

We can’t talk about the lab leak theory for the same reason a third of the country refuses to get vaccinated: it became a politicized issue somewhere along the way, at which point people’s brains turn off and their emotions and tribalism take over.

While I agree with your comment in principle, is any shopper happy with the utterly useless ranking system that everybody uses now?

Ranking a 4.9 star item with 500 reviews above a 5 star item is intuitive to many already, and will become intuition quickly for everyone else because it’s broadly more useful. The average customer doesn’t care that much how the sausage is made, they care about quality of the results.

Ranking items is basic functionality and it’s broken across the web. It shouldn’t be a feature that’s only available to users willing and able to fiddle with browser extensions.

“Luring” implies that you’re tempting someone with intent to trap and ultimately harm them.

“Targeting” is more neutral. You might target someone with an ad because you believe in your product and expect it will improve their life. But it would be a bit weird to say you’re luring someone to use your beneficial product.

In Facebook’s case, they apparently know of harmful effects on youth, so “lure” seems appropriate.

Smart, educated people do things that are bad for then all the time. And eating cereal (in moderation) is pretty far down on the “bad things” list.

San Francisco already has among the highest number of people placed in supportive housing per capita of any city in the country. How many more people need to be placed in supportive housing in San Francisco before this problem is solved?

If homes are abundant in Charlotte, why do so many homeless people live on the streets in San Francisco instead, where there’s not even sufficient housing to support working middle class families?

When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street. And over 90% of the chronically homeless placed in supportive housing there never move out. So what percentage of the nation’s chronically homeless population can be housed indefinitely at taxpayer expense on a tiny landlocked peninsula where seemingly everyone wants to live? This has become a statewide/nationwide problem and it needs solutions on a bigger scale than one city in isolation can provide.

Nothing I said above was refuted or mistaken. You claim that her paper was internally reviewed twice and you chose to ignore evidence to the contrary.

And somehow you managed throughout to completely disregard Timnit’s own responsibility in the situation.

Which makes it more likely to be the truth, not less likely. It would be very foolish to write that if it were demonstrably false, as was claimed above. And I have to assume their lawyers aren’t very foolish.

But this is all another deflection. Whether the paper was rejected by a regular process or an irregular process, it doesn’t condone her actions that followed.

This directly contradicts what Jeff Dean wrote: “A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication” (emphasis mine).

Did she threaten litigation before or after she posted an angry rant telling her coworkers to stop working?

Before or after she demanded that the company release the name of an anonymous reviewer?

Before or after she told them to schedule her last day if they didn’t meet her demands?

No, there was only one internal review. It didn’t pass, and it was too late for her to make revisions because it was past the conference deadline.

It very much does not evaporate.

Her paper got got flagged during internal review. There wasn’t time to revise it because she submitted it late. She then wrote an angry rant to her coworkers that claimed she was oppressed and told them to stop working. And then she demanded the name of the anonymous reviewer and threatened to quit if the company did not meet her demand.

Your defense is that most papers were submitted late without a problem. Perhaps most papers don’t need revisions, but this one did, and there’s no excuse for how she handled it.

I’ve had papers rejected from my company’s internal review process. It sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. You make some revisions and submit to the next conference. You don’t go ballistic and tell your coworkers their work is meaningless and threaten to quit unless you get your way.

She submitted her paper late for internal review when it was too late for revisions. It might be the case that most papers are submitted late for internal review, but most papers don’t expressly criticize the employer’s work. That’s an important distinction, and it was naive to not anticipate that the paper might get extra scrutiny.

Regardless, being upset because you didn’t get your way doesn’t give you carte blanche to do unprofessional things that will get you fired. You can’t say “Give me X or I quit” and not assume there’s a chance your bluff will be called (especially when “X” is a demand for the company to violate its own policies).

From what I read at the time, she wasn’t fired for the content of the paper (though she initially made it sound like this before more details became public). She gave the company an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer or she would quit, and they took her threat seriously.