rongenre

Silicon Valley: Where??

Supercool offices are a negative signal when I'm interviewing. I need fewer distractions when I'm trying to get work done.

He's not in jail, he can continue on twitter all he wants.

This isn't an index fund we're talking about.

Once, on a hiring committee, someone said their definition of a "decent [American] college" was "You've heard of their football team".

I suspect that's a pretty prevalent opinion, wrong as it may be.

Yeah that was my experience too. I did a lot of calculus in high school, but it was.. High School Calculus, and I was definitely good at doing high school plug-and-chug math.

College math is entirely different and I think the arrogance from the former worked against me. In retrospect I should have just taken actual college classes.

"blame-the-game-not-the-player" is so typical of polite SF (and greater CA). A lot of homeowners are quietly rubbing their hands knowing their houses suddenly got more valuable.

My experience with SF rent control is that it's really only valuable if you've got limited resources. I lived there for 5 years, saw market rent double, and my landlady politely asked me to pay a "generous discount from market", which was about a 50% increase and I declined - it would have busted my budget.

Then eviction proceedings started: completely made up, and I lawyered up. I was threatened with OMI (there's no defense if they actually do move in), and I negotiated a settlement. Because if I'd won I'd have a super hostile situation ending in OMI, and if I'd lost I'd have killed a substantial portion of my savings.

If I'd had nothing to lose, I'd have hung on for dear life.

Again - if you've got the talents to make $20k/yr day trading, you can do much better working remotely at far less risk. So higher sharpe ratio.

Also the UP is pretty much miserable.

I'd love to own a full-featured digital camera (and I've bought a bunch over the past couple decades), but unless I enroll in a class to learn to use it well and get in the habit of using it I'm pretty sure it'll collect dust.

Maybe my next vacation.

Oh that return policy.

When I was working at a startup in the early 90's, we decided we needed to max out memory for a demo to a big potential customer. They sent me to Fry's in Palo Alto to get the module.

After the demo -- boss decided it was too expensive and I needed to return it. Slightly horrified (although I think the module was a couple thousand 1994 dollars and we were... bootstrapped) I went back.

"What's wrong with the product?" "Um... wrong color?"

And they did the refund.

If he thought it was close to roll-out and worth billions, he's more a lucky manager than an actual engineer. Which makes his criminality far more understandable.

It's red-line different to take one's skills and know-how and experiences with you than to copy documents and designs from one's current employer and take them to a new gig, especially at the executive level.

I do a lot of travel for family reasons, and even a cheap airbnb (Joe Schmoe's extra bedroom) is better than a budget hotel.

Hotel WiFi is generally way worse than what you get in someone's house, so's the work surface. I don't need housekeeping services, and access to a kitchen can really help with healthy eating.

Buy random, short non-random.

As of 2015, one was still running: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...

I don't see this as a culture issue, but really poor professionalism. These are people who don't seem to realize that work small-talk is... at work.

My non-work life is by most measures pretty unusual. But my answer during the Monday standups to "what did you do on the weekend?" is.. "Oh, not much, some housecleaning and laundry".

Save it for performance reviews. Be a professional.

Being rude to anyone is unkind, tech is a small world, and people remember.

Self-centered reason to cut it out: Sure, you might hand-pick your references for that dream job, but what happens when the hiring manager at said dream job checks out LinkedIn, notices that a college buddy worked with you, asks about you, and that was someone you were rude to.

Why would someone want companies to grow to dominance where their size becomes leverage in itself? I'd rather have rich set of alternatives.

I leave my graduation date off -- it's never been a problem.

56k modems were pretty routine by 1999 and ISDN (It still does nothing) was a thing. But by 2000, DSL rollouts were starting to happen.

I used webvan back in 1999, and it felt... ridiculous? Like they had to be spending a ton of money to bring me basic groceries? But 1999 was like that.

What I think they really missed is how much they were in the logistics business rather than the grocery business -- immediately. That's a seriously tough nut to crack and you have to be Amazon or Walmart or (now) Uber to really play in that space.

They lobbied for this particular disease. They're entirely worthy of blame.

I imagine a big benefit to employers is that if a valued employee doesn't live in a tech hub, then there are limited opportunities to get another job.

It's the counterpart to the Silicon Valley saying "My job security is I can get another job"

Wikipedia link: https://bit.ly/2ZJLGPi (because HN isn't dealing with a period at the end of the URL)

That's not how scarcity works.

(2017)

This could be easily solved using the blockchain /s

While that's cool, you can do it with way more functionality by loading comma or tab-separated data into sqlite.

What's a cigarette pack? /s