home_boi

What I find troubling about Yelp's arguments and the antitrust situation is that these parties are basically telling a company what its website must look like and have.

They are saying that a website must conform to their idea of a search page which contains only plain text search results.

> It's been shown, especially recently, that HR and legal are not necessarily on the side of employees wronged by sexism in the workplace.

Nor are they on the side of employees accused of sexism. They will do whatever is in their best interest. Which can mean both ignoring sexism or wrongfully firing the employee with no proof.

The cost of ignoring sexism is a potential PR nightmare. The cost of wrongfully terminating the accused employee is maybe a low 7 figure wrongful termination suit at the worst.

> The default outcome in he-said-she-said, no other proof is no action from HR.

There needs to be more justification to this statement. What happens in HR is basically a black box to most people.

> Startup compensation can be right up there with the big companies.

Does anyone know how to find these companies when you're already at the high end of the spectrum? There are thousands of start ups and even shooting an email or checking LinkedIn for previous work history of current engineers can be a time drain to figure this out.

Ideally, the compensation would be something like > 80% total comp of big tech company in liquid money + a lot of private RSU's ( > 50% of big tech total comp)

Unfortunately, female offenders receive less attention and appropriate punishment for their actions.

> Seems like many men have a problem with rejection and accepting no

Women don't have the burden of having to initiate relationships and chase after potential partners

You still have almost no power as an individual. It's majority rules. It's a glaring flaw of 'democracy' that prominent figures and governments have tried to work around.

If you perform well and have decent bargaining power, you would not be in the majority. The people who have the most to gain from a union (people who have low individual bargaining power) would likely be the most vocal and involved in the organization.

> Which is all to say that if common workers in your industry unionize you will probably be able to negotiate an even higher premium in exchange for not joining the union.

Or the union can force you out of your job by forcing the employer to hire unionized employees only.

It's true that a union has more bargaining power. But you've just moved the power from the employer to the union.

As an individual you don't have power over the terms of the collective bargaining. The union can very well bargain against your interests. If you want $250,000 salary as a new grad, you might actually have a higher chance of receiving it in non-unionized world.

Tech in the USA is so far away from a bad demand/supply ratio that it isn't worth thinking about.

There is a hell lot of room for the conditions of software jobs to deteriorate before people become concerned when new grads from unknown universities can do a bit of interview prep and get $160,000 total comp working 35 hours/week with free food, massages, etc.

Food for thought, if software engineers unionized, you would be out of a job as a contractor because any employer that uses your service would get inflatable ratted.

Then you would be forced to join a union and take the same low pay as every other engineer. And your income would be based on seniority instead of skill, so there is very little chance that you would make even half of your contracting rate.

Data selling from big tech companies is the least of your worries tbh. It's all presented in aggregate form and protected very well. It isn't even really data selling, although if you want to argue semantics and model it as such, it would be data selling limited in scope in that the only action an advertiser can use the data for is presenting you with an ad.

It's the financial industry that you have to worry about. The finance industry has atrocious security and access to very personal information on you. Finance companies (your bank, credit card, etc.) sell your information to the highest bargainer with much higher privileges (physical mail and junk emails) and don't allow you to opt out.

Edit: And also the health care industry. Super personal information with archaic tech and paper thin security. Data might not be sold but the risk of bad parties gaining access to your information is high.

Interesting to see the professionals part of the website. I wonder how well it competes with Thumbtack

> but you don't have to be a genius to get a CS degree

But most people don't know that.

They don't know that you can make $160,000 total comp right out of undergrad by going to a mediocre school where other students are not bright, failing every test but getting B's and C's from a generous curve (because of your competition) and studying Leetcode for a month.

Their intention doesn't matter. Companies can strive for a monopoly without breaking rules. The point is that at this moment, they don't have it and there is high competition (although oligopolies) in both mobile and desktop preventing them from having a platform monopoly.

But there is more than just web browsing. Microsoft owned the entire platform at one point.

I don't get Levandowski's 5th amendment claim on the privilege log. Doesn't the 5th amendment only stop the individual from incriminating himself?

How can he argue that other people (or an entire company in this case) are not allowed to incriminate him?

Has anyone successfully claimed 5th amendment and forced other people/entities not to incriminate him/her?

Have you found any alternative to online shopping?

I generally just roll the dice with Amazon on anything that is not food or electronics. The convenience trumps the money wasted on buying a bad product.

For electronics, I've looked at Walmart and Jet.com which have shady 3rd party sellers that are worse than Amazon sellers.

I believe BestBuy gets all its inventory from authorized sellers so I trust them, although they have limited selection.

I haven't found a solution for food (mainly specific branded supplements like magnesium/vitamin C/etc. that can't be found in regular grocery stores)

The ideal situation would be if Amazon didn't conmingle its "Sold by Amazon.com" inventory with 3rd party sellers and charged a premium for it (to make it economically feasible for them). Right now the current incentives aren't pointing in that direction.

Most customers don't know about the conmingling. If we could spread awareness of conmingling, the economic incentives could lean in that direction.

The one problem I have with self driving cars is that the software is a single point of failure, so one bad patch (one "mistake") could cause millions of crashes

It's actually not that expensive in the South bay, at least compared to SF. I would say it's roughly Boston area rent prices

What effects would this have on the currently generous insurance plans of $huge_tech_company_based_in_CA?

Not sure if serious, but pragmatically speaking, you would be better off with a locked down laptop that never touches a network with offline Keepass that was installed through a USB.

Despite the damning alleged evidence, I get the feeling that all the offenders knew that they would be found out ahead of time, evaluated the risk reward trade-off and decided that they could somehow get away with it.

Are there any lawyers here who could make an educated guess how they could?

1. Interesting tech problems

2. Smart coworkers (well before this came out)

3. Good compensation (I heard for top tier applicants, they give something like MSFT total comp as salary with a ridiculous amount of paper money)

4. Assumed less bureaucracy compared to Big Cos because of unicorn/start up status

5. Ability to develop the first X in the new ride sharing/autonomous car industry

Uber would be a good fit for someone who specifically wants to work at a big_unicorn with large scale technology problems.

Most engineers wouldn't be able to accurately evaluate the ability of the leadership of tech companies, so that negative is out the door.

For the ethics portion, that's subjective.

For the cut-throat nature of the company, I heard that it was worse than most tech companies but not terrible (60+ hr/wks) like some financial companies.

And easily switch to similar prestigious company like Stripe.

Your argument isn't relevant for the situation and is very black and white. Wearing male sized team gear is a trivial matter. There are obviously other cases where accounting for every minority is important but this is not one of them.

If work from home becomes more prevalent, it might not be so.

The jacket drama had nothing to do with gender really and she was making a big deal out of something trivial. I can imagine the scenario is like "ok we're too cheap to create custom jackets for everyone so we will order the jacket size that fits the majority and the minority can try to fit in it". If the gender ratio was the other way around, there would be a similar situation.

The response to other reports are standard. Whether it is a homosexual boss or a female boss, the company will seek to protect itself.

There is a difference between misogyny and sexual occurrences. If OP had been a male, she would have had as bad, if not worse experience.

I'm of the opinion that the average software engineer in the USA is already overpaid and underworked with excellent benefits and low incentive to unionize.

I'm simplifying it a bit but if you don't like your job, just grab a copy of Cracking the Coding Interview and apply to big companies. The big companies pay very well, have good benefits and interview everyone because of the need for a high head count