gajjanag

Not really true anymore unfortunately, and the system is converging with other large organizations.

For example, to keep compensation in line with market and reduce attrition, there were definitely more people who got promoted to ICT5 last year and the designation has thus been diluted.

Furthermore, candidates coming in from other large companies expect the title/leveling prestige in many cases, and ICT5 is a tough sell while trying to hire a Google L7/8. So Apple does have a fair number of ICT6 from that.

I also think limiting IC layers and keeping the above politics minimal can work - Netflix did that for a long time and was very successful as a company with their approach. Most IC at Netflix were simply titled "senior software engineer", with pay being a wide band dependent on market value. They no longer do that for some reasons, and have adopted the standard large level hierarchy.

One interesting question that isn't really addressed in the article or the comments here is what advice applies to folks who don't really want to move beyond the staff engineer (IC track) or senior manager (management track) level. I have not heard of anyone getting penalized at the staff level for short stints; though I do agree with the gist of this comment and article at the principal engineer (IC) or director (management) levels.

Companies across the industry are well known and notorious for having 4 year cliffs. HR often has no interest in keeping a good senior/staff level developer. Furthermore, companies are also known for making subsequent promotions harder than the first and are more than happy to let developers stagnate - managers at most companies are not responsible for providing growth opportunities beyond the so called "terminal levels" which is roughly senior/staff at most places.

The easiest way for many to keep learning, keep compensation in line with the market, and continue working on interesting projects is to simply hop for a new opportunity after a few years; cliff just makes the choice easier most of the time.

At least from what I have seen, one has to be really fortunate to have good managers/leaders (who can help with some of these issues) and/or a company which aligns very well with one's own goals over a long period of time. I don't believe either of these are common.

> Turns out every company has issues. Eventually you come to accept what the company is in your small pocket of it, and take it or leave it.

+1. I used to think there were some generalizations that could be made based on company size, etc, but now I have realized that it is pretty similar everywhere (except possibly a < 50 employee startup).

There is one aspect that helps with this in certain cultures, namely grandparents. Grandparents are usually thrilled to spend time with young grandchildren.

This is an age old mechanism that mostly alleviates two problems simultaneously - old age care, and the two working parents situation.

The other option (which also works nearly as well) is what other commentators mentioned - European style subsidized childcare/old age support.

The USA shuns the first culturally (I get strange looks from people when I say I am happy working and living with my parents), and shuns the second culturally as well as politically. Some awareness/willingness to learn from history/other cultures would fix that, but I am not holding my breath.

> Apart from charging for membership, these sites also abuse lax privacy laws and sell the individual profiles to data brokers and marketing divisions of various industries.

Am curious - do you think the Match group is any different? Their market cap suggests that they also do the same...

> More on that, I think this insistence on “financial literacy” is a very dirty play by today’s middle class (of which I’m a part, I confess) so that it won’t accept responsibility for the condition of the poor classes, it’s a sort of “it’s their fault for being poor because they are financially illiterate, there’s nothing much that we can do, the system works, the main proof being that we’re not poor”.

Why the focus on middle class? At least middle class bloggers point out the benefits of financial literacy and at least a few people in poverty benefit from this education. The upper classes on the other hand don't do even that.

And anyway, concretely as an individual neither major political party in the US wants to tackle this meaningfully so votes on this front are irrelevant. Providing genuinely useful financial information can be argued to be far more positively impactful than whatever regressive housing policies (e.g., Prop 13) are enacted by our elected governments in the US.

Yes, it will self-correct eventually.

However, one thing that is easily missed is how shipping lines have been operating at a loss/narrow margins for years, e.g., Hanjin bankruptcy: https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-koreas-hanjin-shipping-fi.... Many of the major shippers are not interested in building out capacity right now (e.g., Maersk CEO has consistently messaged this: https://splash247.com/if-msc-ends-up-having-more-capacity-th... ). It makes sense: why would they when they know that inevitably shipping rates will fall and they will have excess capacity on their hands.

Instead, they are essentially adopting a wait and see approach. In the meantime, shipping customers pay more, the shipping companies strengthen their balance sheets and reward shareholders with fat dividends, and finally demand will settle down naturally.

What some fail to realize is that this will take a decent amount of time. In particular, no one expects easing of the shipping situation until 2022: https://www.joc.com/maritime-news/container-lines/hapag-lloy...

Some airlines are offsetting carbon emissions, e.g., https://www.jetblue.com/sustainability/climate-leadership.

Aviation is also a sector where emissions are pretty much unavoidable (long distance electric flight is untenable), and offsetting emissions is the only path forward. Drawing a line and restricting aviation can't work: think of all the important connections, collaborations, business deals, etc that require aviation. One might argue they aren't needed, but such restrictions will reduce the rate of progress/innovation, which is a necessary prerequisite for climate change action. A new solar cell (for example) will not be developed in isolation.

The fact that governments don't mandate carbon offsets for aviation at this stage is appalling though. Trivial to do relative to the impact and doesn't really raise ticket prices a whole lot.

Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow down sync to a crawl and spin CPU at 100%.

Concretely, I had a certain folder with 100,000+ small files for some research I was doing with a collaborator. It took my laptop 24 hours to sync this folder, and throughout my CPU was at 100% throughout. For comparison, rsync got the same job done in a few minutes. See https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file... , the above terrible experience is in line with this caveat.

And companies wonder why loyalty is hard to find...

Far easier to jump ship at opportune moments for fast tracking a career than fighting dysfunctional internal incentive structures.

A developer is worth whatever the local market pays at the time to retain them. If you have a look at housing costs in the bay area/Seattle (close to work 2000 sq ft ~ 2 million US dollars), you will understand why anything below 200k makes almost no sense in these areas for an experienced dev, and why 400k+ is fairly common.

I agree with you - hence why it is very hard for early stage startups to give meaningful offers in the bay area.

This is an excellent question. The math is pretty easy to do and very few politicians want to seriously confront this reality. I did a calculation for a Toyota Camry Hybrid vs a Tesla Model 3 in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27096215), and even in the state of WA which has extremely favorable electricity vs gas tradeoff price wise, the Camry Hybrid is an easy $/mile winner. There were some rebuttals, but they do not change the fundamental conclusion.

Maybe things are a bit different on the lower end, but I haven't looked into it - the range on a Nissan Leaf is extremely low as you point out, and likely rules it out for many in the US regardless of $/mile calculations.

Politics today doesn't care about nuances like this. The stove question covered by the article is an egregious example.

A much less egregious but still valid one is buying a sports/lower mileage ICE car today, and driving it less (e.g., using public transit for commutes, and the sports car for weekend rides). This can have a lower carbon footprint than a long distance everyday commute in an electric car. The fixes that properly account for these things are trivial technically (any econ grad can tell how), but do not have any political support.

I do not expect the political landscape to ever appreciate these things. Therefore, I will alter my consumption pattern according to my own understanding, and not according to the whims of Capitol Hill.

Seconded. I did this first with a first gen iPhone SE that I got for $100 on ebay from a seller with good reputation as a trial.

Been happy enough, so I bought a like new second gen iPhone SE for $250.

> It turns out that "discipline doesn't scale", and programmers have not been able to write substantial amounts of reliable and secure software using pointers. Not Linus, not the BSD maintainers, not the OpenSSL team, not anyone. Not even with C++20 and a tool bag full of fuzzers and linters.

Well, Google has 100s of millions of lines of C++ that power much of the internet. They certainly have no intention of getting rid of this code, and have deemed the tradeoff worthwhile. Yes, in theory this C++ codebase might not be the most reliable or secure, but their practices are certainly scalable and battle tested. Not saying it is easy, but it is certainly possible to build an ecosystem around C++ with fuzzers/linters/whatever to reach an "acceptable" level in practice.

> Meanwhile, huge amounts of quite safe Java and C# code keep happily ticking along -- exposed to the internet -- often needing patches only for the C/C++ modules that they include as a part of some framework!

Not necessarily. Plenty of null pointer exceptions in production Java code that bring down systems. Yes, they are "safe" but I don't think the tens of millions of customers affected appreciate such subtle nuances: the consequences are the same for them.

I agree that there can be more severe consequences due to the lack of "safety" from exploits, privilege escalation, and what not. But with stuff like sandboxing, the broader ecosystem, etc the decision isn't as simple as your argument might suggest.

This right here. I am fairly new to driving, and Apple Maps has been great for my driving confidence. Such crisp, ahead of time, clear directions in major metro US. It also does a much better job at rerouting than Google Maps. I avoid rush hour highways right now, and Apple maps does a good job of figuring out an alternative route once I head on it a bit.

Google Maps has given me directions that just increase my stress level on the road.

> Its by far the most expensive purchase in peoples lives, vital to our needs just like food and water... And I really dont agree with not tracking it in CPI.

Please stop spreading this false information. CPI absolutely does track housing: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

Now, you might disagree with the methodology used above, in which case it is healthy to discuss alternatives, or where CPI housing calculation has issues.

> lower level SWEs should be a more active part of the conversation rather than a Jira ticket consumer.

All fine, though in practice I have found that building the "_right_" thing equates to building the vision of the loudest/senior most person in the room irrespective of merit. Until that culture changes, I am more than happy to be a Jira ticket consumer.

So much this. Until a company adopts a no-BS policy towards meetings, I do not see the point. 80% of my time in company meetings is just wasted. I have talked to my colleagues about this - they feel the same. At least with remote work, I can politely tune out of useless meeting filler by muting audio/video.

Contrast that with grad school, where every minute of my meetings with my advisors was time well spent.

Also, the ability to tune out of useless meetings by muting audio/video is great.

I have heard anecdotally that the situation was quite different in the past. For example, Google became what it is today in part because their early offers were outstanding for the time, compared to what the typical VC/IPO gives today. I would love to know if there is concrete data supporting this. I can't easily find it myself on the net.

Tesla also has a carbon footprint. I won't deny that it is lower, but it isn't some "order of magnitude" improvement over a hybrid vehicle. Rather, it is approximately 35%: https://electrek.co/2020/09/01/tesla-model-3-emits-less-life...

If you really want to go down this route and account for this externality, you should calculate the cost of carbon capture. Costs of carbon capture are around $100 per metric tonne. The above link suggests a differential of around 6-10 tonnes of C02 in favor of the Tesla over a hybrid. This amount to an extra $1000 in favor of the Tesla. Once again, this doesn't change my point about cost per mile at all.

> If you purchased a model 3 with both state and federal rebates a year or two ago, in a number of states the short range RWD model was the sticker price of a nice civic. And Biden has frequently floated massive tax breaks for EV purchases to come….

I am referring to today. There are no federal tax incentives right now for Tesla.

> The maintenance is extremely infrequent and cost of travel per mile is cheap for electric, like an order of magnitude cheaper than a typical consumer car, not sure about a Prius.

Maintenance is infrequent for a reliable gas vehicle as well. Things like new tires, AC repairs are common for both. As for fueling costs, the difference in essentially any state between a hybrid vehicle (Camry hybrid) and an electric one (Tesla model 3) doesn't exceed 5 cents per mile - I used WA as an extreme point with respect to the gas/electricity differential for this calculation. Thus over 60000 miles the fueling cost is only $3000 in favor of the electric vehicle. In most states it will be significantly lower. This number will also reduce if one uses the supercharger network frequently.

> Depreciation is definitely in teslas favor- the cars hold their value incredibly well compared to most every other vehicle…

Nope. I used https://caredge.com/tesla/model-3/depreciation and https://caredge.com/toyota/camry/depreciation . Depreciation rates are virtually identical.

Adding things up, the difference of $3000 isn't even close to being offset by the higher sticker price for the Tesla.

You should define "better" carefully. Even today, there is no Tesla vehicle that comes close to, e.g., a Toyota Camry/Prius on the cost per mile front once you account for depreciation and maintenance.

Not necessarily. Migration of jobs is real - for example, Seattle offers the same FAANG pay and opportunities with beautiful geography, with at least 30% cheaper housing. Migration that is already taking place will continue until housing reaches an equilibrium.

I couldn't find a good comment here about how property taxes work in Canada, so I dug up: https://torontoist.com/2016/12/how-property-taxes-work-toron...

If this is indeed the case, Toronto's housing will not price correct: ultimately, capital from China/wherever needs a place to be parked, and it will flow most to the places where taxes are lowest: hence Toronto (see above), Vancouver (see articles listed in this discussion along with some steps taken to patch the issue), SF Bay Area/California (Prop 13 makes it attractive).

I ran through this thought experiment now to understand why East coast real estate (e.g., Boston) as well as Seattle don't see as much absentee buying.

I have seen a fair number of submissions regarding information theory on Hacker News.

Here are my personal favorite resources: 1. "A Diary on Information Theory" by Alfred Renyi: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4962977-a-diary-on-infor... . Written in a very charming manner (dialog between teacher and student) and is accessible to a wide audience. 2. Some lecture notes on information theory: http://people.lids.mit.edu/yp/homepage/data/itlectures_v5.pd... . Much more mathematically demanding, but is quite comprehensive, and a modern account of the subject.

> And sure, moving to another FAANG isn't necessarily going to help, they all have those skeletons. But there is a ton of tech that isn't done by Fortune 50 companies. There's a ton of tech that is for the good of humanity or on new and innovative upstarts. The only alternative to Google isn't Facebook or Twitter.

I would be happy to hear of tech companies falling under that bucket which meaningfully employ PhD's, and are either located in a low cost of living location or pay comparably to FAANG in a high cost of living location.

The issue (for me at least) is not the idea of microservices itself, it is the granularity at which services get defined/split off. What usually happens is that companies go all-in on the microservices idea, and force it upon all teams regardless of their size/head count. It is far easier for a 10 person team to maintain a microservice than it is for a 3 person team. Microservices impart some fixed costs to every team managing a service and thus make very little sense for small teams.

On the other hand, a 3 person team can much more productively contribute to a monolith. From my experience in the industry so far, taking into account the current quality of tooling, I would say it starts to make sense for teams above the 10 person mark to own their own service.

You should have a look at MotoGP. 2 wheels as opposed to 4, but it delivers on many race weekends.