I 100% agree with you. Over the course of my career, I've taken plenty of time, on the clock, to do such. Not necessarily with any particular direction of my managers, but just understanding that "My job is to solve problem X. Doing so requires learning tool Y, therefore, I'll spend a day of learning and an hour of coding".
Having talked to others, though, I find that a lot of folks don't necessarily realize that this is acceptable/encouraged. As I moved into senior roles, I tried to do a better job of conveying this. And overall, employers and managers need to do a better job communicating that doing this is expected/reasonable behavior.
NYC is nowhere in the mess that DC is in. Mostly, because Manhattan, at least, is well-shaped to be navigated efficiently by rail. Because of height restrictions, DC has a relatively sprawled, 2-dimensional core, which means many common routes require transfers (also, the metro being so deep means a nontrivial amount of time is spent on escalators). For me, I often faced the decision of "$6, 10 minute Uber vs. $3.50 1 hour metro". Manhattan is long and skinny -- there's almost always a 0-transfer ride that can get you from point A to B + the wait is almost never longer than 10 mins. Every time I've said "I'm running late, I'll take a cab", it turned out to be a mistake. The situation is certainly different in the boroughs, though.
We already have ways to turn corporate money into community services. They're called taxes. I'd much rather we as as a community take Amazon's money and build our own schools rather than have Amazon build an Amazon Education Facility and thank them for their time.
When someone does the denegrating you mention (and folks do), they go on my “I’ll never work with them” list. I’ve had folks do it in an interview and it’s an immediate no-hire.
JS is a tool, just like on the any other. It has some big pluses, and some annoying “WTFs”, but today, it’s a more-than-solid default answer to “What should I write my webapp in”.
Hundreds is a stretch. When you get down to the hundredth-largest city you’re at Des Moines, population 217k. At that point, if the company were to say “zero our taxes or we leave”, the city would do as told.
How small can a city be and have a healthy relationship with an employer of 25,000?
Taking the slider to the other extreme, you end up with company towns everywhere, and there are a whole lot of burned out husks of civilization that are memories to that.
Until we truly solve remote, there will be some concentration. And there's value to that as an employee. If your employer goes kaput, or you're stagnating in your career, or you have an abusive boss, there are plenty of opportunities available, and enough of them that one shock to the system won't break the local economy.
Of course, the flip side of that is that real estate values go through the roof.
One of the great parts of being in NYC is having friends who aren’t “in tech”. Tech is an industry here, and there’s a massive network where you’re not tying yourself to one company though your move, but it doesn’t define the culture of the city.
Yep — I’m a Manhattanite as well. It’s telling that when you intersect pedestrian-friendly with transit accessibility you end up with a list of the most expensive places to live in the US, even when the housing stock is mostly shit.
The one thing that this seems to miss, and for me what defines the "character" of a neighborhood as "walkable" or not, is how much of the space between buildings is for people vs. for cars.
So many of the photos here have skinny sidewalks for people and fat roads for cars, and a space like that is never going to be full of people -- the sidewalk is a place "to get from here to there", not a place to be.
Probably the best rule of thumb I've found is "Would I jaywalk here"? If an area is people-first, you have a lot of pedestrian traffic, little car traffic (because folks drive alternate routes), and what traffic there is travels at low speed. For car-first areas, it's a losing game of Frogger.
Yeah -- I bought some puts at 5 expiring in January for a nickel apiece in August... It was pretty obvious there was nothing there and would drop like a stone -- the question was when the market would wake up. I honestly don't understand what the longs are betting on here, either.
The mid-Atlantic is pretty good about nature not killing you. I grew up in suburban Philly — the only wildlife really to worry about were deer (and deer ticks). Every few years there would be a bear sighting, or a tree branch falling on someone’s head while out for a run, but if you’re inland, hurricanes aren’t a problem, you don’t really get snow that can’t be dealt with, no earthquakes, volcanos, wildfires, etc.
If you have a million bucks in assets, I don't care if you're 75. Our country has been ruined by boomers running the country into debt by way of cutting their taxes -- taxes that millennials will eventually have to pay. I have no qualms with taxing the "winners" of that generation. They owe it to us anyway.
Cities need to fund themselves through real estate rather than income taxes. Tax “the person who could live in a place” rather than “the person who does live in a place”. For actual residents, it’s a wash, but it severely penalizes the investment crowd.
There's (at least one) order of magnitude difference in popularity between the two. I don't think the average American could name the Sagrada Familia from a picture of it, for instance. For me, when I travel, sometimes I don't really look up what there is to see/do in a city until I'm there. When I landed in Barcelona, I didn't know what the Sagrada Familia was.
Recent search history is accessible in the UI when you click on the search box. Assuming someone could see "what FB looks like from your perspective", they'd be able to access the last dozen-or-so searches.
The search box in the UI is populated with your last dozen-or-so searches. You can access that data about yourself, so presumably if someone has the ability to "view as" you, they can see it.
I’m primarily an engineer, though I have worn the data scientist hat in the past. There’s a bunch of data engineering/plumbing work that’s necessary in any data science organization, as well as data visualization for things that are beyond a standard chart.
Still brand new to this, but have pretty much hit the tipping point from "unsure if enough work" to "too much work" immediately.
If the goal is to be on your own, one thing that is incredibly useful is to build a network of people who would be in a complimentary business to yours, are likely to stumble across work that you would be able to do, and aren't in the position to do themselves. For me, that's working with a former coworker whose business is data science + the strategy around it, or a larger consulting firm where I used to work that has projects come across their plate for steady clients that are too small to be worth their time, but can be quite lucrative for an individual.
It’s a bit more meta than what this guide covers, but I wish something was said about treating writing code as fundamentally a writing process. Most documents like this focus on “what readable code is”, and not “how do I achieve that product”.
Brainstorm, outline, draft, revise, rearrange. Have a high-level structure that makes sense, clean up “sentence structure” and “word choice”. Often the best path to “readable code” is “brain dump a mess, than revise” rather than “write a perfect first draft”.
We had a (mostly) working house, then money happened to it, driven by legislation which let the VCs and their friends avoid the liability that prevented others from doing the same before.
What we needed was tools to make it easier for people to publish to the shared internet. What we got was a centralized mess -- the bastard child of AOL and the advertising industry.
The past 20 years of growth in the internet have been a mistake. Not a "small, needs a bit of tweaking" sort of mistake, but a "burn it all" mistake. Twitter is a garbage fire. Facebook is a garbage fire. The world would be better without them. Not a "slightly modified" version. Burned to the ground.
The liability insurance required to hold data on a billion people should be unaffordable. Services at that scale should not exist.
There's some irony in posting this here, given this is a user-generated site and all, but I'd love to see all the safe-harbor provisions be seriously rethought. It would wreck the tech industry, but save the internet by decentralizing it, and kill off cesspools where idiots wreck society while profiteering scum become billionaires amid the carnage.
Re #2: Ugh. This sort of thing is a selector for plenty that is negative about the tech industry — selects for young single men without a family.
Frankly, I want to go home at night and do anything but code. Music, art, explore the city, have friends. And I want to work with others who value the same.
Salary after rent is not necessarily an optimal metric. It works when looking at things like vacations and national products, but when you’re looking at local spend, that rent gets passed through everything that requires local land and labor. Food (especially prepared food) and entertainment tend to be priced in local dollars.
For me it’s hit or miss. The Mona Lisa was underwhelming in person, and I saw it on a day when there were few crowds. Guernica, the Sistine Chapel (if you avoid the cattle prods), Garden of Earthly Delights (and plenty of the Goya/Velazquez/El Greco works at the Peadon), the Van Gogh room in Musee d’Orsay —- all worth a trip if you have the means.