simplestats

Harmful according to other ideologies conlficting in the mind of the same person.

You think murder is morally wrong. You think some govt policy is so important that when govt kills people while it is carrying out the policy, the ends justify the means. Ideology is what killed those people.

Hey I have anecdotal evidence proving it. It's all about risk management. At some point you have to make a choice.

I think it's just hyperbole. I wonder how sensitive 97 year-olds are about their age. If it bugs them, they probably also wouldn't appreciate having it pointed out prominently in headlines and articles about their other accomplishments.

govt bonds aren't generally expected to decay over time either. But I suppose they are these days.

Ah. No that's not what I meant. Option #1 is risk the money. Option #2 is sit on cash. You forgot about option #3: invest it somewhere that is both not risky and safe from inflation. Institutional investors have hedging strategies that achieve this. For us little people, there used to be crappy govt bonds that would safely give you the inflation rate more or less. Now they give you negative returns while inflation climbs. And of course the traditional hedges like real estate and precious metals are sky-high and dominated by speculators.

It's not completely about time you mean. Time is just a rough proxy for experience. It's not just about significant accomplishments either, but rather significant accomplishments that are recognized by your employer. For all you know that senior engineer was single-handedly key to their last company's success, but their manager got all the credit while the engineer got a 1.5 multiplier on their annual bonus.

But sure. My question was more about the meaning of principal where you are. At some places it's more like just another grade of senior engineer. While at others it's equivalent to a decent rung of middle management and part of a different salary range, to which the current discussions about tech employee pay may not apply so much.

I was being a little generous, yes. I wonder if that's what is triggering people.

The stated goal of govt seems to be low (but positive) levels of inflation and high growth. The current situation with high inflation and low interest rates makes even tax-free govt bonds undesirable. And they will need to raise rates. So I'd say policies are backfiring, yes.

I'm saying it's a step in the right direction. No more starting at zero or even being "under water" like with ISO's. With RSU's they just grant you the stock like they used to only do for execs (with nonqualified options or whatever). As long as the company doesn't get delisted or something you're a stakeholder.

Is principal engineer typical for 20 years experience where you are? Or are they typically stuck at senior engineer? Because if you're ahead of the average already like that, then indeed it will be hard to do better elsewhere.

Having said that, yes I agree it does seem that at higher levels companies are a lot better about fitting compensation to that of competitors.

> Inflation is insipid. You _must_ take risk with your funds just to not lose the value of it.

This certainly seems to be the case, but it's fustrating. I can think of no fundamental reason why it should be so. Other than speculators and govt policies backfiring to destroy the safety of alternative places to keep your money besides cash.

Er you think I was saying that women getting pregnant more often than men was not a reflection of reality?

I did make the argument with more. I gave you actual stats. Where's yours again? (other than a thorough analysis of undesirable countries). You continue to make unsupported anecdotal arguments countered by my stats. At the most elite levels of accomplishments requiring "more energy", your little biological advantage isn't there. I have more actual stats for you: older students get higher grades and graduate at higher rates than younger students.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7044164

It's not wrong to discriminate against women? where?

And where are you getting these statistics you refer to?

I think I disagree with pretty much every point you made here. Tech jobs more like fast food than research?

If you're not even trying to make the argument about raw mental abilities (which at least has some kind of support, in narrow situations like chess) then I'd bet the stats regarding work ethic support older workers too.

That "all things being equal" trick you keep pulling is the problem. Yeah they're so equal except you're presumimg one is a hard worker and the other one is a slacker and you can't tell from the resume or interview for some reason. Does the older applicant come in with amnesia?

It's not so different in the ways that matter here. The point is that hard mental work isn't a "young man's game". It's about time and energy still. You need to work very very hard for years to win a nobel prize. In another universe (different only in choice of career path) that nobel prize winner would be an entrepreneur doing 80 hours a week, or a star employee somewhere. You'd be lucky to hire them.

If the nobel prize winner went into basketball, however, there's no way they'll be a top athelete when they're 44. Unless they happen to also be seven feet tall, and even then they have biology heavily stacked against their performance.

Statistics aren't what I'm talking about. Statistically, some perentage of young women will get pregnant. If the stat is not a guarantee which applies to everyone in the group, it's wrong to use it to stereotype people.

This is bs, sorry. This isn't pro basketball. Your eyes degrade slowly and your memory does too eventually. But unless you're talking about 60+ when such issues really start to catch up with you (still to variable degree depending on the person), you can't possibly make such a generalization.

The average age people do Nobel prize winning work is 44, with a standard deviation of ten years. EDIT: for physics it's actually 42. The 35 is from a prior publication for 1901-1950 (if I'm skimming that right).

https://orbit.dtu.dk/en/publications/the-age-at-which-noble-...

As for niavette, age isn't a guarantee of wisdom by any stretch.

"de facto " is better, but still, it's "may be" considered evidence.

People who name and shame tend to want to hurt their target. That motivation tends to also lead to spinning the story, even a tiny bit, to sound worse and therefore hurt them worse.

It could be the interviewer was trying to ask something beneficial like "explain to us why your additional years of experience make you more valuable than someone who lacks that additional experience?", but wasn't worded well, and with a little spin or removal of context, gets turned into the opposite of what they meant.

Similarly the marriage one comes up a lot. People instantly assume that the implication is they might quit and become a housewife. But in context it could also be the interviewer trying to sell their company's and city's benefits for their specific lifestyle (whatever it is), to try and further attract the candidate.

There's always a conflict between leveraging your background and optimizing for what is highest pay currently (unless you're really lucky). Neither direction is a guarantee. Certainly we would like a society where a person who follows the latter policy is always able to succeed at it. It's an important signal for where the need is the highest. At some point (hopefully soon..) society will have way too many real estate agents again, and it's better if they go where they are needed rather than toughing it out because they think there are no alternatives at their age.

Well in the past employees got ISO's. Now employees are getting RSU's.

And in our lawsuit-happy culture (with a perverse incentive for companies to always settle lawsuits even when they can win), even the most employee-friendly place probably needs such an agreement for CYA reasons.

I do agree ecompanies can do a much better job of treating employees like partners instead of "resources" to optimize. Even on HN, we have fellow engineers talking of the importance of (soul-crushing) processes that ensure no one is essential. As if it's undesirable to let anyone be special or important...

I don't think "straight up illegal" is quite right. More like discrimination is illegal and if they ask then don't hire you, then they're practically asking you to sue them. They might deny it of course.

Is "at will" the right term here? What's the alternative, granting you tenure at their little company or something? If you are an at-will employee who is kept around, then might that demonstrate actual loyalty (and probably higher pay) versus being at a place that is prohibited by law from laying you off without good cause?

Perhaps you mean if they treat employees like a commodity. They can do that withoug laying people off; universities tend to treat their tenured faculty this way also. Optimizing for getting the most work out of the witth the lowest cost. If so, then yes employees should, in turn, act like the job is a commodity and try to optimize income-minus-costs on their end too.

Buildings are traditionally paid for by a benefactor who gets their name on it. And the school often ends up with higher costs as a result (and one less parking lot or green area). Such donors are kind of a mixed bag.

It's a simple economic argument. If students care only about quality, Universities will only care about it also. And improving quality leads to higher price.

Depends how you look at it. If you're from a poor state, you can get into a solid flagship school (including medical school) even if you could never get in to places with single-digit admissions (like the top tier ofCalifornia schools). Whereas people who would be able get into the high-ranked California Universities can probably get full scholarships to solid out-of-state private schools too.

Overall I'd say the whole point of the interview process at senior level and beyond is to make as sure as possible that you are productive immediately. They give you tasks you can do without thorough knowledge of their process. And these days, lots of one-to-one meetings to hold your hand some and keep your productive.

If you don't get a raise in the first year, it's often more about pedantry regarding the HR rules, which tend to be "optimized" by penny-pinching adjustments over the years to take advantage of employees every way they can (this is their job, squeezing money out of people any way they can). E.g. you weren't there for the last round of evaluations so you don't get a raise. Possibly no bonus too. You need to discuss all this stuff when negotiating, they'll be trying to help you work the system at that point, rather than using it against you.

No. the new comes with new shortcomings that need to be countered with something extra before you can treat them equivalently to the old. This is what I meant above when I said: "part of the reason for that investment is the verifiable resume showing skills and experience in the right things. So you'd need some alternative that is similarly confidence-building in some other way."

Otherwise I'm just hearing extreme risk-aversion. And a patronizing tone for that matter. I have repeatedly used terms like "interesting" to describe the problem. Since you seem to be devoting a very limited effort towards parsing my words, let me paraphrase for you: that means it's a hard problem. Stop tell me it's hard and thinking you countered my post.

> Given pseudonymity not linked to any real assets (unlike a company), it's even easier.

A pseudonym can be linked to a company with real assets. I don't follow you here. I even referred to such a situation above. As did the article.

To answer your easy question, yes I can easily imagine scenarios where I might give a sizeable amount of money to someone that way. I have an online business and people in distant countries who don't actually know me give me sizeable amounts of money. They have my webpage which looks legit and demo software which works. There's no magic identity ingredient here to protect them. They'd move on and deal with someone else. There's a risk of course in everything. You certainly shouldn't risk money you can't afford to lose.

Now as for giving out something like seed funding, this is where it actually does start to get interesting. As I also said above, and as the author of the article also says, one needs some kind of data trail to build confidence. No you certainly shouldn't implement your due dilligence in a way that can be easily hacked with ringers or plagiarized code.

Are you talking about victims of Indian consulting companies that are basically hacking the H1b system? Yes they need to be dealt with. Perhaps they need to just block consulting jobs from the program generally. Stick to at least enriching employers who add some value to the system other than just performing arbitrage.

Because this isn't an article about the current systems of legal identities, it's about pseudonmys. Identities come with their own hangups and prejudices. I can't help noticing we both are both posting behind pseudonyms.

the footnote says that sometimes identities are revealed to stakeholders.

I think it's an interesting topic. Rather than lumping the author in with criminals and scammers, who would of course love nothing better than to take money from naive people (anonymously or not), try to identify what it would take to make you trust a pseudonymous organization or identity. For example it needs a track record you can validate. Valuable real-world holdings or a business or something else you could take legal recourse against. One certainly wouldn't give anons with nothing but an idea a million bucks quite so readily as people with real identities. But then part of the reason for that investment is the verifiable resume showing skills and experience in the right things. So you'd need some alternative that is similarly confidence-building in some other way.