pyrrhotech

I'm saying "decently high" compared to my software engineering peers in Silicon Valley. Of course, nearly every worker in the US has at least a decently high income compared to most of the world. The minimum wage in India is $3 per day.

Reading this was an interesting anthropological experience to me as the lifestyle is so different from my own though it seems the underlying long-term goals are similar to mine (wealth, meaning, having smart and interesting friends and acquaintances). I too live in SV, but in a modest home I own in the East Bay. I too commute a little less than an hour to work, but I do my own grocery shopping and I don't care for nice restaurants, fancy cars or the latest gadgets. I still drive my 08 Prius.

I have a fair amount of stock options I've collected from 3 different mid-size companies over the last half decade; all are still in business but none are showing extremely promising outlooks, so I no longer count stock options in my long-term financial planning though it would be a welcomed bonus to my plans. Instead, I count the value of $5000/month left over from my decently high salary minus my non-materialist lifestyle invested in index funds to achieve financial independence the old fashioned way. Somewhat anti-Silicon Valley philosophy? Perhaps, but the Bay Area is all testing diverse ideas and out of the box approaches to life satisfaction. I don't claim my life is superior to the theoretical in this article, but it is much simpler and probably lower stress, and I'm pretty happy on a day to day basis so I'm not yet tempted to dive in to the alternate approach.

long term capital gains tax can be up to 33% in CA: http://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-high-are-capital-gains-tax...

TIL I'm very glad I don't work for Stack Overflow and feel very bad for the underpaid devs who do. Apparently, with only 5 years experience, my salary has eclipsed a maxed out 25 year veteran of "5" skill. Not to mention my salary is only about half of my total compensation. I don't say this to brag, but to help raise awareness to the underpaid devs out there. You have to stand up for yourself, realize your value and fight with these companies to pay you what you are really worth.

It's highly likely that he did it taking all evidence into consideration, but there is a small amount of doubt. Who defines what is reasonable? Either way, 17 years in prison for a crime of passion at 17 is probably enough

That's because you and I have no idea what it's like to be part of the capitalist class. Perhaps studying the capitalist class is silly, but if we wanted to, this is an accurate description of it's members. Obviously 2-4 million isn't "poor" but it isn't quite capitalist class. More like upper-middle class saver. 10 million is entry level to capitalist class

Qualifying 125k as upper class is indicative of a gross misunderstanding of capitalism and wealth concentration. Upper class are business owners, old money heirs, celebrities and the like who find it odd that other people go into work 9-5 for 40 hours of their lives for 40 years. They are less than 1 percent of the population and have incomes from investments of generally over 500k/year and net worths of 10 million+.

This is a much more accurate description of the various levels of upper class from Economist Felix Dennis:

$2-4 million: The comfortable poor

$4-10 million: The comfortably off

$10-30 million: The comfortably wealthy

$30-80 million: The lesser rich

$80-150 million: The comfortably rich

$150-200 million: The rich

$200-400 million: The seriously rich

$400-800 million: The truly rich

$800 million - $1.998 billion: The filthy rich

$1.998 billion and Above: The super rich

citation: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/who-is-rich

With a little planning and an abandonment of materialism, it is pretty easy to live on 10,000 a year in the US. Example: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-yea...

After living in the SF Bay Area for 5 years, (1 in a crappy apt in Belmont, 4 in a modest home in Hayward), I have very mixed views of the place. I love the progressive politics, diversity, high concentration of smart and interesting people. I hate the traffic, over-crowded trains and the vast wealth inequality--especially since I feel that a large portion of the wealth has been retained due to tax loop holes and that if it were taxed fairly, we could solve a lot of the referenced infrastructure problems.

It's strategic because they know that most candidates barely know what an RSU is and salary is the main factor they will take into consideration. So companies can get by with paying the workers half what they'd make at Google and still make it seem competitive because the salary may be the same.

quick calculation comes to about a 45% tax rate for single in CA and 42.4% for married. So 50% is a small exaggeration, but it's definitely closer to reality than 30-35% underestimate.

this is why I'm a big fan of the command line browser lynx. This is a bit of an improvement over my usual lynx https://news.ycombinator.com (aliased to lynxhn), but not sure it's worth it to add a one-off when my current tool is so flexible. I frequently use lynx to browse not only HN but also reddit, wikipedia and even do google searches.

Any tips on finding clients this desperate for code reviews and bug fixes?

"Corner the market, then raise the price. Simple economics." -Walter White

A lot of people hating on LNKD here, but this isn't really company-specific. This is a macro shift. LNKD being down by 40% by only guiding down 8% below estimates is a big warning of how the market is about to treat all bloated growth stocks. In 2013, if they reported the same results, the stock would have been flat or slightly down. It's a major shift in investor sentiment.

Bubble bursts always start in the public markets. Next, VC-backed "unicorns" with ludicrous multiples will soon find themselves unable to raise cash at even half their previous valuations. Then those companies will have to tighten their spending which means layoffs and smaller revenue growth which is a vicious cycle towards even lower valuations, bankruptcies and ultimately a much worse job market for tech workers.

I'm expecting a 30-40% decline in S&P 500, 30% decline in bay area real estate values, 30% of bay area "well-funded" startups going bust, and 25% reduction in market rate pay for software engineers over the next 2 years. Hopefully that will turn out to be a gloomy forecast, but it's best to prepare for the worst.

The company is still valued as if it has a whole lot of "real value"--even after tonight's precipitous decline, it is valued at $17B to be exact. Based on its slowing growth in the 30% range, it no longer deserves a unicorn multiple on its revenue. I think the company provides a useful service and will succeed in the long term, but there are two pieces to investing--company prospects and price. I would only buy under $75 which we may see in a coming bear market.

I suppose my point is more that it's great for personal use, but they've failed to monetize that aspect and AFAIK their primary monetization strategy is corporate which I agree will fail. In other words, I don't think success in the consumer space will be enough to sustain the company. Perhaps they won't completely fail--I could see them being acquired, but it would definitely be under even their valuation raised 2 years ago. Drew Houston and the early VCs will still make out like bandits, but the workers won't get much for their stock options.

I'd be shocked if Dropbox is still in business in 5 years. It's kind of sad because it was the first mover and I loved the service when it was the only one, but now there are a million options that are probably just as good. Not to mention they've never made a dime on me personally or anyone I know (and as I understand it that's true for 95% of their user-base). Our company actually banned Dropbox.com because we decided we'd rather do everything on Google drive for free instead of pay Dropbox for corporate use. The whole industry also has bearish macro outlook as storage continues to get cheaper and yet people's need for it doesn't grow proportionately.

I still see no reason to upgrade my iPad 2. I only use it for casual web browsing on the sofa and reading on the airplane. What new features could be useful enough to me to warrant an upgrade? Unless it gets damaged or the battery craps out, I won't be buying a new one for a long time.

Work is called work because it isn't supposed to be fun. If your's is remotely tolerable, only requires your time from 9 to 5 and pays you enough to cover all your necessities and even some luxuries you are better off than 95% of the world. Life's a bitch, then you die. At least you make enough money to not have to do it past your 40s if you don't want to.

Can we stop the whole "engineers make a lot of money" spiel? Most engineers make between 120 - 160k in SF, where the median household income is 104k. They don't make more than product managers, project managers or even many BART operators. See http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area if you don't believe me. Sure, they make a bit more than average, but if that's the standard of "a lot of money", you have a totally skewed view of how capitalism works and the wealth gap in the US. Very few engineers are members of the capitalist class, commonly referred to as the 1% that own 40% of the country's assets. Making 50% more than the median is not a lot. Making 500% more is a lot.

Very sad and surreal, I happened to just be reading his Wikipedia page yesterday. I hope the cause of death does not prevent his cryopreservation. Say what you will about cryonics, but it definitely gives you a better chance of living again than internment or cremation. I hope the world will see his genius again.

I know exactly how you feel and I've felt the same way, except I'm 3 years older than you. Still haven't figured out the solution, but I'm hopeful. My biggest issue is that I'm a big picture guy.

I like thinking about AI at the high level, reading about the ultimate fate of the universe and studying macroeconomics. I don't like worrying about the details, Angular vs. React, writing unit tests, fixing bugs. I suppose I'm just lazy. But at my point in my career at least, I'm the one supposed to be doing the grunt coding work and I find it boring.

One day we'll figure it out, but it's not a problem you solve overnight I've learned. I've been dealing with this for half a decade now. Some days feel worse than others, but at the end of the day, we can pay our bills and live a pretty nice lifestyle to find consolation, so I guess it's all a first world problem.

This is a given and has already happened twice in the past 20 years. Housing is in a bubble in the Bay area yet again and history always finds a way to repeat itself. I do think we've learned some and that the economy is stronger now than the previous two crashes, but a 15-30% drop across the board seems reasonable.

I'll concede that Uber and Airbnb business models are stronger than the others, but they are still massively overvalued based on near future growth prospects. Those two will probably succeed in the long run, but they still won't be good stock picks

Soon we will see uber, airbnb and dropbox added to this list. The problem is the new VC-funded startup model is a sham to rip off the public.

Basically build a bunch of hype around fad-based, unprofitable companies with unsustainable business models and capture massive valuation of ~50x sales before going IPO and then insiders dump all the overvalued shares on the naive dumb money and only stick around long enough to dump the majority of their stake by SEC regulations. Then proceed to shout about how you changed the world and how it wasn't for the money from your yacht.

In most cases, it takes many months or years of unpaid work before you can even get VC funding or revenue of any type for your startup. And most startups fail before they even reach that state.

Another service for the 1%. This one will go the way of homejoy. These kids don't understand how tight the household budget is for nearly all Americans.

You can smell the elitism dripping in their examples on the site. Private helicoptors, $31 grocery delivery... most people will pay a little extra for convenience, but this is ridiculous.

The median income for full time workers in the US is about 40k, not 30k. Also I don't personally know anyone who makes $250k cash comp, and I know people at google and facebook and a handful of other "big corps". I have a friend who's close tho, around $230k at google after 6 years. You can't count the appreciation of the stock on the RSUs

the average P/S ratio of the S&P 500 is at a historic high around 1.8 (http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-price-to-sales) with long term average at 1.4, so this is still double the long term average. Square's gross margins are very thin in comparison to many other "household name" tech companies, so it deserves a much lower P/S. I've also heard growth is really slowing. This multiple doesn't surprise me at all, and I still won't be buying any of the stock.