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No it's definitely not easier to build a company that exits (even an acquire) than it is to get a job at a tech company that pays 100K.

This is on the onus of mid / experienced level engineers. The community should decide collectively that we don't interview at companies like this.

Yes, I do feel you have the terminology wrong. I consider myself full stack and I work with Rails, Django, etc. I have interviewed with many companies with the title "Full Stack Developer" and most of them have not expected the type of experience you are talking about. I think you are talking essentially about a Systems roles.

When you are full stack there's usually an assumption that you are "better" on one side of the stack and won't be strong at everything. So a back-end focused full stack developer would be better at the things you are talking about while a front-end focused full stack developer would be much stronger in Javascript / CSS. The main thing is that you understand how an app works end to end and can contribute / fix bugs across the stack.

As a former bootcamp grad, please prioritize interviewing skills over development skills. once you get a good job, you can spend your free time on side projects but until then you need to practice on interviews not coding.

Sadly it's the reality of interviewing and I hate it but there is nothing you can do until you are an experienced dev and can leverage your power to say "I refuse to work or interview at companies with dumb interviewing processes."

Why doesn't rails count as a backend engineer? Would you also not count someone who works with Django as a backend engineer?

Well the revenue of US based businesses is at a significantly higher scale than most European technology companies. Specifically companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel all make over $500K per employee (Apple is at $2m!). With such a high revenue to employee ratio, these companies can afford to pay developers at rates immensely above what we see anywhere else. And they should, since smart engineers who can move the needle even 0.01% are worth it. Since these companies hire such a high # of engineers, they tend to set the market rates of salaries in the cities they are based in. When you move out of the major cities, U.S. salaries drop significantly.

If Europe can build a few companies that churn out revenue at the scale of Google / Intel/ MSFT, European developer salaries will skyrocket. US companies with offices in Europe have helped salary increases, but really the continent needs a few Googles to really skyrocket salaries.

a) To build an ad business capable of handling $100m of ads. You need massive investments in sales, infrastructure, tools, etc. to build a business like that

b) They have one of the fastest growing user bases in the social space, their users spends an astounding amount of time on the app (estimated at 30 minutes per day), and their user base is the most targeted demographic for demographics. Also they have literally barely turned on the advertising machine and their initial forays have already hit a revenue run rate of $300M+.

So essentially they have a shitload of eyeballs, the eyeballs are growing massively, their eyeballs spend a lot of time on their app, and advertisers love those eyeballs. Their business valuation is based on massive potential, not current revenues, but their advertising efforts already show huge promise. There is almost no startup with anything close to their engagement, growth, and monetization potential and the last company that looked like them was Facebook. Hence, the HYPE.

As a coding bootcamp grad, I agree. I think bootcamps are better for mid to large companies actually where you will get mentorship and processes to help you graduate from being an apprentice to a contributing member of your team.

Many of my bootcamp colleagues at small stage startups regretted the decision.

Which is why access to a competent education is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.

In my opinion, we aren't there yet since there are huge disparities between education quality across the public school system. One solution (IMO) is to standardize funding; today school districts rely on local funding which can result in tremendous funding disparities (and by extension, disparities in education quality).

A pretty ridiculous statement given that a VC pays close to 20% income tax while these well paid engineers are taxed at almost double that %. The VCs carried interest tax loophole has gone too far, not market competition for engineering salaries (which was previously priced fixed through non-poaching agreements).

"The engineers are getting paid too much so my startups can't convince them to work for equity because of the free market while my entire industry avoids paying taxes and stiffs America." Cry me a river, vc.

This looks interesting. Are you a non-profit?

So you believe that by singling out women we may be adding to the problem because we are reinforcing the culture of treating people differently instead of judging them equally? That's a really fair point; it's exactly why I'm uncomfortable with policy solutions like affirmative action because I think they fight discrimination with discrimination.

This is exactly the type of discussion I'd like to have more of on Hacker News, I'm just making a broader call for us to do better as a community (and try to read the article if you are going to comment).

I'm assuming people haven't read it because the comment (and a several others in the thread) starts complaining that the series "starts" by asking stereotypical questions to women. The first line in the article is talking about this is a series and that it's not the first post (it links to the first one). So I'm making this assumption because people are making a claim directly disproved in the first line of the article.

I do agree that every question in this article is just as relevant to men.

Do you have an ethical objection to surveying under-represented groups on general questions?

To me this is no different than "ask a black engineer, ask college dropout engineer, ask an engineer working in a developing country, ask a house husband, ask an engineer who grew up in the projects, ask an engineer who didn't study cs, etc."

The point is for me to get a perspective from a background that I don't have. To me that adds value.

I think it's hilarious that there are so many comments like this one that make it clear that people are criticizing this article without actually reading it.

[As others have pointed out, it's the 4th article in a series so they are not "starting out" with stereotypical questions]

Even before I read this, I expected the comment section to be full of comments being like "why can't it be ask an engineer" or "why are they asking questions about kids, men have kids too". I've noticed a pattern where if there's any social issue on hacker news that is politically polarized (i.e. women's issues in tech, BLM, diversity in hiring, etc.) you can expect a a huge wave of comments that criticize the article from authors who don't actually read it.

The funny thing is that when you get into social issues that are not that polarizing (i.e. living wages, ethical issues of AI, privacy) the community tends to have a much more intelligent, civil discussion.

10% is not the normal discount rate for most people. I don't know what assets you are buying into but most assume a 5-7% discount rate because thats what most expect the long term growth of a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds.

Do you remember the super bowl janet jackson fiasco? There were millions of people outraged by an accident and it almost wrecked her career. It's issue like this that mean that Facebook has to build aggressive adult filters that will have false positives. Because frankly the cost of a false negative is much much bigger than a false positive.

Did you hear about residents protesting that a 100% affordable housing projected blocked their view? Some San Franciscans have an entitled view that their basic rights include the right to have a nice view from their house (to the detriment of any other social issue).

well on multi-lane roads like geary, you could just have a dedicated lane that normal traffic can't enter

Unfortunately this is a negative feedback loop. Essentially you are saying that because housing prices are expensive and people are over-leveraged, they will vote for any legislation that will protect and increase housing prices. This legislation increases prices further, which means even more over-leveraged housing owners.

We need something to break out of this negative feedback loop.

Technology is making things more efficient; things are produced cheaper and more efficiently and with less humans.

The problem is that policy hasn't evolved with technology. Technology has caused two things: 1) increase income disparity & 2) increase unemployment. The problem is that what worked for American til WW2, a laissez faire economic policy, doesn't handle these two things well. We need to encourage our policy makers to figure out a society that has better wealth distribution and can handle a large % of the population not working.

People always mention the big 5 but what are they? Are there any major companies outside these 5 that pay 300K+?

The main issue with Google Sites is there's a much higher level of friction for creating documents and then more importantly it's much more difficult to find things (search is way better on Confluence).

I can't speak as much on Wikis as a category but the ones I've seen at orgs are difficult to set up and manage. I have also found that non-technical people have more trouble using Wikis that Confluence.

My company uses Confluence as well. It's been really useful - we use the Q&A and also document features a LOT. It makes sense since we are mostly on the Atlassian stack (JIRA, & Confluence)

Previously we used Google Docs. However, in every company I've worked at I've seen this tool fail. People start of using it but after a while people forget. The main issue I think is that docs lacks key capabilities in discoverability, search, and engagement; essentially confluence does a way better job of pulling our team back in so we "remember" to use it again. We have a senior manager who is addicted to the Q&A feature and looks at it daily to help answer questions from our team.

The main tools I've seen consistently fail in large orgs for documentation has been Google Docs, Google Sites, and Wikis. All of these fail in the "living" component of "living documentation". They tend to be places where you write and things die / don't get updated / are never seen.

How many hours per week is the program and how long does it take? how far are you into it?

That's not how ROI works. You can show that in San Francisco, IF you live in a rent controlled apartment, it's very possible that you get a better economic ROI from renting than owning. The factor you are forgetting is that owning a house requires a down payment and there's an opportunity cost of not investing that down payment in alternative investments (stocks average 6-8% ) which could generate a return that's significantly better than your house.

I've actually done a 10 year DCF analysis for SF and in many scenarios, a rent controlled apartment whose rent becomes cheaper over time (since SF rent controls are at 1% while inflation is 3%) can be a significantly better (and less risky) investment than owning.

There is this false concept that rent is "throwing money away" but that's not true in many cases; there's an opportunity cost of your down payment, property taxes, etc. with house ownership. NYTimes has a nice web calculator to help figure it out for you: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calc...

Key reasons why renting could make sense 1 house ownership is incredible risky due to high down payments 2) rent control laws makes renting actually cheaper over time

I count these as the more respected tech new sources:

Recode Verge Wall Street Journal (paywall)

and surprisingly enough BuzzFeed's long form content is actually quite strong. They had some excellent investigative journalism on Zenefits this last year.

Techmeme is the best aggregator I've found.