hgytr

Eh. Poetry and handling kids is orthogonal to intelligence.

Intelligence is a very narrow and specific skill of discerning the real. It allows us to predict things. Coincidentally, it allows to make money and thus is well paid. It's ok if others disagree with me.

My two examples above are meant to hint that intelligence consists of two distinct skills: ability to keep a still detailed image in your mind (the 3x3 grid example) and ability to analyze this still image (the counting bottles example). The latter builds on the former because if the image is blurry in your mind, there is nothing to analyze (you can't see words in the 3x3 grid if it keeps floating away). We can go further and divide the two skills into say 10 distinct levels of mastery, define their characteristics, but the point remains the same: it's a steep ladder that has to be climbed if one wants to get this skill.

Poetry, music and handling kids are different skills and are of no help in climbing the ladder of intelligence. No, I agree that compassion and other skills can be as useful as intelligence, but they are different skills and have to be mastered separately.

Just my 2c.

There is a reason why a cashier works for minimum wage.

A few days ago I went to a grocery store to buy sparkling water. I got 16 small bottles and arranged them as a 4 by 4 grid before cashier, so she wouldn't need to spend time counting them and delaying the line. It took her over 10 seconds to count the bottles: apparently, she didn't recognize the pattern and counted them by groups of 3-4 bottles covering the counted ones with her hands to simplify the process. Programmers don't even need to multiply 4x4, they just see the answer. This scene hints that the cashier's analytical skills are next to none and this alone explains why she is a cashier.

Another example. There is a curious simple test to check your working memory capacity. Imagine a 3x3 grid and draw there words oil/gas/dry. Now read all the words that you see on the grid. Not all people have visual imaginations: some operate with graph-like structures and represent the grid as a set of logical statements: row1 is gas, row2 is oil, row3 is dry. This is fine as long as they do it efficiently. Most people in this task will resort to the snail analytical approach and will be thinking like: cell 2-1 is A, so cell next to the right is 2-2 belongs to word 2 which is oil and thus the second letter is I, so our current sequence is AI. Obviously it will take them ages to enumerate all the words this way. High level programmers can keep the entire grid in memory, either as an image or in symbolic form, and thus can enumerate words quickly. Why does this example matter? Programmers have to keep many objects and connections between them in memory.

If everybody had these raw cognitive skills, programmers would get the standard minimum wage. Same for accountants, lawyers, bankers.

I know SDE IIs at MS who made 350+. However 90% of those SDE IIs don't even approach the entry level Google pay. My info about the principal salaries comes from those principals themselves.

By the best place I just meant best in terms of getting knowledge, status and pay with the least effort in the least stressful conditions.

Microsoft is pretty good, indeed, but they don't match the Google pay. A senior at Google pulls 350 (add free food and gym to that), while a principal at Microsoft will be lucky to cross 250 (no free food and no gym on site). Sample size: a few tens of people. And the limited housing supply means that prices are tuned to the more successful folks.

Amazon seems to be very focused on squeezing out most out of its employees. The curious vesting schedule means you instantly lose 10% of your stock grant value. The company expects you to pull more hours and do some real oncall duties: this means less free time for you and less pay/hour rate. Good and gym are out if question. And don't forget to pay for your parking spot. IMHO, if you aren't big enough to demand a custom contract, you don't go to Amazon unless you have no better choices.

My question is still open: what are those better places?

That's more like the low end for L5, honestly. And 500k is the high end, for a top performer L5.

I heard that Tesla could effectively "run" experiments in his mind, not just visualize them. Another pointer is that some "schools of thought" divide the art of thought into ability to visualize and ability to analyze where the latter has to be built upon the former and only when the former is perfected. My personal belief is that being a genius is about the ability to keep in mind many things at a time without losing details.

There is an interesting analogy. Two uranium hemispheres remain peaceful only until they are joined.

If you know names of those better workplaces, I'm all ears.

First. Thanks to HN for not demanding phone numbers: anonymity allows to say things that cannot be said.

Second. Many googlers read HN. In some sense, HN is the extension of the internal forums.

CNBC made a good summary and I can comment on each bullet point.

Larry and Brin probably stopped attending because nothing important is said on TGIFs. More people -> more leaks -> less interesting information -> less attendence. Nothing surprising here. Sundar's solution seems to be resorting to boring once a quarter all-hands about business strategy. I wonder what the attendance will be.

It's a hypocrisy to complain about troubles with trust and at the same time ban political or whatever discussions. Googlers are generally very smart folks and understand that whatever they say may be used against them in the future, when policies change once again. Today you post a memegen where you state that triangles are better than squares, tomorrow you get fired because squares have become the symbol of some protected class. You have to apply a form of forward self-censorship and be very careful about what you say to whom.

I don't think there is a tension between execs and workers, but only because the two classes live in different worlds.

Don't get me wrong. Google is still the best workplace with top notch pay, but as it's got big, it's also morphed into a typical big corporation with typical corporate politics.

Just my 2c.