pauleastlund

Z

> people who have family responsibilities through no fault of their own ... are ignored while companies fawn over people who (largely) choose to pop out more mouths to feed.

This is really a regrettable choice of words. There is no "fault" involved in becoming a parent. The point you are trying to get across could have been communicated so much more convincingly if you had checked your attitude. "This is a great first step, but many of us have responsibilities to other family members, also -- sick or disabled parents or siblings, for instance. It would be terrific to see benefits that support those needs as well."

EDIT: It has been (correctly) pointed out that my translation was lossy; I dropped the fact that no one chooses to have a sick sibling, and thus it might be even worthier of compensation / support than parenthood. That was unintentional, and I regret it. I still think there's a less caustic, more productive way to make that point.

Citation?

From Wikipedia: "The alt-right has no formal ideology... 'Alt-right' is a recently coined umbrella term, with no clear criteria of membership yet agreed upon."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

Would each of the people being banned agree that they've signed on to an admittedly racist and sexist platform? I doubt it.

EDIT: Let me amend "I doubt it" to "I am not sure and haven't done enough research to have an informed opinion." From the article I can't get the full set of people that are known to have been banned or how many of them are professed white nationalists...

Assuming your interpretation of your manager's motivations are correct, that's horrible and I'm sorry you had to go through it. With that said, would you have had any more protections at a smaller company? The process at those bigger companies, while excruciating for all companies, makes it harder for managers to fire, not easier.

> ... a crutch that stifles people's success ...

I'm not sure how that's a "crutch."

Also, in the future utopia you're describing where no one has to work a shit job that "stifles [future] success"... who cleans the toilets? Who waits tables?

I think it's partly a matter of priming the pump with a one or two fantastic initial hires. Go above and beyond to get a couple terrific people on board (offer a title, or an opportunity to earn a title, or a big piece of equity, etc.), and then you have "and we have an amazing team" as a big new piece of your sales pitch to the rest.

Anecdotally -- from my own job search experiences, and from my experiences hiring engineers at a few different places -- a candidate's sense of the people they'll be working is a huge factor in their decision. Make that factor strongly in your favor and you'll be in good shape. Also, don't be afraid to have a rigorous technical interview process -- I think that can double as a sales pitch for great candidates who want to be at companies that recognize and appreciate their skills.

You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs."

What is a page view on an article worth these days? A couple cents? Less? If the micropayments implementation was right, and if paying for content became a more mainstream idea, I don't think you'd feel that you "[could] read but [couldn't] share" an article just because it charged a nickel to continue past the intro paragraph. I don't see how that would break hyperlinks.

I rarely take the time to comment on HN or submit content but I'm occasionally really tempted to earn enough karma that I can down-vote arrogant, condescending, asinine posts like this one. Neither side of the political spectrum has anything like a monopoly on "rational people" and "the sheer idiocy of [people who disagree with bitwize]" is not "relevant to hackers as an interesting and difficult problem."

I mean, I take his point that some kinds of attention are really bad. I knew mchurch at Google and that whole debacle was a pretty up-close look at just how bad they can be.

I just don't think this case is analogous. mchurch became instantly infamous with all Googlers, which made him radioactive in a big swath of the upper tier of the software industry, not just in NYC but also CA and other tech hubs. In contrast, this guy posted one thread to Hacker News that (from what I can tell) is fairly anonymized. Maybe folks close to him will recognize that this is his story, and maybe in his local dev community word will get around that he wrote it. But he's looking for remote work, and I think it extremely unlikely that he'll go to apply for a remote job a year from now and they will somehow connect him to this post.

I hear where you're coming from, but if he had scrubbed all of that from this post and gone with "professional" -- "I am a self-taught web dev looking for work, I am familiar with Ruby and have recently been doing API work, I want to work remotely and can start immediately" -- would it have gotten anywhere near the front page of HN?

This makes intuitive sense to me but doesn't match up with what I've seen anecdotally. I lived in some very wealthy suburbs of NYC, and nearly every family was a two-earner family. My wife and I also homeschool, and have met a bunch of other homeschoolers both in CT and now in CO. By your logic, you'd expect the primary earners in the homeschooling families to earn more than in the average family, but in my experience the reverse is true.

You're right that there's a level of income at which one parent staying home is just not a plausible choice. But it's a lot lower than I'd expected -- I've met some homeschooling families that are doing extremely well by their children at a substantially lower income level than I'd thought feasible. I think the issue here in most cases is less a problem of economics than of cultural values. (Before anyone reads anything pernicious into that, all I mean is that I think American culture overvalues possessions and professional accomplishments and undervalues family in specific and relationships in general.)

I spent about 5 years at Google starting in 2006. When I arrived I was assigned to one manager, but I wasn't _super_ excited about the project. A week in, another manager offered me another opportunity and got me permission to transfer. Problem solved.

A couple years later, a new hire got assigned to a team I was on. He was a little bummed because he'd really had his eye on another project. So we talked to our manager about it and he was allowed to transfer to the team he'd been hoping for.

I have more anecdotes like this, but the long and short of it is that in my experience Google is a lot less capricious and uncaring an organization than you imagine.

It definitely happens. I don't think it makes sense for the buyer, but it definitely happens.

Was acqui-hired a couple years ago, and after that vetted several other acqui-hires on behalf of my new employer. A couple quick points:

Few engineers understand that their interests != the founding team's interests and negotiate hard against the founding team. The engineers that do, do much better for themselves. You need to own the possibility of being the asshole that ruins the deal for everyone, but reframe it. Put that decision in their hands. "I want to play ball, but I am burnt out and I need X for this to be worth all the stress and anguish." If they don't give you X, they're ruining it, not you. This "stress and anguish" argument is not bullshit. You have dealt with stress and anguish already, but realize also that there will be more. Two of the five devs on our team got acqui-hired and never made it to vesting because they got so disheartened. It could easily have been three or four. This is not as uncommon as you'd think.

You are saying that you want to leave early and the sale to be about the product, not the team, but you also want leverage. That makes no sense. You can't have it both ways. If the company is buying the product, you won't have a ton of leverage. If the company is paying you a high price, it's because they're buying you, and you're almost certainly going to have to swallow at least a year of vesting to get anything out of this. And that won't be a one-year vesting program, either -- it will be 3-4 years' worth of vesting and you'll be walking away at a year taking home the first big chunk but leaving a lot of it still on the table. This is stupid but pretty commonplace.

Feel free to e-mail if you want more specific advice. I've been through this recently and know a bunch of other people who have as well.

I get that it didn't come across well, but I wasn't saying "whatever Donald Trump does in a campaign speech is good enough for me," I was saying, "this seems to be a defining characteristic of our political discourse, I get finding it distasteful all-caps yelling about it seems like an over-reaction." I stand by that. Down-vote all you want.

Isn't this what every major political figure in America does, constantly? I don't know where you live but here I feel like not a single school shooting, natural disaster, high-profile murder, outbreak of sickness, etc. goes by without major figures from one or both political parties trying to use it to somehow advance their agenda.

It's a little scummy, but yours seems like a bit of an overreaction for a (sadly) extremely common practice.

Silicon Valley might not be representative of the nation or the world, but (thankfully!) anonymous internet forums aren't, either.

Yeah, when I realized that Ravel accepted other answers it was like discovering Santa Clause wasn't real. "Regret" was the answer that made by far the most sense given TNO's narrative. Anyone who played and didn't choose "regret" was wrong.

It was for Lyme, and IIRC the justification for including it in my course of treatment was roughly what lisa_henderson describes below.

I dealt with Lyme Disease about a decade ago. Some of this sounds very familiar -- before I was diagnosed I went to the hospital multiple times sure I was having a heart attack, and each time was told it was just stress.

The neurological symptoms I dealt with were really creepy. I would periodically realize that I had no idea how I had spent the previous day or two. The final straw that led me to seriously start hunting for a diagnosis was a college exam. I came down with a fever just as I was getting ready to prepare for the exam. The fever lasted several days. After I recovered I e-mailed and scheduled a make-up, began to read the material from the exam, experienced profound deja vu, and realized four hours into studying that I had, during my fever, read all the material, gone to class, taken the exam, and lost all memory of having done any of it.

After I got diagnosed I spent years on antibiotics, including most of a year with a PICC line in my arm and most of a year getting regular intramuscular injections. Some of the medications effectively incapacitated me with headaches and brain fog. Metronidazole was hell.

Even so, my case was a very mild one compared to many of the other Lyme sufferers I encountered in my doctor's waiting room. I met people who had lost huge swathes of memory, people who had nearly doubled their body weight practically overnight, people who had developed severe tics. Lyme can be a hell of a disease.

Background: I worked at Google for 5 years and did a bunch of interviewing for them.

I don't support skipping interviews even for good candidates, but if you were going to it would work the other way around -- you'd value recent accomplishments over more distant ones.

People don't understand that cutting out folks who had their name attached to some big successes but can't solve a toy problem in an interview is usually a really good thing. It's a strength of the system more often than a weakness. You wouldn't believe the number of senior candidates I interviewed who had really impressive resumes but were clearly checked out from doing real technical work -- folks who obviously no longer lived close to the code and either were very rusty or just no longer had the temperament to spend time thinking through a slightly tricky piece of code.

One of the reasons not to skip an interview for a candidate you're confident is good is that a good interview can be a great sales pitch to come work for your company.

Really? Parents offering to subsidize some activities, but not others, are "forcing their children into servitude?" Give me a break. If your parents attaching a few conditions to the $250k trust fund they hand over to you "sounds like hell" try to imagine growing up without a $250k trust fund in the first place. (Or, far worse, without parents.)

When you become an utterly dependable one-party voter you really diminish your say in what your party stands for.

More than that, though, if Rand Paul actually got the nomination -- which he almost certainly won't -- and went on to win the general election, that would potentially be a lot bigger than one minor victory in the constant right-vs-left tug-of-war over American government. It would be a political realignment, because the coalition Rand Paul would build and the platform he would run on are not the traditional Republican coalition and platform.

It could be the start of America actually having a pro-liberty party. That tradeoff might be worth it even for folks on the left who lean libertarian.

Everywhere I've worked and to my knowledge everywhere I've interviewed has considered culture fit. I don't think it's always as pernicious as you're describing. When done right, hiring for culture fit means some combination of "don't hire people who aren't excited to work here" and "don't hire assholes, no matter how well they code." Both of those are important filters, and I don't think either of them is unfair to the applicant.

Unfortunately I've also seen teams where it meant "don't hire anyone who isn't a workaholic," and teams where it meant something like "don't hire anyone who is going to wreck the hard-partying vibe of the workplace." (I've never seen anything nearly as crazy as "don't hire Yankees fans.") It sucks to get rejected for a job because the current team all hangs out and they don't think you'd dig the vibe. It would also probably suck to get hired into a team that's also a close-knit social group that you aren't particularly interested in joining. I think the takeaway is that if you get rejected for a team for being a bad cultural fit you've probably dodged a bullet anyway. Go find a job with a team that knows how to make people of all ages and stripes feel welcome.

EDIT: I just remembered my favorite "culture fit" interview question of all time. I was head of engineering at a startup that was interviewing around with potential acquirers. I was talking to a senior engineer at one of the companies. He ran me through a couple simple warm-up questions and then hit me with the big one: "If we acquire you, are you likely to up and quit in two months?" I stuttered for about two minutes.

It was a great question! In hindsight, I almost certainly would have. We both dodged a bullet there!

This is me reading between the lines -- so maybe not the parent commenter meant at all! -- but I think the point is that all sorts of grudges, prejudices, and regrets naturally expire through generational turnover, and in a world without aging that natural expiration won't be there to help society put the past behind us.

Speak for yourself. I've chosen all of my jobs based on a pretty robust combination of (a) income, (b) technical challenges, (c) project, (d) people -- the team + the management. I don't think I've ever taken a job where (c) and (d) weren't major factors in my decision, and I've repeatedly quit lucrative jobs for substantially less lucrative ones because I was dissatisfied with either the project or the people at my current gig.

I know there are plenty of people out there for whom life is relationships and hobbies, and career is a way of subsidizing life. That's a totally respectable set of priorities. There are also a lot of people, especially in the startup world, who want more from their career than a comfortable job and a paycheck. It's not crazy for a founder to seek out candidates who are motivated by those other more enduring (and cheaper!) factors of love of the team and belief in the mission.

I get what you're saying, but there is a vast gulf between:

- gender is not just a social construct, men and women in aggregate don't have the exact same strengths, and that diversity is beautiful rather than something we need to suppress

and

- boys should play football and girls should play with dolls and wear frilly dresses

I think people who agree with the former, but not the latter, should overall feel good about Amazon not gratuitously dividing all sorts of categories of toys into "his" and "hers."

Personally I'm of a like mind and I consider this progress. I have a bunch of (smart, curious) daughters and I feel a real struggle against gender role orthodoxy when I'm trying to nurture their interests in legos and science and Tolkien and their friends are into American Girl dolls and Disney princesses.

With that said, you can see why retailers would be slow to drop gender categorization. For people who aren't particularly progressive on this issue, Amazon just made shopping harder. For the average adult shopping for kids' toys, I bet the single most valuable bit of information to predicting their purchase is the gender of the recipient.

Father of four here.

> It is worth it, and anybody without kids who says otherwise knows not of which they speak.

Marriage and parenthood have both transformed my life in really amazing ways. Having a family relying on me has made me a better, happier person, and it's brought me a stronger sense of purpose. I had kids early, and my friends thought I was crazy, and I used to try to change their minds: you've no idea what you're missing, I told them! You've got to try it!

I still think parenthood is life-changingly amazing, but as I've watched more of my contemporaries get married have kids... a lot of them are pleased as punch, but at least a few don't seem to be. I've begun to temper my advocacy of getting married and having kids to people who aren't sure if it's for them. Maybe they're not sure for a reason. People who've never been parents can't know how great it might be without trying it, but I've learned that I can't extrapolate perfectly from my experience, either.