245 karma · joined September 11, 2016
It's definitely not for everybody, but you might be surprised as to what you find by cutting expenses by what most consider to be "drastic measures" just to see. You can always just go spend more anyways after seeing what it's like!
Compared to super-early and mid-stage startups, the ability to work a sane amount is done amazingly well at Google, and they pay too much. The downside is that the work is really simple, and the complexity (e.g. of service development) is through the roof and not supported very well. So just get ready to move at less than half the speed you're used to.
TOTALLY worth it to bank money for 3-5 years, IMO.
That's putting it nicely. Based on experience, I'd say it's arguing about preferences while demanding that code be coupled because "that's how we do things here".
> culture is far more like academia anyway
Academia is actually based on research and correctness to a much higher degree. The lack of focus on correctness in code worked on at Google is, honestly, appalling. Until, of course, you realize that all other FAANG employees still write loads of concurrency bugs and pronounce themselves gods for doing so.
Consider this:
> Introducing code search and monitoring doesn't require asking anyone on the team to change existing workflows. Changing the code review tool, however, does.
It basically sounds like the author wants to take over and tell everyone how to do things.
After time at Google, comparing them to other organizations all the way from 8-person start-ups to other FAANG+Microsoft, there are a LOT of downsides to their tools and their isolated ecosystem. A lot of things are more difficult and take longer to just get done than elsewhere at the same quality.
> Google is well-known for its internal tools. It would help to educate yourself a bit.
This may also be exactly the attitude OP was talking about.
I guess what I was trying to convey is different: being good at algorithms doesn't give much of a signal (positive or negative) about other things I think really matter more on the whole.
(Of course, having enough people being aware of algorithms subtleties is important ... everyone, not so much)
Exactly this. I suggest learning how to fabricate (or at least exaggerate) "impact" to get promoted. It's the fastest way to make money once you're in the door. Show how much of a team player you are to deliver cross-team, impactful results specifically by stepping on bodies to get there--it'll make you rich!
I'm personally very wary of using algorithms questions as a proxy for how "adept" someone is at software engineering. If I were running a business, I'd personally want to make sure people could manage technical debt and build decoupled systems.
I have had multiple positions at FAANG companies, and despite being "adept" according to these algorithms questions the systems built by these highly-paid (and, around me, generally experienced) people are pretty awful in terms of quality and maintenance.
Learning a proprietary stack also hampers effectiveness in future positions if wanting to opt-out of FAANG later on.
In my experience, this is VERY far from accurate in high-paying markets like Seattle and the Bay Area
Persistent data structures are really game-changing.
For business school grad PMs I like to see if they can run with an analogy to selling unhedged call options rather than thinking of it in terms of debt with a known payoff schedule.
Even the bankers got derivatives wrong at an epic scale.
If the only way people save is "force saving" by diving headfirst into something that sucks all of their other assets in, sure.
How could we make housing a terrible investment?
* It should be illiquid. We’ll make it something that takes weeks, no – wait – even better, months of time and effort to buy or sell.
* It should be something that locks its owner in one geographical area. That’ll limit their options and keep ’em docile for their employers!
* It should be leveraged! Oh, oh this one is great! This is how we’ll get people to swallow those low returns!
(copied from amusing thought experiment for another perspective: https://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/29/why-your-house-is-a-terri...)
That said, I bought a place to live anyways.
at this point a reasonable response is "there are no guarantees". If the 4% rule was back-tested through the great depression and generally came out fine, it's probably in the right ballpark.
As another FIRE blogger puts it, "3% or less is a near sure bet as anything in this life can be"
https://jlcollinsnh.com/2012/12/07/stocks-part-xiii-withdraw...
I'd push back at this. After starting to use protos (even at Google) these issues smack pretty much everybody right in the face.
At this point it's Kool-aid. In practice bar raisers have so much more interview experience that you can very easily pick them out, but so much of their behavior results in simply weeding out the bad.
I have received LOTS of offers from Amazon over more than a decade (only one accepted at one point), and my friend used to be a bar raiser. In his first interview at a new company he was both rude to an interviewee and flat-out wrong technically on multiple points along with it.
You can't raise the bar if you can't pick the bar raisers.
Ecosystem takes a while.
(Yes, I was using both JDBC and Ring as well as other things like Leiningen. Core.async was a notable exception as something done better in Clojure than elsewhere)
The entire Financial Independence (FI) movement is all about doing this everywhere (not just the valley) and without luck aside from household income around $45,000/yr in the US.
29 U.S.C. Sec. 157
Do you think that objecting to a business model or alleged risks thereof falls under the category of "mutual aid and protection" of other workers?
Eventually as the system grew it was much better to have bulk-interfaces of data-only for reads that completely bypassed ActiveRecord. Logic in controllers was also eventually factored out and re-used elsewhere.
My experience is that a lot of advice for Rails centers around small-to-medium size applications, and of course practices that are efficient and practical for apps of that size might not work exceptionally well in other scenarios.
I have found meetup.com to be exactly this. Not everybody at a meetup will click personally, but they're much more likely to share interests. One meetup group has completely changed my life, and I have met people I consider some of the best people I have ever encountered anywhere. And they all live right near me.
As a runner this feels like a statement that shows some (very reasonable) ignorance of feelings and motivations. Achievement through empowerment of hard work can be a very healthy way for a successful marathon to be pleasurable.
Depends what you mean by "early". The first engineers should be getting 1% or a bit more and getting diluted along the way. This can still be $400k-1M for 4 years of work with a base that is more than enough to "pay the bills".
Not quite nothing ...
of course not - there are no certainties
> It included massive bull runs that may not be repeated
it also worked through times like the great depression; on aggregate it's amazingly resilient
> A lot of research has predicted lower real rates of return
This is a SUPER-important thing for making your own FI models!
Achieving "Financial Independence" -- when a portfolio meets all basic income needs -- can greatly enable this. The question is why people postpone their own "freedom" in favor of little wins now like trying expensive restaurants, etc.