mycentstoo

Cost of living near an office is absurd. Houses in all tech hubs in the US are completely blown out (NYC, Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc.) [1].

Average house price in Cupertino (not that you'd live directly in the same place) is 2.6+ million. $300-400,000 salary doesn't cut it anymore.

I wouldn't want to finance the average house on the average Apple salary [2] or a doctor's salary [3].

Realistically, to comfortably afford a 3 million house with 10% down assuming 3% financing (good luck getting that now), you'd need clear about $780,000 per year in cash [4].

[1] https://www.redfin.com/city/4561/CA/Cupertino/housing-market

[2] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...

[3] https://www1.salary.com/CA/San-Francisco/Doctor-Salary.html

[4] https://www.financialsamurai.com/how-much-should-you-make-to...

Maybe not forever but the developer shortage is accelerating [1].

1 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US48223621

The reality of my personal situation - and I'm sure others are at the same point - is that remote work offers the biggest chance we have to fight (in my opinion) two of the most important issues of our time - cost of housing and climate change.

First - housing. The cost of housing is hugely tied to location and being remote offers a chance to fight back against that. There's not more land in San Francisco and New York and building has become politically untenable. This has and will have tremendous consequences for my financial future. Being remote offers a way to fight against that both because workers can expand their horizons for other locations that are building housing but also because in the future we potentially have an opportunity to re-zone commercial real estate into residential, higher-density real-estate. Rather than needing to provide an individual with two places (house, office), in the future a lot of jobs would only require an individual to have one place (house).

Second - climate change. The environment cost of commuting everyday is high since many cities functionally require a car. Traffic and pollution wreck real, tangible havoc on our habitat. Reducing the need to commute coupled with another opportunity to redesign urban landscapes into greener landscapes offers at least some pushback against climate change.

In my opinion, both of these concerns massively outweigh any intangible benefits such as workplace community.

They would also stop providing plates with the meal. They would be available for an additional charge.

I wonder how true this is for SRE positions. I feel like those are more rare.

My worry is that as financing becomes more expensive, institutional demand will replace retail demand. Institutional demand will be driven by a constrained supply which will in turn drive up rent prices.

I fear a future where houses are nearly exclusively bought by institutional investors because the amount of capital needed to secure a reasonable mortgage will soar and banks in turn will view the retail buyer as too much risk because of the need to have very high income for 30 years.

Somewhat relatedly, I converted from SWE to SRE for three reasons. 1. SWE interviews are torture and no matter what I accomplish at my job, the next job I have to re-prove everything all over again. SRE interviews do not typically have this style of interview (I've heard Meta and Alphabet do however). 2. SRE focuses on lower level abstractions and therefore seems less prone to product oversight which is tiresome. SRE work is typically longer lived and deadlines less tight. 3. SRE jobs seem even more remote friendly than traditional SWE roles because of reason 2.

I'm much better as a SWE but I'm paid more as an SRE and have much more freedom. I don't actually like ops work that much but I'll take that trade off to guarantee the other three advantages above.

All that said, in my short time as an SRE I've noticed that it's very much in an identity crises because there's not really a standard job. Infrastructure is very different company to company and some companies expect SREs to be able to code as well as SWEs whereas others don't expect you know how to code at all.

In my experience, an SRE is someone who's principal goal is to maintain infrastructure and ensure code is able to be developed, built and shipped. In the "better" SRE roles, SREs are able to build platform tooling rather than just ops.

Brilliant analysis. Anecdotally, I find this to be true in my own case.

Metabook? Instameta? WhatsMeta?

This rings very true for me as well. Family time never feels wasted but staying up all those extra hours to ship better code never seems to be worth it in the end.

All biological life or human life only?

Not a fan but seems inevitable. My personal feeling is that this won’t lead to decreases in rates but just increases in rates on those who are deemed unsafe. I’d want to disable this if possible.

Fantastic. Give workers more choices.

Pass higher property taxes, further lower deductions based upon wealth of buyer, and build build build.

In my opinion, this is example of poor/incomplete regulation. Using sports as an analogy, it's like if a game was designed poorly, we have the expectation that players would act in good faith to not take advantage of rules. But players have the incentive to win, not act in good faith.

It will be interesting to see the impact of this on the broader tech community.

If this passes and the characterization of this bill is true, I think we should expect to see a further divide between private and public schooling outcomes.

One of the major drawbacks to going back to the office is dealing with the dreaded open office plan. If Google popularizes a new office style that discourages the bullpen feel of open offices, it would be a welcome relief.

In my opinion, at some point, there will be a lot more voters who don't have houses than there are that do. When that happens, there will be a strong incentive to level the playing field and increase property taxes, reduce tax benefits and in general, degrade some of the financial incentives to have a house.

Ah that makes sense. I wasn't aware of that.

Still 4.8 on the App Store though

Figure out what number you can live on and compare that to the expected growth of your investment. If you have $1 million and you assume a 6% growth rate, you can live on 60k and not work. If you want less risk, assume a lower growth rate. If you want a higher standard of living, work until your nest egg provides a greater income through investment.

My investing strategy has always been to just allocate a certain amount of money per pay period to high growth mutual funds through a Morningstar 5-star rated fund. I wonder what I'm missing out on with things like this.

Flutter is pretty great. Code development is faster in my opinion when compared with React Native. Dart is fairly similar to JS but that's probably the biggest learning curve.

I've starting picking back up the piano. Currently working through Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag and Beethoven's Moonlight (1st movement) after taking years off.

I did spend sometime looking at Flutter too.

After reading, I can't help but wonder if this dismissive attitude Google (and others) have towards social and political issues such as censorship, privacy, diversity, etc. has something to do with the hiring model. I can't speak for other departments but in terms of engineering, competency in algorithms and system design are the only things that are screened for. These aren't well rounded people. They aren't leaders. They're not screened to think beyond the immediate task at hand which shouldn't leave us surprised when they fail to see beyond the objective. In some ways, it would be akin to colleges looking exclusively at SAT scores instead of the whole person.

In this process though, what I believe might be getting lost is any sense of ethics, purpose or vision beyond code. One has to wonder if that's in these companies' long-term best interests to pursue the best leetcoders at the expense of other skills. I won't pretend to have an answer as to how those skills are screened for but it's evident from what I've experienced that there isn't any expectation beyond writing code at all.

I think an assumption being made is that the surface area can't increase while the vehicle isn't moving. Maybe in the future it might be possible to have the solar panels fold out when parked to at least 2x the surface area. If we are rethinking the grid, I don't see why we can't rethink parking at the same time.

I've had an interview process that included 2 phone screens, 1 virtual coding exercise, 7 on-sites with a grand total of 4 white board interviews. There's something profoundly stupid about having that many whiteboards. The whiteboards were not testing different skills - they were literally just different problems. I always think back to this: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/834146806594433025?lang=en.

I've gotten old enough to not want to re-learn how to put things in order.

Probably because of the judicial cycle.

I just use my credit card for all my purchases and then the bank already breaks it down by category. I'm not sure why I'd need a separate app and I don't want to give banking credentials to third-parties if I don't have to.