rgossiaux

There's some data about this on Blind for Google that seems pretty solid: https://www.teamblind.com/article/google-engineer---total-co...

For Google, it looks like 90% of L6 engineers and a single-digit percentage of L5 engineers are at this number. So yes, not your typical mid-level engineer (many/most engineers plateau at L5).

I don't quite understand. On the one hand you're saying that early employees should "demand market comp" and on the other you're saying that equity basically doesn't matter (and if you feel this way, it doesn't really make any sense to be joining a startup anyway). Are you conflating "compensation" with "salary"?

"Market comp" for a good engineer with several years of experience in the Bay Area is something like 250k - 350k at a Google or Facebook (with some variation in both directions here). It's not realistic, nor consistent with the market, for an early-stage startup to pay people this much in cash.

Early-stage companies should offer sufficient equity such that their employees should in expectation earn at least the same as they would at a public company. If their expected earnings are less than this, then more equity is absolutely a good solution.

The logic behind this is more or less the same idea behind the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%E2%80%93Morris%E2%80%93P...), which might help with your intuition.

>I'm hesitant to share anecdotes so I'll keep them fuzzy, but a few things I've seen are along the lines of places removing a comedic joke item because it /might/ give a newcomer the impression that the place "normalizes fascism" (rationale was fear someone wouldn't understand it's a joke and thus let's err on the side of keeping the space sterile), and hiring/comp policies designed around explicitly not paying men more than woman for the same role (everyone's the same role when your company doesn't have roles...) regardless of experience, performance, market, etc. at the expense of acquiring or retaining outstanding talent. And look what happened at Google...

You know your situation better than I do, but based on your descriptions I'm with your company on these. You haven't painted a very sympathetic picture of whatever this joke item is, and as for comp, I mean, it seems pretty logical that men and women should be paid the same for the same role, no? That doesn't mean you can't hire/retain talent, you just implement a leveling system like every other company and promote high performers to higher levels.

As for Google, are we talking about the guy who was a dick and caused a massive PR problem and got fired for it? And if your claim is that companies are making bad business decisions and you're pointing at Google, doesn't their 750B market cap undermine the point?

Yes, after working on a rich-text editor this is now the only thing that I think of when I see things about Grammarly. In our case, we emailed the Grammarly devs, who shortly turned it off for our domains. I prefer this to turning it off on our end with the data-gramm attribute for probably obvious reasons (maintenance, cleanliness).

The thing is, it seems pretty clear-cut to me that the good that Gates has done with his foundation has far exceeded any bad that was done through MS business practices. It's hard for me to take seriously the idea that things like aggressively stifling competing software is the same or larger magnitude as helping millions of people in the developing world with basic things like nutrition, sanitation, and disease prevention. Gates is worshipped because he's currently making a very serious, very earnest, very large positive impact on the developing world, and I have no shame in supporting him.

This was the typographical choice that Medium landed on for their rich text editor as well

I think you're missing a key distinction. The problem is not that merely that you hold a political belief-- as you say, this by itself is over-the-top and unreasonable.

The problem rather is that your particular political belief is viewed as being actively hostile towards people themselves or towards their friends or family or others. Voicing opposition towards gay marriage comes across as an attack on all gay people. That's where the reaction comes from.

A political belief that's not treated as openly hostile towards others (for example, supporting charter schools or something) doesn't get this reaction, of course. It's not merely that "you just can't say that you believe certain things are right/wrong if it goes against norms"; you're missing the nuance here.

Yeah, I'm not sure being super racist against black people or telling fat people to kill themselves is really an "important truth" though...

>Besides, if you confuse extant with useful you might end up believing that some random large integers aren't "there!"

In addition to the points already made about the "all at once" claim, every integer (every rational number, even) can be given a finite description (just write it down).

That's also heavily impacted by hiring patterns, though: a company that just hired a lot of people is going to have fewer people leaving (proportionately) after that, since people probably get more likely to leave the longer they've been at the company (though perhaps this is a wrong assumption -- would be interesting to see some data).

You can look at cohorts: of all the people who joined Google in 2013 (eg), what percentage left within one year, what percentage within two years, etc.

They're the same, really -- those quakes happen every 100 years because that's how long it takes for that much pressure to build up. 159 years without one means there's already going to be quite a lot of pressure built up that's going to have to give way sooner or later.

>Why not let me pay twice what they get from the advertisers to completely disable ads?

Because the people who opt out will be the people who it's most valuable to advertise to. The people who'd opt out are almost certainly worth much more than 2x the average user. The amount you'd have to charge to make this work is probably reasonably significant.

Your example is a bit exaggerated, though I agree with you directionally. There aren't quite 100+ levels (more like 50-60 including the Mines and the Quest), and you don't have to do all those things: I rarely genocide sea monsters; my magical breathing is usually just a ring of levitation, which you need in other parts; you can easily get by without rustproofing your armor; the means of removing confusion and the speed boots are both things that you want/need earlier in the game too (vs a special preparation just for the Planes).

Once you've beaten it a few times and have a generally strong command on all the game mechanics and interactions, I think the fun part tends to be figuring out just which things are really necessary and which aren't, and generally optimizing your plan along some dimension or another (conducts, time, minimizing tedium, going for a streak, etc).