robbyking

I had almost the exact opposite experience.

I lived in SF, then moved to Athens, GA for 6 years, then back to SF. I have a lot more disposable income in SF because while my rent doubled, my salary tripled. On top of that, anything with an MSRP set at a national level (cars, bicycles, guitars) is a much, much smaller percentage of my monthly income. On top of that, I can contribute 3x as much to my retirement as I did before. It's win/win/win.

I'm a software engineer, and I searched my company and found that the average salary listed was inline with what I know to be our baseline staff salary for developers. (For what it's worth, we annually review industry salary surveys and adjust compensation for our existing employees accordingly.)

A lot of engineers (especially in the Bay Area) either want the excitement and IPO potential of a start up or the stability of working for a large, established company. It makes recruiting difficult for mid-sized companies like mine.

My wife used to work at a public university and their salaries were publicly available on the university website.

You could literally search "EMPLOYEE NAME salary" on their site and find any employee's annual income.

>> It's hard to say if this is a bad thing, though. [...] The saturation of poor-quality music seems to be having a negative effect on music quality overall.

Personally, I think it's fantastic. While mainstream pop has become overwhelmingly homogeneous over the last decade, underground and alternative hip hop have arguably become the two most innovative genres of music of the last 40 years.

That said, it works both ways, and as you pointed out the static to noise ratio is still pretty bad. I think the biggest issue is still the fact that the loudest voices get the most attention, and those voices still belong to the big three record labels.

I have a sincere question: are 3D printing materials strong enough to print a useful lock picking set? The pieces need to be extremely thin to fit into an average sized keyhole.

Fortunately you can buy a lock picking set pretty easily and inexpensively. I have a Sparrow lock picking kit, and IIRC it was around $20

Politicians do the same thing. I read an article once about how Dick Chaney would identify groups of voters who weren't in favor a Bush administration policy or action (the war in Iraq is an obvious example) and would then identify a issue the majority of that group more passionately supported. (Abortion and gay marriage were two of the more notable ones.) This way, blocs of voters who normally wouldn't vote for Bush would feel compelled rethink their decision.

Now instead of voters, what Google is doing is courting customers. Consumers who may feel passionate about buying locally may be persuaded to buy something online if the targeted ad makes a compelling argument for product's environmental or social policies.

As an employee, I think it's important to remember that your manager isn't going to withdraw his initial offer just because you make a counter offer.

The worst thing that can happen is you'll be told "no" and you'll have the same raise (or job offer) that you had before.

> OSX is the best Unix based operating system for productivity in my market (startup/web development).

I agree 100%. For years I used Linux for almost everything, but I always kept Windows installed on a separate partition for the handful of Windows-only programs I needed as part of my job. (Photoshop being the most notable.) A coworker finally convinced me to make the switch to a MacBook Pro, and I haven't looked back: Apple bashing aside, the truth of the matter is my MBP runs well, runs consistently, and supports all the tools I need as a software engineer.

And regarding your point on price: I have a two year old ThinkPad (they were literally giving them away where I work) that I finally gave up and installed Linux on because of its poor performance. Compare that to my early-2011 MacBook Pro, which I still use for day to day web browsing, web development and light Photoshop work, and the long term cost benefits of a MBP become apparent.

I had a friend who studied journalism, and in his last year of school he was lucky enough to land an internship with The Onion. What he quickly learned was The Onion's internships are some of the most difficult in the industry. While other publications have to capture the facts surrounding a story, The Onion has to capture the zeitgeist of a time and place for their stories to be believable. The amount of research that goes into their stories is staggering.

I'm an iOS engineer, and the company I work for recently started using Twitter's analytic tool Fabric for mobile crash debugging.

Until then I had also written Twitter off, but if they can monetize Fabric and leverage some of what they've learned about big data and how (not) to scale technical infrastructure, they may be able to position themselves as a technology solutions company that also has a limited character notification system.

I just finished reading John Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" for the the third time, and for the third time I was completely enthralled from beginning to end.

I agree completely. It looks weird in print, but in when spoken it makes much more sense.

Another example is "No (I don't disagree with you), I do want to do XYZ."

I agree with you 100%. I used to live in a small town and worked for a company whose CEO was infamous for stealing ideas. According to him, he wasn't actually stealing ideas, he was just implementing other people's ideas without them.

The typical scenario -- according to him -- was someone would pitch an idea to him, then he would counter that they should go half on the seed money. If the person wasn't able (or willing) to come up with the money, he'd implement the idea without them.

> Linear growth can be worse than no growth.

This one is huge. I had a manger once who confused linear growth with vertical growth, and as a result our entire engineering staff was spread thin trying to make progress on a large variety of mediocre products.

You have to enter your one sentence pitch first. Maybe the site's ulterior motive is to steal start-up ideas.

Good news!

https://developer.uber.com/earn/

This is a bit of an aside, but this line really stung:

>> Ross was a techie, but he didn't act like one. He seemed eloquent, optimistic, down-to-earth.

One of the main reasons I got into software development in the 90's was the fact that software engineers were (largely) eloquent, optimistic, and down-to-earth.

It's sad that a vocal minority has sullied the image of an entire industry.

I agree completely. When your skills are no longer needed (or the company can no longer afford you), you're laid off; when you perform your job poorly you're fired. There's a significant difference, and it has nothing to do with the number of people who are let go at once.

This may be a matter of semantics, but aren't you describing being laid off and not being fired?

I've been laid off a couple times when the company I was working for shifted directions and my skill set no longer met their needs; with smaller/younger companies (especially in our industry) it's to be expected from time to time. To me, though, being fired is what happens when an employee fails to perform their job satisfactorily.

>> The web isn't close to competing with higher-end native apps.

I made the switch from web development to native app development after leaning this fact at the HTML 5 conference a couple years ago. Every framework, rendering engine, etc., touted its strength in terms of a percentage of native app performance: this renders 80% as fast as native code, that responds 90% as fast, etc., etc. At the end all I could think was why are we wasting our time with mobile web?"

It's amazing that magazine layout designers did as well as they did considering they didn't have a measurable fraction of the data we have now on users' reading habits. With the (ever evolving) data we now have from eye tracking tests in usability labs, modern designers have an amazing advantage when it comes to creating intuitive web pages and applications.

The downside, though, is so much of the web has become homogenous. It feels like every start up has an out-of-the-box website build with bootstrap, complete with a full-width parallax header image and liberal use of Helvetica Neue.

It's interesting to me that so many Objective C repositories have so few pushes yet so many forks. I wonder if it's because companies like Facebook and Square "release" open source projects on Github then move on to something else.

There's a pretty big "if" in that sentence.

In my experience in my areas of interest (be it music, cycling, or software development) that it’s the knowledgable, confident members of these communities who are encouraging and happy to share what they know, and it’s the inexperienced, insecure ones who are standoffish and quick to dismiss others’ abilities.

This is a serious question: are your salaries competitive for that area? Your lead iOS engineers make far less than most staff (entry level) iOS engineers in SF. I ask because my wife and I are thinking of possibly moving to Virginia in a year or so.

It looks like Coinbase's CDN uses unique identifiers for static assets to prevent caching, and the one Mozilla used for that image is out of date.

Broken: https://coinbase.com/assets/buttons/donation_large-36ee93618...

Working: https://coinbase.com/assets/buttons/donation_large.png

To be fair, there are already a number of dispensaries in SF that deliver medical cannabis. (Lifted Health and Wellness, for one.)

I very clearly remember when I realized getting good grades was easy, but learning and getting good grades was tough.

I actually wrote an application using WPF, and what's worse is it was relatively recently. The project was an audio/visual control application, and our CEO (not CTO) made the decision to use WPF because "the Mac fad was in its final days." (Never mind the obvious, platform-neutral rebuttals.)

Truth be told, though, the development process was pretty straight-forward and I don't have anything negative to say about that aspect of the project (though our application was pretty straight forward). The only downside was we deployed the application at a university, where about 90% of students and staff were running OS X and unwilling to install Silverlight on their machines, which made sense; the iPhone 4 was already out, and responsive, cross-platform access was already considered MVP by most product managers at the time.

I moderate a medium sized Reddit community (r/mtb, ~32k), and the key for me has been enforcing a few basic rules: no memes, no rage comics, and all posts must follow reddiquette. (Okay, that 3rd rules is really a blanket for 10 rules, I admit.)

Sometimes we get trolls, but because of the rule structure they usually get bored pretty quickly. I have a handful of regular posters, too, who do a good job of posting every day and reporting spammers. It really has a true community feel, as was the intention of the site.