hkarthik

Decide what you want to optimize for. Every option has its trade offs.

If you're tired of SF proper, but the rest of the Bay Area is fine for you and you still want the best tech jobs in large numbers, move to the Peninsula, East Bay, or San Jose.

If you want great tech jobs, slightly lower living costs, and don't mind dreary weather, go to Seattle.

If you want to stay in an urban area with a lot of tech jobs and don't mind high living costs and cold winters, go to NYC.

If you want amazing weather, very few tech jobs, a great nightlife, but don't mind a high living cost, go to LA.

If you want hot weather, decent tech jobs, and lower living costs all around, go to Austin.

There are other options besides these, depending on how much you are willing to trade off having lots of job opportunities, weather, living costs, and other quality of life stuff. Politics and racial diversity may also be pretty different from city to city, so decide how important that is to you.

Don't force it. It's an in-person skill that some people simply don't have, and as an Engineering Manager, I honestly don't think its particularly valuable. I find the quiet folks often have the most valuable insights.

Push for more pre-work before meetings with documents to encourage async discussion at your company. Be the person person that reviews and comments such documents to add insights, and then ensure the person running the design meeting prompts any left over comments while running the meeting, to cover your items.

This is how most forward-looking, remote-friendly companies work now. If you're not in such an environment, then consider moving to one. It will probably work out better for you.

A lot of folks in here in CA rent homes and apartments because the cost of living out here is so insane. You can't really get a 240V EV charger installed in your garage or driveway unless you own a home /w vehicle parking and can make such modifications. Having charging infrastructure nearby becomes very critical for anyone in this situation. Charging infrastructure has not kept up with the EVs that are now on the road.

A lot of folks also leased their EVs and got great deals on charging with the lease. As these leases have expired along with their charging discounts, it's not surprising that these folks are returning the cars and switching back to gas powered vehicles with better ROI.

More government incentives are needed to build charging infrastructure and make EV ownership more viable for people that don't own a single family home. Otherwise the EV revolution will be dead in the water.

It also incentivizes teenagers to work instead of hang around parking lots being goofballs.

I really like educative.io. I pay for it every year. Lots of great content and it is well curated.

My theory is that college has become too expensive to afford to drop out and start a company with a massive student loan bill that you may never pay off, and will cripple you with debt for a couple of decades.

Given that reality, it makes way more sense for someone to finish their degree, land a FAANG job, work a few years to pay off their debt/save, and then take a swing at a startup if they still have the itch.

This has changed the financing substantially, because an ex FAANG engineer is only going to do a startup if they can get back to a similar pay/lifestyle within a few years. This means the VCs have to write much bigger funding checks, and the companies need to have bigger ideas and reach unicorn status much more quickly.

My view is that Rust is pretty much where Go was about 3-4 years ago. About to see a lot of strong adoption and emerge as a pre-eminent language for writing backends. Strong library support and first class tooling is probably the only thing holding it back, but I'm hearing of more and more companies starting to use it. So it's definitely going to be a good bet to learn it.

Best way to learn Rust is going to be finding a way to get it into your current job. Write a small CLI tool in Rust, or spin up a small service in Rust. Make sure it's not on the critical path so that even if you're the only one who knows it, nothing horribly bad will happen. Ideally, see if you can get a coworker to learn it with you and contribute so multiple people know it. This helps engineering managers/directors get more comfortable with adopting a new language and tech. This might have to happen in your spare time initially, but hopefully if you're successful at it, you can start to use Rust at work and get the credibility you're looking for.

I think having a moral compass is important, because a lot of people will optimize for themselves in the short term, and screw up society in the long term. But I don't think this is obvious at all to people unless they're taught, or if they are really good at learning from their own mistakes.

I think others have pointed this out to you, but there is a high dependence on people learning this through good parenting, good teachers, and being around the right people, all while having security for things like food, shelter, etc.

Some of those things get wrapped up in the over-arching term called "privilege" but I think there is something to be said for the fact that you can't assume most people are securing these things. But you can assume that in the absence of this kind of security, many people (maybe even most) will lose their moral compass.

I think the argument could be made that most of the top countries you mentioned are linguistically and racially homogenous. I don't really have a conclusion on whether religion helps or hurts a more racially diverse population but just something worth pointing out.

It's an interesting argument that you lay out, and as agnostic that came from a religious family, it's something that I've personally grappled with. In the absence of religion, where do people find their moral and ethical compass? I wasn't raised atheist, and when I ask atheists this question they often dismiss it as not important or obvious. I feel like that's half the reason religion persists, because they actually attempt to answer such questions with respect.

Just because they eat it, doesn't mean they digest it and get it out of the ecosystem.

That's the problem with plastic, breaking it down without consuming a ton of other resources, or getting even worse by-products in the process. Plastic in its current form should have been made illegal at least 30 years ago in favor of far more biodegradable options.

It’s not that it isn’t used, more that it’s not encouraged long term due to several downsides.

First and foremost, top tech companies encourage autonomy. It’s hard to achieve or support autonomy for an engineer if they become too reliant on pair programming. It’s also difficult to scale teams and projects if you need a well matched pair to execute on them. Good pairs are hard to find and harder to sustain. And a fair number of programmers like their independence and aren’t excited to pair all the time. For these folks, pairing can be a big tax.

And I have come across engineers who become individually far less effective without pairing, so it can become a crutch. And over time, it becomes really hard to continue setting them up for success. Their pairing partner might leave or simply lose interest in constantly carrying them.

It's a much smaller scale problem than the pesticide issue.

Here in Northern California, we're actually unable to use poisons on pest rodents like squirrels and rats since they often enter the ecosystem through raptors ingesting them.

My friends with a lot of land were advised to get pellet guns and air rifles to deal with their squirrel problems. It's considered the lowest impact to the ecosystem and food chain.

Electric assist bikes. I don't have one yet but I've rented them in SF before. They make biking in a hilly city a far more enjoyable experience. If the cost falls enough to be on part with a normal bike in a few years, I suspect everyone will start riding them and cars will be less prevalent for short trips.

10 years ago, there was a case to be made for Austin, TX really fitting this bill.

However now with so many moving there from other parts of the country, it's gotten crowded and more expensive. I would no longer consider it "cheap".

This is interesting but I think it's just a matter of time before the dam breaks and all the tech companies with a UK presence start increasing salaries to get more competitive. The same thing happened in NYC around 2015-2020. At some point money talks and the bullshit starts to walk.

I know someone who is moving from NYC to the UK to run an engineering team at a FANG company. He'll want to hire the best engineers and be willing to pay for them. And I know he wouldn't have taken that job if it didn't come with a big pay increase.

Web like projectiles to grapple and swing around NYC sky scrapers?

If you are already in London, I would stay put. Major FANG companies like FB are already making major inroads to build out offices in the UK. And they will likely disrupt the UK/EU salaries quite a bit in the coming years.

Look for contacts in those companies and try and land a gig there. Far easier than relocating and dealing with Visa issues in the US.

I struggled with this too, and it actually got even worse when I started managing people. I also started writing people off as "amazing folks can take feedback, and not great folks who can't."

What changed my perspective was the talks and books around Radical Candor.

The basic idea is this, you need to get people into the right state of mind through genuine empathy and shared trust before they will be ready to hear feedback. Otherwise, it's human nature to become defensive and not hear it.

If it comes from someone you know and trust, then you'll hear the feedback as constructive. If it's from a stranger, or someone who you see as a rival, then you'll see it as a threat.

It can take a long time to build enough trust with people to get them into a place where you can provide constructive feedback. But it's crucial to actually getting the feedback to achieve the outcome you wan.

Why not find a new CEO to run the day to day, while you switch to more of a chairman/advisory role? You could then create enough incentives in place to grow everything towards a meaningful exit.

I worked at a company that used this exact strategy. Took a few years to play out, but it allowed the founder to take some money off the table through a private equity round, and finally get a meaningful acquisition spearheaded by the new CEO.

yes you are absolutely right, these are more oligopolies not monopolies.

I think the oligopoly term hasn't really entered the North American vernacular. Even I think about Russian oil companies when I hear it.

And yes, we're still creating more of these every year as Big Tech expands to eat the world.

"Big Tech" has become an umbrella term which can mean any of the following:

* Big Tech monopolies controlling news and information: Twitter, Facebook, Google

* Big Tech monopolies on Advertising/Marketing: Facebook and Google

* Big Tech monopolies on Multimedia content: Netflix and Spotify

* Big Tech monopolies on Cloud Technology Infrastructure: Amazon, Google, Microsoft

* Big Tech monopolies on Mobile: Apple and Google

* Big Tech monopolies on eCommerce: Amazon

We could be talking about "Breaking up Big Tech" for 50 years trying to break all of these up. It's kind of insane.

Uber rewrote its entire backend and both major mobile apps between 2014 and 2019. While there was definitely some reuse, we switched languages on several of these so there were direct ports as well.

It took a lot of engineers to do this while also launching several new business units and scaling to hypergrowth simultaneously.

So yes it can be done, but it will come at a cost and you need to be in a position where the business won’t fail if it takes a long time, or you can afford to run several concurrent legacy systems at the same time.

On that link you posted, they updated and said they sunset the program because it didn't work.

I see a lot less value in these benchmarks than I did 6 years ago or so when they first started appearing. Maybe I'm showing my age but the speed argument just isn't that important to me any more.

These days when I'm evaluating a framework, I look for strong documentation, integration with tools for observability and deployment, and compatibility with a well understood runtime that makes operations easier.

These things are way more important for building software that works, that scales, and is operationally efficient for a team of engineers to work with for several years.

Everything else is just vanity metrics.

I can throw an ambiguous business problem at you and you can reasonably solve it with technology.

Your seniority is based on how big a problem you can solve and how reasonable your solutions remain.

I suspect that hunting, field dressing, and butchering lost their mainstream appeal soon after industrialization.

It's one thing to do these things once a month on a hunting trip for leisure versus doing it nearly every week in order to maintain your property or community. It's like the difference between gardening as a hobby versus farming as a lifestyle.

The amount of hunting needed to control the deer population and the population of able bodied and sufficiently interested hunters simply doesn't scale properly in most communities.

Predators who hunt as their main purpose and niche in life seems like a more viable solution if we determine how to keep the livestock predation to an acceptable level.

You're partially right, and creating additional supply (especially with restaurants) was one of the main challenges. We tried bringing chain restaurants like McDonalds to table to start to address this. The latest version was a concept of ghost kitchens (restaurants with excess production capacity that was under utilized for in-person dining, with more flexibility on cuisine choices). Super interesting topic as well.

There is another supply issue with door-to-door vaccine delivery which is the courier distribution. Amazon Flex works because its fairly low barrier to spin up vans and delivery drivers. With vaccines you get into compliance/regulatory challenges as well as refrigeration etc. Some of these regulations would likely need to be intentionally loosened to enable a greater volume of delivery drivers and vans to hit the road.

Thanks for sharing, had no idea about the dabbawalas but that's fascinating. Definitely I think the demand and supply patterns of such a system have found their equilibrium over the past 115 years. Which is probably what makes it work and makes it resilient to all the societal changes we've experienced since then.

Much harder to replicate something like that on a shorter time frame of 6 months!

The logistics of mobile distribution of a fast expiring product are much more complex than you think, and spoilage and expiration losses need to be acceptable at some level to proceed. I think in the case of the vaccine, the latter is well understood, but no one wants to be responsible or held accountable for any vaccines expiring, due to the optics of the situation.

I worked on Uber briefly while we tested the early version of UberEats which involved distributing burritos in San Francisco during lunchtime.

The restaurant making the burritos would have to pre-make the burritos between 7am and 10:30am and ensure that they were made available to supply depots around the city.

From 11am-1PM we would accept orders in the app. An order would be dispatched to a bike or walking courier who would walk the burrito from the supply depot to the consumer who ordered it. The goal was to make sure you had a hot lunch and could get it quickly.

When it worked, it was awesome and it helped validate the consumer demand very clearly. But we lost a lot of burritos due to spoilage and no amount of data analysis and better supply positioning could make up for it. It was also not at all economically viable to bake in a 20-30% loss rate and price the burritos high enough to grow as a business. People will pay a lot for on-demand food, but we found they were willing to wait 30 minutes (if it came straight from the restaurant) and pay a little more (if we dispatched with more courier delays), so the on-demand marketplace was born.

With the COVID-19 vaccine, right now I think it would be political suicide to accept a 30% daily loss rate on expired vaccines, even if it meant we vaccinated people twice as fast. There would need to be a higher vaccine supply available where vaccine expiry becomes as moot point as a spoiled burrito.