lsc

> Not really, you have to pay competitively of course. But you can safely assume that everybody else does that too.

In silicon valley, the difference between what a FAANG company pays and what almost everyone else pays is... pretty big. Like maybe not double? but certainly half again as much. I mean, you could say they are competing for different people, I suppose, but when a recruiter tells me that they "pay competitively" - that means drastically different things for different companies, even if I am limiting myself to companies within 10 miles of santa clara.

> I noticed a pattern in Berlin where I'm based where the less attractive jobs indeed come with higher salaries. When the work is shit and they bleed engineers faster than they can hire them there's nothing else they can do than up their rates.

Huh. That's really interesting, 'cause my experience (In the US, mostly in silicon valley) is the opposite. There were times in my life where I actively sought out harder and even more dangerous work for more money; but even casting aside any concern over who I worked for, even if I was willing to go work in a war zone, for my skills? the pay was better sitting on an expensive chair in a safe office in mountain view.

Even within silicon valley, the smaller companies and the "scrappy" startups or small companies seemed to me to be a whole lot higher stress... which for parts of my life? sure, I'll take extra stress for extra money, but no, those companies pay a lot less. Which, again, is fine in certain parts of my life; I'm not educated, so I needed to get a lot of experience before I was given a shot at a job in one of the FAANG companies. And it was... really a very different sort of experience; I was 20 last time I had a job where I felt that junior compared to my colleagues, (and I had a hell of a job when I was 20).

I've seen something similar around layoffs; I've been through several layoffs but have yet to get a pink slip myself. and I've always found myself dissapointed that I wasn't laid off; those in the first round get nice severance, a retraining bonus, and a chance to get another job before too many other people are laid off. Those of us who "dodge the axe" end up having to do twice the work with almost no hope of a raise and with co-workers who are afraid of getting laid off in the next round.

Interesting. when I use my iphone SE, I use it one handed; I use swype with my thumb, which doesn't look like it'd work; my thumb practically covers the whole keyboard, but it ends up working really well for me. swype on the bigger iphones for me is a lot less comfortable, and I end up holding the phone with one hand and typing with the other. I haven't tried a "pop socket" yet, but that might be the solution.

that's the thing; I mean, yeah, we'd all take small pay cuts for a lot of things; but dropping out of a FAANG company to one of the companies that is having a hard time hiring is a massive pay cut.

Like, for me; I'd be so happy to take a 20% (hourly) pay cut and work half-time for 40% of my current total pay and go to school the rest of the time. But as far as I can tell, the hourly paycut would be more like 50+% just on the hourly, so I'd be looking at like a quarter the total comp, and the prestige cut (and thus hit to future earnings) would be huge, as I'd have to go work for a startup/small company.

I guess this will make more sense if marginal tax rates go back up.

I think #1 is mostly a pay issue. If two companies pay the same and one expects more hours, they don't pay the same.

(note, I'd also take a small hourly cut to work fewer hours a week, but as far as I can tell, the paycut I would need to take to do that is so large that I'm better off working a few years on and then taking six months or a year off and eating the tax and career disadvantages of that)

For most people in my area, #2 and #3 are also mostly pay issues. Like #1, it's not entirely pay, but the most common reason I've heard for people wanting to work places other than here (I'm in silicon valley, as you'd expect from someone trying to maximize salary) is that it's less expensive to live almost anywhere else in the world.

Isn't it just... mostly money? I mean, if you want to hire someone good, who presumably has a good job, you have to pay better than what they are getting now.

I think this is probably especially true in Europe; I mean, as far as I know, people get like a 2x-4x raise moving to silicon valley from europe. If you pay more than your local competitors, you will largely have your pick of the candidates.

I mean, yes, things other than money matter a lot, too. But as an employee? I think that's really, really hard to judge from the interview. The money is pretty easy to judge, and as far as I can tell, total comp is a good 'honest signal' that I'm going to be treated in other ways. How much money they offer is a better indicator that I'll be treated well, in my experience, than anything anyone can say at an interview.

I think as workers, we're not doing ourselves any favors by pretending that an employer can get the best people without paying the best rates.

I'm reminded of the quote about how writing everything down is going to ruin the minds of young people for memorization.

In general, I'd argue that this is not so much 'de-skilling' as 'learning how to use tools'

I mean, I'm sure that before shovels, people were way better at digging with their hands. Before bows, I'm sure we were way better at chasing down animals through strength and endurance.

Sometimes there are knock-on effects that aren't so good; cars may be making us less fit, (I personally think this is largely a problem preferences; most people prefer a density level that makes public transit not so practical, and are willing to pay a huge price for this in terms of lost time, traffic deaths, obesity, increased housing costs, etc...)

But the point is that these new tools usually make us better at the thing we're trying to do.

When I started working on cars in the late '90s, all I had were the manuals and exploded parts diagrams. It is difficult to overstate how much easier a repair becomes now that I can type a few words in and get a video of someone performing the exact repair I need on the exact same model of car. As a shadetree mechanic who isn't an expert with the exploded parts diagrams, this is a huge game changer.

I've even used the youtube to fix a laptop, something you'd expect me to be good at. (I'm no longer a professional hardware tech, but I was never a professional mechanic; go back far enough and I did fix laptops and other computer hardware for money) a friend had one of those fancy, thin Sony laptops; they tried to replace a keyboard and it wouldn't boot. they then took it to a repair place, who couldn't figure it out.

The exploded parts diagram was impossible. But I looked up on youtube, and found a detailed teardown and assembly. I followed along with the heavily accented voice, and the laptop booted up like new.

You could argue that in a bygone era, I would be more incented to figure out how to go from those line drawings to actual parts, to learn how to read those exploded parts diagrams. And you are right, of course; but I didn't, and because of modern tools, I'm better at fixing things than I would have been.

is that true? I mean, that staring at a screen degrades your vision?

I haven't read anything convincing on the subject.

I personally agree, but most people like cars as they are now, even in SF and LA; only in NYC is public transit really good enough that there is a critical mass of non-car owners voting to keep up the public transit.

I live in silicon valley, and the traffic isn't SF or LA bad yet, but it's pretty bad, and it's also clear that the voters around here aren't prepared to vote in usefu public transit; (one could make the argument that VTA is proof that voters are prepared to pay for public transit but aren't willing to allow useful public transit)

The upshot is that most people outside of NYC don't think automotive transportation is broken. Most people prefer automotive transportation. I personally am with you; driving when you could be on transit is nuts, but I'm clearly in the minority.

making a safety-grade data network would be an interesting challenge. I do think it is a possible thing to do over limited areas, and I think that if we had defined areas that had safety-rated networks, that's a thing that self-driving cars could plan around... e.g. if you request a trip outside of those areas, the self driving car would take you as far as it could and then park, allowing you to prepare to drive manually.

>Almost all technical problems of self-driving cars are solved by current algorithms once we get 100x faster HW,

That sounds off to me, because my understanding is that the computer is a small portion of the cost and the mass of the self-driving car. If you could solve the problem by just filling up the back seats with computers, someone would have prototyped it, and probably even brought it to market as a way to drive large vehicles.

(I mean, unless you were on some non-parallelizable process, but my understanding is that most image processing tasks are massively parallel.)

do you type with both hands?

>What I don't get about the larger phones is how people comfortably carry them around. Maybe its because I wear skinny jeans / pants, but there's absolutely no way I could fit a larger phone in the pockets of my pants, and I rarely have a jacket on.

Aside from a cellphone, I also carry a kindle all the time. I literally wear special pants so I can carry my kindle without a bag.

I mean, they aren't custom made or anything, but I do limit myself to baggy pants with giant cargo pockets. I keep saying I'm going to take all my electronics to a tailor and ask for less ridiculous pants that can carry all my stuff, but I haven't.

(that said, if apple released a new phone with new screen and network quality that was the size of the SE, I would buy it, just 'cause it's a lot easier to use with just one hand, and when I want to use both hands, I have bigger devices.)

My theory is that big phones are best for single device users. Most of my social circle has a computer at home and at work, and they often carry a laptop or tablet. The phone, in that case, really is a mobile device, and especially if you are carrying around a bunch of other crap, a small phone is awful nice.

My theory is that big phones dominate because a lot of people don't have reliable/maintained computers other than their cellphone. If that was true of me, I'd want the biggest cellphone I could get, too.

Personally, I think if this is true, and phone companies figure it out, you'll see phones begin to be priced like turn-of-the-millennium laptops. The giant and clunky "desktop replacement" units should be giant and priced at the bottom of the market. The small units should have all the premium features and be way more expensive.

The fact that there are very few small smartphones being made and that none of those are 'premium' smartphones would indicate that either I am wrong or there's a market opportunity that the major cellphone manufacturers are missing.

Do you eat yeast? It's good for that sort of thing; I mean, you can get it drinking unfiltered beer, too, but personally I kinda like how nutritional yeast tastes, and I'll use it as a condiment.

If you are in Silicon Valley and want to experience a flip, try out 'the haberdasher' in san jose. So good. If they have a good thick stout on tap, get the 'beer flip' - I can't tell you what's in it, other than it's cold and sweet and slightly carbonated and involves a whole egg and some stout. How good it is depends a lot on what kind of stout they use; the best I've had was with a peanut butter stout.

Their 'fenway flip' is also pretty great.

The rest of their drinks are pretty good, too, and the bartenders are very knowledgeable if you come on a weeknight when they aren't too busy.

Note, walmart has a wide selection of extremely cheap mail-order mattresses. No idea if they are any good, but if you are looking to save money on a mattress, it's probably worth doing some research.

I'm not sure anyone is fooled by the "It's cheaper" - but there are a lot of us who will pay a reasonable premium to not have to go to the store and deal with salespeople in person, and personally... I think that's a reasonable luxury to buy?

I mean, even if salespeople weren't... salespeople, it's still often a good several hours of time during business hours to drive to the store that has the thing you want, and I personally have a really hard time telling you how much I will like a mattress without sleeping on it for a week, anyhow, so I don't feel like I'm getting any value out of shopping in person.

The other thing I point out here is that "the cloud" is suuuper expensive, and while that is still way cheaper than hiring a me or two to handle your hardware while you are small, there comes a point pretty quickly on amazon where buying hardware and hiring a few people like me becomes cheaper for base load in the long term.

I believe that companies are staying on amazon longer than it is in their interest to do so, and I further believe that this will change when people start looking for savings during the next downturn.

For that matter, I believe that people will overreact and move in the opposite direction; you will see a fad of people buying their own hardware before they really have enough load to justify the person with the requisite hardware abilities. That's just how these in-sourcing/outsourcing fads work.

physical activity has a lot to do with burning calories; that doesn't translate into weight loss for most people because physical activity makes you hungry.

Eh, I've been a sysadmin/programmer since 1997 or so; I'd argue the slow automation of our profession has been going on forever. it used to be that sysadmin started as the kid who swaps the tapes and does the reboots, and went up to the person automating, and above that, the person troubleshooting your backtrace when the kernel panics. We were all sysadmins, just of different levels.

But... the job, if you were a mid to senor sysadmin, was always to automate away your job. There was always this race against yourself and the other sysadmins to keep your skills ahead of the scripts, and there were always people who fell behind during the crashes and couldn't get back in.

Really, I think the radical change that cloud brought us sysadmins was that employers care so much less now about your ability to go from a kernel backtrace to bad hardware. Knowledge of hardware in general has lost most of it's value; that's a lot of my knowledge and experience that isn't worth much anymore, and a lot of people who will have to find new roles. in my early 20s, I paid expenses while trying to start a company being on-call datacenter guy for a few small companies. I mean, I'd charge a minimum number of hours, they'd call me up or depending on the customer, my systems would page me when something needed fiddling with at the datacenter. - this job... almost doesn't exist anymore, because most of the customers are on AWS. (I mean, the job does exist; prgmr.com still even has co-lo customers, though I don't think they are accepting more... but it's super rare.)

Now, it seems like we want to split the sysadmin role into different titles;

SRE - production sysadmins; you have a high bar for programming skill and Linux internals knowledge, but a very weak requirement to have experience with standard configuration management tools (often SRE implies you will be using custom configuration management tools) -

then you have the devops title for smaller scale cloud sysadmins with a low bar for Linux knowledge, a medium bar for programming knowledge and a high bar for knowledge of standardized configuration management tools.

The sysadmin title remains for people who hit SRE standards for linux knowledge but don't meet the programming bar of SRE or necessarily have the experience with the standard configuration tools of the devops.

Generally, both in terms of pay and in terms of the number of machines you manage, SRE > DevOps > Sysadmin - of course, that's modified by level, location and company;

(Note, both SRE and DevOps involve systems design in ways that I don't understand well enough to speak about. I mean, I can pass SRE interviews at 3rd tier companies no problem, but at the first tier, I'm not even sure why I'm failing, which means I'm a long ways from passing. I mean, I also need to level up my programming to be a SRE at a first-tier company, but I have a solid idea of where that bar is and what I need to do to get there. I don't understand the systems design questions well enough to even really know what I have to learn.)

Also note, I personally think that SRE is probably a more solid career path than DevOps going forward, if you are in an operations career. Programming basics has been the thing that has changed the least during my career; the skill that is most portable. You don't want to marry a particular tool any more than you have to, 'cause that tool... might be out of favor next year.

right. I mean, getting a new job has always seemed easy for me? but I don't think that disproves anything you say. (Another big part of why I think finding a new job is easy is 'cause I kinda like interviewing, and can do it a lot before it starts feeling hard.) but I'm just saying that passion, at least as I define passion, seems to be more of a career hindrance than a career help; I know several people who are fairly technically competent who are un/underemployed because they have a lot of passion and can't stand to see their work being used except in exactly the way they think is best, and that attitude really only works if the power imbalance is hugely in your favor or if you can do the whole project yourself.

I would argue that 'interviewee' is part of all our jobs. Not a big part, but it's a very important part.

My observation is that my interview-avoidant friends either spend a lot of time unemployed after an employer goes away, or they end up in positions that pay them less (and often treat them less well in other ways) than they otherwise would.

I know a few people who have a pretty consistent 50% success rate at interviews... but they are also working way below, pay and treatment wise, what they could get if they interviewed for the next level up or the next company up and maybe accepted something closer to a 15% or 20% success rate at the interview.

eh? I dunno about hoarding, but I have feelings about eating.

At least for eating, most people don't operate rationally; can you tell me how many calories you ate and burned today? yesterday? I can, but I have been putting a lot of effort into this for some time now. most people don't know what they ate yesterday, unless they eat the same thing every day. Most people operate on instinct. I've operated on instinct for most of my life, too; I was super skinny as a teenager, healthy in my early 20s, then growing into overweight but not obese in my late 20s and early 30s... then obesity set in during the mid to late '30s

This really was pretty steady; my strength changed a lot; during that period my bench press would go from 50kg to 100Kg and back again multiple times, but my weight just continued to very slowly increase.

Clearly, whatever subsystem decides "I'm hungry" or "I'm full" is tuned to get me to eat just a little bit more than I need to maintain my body. And it's pretty good at it. If I work out? the more I work out, the more I want to eat. working out without caloric control simply doesn't work to lose weight for me.

I've been counting calories in and out (and trying to run a small long term deficit without otherwise spending a lot of effort on what I eat) for some time now. I have gone from a BMI of 31 to a BMI of 26 in the last year or so. This after trying a bunch of "eat this not that" diets, which have never worked for me. But I have been... slightly hungry for the last year or so, and thus I think about food and my relationship to food a lot.

My theory? My theory is that my farming ancestors found it advantageous to eat a little more than they needed when food was around; that it was better to carry that bit of a belly around all the time if it meant that you wouldn't die if you didn't stash away quite enough grain for the winter.

(As an aside "just eat less" "stop when you are only slightly hungry" also doesn't work for me; that ends up with me eating way less than I need to for some reason (I need to come within 20 or 30% of my maintenance caloric intake, from experience, or after a few days I enter a semi-fasting state where I'm tired and can't focus - I'm guessing this is also the farming ancestors. "Oh, there isn't enough food stored? Maybe you should take a lot of naps until this year's crop is ready to bring in")

I think that has more to do with competence than passion. If you are good (and good at interviewing) getting a new job is easy. If you have passion... losing your current job over differences in how to do things is... common.

I know, right? No company would give us a private area to make phone calls without disturbing our neighbors.

I don't think that changes my point? A lot of people consider something like article 25; some right to minimal food, shelter and medical care to be part of human rights.

Right-libertarians generally don't believe that you have a right to any of those things if nobody else wants to give those things to you.

Generally this is talked about as the conflict between positive vs negative rights, or human rights vs property rights.

I mean, you could come up with some version of "human rights" that doesn't include the right to food, shelter and medical care... but you could also come up with a definition of libertarianisim that includes some form of welfare for everyone. I personally know several people who identify as libertarians who also support universal basic income...

I'm just saying, that's not how those words are usually used. Usually 'human rights' includes some kind of positive rights, and usually 'libertarian' means 'primarily focuses on property rights'

> Since when libertarianism and human rights have been on the opposite sides?

I dunno about opposite, but certainly in opposition on certain points: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/inde...

"Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection."

Obviously, this means taking from those who have to give to those who have not, which is pretty strongly opposed by the right-libertarians.

a bunch of the others also conflict with right-libertarian principles; like article 24 limits working hours and says I should get some paid vacation and 26 says elementary education should be free (and compulsory)

like... half the people I know who own a single family home generate a good portion of their own electricity.

Sometimes centralization helps efficiency, it's true, but sometimes the opposite, decentralization helps, too... it sure looks like for peak-load in sunny areas, decentralized power generation is cheaper.

I think that for commodity compute, the big players are not a lot more efficient than the big hardware manufacturers. Go to a supermicro, a foxcon, or other ODM server manufacturer, and you'd be surprised how cheap it is to buy actual hardware.

Small companies will scrap for margins that the big players, so far, at least, have laughed at, because so far, most of the market seems to be okay paying these large margins. (I used to be one of those small companies scrapping for those low margins; I am not happily and much more renumeratively employed by a big player, outside of their cloud department)

I personally think that long term, smaller players or in-house hosting will be the way to go for your 'base load' compute resource. I think that paying the margins of the big players makes a lot more sense for your 'peak load'

But, of course, we don't know yet; none of this will shake out until the next serious economic downturn. There isn't a lot of pressure to save money when the economy looks like this.

eh, I think the real problem is that we're building/converting space into office space at a much faster rate than we're building/converting space into residential.

I personally think that to get zoning approval to build an office tower in this area, you should need to get someone to agree to build an apartment tower nearby with a similar number of units. I mean, I'm not saying they need to be owned by the same people or that those apartments will be occupied only by people who work in that office building, but you need housing nearby where there are jobs.

hm. what if the employer starts counting commuting as work time? I mean, the big difference between this and just paying enough that I'm getting more money per hour counting my commute is the recognition that if I'm commuting 10 hours a week, there's not going to be much more than 30 good hours of non-commute work in me.